Tennant, Stephen (1906-1987). British aesthete. Born at Wilsford Manor in Wiltshire, England, Stephen Tennant was the fourth son of Edward Priaulx Tennant, Baron Glenconner, a landowner and member of Parliament, and Pamela Adelaide Genevieve Wyndam, a writer. After her first husband’s death, his mother married the Viscount Grey of Fallodon. Educated at home, Tennant attended the Slade School of Fine Art in 1922 and became known for his flamboyance and decadence. He had a long romantic relationship with poet Siegfried Sassoon. After breaking off his relationship with Sassoon in 1932, he began writing Lascar: A Story of the Maritime Boulevards, which was based on his travels in the south of France and which he never completed. In 1927, British novelists Anne Douglas Sedgwick arranged an epistolary introduction of Tennant to Cather, and they corresponded for the rest of Cather’s life. In late 1935, he traveled to the U.S. and met Cather and Edith Lewis in New York City, and Cather recommended to him the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, NH. Cather found Lascar fascinating, and she attempted to help him find a U.S. publisher for his Leaves From a Missionary’s Notebook (1937), but she could not interest Knopf or Houghton Mifflin in his decadent, risqué work. Cather made a bequest to Tennant in her will, and he became close to Edith Lewis, who arranged for him to write the foreword to Willa Cather on Writing (1949). He spent his later years as a semi-invalid at Wiltshire Manor, where he died.