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Concept
Lady Diana Cooper
Summary
Diana Cooper, Viscountess Norwich (née Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners; 29 August 1892 – 16 June 1986) was an English actress and aristocrat who was a well-known social figure in London and Paris.
As a young woman, she moved in a celebrated group of intellectuals known as the Coterie, most of whom were killed in the First World War. She married one of the few survivors, Duff Cooper, later British ambassador to France.
After his death, she wrote three volumes of memoirs which reveal much about early 20th-century upper-class life.
Lady Diana Olivia Winifred Maud Manners was born at 23A Bruton Street in Mayfair, London, on 29 August 1892. Her mother, who was a devotee of the author George Meredith, named her daughter after the titular character in Meredith's novel Diana of the Crossways. Officially the youngest daughter of the 8th Duke of Rutland and his wife, the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Diana's biological father was the writer Harry Cust. As early as 1908, various pamphlets were being circulated by a former governess claiming that Cust fathered Diana Manners, and David Lindsay (a distant cousin of her mother) noted in his diary that the resemblance was said to be striking. Cooper herself did not become aware of this until it was casually mentioned to her by Edward Horner at a party after she had come out into society, though "It didn’t seem to matter—I was devoted to my father and I liked Harry Cust too." She later wrote to a friend that "I am cheered very much by Tom Jones on bastards and I like to see myself as a living monument to incontinence."
In her prime, she had the widespread reputation as the most beautiful young woman in England, and appeared in countless profiles, photographs and articles in newspapers and magazines. She became active in the Coterie, an influential group of young English aristocrats and intellectuals of the 1910s whose prominence and numbers were cut short by the First World War. Some see them as people ahead of their time, precursors of the Jazz Age.
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