Born Violet Keppel, she was the daughter of Alice Keppel,
later a mistress of King Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and her husband, the
Hon. George Keppel, a son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle. But members of the
Keppel family thought her biological father was William Beckett, subsequently
2nd Baron Grimthorpe, a banker and MP for Whitby.
Violet lived her early youth in London, where the Keppel
family had a house in Portman Square. When she was four years old, her mother
became the favourite mistress of Albert Edward ("Bertie"), the Prince
of Wales, who succeeded to the throne as King Edward VII on 22 January 1901. He
paid visits to the Keppel household in the afternoon around tea-time on a
regular basis until the end of his life in 1910. (George Keppel, who was aware
of the affair, was conveniently absent at these times.
In 1900 Violet's only sibling, Sonia, was born (Sonia is the
grandmother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Violet was her great-aunt).
Trefusis is best remembered today for her love affair with
the wealthy Vita Sackville-West. Virginia Woolf described this by analogy in
her novel Orlando. In this romanticized biography of Vita, Trefusis is
represented by the Russian princess Sasha.
The two women both wrote fictional accounts that referred to
this love affair (Challenge by Sackville-West and Broderie Anglaise a roman à
clef in French by Trefusis). Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson wrote the
non-fiction Portrait of a Marriage, based on material from his mother's
letters, and adding extensive "clarifications," including some of his
father's point of view. Such works explored other aspects of the affair.
Trefusis was also featured as a pivotal fictional character in other novels,
including as "Lady Montdore" in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold
Climate and "Muriel" in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium.
Each of the participants left extensive written accounts in
surviving letters and diaries. Alice Keppel, Victoria Sackville-West, Harold
Nicolson, Denys Trefusis and Pat Dansey also left documents that referred to
the affair.
Diana Souhami's Mrs Keppel and her Daughter (1997) provides
an overview of the affair and of the main actors in the drama. When Violet was
10, she met Vita (who was two years older) for the first time. After that, they
attended the same school for several years and soon recognised a bond between
them. When Violet was 14, she confessed her love to Vita and gave her a ring.
In 1910, after the death of Edward VII, Mrs Keppel made her family observe a
"discretion" leave of about two years before re-establishing
themselves in British society. When they returned to London, the Keppels moved
to a house in Grosvenor Street. At that time, Violet learned that Vita was soon
to be engaged to Harold Nicolson and was involved in an affair with Rosamund
Grosvenor. Violet made it clear that she still loved Vita, but became engaged
to make Vita jealous. This did not stop Vita from marrying Harold (in October
1913), nor did he curtail his own homosexual adventures after marriage.
In April 1918, Violet and Vita refreshed and intensified
their bond. Vita had two sons by then, but she left them in the care of others
while she and Violet took a holiday in Cornwall. Meanwhile, Mrs Keppel was busy
arranging a marriage for Violet with Denys Robert Trefusis (1890–1929), son of
Colonel Hon. John Schomberg Trefusis (son of the 19th Baron Clinton) and Eva
Louisa Bontein. A few days after the armistice, Violet and Vita went to France
for several months. Because of Vita's exclusive claim, and her own loathing of
marriage, Violet made Denys promise never to have sex with her as a condition
for marriage. He apparently agreed as, on 16 June 1919, they married. At the
end of that year, Violet and Vita made a new two-month excursion to France:
ordered to do so by his mother-in-law, Denys retrieved Violet from the south of
France when new gossip about her and Sackville-West's loose behaviour began to
reach London. The next time they left, in February 1920, was to be the final
elopement. Sackville-West might still have had some doubts and probably hoped
that Harold would interfere. Harold and Denys pursued the women, flying to
France in a two-seater airplane. The couples had heated scenes in Amiens.
The climax came when Harold told Vita that Violet had been
unfaithful to her (with Denys). Violet tried to explain and assured Vita of her
innocence (which was in all likelihood true). Vita was much too angry and upset
to listen, and fled saying she couldn't bear to see Violet for at least two
months. Six weeks later Vita returned to France to meet Violet. Mrs Keppel
desperately tried to keep the scandal away from London, where Violet's sister,
Sonia, was about to be married (to Roland Cubitt). Violet spent much of 1920
abroad, clinging desperately to Vita via continuous letters. In January 1921,
Vita and Violet made a final journey to France, where they spent six weeks
together. At this time, Harold threatened to break off the marriage if Vita
continued her escapades. When Vita returned to England in March, it was
practically the end of the affair. Violet was sent to Italy; and, from there she
wrote her last desperate letters to their mutual friend Pat Dansey, having been
forbidden from writing directly to Vita. At the end of the year, Violet had to
face the facts and start to build her life from scratch.
