Oh, please don't, please don't, please don't.” Ensconced between the plush furnishings, Churchill biographies and crystal decanters of Mayfair's 5 Hertford Street, Emerald Fennell is frozen, mortified, a cheese straw halfway to her mouth. “I am just not a serious figure.”
You see, I've brought up a carefully repressed memory. Back in 2007, the same month the first iPhone launched, Fennell – then an English student polishing her thesis on “incest in modern drama” at Greyfriars College at Oxford – posed for a feature in Tatler. The issue – fronted, improbably yet gloriously, by Lindsay Lohan – honed in on that year's notable Oxford graduates. There, in among the requisite Guinnesses and Von Bismarcks, is a 20-year-old Fennell, “frequently found singing along to 90s megamixes”, posing in a mirrored silk Matthew Williamson dress, a feather boa and pink satin Miu Miu Mary Janes. “I've never got over giving my tutor an essay with a lipstick kiss mark on it by mistake,” she offered by way of comment on her university career. “I had put the paper in my mouth to get some cash out.”
This sort of commentary, I learn, is typical of Fennell. She is as comically self-effacing about herself (“a flibbertigibbet”, “a silly billy”, “an unbearable child and quite possibly adult”) as she is gushing about everything else. Her ferocious intellect is apparent within approximately 90 seconds of her sitting down in an
