Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West . Portrait of more than a Marriage.

 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

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/29/sackville-west-lost-poem-lover-trefusis

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

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/12/behind-the-mask-life-of-vita-sackville-west-review-catalogue-sexual-conquest-matthew-dennison-review

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.