Ettie found her most passionate fulfilment in motherhood. This may partly have been, as Davenport-Hines suggests, because children satisfied "her strong need to be adored, admired and dominant"; but she passionately adored them back, particularly her "dear boys, with their straight sunny eyes, who walk so happily & healthily in their bright lives".

All three of her "golden boys" were killed. Two died in the war. The eldest, Julian, was wounded in the head by a splinter shell near Ypres in May 1915. He took 13 days to die of septicaemia; his parents were at his hospital bed. "He always seemed radiantly happy," reported his mother, "and he never saw any of the people he loved look sad." Self-­delusion? Maybe; but also a truly heroic strategy for coping with the unbearable.

Only months later, her second son, Billy, was killed in a futile and misconceived attack, "one of the worst of the many blunders of the war". Ettie could not and did not allow herself to believe that the lives of her sons had been wasted. In celebration (the only way she could allow herself to mourn) she commemorated Julian and Billy with the publication of Pages from a Family Journal, portraying them as forever young, brave and gay.

Davenport-Hines adds proper notes of balance to this desperate maternal idealisation: the faintly sour remarks of their Eton housemaster, and those of Lytton Strachey, wondering whether there was really anything special in the lives of ex-­undergraduates who had been keen on blood sports. Yet these spots of tarnish on the golden image make Ettie's account all the more moving: these were real boys, who certainly adored their mother, but also, in ordinary teenage fashion, had begun to find her adoration stifling. Poor Ettie, even she confessed to a "bankruptcy of courage" at the prospect of her last son, Ivo, going off to war. A certain amount of string-­pulling seems to have kept him from the front, only, soon after the war, to die in a car crash. He too took 13 days to die in hospital. This time, his mother could not even cling to the consolation that he was dying for a noble cause.

Courage, like corsetry, has its fashions; and Ettie Desborough's version, whale-boned in Christian faith and privilege, may seem thoroughly outdated. ­Davenport-Hines' excel­lent biography, which frequently moved me to tears, resurrects her "dauntless spirit" - and her era - for modern readers.