The two former lovers met again in 1940, after the progress
of World War II forced Trefusis to return to England. The women continued to
keep in touch and send each other affectionate letters.
Vita Sackville-West's erotic verse to her lover emerges from
'intoxicating night'
Scholar finds writer's poem to mistress Violet Trefusis as
it falls out of book during conservation work at her Sissinghurst home
Maev Kennedy
Mon 29 Apr 2013 21.24 BST First published on Mon 29 Apr 2013
21.24 BST
When Vita Sackville-West married the diplomat Sir Harold
Nicolson in the chapel of the palatial family home at Knole in Kent in 1913,
the society column-writers enthused over the 21-year-old bride's beauty and her
magnificent wedding gown. But as a poem going on display this week for the
first time makes clear, there was more to the marriage than a conventional
fairytale romance.
Sackville-West's erotic verse, written in French to her
lover Violet Trefusis and translated by Harvey James, the scholar who found it,
contrasts daytime strolls through floral meadows with "intoxicating
night" when "I search on your lip for a madder caress/ I tear secrets
from your yielding flesh."
Nicolson and Sackville-West went on to create one of the
most famous gardens in England at their home at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent,
now, like Knole, in the care of the National Trust, but both had many same-sex
affairs during their long marriage, which only ended with her death in 1962.
Their tangled love life overlapped with the Bloomsbury Group
of writers and artists. Sackville-West's most famous affair was with Virginia
Woolf, who immortalised their relationship and her family background in the
1928 novel Orlando.
Knole, said to have a room for every day of the year,
including one with silver furniture, was lost to an uncle because
Sackville-West's parents had not produced a son – a loss Nigel Nicolson, who
wrote a classic account of his parents in his book Portrait of a Marriage,
described as the tragedy of her life.
Sackville-West also wrote extensively and the poem, which
fell out of a bookin her writing room at Sissinghurst as her library was being
catalogued, was written just five years after her marriage, when her on-off
affair with Trefusis resumed. Trefusis, daughter of Alice Keppel, the lover of
King Edward VII, also had literary pretensions, and described how her lover's
"profound, hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning
mists had lifted".
The poem was only found in February by James, a bookmark in
a gift from Trefusis. "It literally just fell out from between the pages
of an old book that was being catalogued as part of our conservation work. It's
a really poignant reminder of the challenges and crises that Vita and Harold's
relationship endured," he said.
The garden has been open to visitors since 1 May 1938, and
on Wednesday, the anniversary, visitors will again pay just 5p – worth far less
than when Sackville-West called her visitors the "shillingses".
The family heirlooms displayed for the first time have been
lent by her grandchildren, novelist and historian Juliet and Adam Nicolson.
Only the skirt survives of the sumptuous wedding gown, which was described by
the Lady's Pictorial as "'the colour like the tassel of Indian corn, the
silk shimmering bright like the silk on the cocoon".
The wedding outfit was made by Reville & Rossiter, whose
clientele included Queen Mary. Her trousseau also included a dress by one of
the most important and influential designers of the day, Mariano Fortuny, whose
pleated silk gowns transformed Edwardian women into Grecian goddesses.
Juliet Nicolson has transcribed some of her
great-grandmother's journals for the exhibition, recording the fabulous expense
of the wedding: they went with Nicolson to choose the ring and inspected
"over 100 emerald and d[iamond] rings" before he settled on "a
lovely one" for £185. On 14 October she settled the bill at Reville &
Rossiter, "nearly £400, the wedding dress cost 50 guineas".
The exhibition, along with one on the creation of the
garden, whose quintessentially English style remains influential, runs until
the end of October.
