[1][2] Ottoline was granted the rank of a daughter of a duke with the courtesy title of "Lady" soon after her half-brother William succeeded to the Dukedom of Portland in 1879,[2][3] at which time the family moved into Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire.

The dukedom was a title which belonged to the head of the Cavendish-Bentinck family and which passed to Lady Ottoline's branch upon the death of their cousin, the 5th Duke of Portland, in December 1879.

Her first love affair was with an older man, the physician and writer Axel Munthe,[5] but she rejected his impulsive proposal of marriage because her spiritual beliefs were incompatible with his atheism.

[12] Her lovers may have included the painters Augustus John[13] and Henry Lamb,[10][14] the artist Dora Carrington, and the art historian Roger Fry.

[10] According to some literary critics, the fling of Morrell with "Tiger", a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, influenced the story in D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover.

She took a keen interest in the work of young contemporary artists, such as Stanley Spencer, and she was particularly close to Mark Gertler and Dora Carrington, who were regular visitors to Garsington during the war.

This was far from being the case and during 1927, the Morrells were compelled to sell the manor house and its estate, and move to more modest quarters in Gower Street, London.

[19] Later, Lady Ottoline remained a regular host to the adherents of the Bloomsbury Group, in particular Virginia Woolf, and to many other artists and authors, who included W. B. Yeats, L. P. Hartley, and T. S. Eliot, and maintained an enduring friendship with Welsh painter Augustus John.

She was an influential patron to many of them, and a valued friend, who nevertheless attracted understandable mockery, due to her combination of eccentric attire with an aristocratic manner, extreme shyness and a deep religious faith that set her apart from her times.

The Coming Back (1933), another novel which portrays her, was written by Constance Malleson, one of Ottoline's many rivals for the affection of Bertrand Russell, as was Pugs and Peacocks (1921) by Gabriel Cannan.

[27] Huxley's roman à clef Crome Yellow depicts the life at a thinly veiled Garsington, with a caricature of Lady Ottoline Morrell for which she never forgave him.