Lady Duff Twysden

Lady Duff Twysden was born in Yorkshire in 1891 and christened Dorothy Smurthwaite. After her parents divorced she restyled herself Mary Duff Stirling, took the Scottish family name she preferred, and kept the name Duff for the rest of her life. She was educated partly in Paris and presented at court. In 1914 she married Edward Luttrell Grimston Byrom; he petitioned for divorce the following year, and in January 1917 she married Sir Roger Thomas Twysden at Edinburgh, which is where the title came from. Their son Anthony, born in 1918, later became the eleventh baronet.

The marriage went badly and she left it. By the early 1920s she was in Paris with her cousin Pat Guthrie, living in Montparnasse on very little money, wearing a man's felt hat and her hair cut short. In July 1925 she went to the Festival of San Fermín at Pamplona in a party that included Ernest Hemingway and his wife Hadley Richardson, Harold Loeb, Guthrie, and Donald Ogden Stewart. Loeb had spent a week with her on the coast shortly before; Guthrie was her companion; Hemingway was attracted to her and challenged Loeb to a fight over her during the week. Days after it ended Hemingway began writing, and the quarrel became the plot of The Sun Also Rises.

She never answered the portrait in print. Her divorce from Sir Roger came through in 1926, the year the novel was published, and she later married the American painter Clinton King. They lived in Mexico for a time, then moved to New York and settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she died of tuberculosis on 27 June 1938 at forty-seven. Hemingway told interviewers a story about her funeral — pallbearers who had all been her lovers, a dropped coffin — which biographers have since shown he invented. She was cremated.