Behind this playful, exuberant image, celebrating Lady Ottoline Morrell and her court at Garsington, lie complex emotions. At an early age, Dorothy Brett had suffered from hearing problems. It first became noticeable while she was a student at the Slade School of Art, then, as now, part of University College, London. The Provost of this prestigious institution, horrified by the fact that Brett and two friends had chosen to picnic on the hallowed lawn inside the courtyard, delivered a severe reprimand. ‘I'm sorry, I'm deaf,’ Brett replied, ‘I haven't been able to hear a word you said.’

To some degree, it may be possible to turn the early stages of deafness to one's advantage. Certainly, both D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry thought Brett's deafness was psychosomatic. Brett herself knew otherwise. It was through Lady Ottoline, whom she met around 1915, that she was drawn into a world of talented individuals composed of artists, writers and intellectuals. This intense, brilliant coterie loved to talk, and Brett, needing to step out of her inner security into the warmth of friendship, was frustrated by not being able to follow what was being said. Yet she and her friend from the Slade, Dora Carrington, for a couple of years spent almost every weekend at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire. This had become Lady Ottoline's home in 1915, when she and her husband decided to leave London in order to use the massive garden and estate attached to the manor as a source of agricultural work for those of their friends who were conscientious objectors. In this way, by giving employment to Clive Bell and Aldous Huxley, for example, Ottoline and her husband Philip saved them from forced labour or prison.

For Brett, however, Garsington was a source of pleasure and frustration. In 1918, she summed up the problem it had presented in a letter to Bertrand Russell: