| Mary Lutyens | |
| Pseudonym: | Esther Wyndham |
| Birth Name: | Edith Penelope Mary Lutyens |
| Birth Date: | 31 July 1908 |
| Birth Place: | Bloomsbury Square, London |
| Death Place: | London[1] |
| Occupation: | Writer |
| Language: | English |
| Genre: | Biography, Romantic fiction |
| Subjects: | --> |
| Notablework: | --> |
| Spouse: | |
| Partners: | --> |
| Children: | 1 daughter |
| Parents: | Edwin Lutyens Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton |
| Relatives: | Elisabeth Lutyens (sister) Matthew White Ridley, 4th Viscount Ridley (nephew) Nicholas Ridley (nephew) |
Edith Penelope Mary Lutyens (pseudonym Esther Wyndham; 31 July 1908 - 9 April 1999)[2] was a British author who is principally known for her biographical works on the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti.
Mary Lutyens was born in London, the fourth and youngest daughter of the architect Edwin Lutyens, and his wife, Emily, the daughter of Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton, Viceroy of India, and the granddaughter of the writer and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton. Mary was the younger sister of the composer Elisabeth Lutyens, and aunt of the 4th Viscount Ridley and the politician Nicholas Ridley.
As a child, Lutyens spent time with her maternal grandmother Edith, the former vicereine, who lived at Knebworth, thirty miles from London, with her daughter the suffragette Constance Bulwer-Lytton. Edwin Lutyens had designed a dower house for his mother-in-law called Homewood.
As a result of her mother's interest in theosophy,[3] Lutyens met Krishnamurti when she was a child: she knew him from 1911 until his death in 1986.
In the 1920s, her father was working on his buildings at Delhi. Lutyens visited India with her mother and went to Australia, staying at The Manor, a centre run by Charles Webster Leadbeater in Mosman, New South Wales,[4] while Krishnamurti and his brother Nitya stayed at another house nearby. Lutyens stayed there for some time, which eventually provided her with material for her book Krishnamurti: The Years of Awakening.[5]
Apart from her works on Krishnamurti, Lutyens wrote biographies of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and her own family. In her book Millais and the Ruskins she put forward the controversial argument that Ruskin could not consummate his marriage because he was repelled by his wife's pubic hair.[6]
She wrote novels under the pseudonym "Esther Wyndham" for the Mills & Boon and Harlequin Romance imprints.[7]
Lutyens married twice. Her first marriage, in 1930, to Anthony Rupert Herbert Franklin Sewell, a stockbroker, produced one daughter, Amanda Lutyens Sewell, but ended in divorce in 1945. Her second marriage, in 1945, was to Joseph Gluckstein Links, art historian and royal furrier, and ended with his death in 1997.
Lutyens was interviewed, in April 1976, by the historian, Brian Harrison, as part of the Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews[8] . She spoke about her mother's disapproval of militancy in the suffrage movement, and her interest in Theosophy and in India, including her influence over her brother(Mary's Uncle) Victor Lytton, as regards Home Rule in India. She also speaks about the life of her Aunt, the suffragette, Constance Bulwer-Lytton.