Janetta Parladé

Janetta Parladé (born Janet E. Woolley; London, 31 December 1921–London, 9 June 2018) was a British socialite, painter and aristocrat.

Woolley was profiled in DJ Taylor's 2019 book Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951.

Family origins Her parents were Geoffrey Harold Woolley, VC, OBE, MC (1892 - 1968) and Janet Beatrix Orr-Ewing. Her brother was Harold Lindsay Cathcart “Rollo” Woolley (1919-1942), Flying Officer of the RAF during World War II and killed in action over Tunisia.

Life Woolley was pulled from school at age 14 by her mother, and the two moved to Torremolinos, Spain by the mid-1930s.

Woolley was a member of the circle of clerks and secretaries of Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art, founded and edited by Cyril Connolly during the World War II. There, she earned the nickname 'Miss Bluefeet', as she tended to walk around barefoot in the magazine's office. Ivan Moffat, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Arthur Koestler, Alfred J. Ayer, Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, among others.

Woolley had three daughters. Her first daughter, Nicolette, was born during her relationship with Spanish Civil War veteran Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit, following the dissolution of her marriage to Humphrey Slater.

Character and personality Patrick Leigh Fermor said about her: “Janetta has a marvellous fine-boned beauty… there is something magical and quiet about her”. “She was beautiful, and in her quiet manner she had an immense presence…”, Sinclair-Loutit recalled. “Sad, grave, gem-like beauty and happiness soon to be thrown away…”, Connolly confessed in The unquiet grave. The baron, critic and philanthropist George Weidenfeld remembers her in his memoirs as “a wayward beauty who had been the Egeria to many remarkable men, some of whom she wed”.