Death at Daisy's Folly (36 page)

The money Daisy received for the letters was not enough to erase her debts, but it wouldn't have mattered anyway, since she never changed her spendthrift ways, foolishly lavishing money on well-meant but often ill-conceived causes. She became an avowed Socialist and ran as a Labor candidate for Parliament in 1923, but she was never accepted by the people she sought to help. Even her efforts to give Easton Lodge to the Trade Union Congress as an international Socialist university were ultimately rejected. The long-suffering Lord Warwick died in 1924, on the verge of bankruptcy, and Daisy's assets by then had dwindled to almost nothing.

“When ‘they' write my obituary notice,” she wrote in her memoirs, “it should be the record of a woman who feverishly designed many things for the betterment of human lives, while the 'Green Gods' sat smiling at the puny efforts of an imprisoned soul trying to find a way of escape.” In the 1930s, she retired to Easton Lodge, where she lived as an eccentric recluse. When thieves ransacked the estate two months prior to her death in 1938, they found little to carry off. In World War II, what remained of the park was turned into a military airfield, and in 1947 the hulk of the lodge was demolished.

Nothing remains of Daisy's Folly.

 

Bill and Susan Albert AKA Robin Paige

For this series, we have consulted numerous primary and secondary sources. The books listed here were most helpful to us.

 

Blunden, Margaret.
The Countess of Warwick.
London: Cassell & Company, 1967.

Brooke, Frances, Countess of Warwick.
Discretions.
New York: Scribners, 1931.

Brooke, Francis, Earl of Warwick.
Memories of Sixty Years.
London: Cassell & Company, 1917.

Girouard, Mark.
Life in the English Country House.
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978.

Hough, Richard.
Edward and Alexandra: Their Private & Public Lives.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

Lang, Theodore.
The Darling Daisy Affair.
New York: Atheneum, 1966.

Montague, Lord, and F. Wilson McComb.
Behind the Wheel: The Magic & Manners of Early Motoring.
London: Paddington Press, 1977.

Thorwald, Jurgen.
The Century of the Detective.
New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965.