Lost poem
When sometimes I stroll in silence, with you
Through great floral meadows of open country
I listen to your chatter, and give thanks to the gods
For the honest friendship, which made you my companion
But in the heavy fragrance of intoxicating night
I search on your lip for a madder caress
I tear secrets from your yielding flesh
Giving thanks to the fate which made you my mistress
• Courtesy of the beneficiaries of the Literary Estate of
Vita Sackville-West, 2013
Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West review – a
catalogue of sexual conquests
No salacious detail of her love affairs is spared in an
infuriating new life of Vita Sackville-West, the first new biography in 30
years
Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Sun 12 Oct 2014 08.00 BST Last modified on Thu 22 Mar 2018
00.21 GMT
Vita Sackville-West, the writer and gardener extraordinaire,
grew up at Knole in Kent, a house that resembled “a medieval village with its
square turrets and its grey walls, its hundred chimneys sending blue threads up
into the air”. It is a self-contained but irredeemably grand building: now in
the care of the National Trust, it is reputed to have a room for every day of
the year. Sackville-West was deeply, cripplingly attached to it, perhaps for
the simple, stubborn reason that it would never be hers (it would pass to a
male heir). Down the years, Knole was first a shield – a perimeter wall over
which those she disdained would never be able to climb – and then, once it was
lost to her, a perpetual ache. Thanks to this, she grew up to be that most rare
of creatures: a restive, questing woman who seemed always to be in search of a
means of assuaging her loss, yet was also wholly herself, as easy in her skin
as in her breeches and gardening boots.
The whiff of scandal, though, was there from the beginning,
and sometimes it was in danger of turning into a stench. In 1910, when she was
18, her mother’s siblings launched a legal claim to the estate, one that would
climax in a salacious court case (Vita’s mother, Victoria Sackville-West, was
only the mistress of Knole because she had married her cousin, the third Lord
Sackville; Victoria and her brothers and sisters were the illegitimate children
of the second Lord Sackville). Three years later, another battle followed when
the family of Victoria’s late lover, Sir John Murray Scott, challenged his
will, accusing Lady Sackville-West of having used undue influence over him in
order to secure a substantial legacy. Victoria triumphed on both occasions, but
such public notoriety, you feel, also had its effect on her only child. Beneath
Vita’s expansive, passionate nature ran a certain coolness. She was blithe,
flexible, thick-skinned: as oblivious to the pain she caused others as to the
gossip that inevitably trailed her.
In his new biography of Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison
whizzes through her childhood and these court cases. His interest, in spite of
the vague protestations he makes in the preface, seems to lie mostly in his
subject’s sex life, a frisky business that was never going to be compromised by
her marriage in 1913 to the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, who was gay.
As a result, his narrative consists for the most part of a somewhat
well-rehearsed catalogue of conquest, Vita’s béguins – this is his preferred
term for the many women with whom she falls into bed – lined up one after the
other in what quickly comes to resemble a kind of sapphic beauty pageant. The roll
call begins in 1917 with Violet Keppel, the daughter of Edward VII’s mistress
(“I know that when you fall into V’s hands your will becomes like a jellyfish
addicted to cocaine,” wrote Harold, who couldn’t help wishing the manipulative
Violet would simply drop dead); it ends with Alvilde Lees-Milne, the wife of
the diarist James Lees-Milne. Along the way it takes in, among many others,
Virginia Woolf; Hilda Matheson, a director of talks at the BBC; and Gwen St
Aubyn, Vita’s sister-in-law. Faced with this seamless parade, the reader has
little choice but to agree with another lover, the cruelly abandoned and
unfortunately-named Olive Grinder, who wrote to Vita in 1932: “You do like to
have your cake and eat it – and so many cakes, so many, a surfeit of sweet
things.” There are times when the reader simply cannot tell these female
confections apart. Poor Matheson stands out in the memory only because Vita
charmingly likened her blue-stocking darling to “a strong purge… a hair shirt”.
You can see where this is going. Predictably, Dennison’s
attention wanes dramatically after Vita, Harold and their two sons move to
Sissinghurst Castle in 1930, the purchase of which did not go down terribly
well with some of their friends (Harold’s lover, Raymond Mortimer, thought it
“a gloomy place in hideous flat country, with commonplace cottages and no
view”). Once they’re settled in and busy planting their hornbeams and climbing
roses, his book starts to feel very much like a race to the end. The menopausal
Vita, with her refusal to attend grand parties – “I hate the idea of being
examined under electric lights,” she told Harold – and her “dark shadow of
moustache” cannot match, for him, the young Vita, whose hooded eyes were feted,
whose wedding dress was the same gold as “the tassel of Indian corn”. He
touches on her drinking, the “muzzy moods” that came to worry Harold, only
lightly. Ditto the staggering success and influence of the garden she created.
He puts some effort into summarising her literary output, which was prodigious,
reminding us along the way that she was briefly talked of as a future poet
laureate (her reputation used to rest, somewhat uneasily, on her long poem, The
Land; these days, if she is loved at all it is for her novel All Passion Spent,
in which an elderly aristocratic widow finds new freedom in Hampstead). But his
accounts are so uninspiring, so unwitty. In the end, what lingers in the memory
is not this character or that plot, but the fact that Virginia and Leonard
Woolf bought their Frigidaire on the back of the profits from Vita’s
bestseller, The Edwardians, a novel they published at the Hogarth Press.
Dennison is an old-school biographer who begins at the
beginning and ends at the end, and whose style is occasionally grandiloquent
(his last subject was Queen Victoria, the life of whose youngest daughter, Beatrice,
he has also written). But it wasn’t this that infuriated me as I read Behind
the Mask. Nor was it his failures of psychology, weird though many of them are
(Vita’s affair with Trefusis, he says, resembled “short-term schizophrenia”).
Rather, it was simply that the information contained in his book is so
obviously inadequate, so frequently incomplete. I need give only one example to
make the point. What kind of biography of Vita Sackville-West, I wonder, refers
to the suicide of Virginia Woolf in a single sentence? The only possible answer
is a wholly deficient one. This friendship was one of the most significant of
her life. Apart from anything else, it is clear (look at the letters) that Vita
felt she might have been able to save her friend if only she’d known her state
of mind (Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, can be seen as a farewell to
her – a letter with a subtext that Vita singularly failed to grasp when she
read it). Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria
Glendinning’s Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West, the better
to fill in the holes in Dennison’s doily. If you are going to write, as he has
done, the first new life of Vita to appear in more than 30 years, it is, I
feel, beholden on you to bring more to the biographical table, not vastly less.
Portrait of a Marriage is a British television miniseries
detailing the real-life love affair between Vita Sackville-West and Violet
Keppel, as well as the strength of Vita's enduring marriage to the diplomat
Harold Nicolson. Based on the biographical novel of the same name by Nigel
Nicolson, it features Janet McTeer as Vita, and Cathryn Harrison as Violet.
The series was adapted by Penelope Mortimer, directed by
Stephen Whittaker and produced by Colin Tucker. It was first aired on BBC Two
in four parts in 1990; a three-part edited version aired in the United States
on PBS in 1992 as part of the Masterpiece Theatre strand.
Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold
Nicolson is the 1973 biography of writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West
compiled by her son Nigel Nicolson from her journals and letters.
The book relates to Sackville-West's complicated marriage to
writer and politician Harold Nicolson. Two chapters are written by
Sackville-West. They are centred on herself and her passion for Violet Trefusis
for whom she abandoned Harold Nicolson, Vita’s bisexual husband and her two
children, Nigel and Ben.
Three chapters were written by her son Nigel Nicolson. They
present the sexual and emotional life secrets of his mother: ”I did not know
Violet. I met her only twice, and by then she had become a galleon, no longer
the pinnace of her youth, and I did not recognize in her sails the high wind
which had swept my mother away […]. I did not know that Vita could love like
this, had loved like this, because she would not speak of it to her son. Now
that I know everything I love her more, as my father did, because she was
tempted, because she was weak. She was a rebel, she was Julian [Vita’s alter
ego], and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She
fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that
marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men
only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything. Yes, she may have
been mad, as she later said, but it was a magnificent folly. She may have been
cruel, but it was a cruelty on a heroic scale. How can I despise the violence
of such passion?”
Sackville-West writes mostly about herself and her emotions.
Nicolson writes about his father and the love between him and Vita, that grew
more and more important for them as their life progressed, and was the base to
which each of them returned after Vita’s strong passions for other people,
including the famous Virginia Woolf and Harold’s adventures with men. Nicolson
stresses the liberal nature of Vita’s and Harold’s views and actions about
marriage and sexuality in the early years of the 20th century, but also brings
forward Vita’s intense snobbism and coldness about the lower social classes.
