Darren Coffield

FEATURED IN THE SUNDAY TIMESHenrietta Moraes first discovered Soho when she was eighteen – or so she tells us. Her favourite sport was social climbing (heaven knows she enjoyed the exercise) and she was good at it, going to all the right parties and simply gate-crashing others. From the summit of the 1950s bohemian scene she surveyed the life and times of those who broke all the rules, such as the artists Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon (for whom she became a muse). But that’s not all she did – as a key counter-culture figure in the 1960s Chelsea Set, no other woman was more indefatigable in becoming a bohemian legend. Through Hen, you’ll learn how to steal your best friend’s boyfriend; enchant and ensnare a husband; blossom into a magnificent muse; dress like a comic book superhero; become a connoisseur of every illicit drug known to medical science and dose a Rolling Stones concert with them; join the caravan set and head along the gypsy trail in search of the Holy Grail, before rematerialising as the minder for a mind-blowing pop icon…Along the way you’ll indulge in the gentle art of cadging drinks; the feline felony of cat burglary; the canny craft of charity shop shoplifting and the haphazardness of steamy sex in second-hand bookshops. Hen, Mistress of Mayhem takes you to the epicentre of Soho’s Golden Age; stage by stage it forms a complete guide to a hell-raising companion.

Our story begins in 1920s London, at a time when women’s rights were surging after the long battle for suffrage and nightclubs emerged as spaces where single women could socialise unchaperoned. This was the age of the dance craze and the gender-bending ‘Flapper’, who inspired the creation of the Gargoyle club, a nocturnal hunting ground for Femmes Fatales.Meanwhile, London’s Bohemia was ruled by the ‘Queen of Clubs’, Kate Meyrick; the taboo-breaking ‘Tiger Woman’, Betty May; the original ‘Chelsea Girl’, Viva King; the artist, Nina Hamnett; the ‘Euston Road Venus’, Sonia Orwell; and Isabel Rawsthorne, artist, spy, pornographer, model and muse … to name but a few.Using previously unpublished memoirs and interviews, Queens of Bohemia creates a soundscape of voices that gives the reader a taste of their world, so exotic and yet often wracked with despair. It offers a unique insight into a generation of women for whom ideals of duty and self-sacrifice had been debunked by the horrors of war and whose morality resided in being true to one’s self, as they took their struggle for freedom into the wider world and learned to value their individuality along the way.