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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
A Personal Note
PART ONE: Queens and Heirs Apparent
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
PART TWO: Portrait of a Lesbian Affair
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
PART THREE: Chacun Sa Tour
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Notes
Sources and Bibliography
Index
Also by Diana Souhami
Praise for Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter
Copyright
A Personal Note
Violet Trefusis’s letters to Vita Sackville-West suggested this book to me. Written between 1910 and 1920, immediate, unedited, passionate, they are a cry from the heart quite unlike the polished style she contrived for her novels. Most are collected in the volume Violet to Vita published in 1989, others are at the Beinecke Library, Yale. They give Violet’s version of her affair with Vita. Romantic, overstated, eloquent, they testify to the destruction of love.
Behind these letters lies a story of more than thwarted love. Its essence is hypocrisy and double standards, of high social standing for Violet’s mother, Alice Keppel, and of silence and exile for Violet.
Mrs Keppel loved profitably. ‘La Favorita’ of Edwardian high society, she was the mistress of Queen Victoria’s son Bertie, when he was Prince of Wales then King Edward VII. It was an affair that brought her social splendour and great riches. Memoirs, diaries and her own letters give evidence of her style. Those old enough to remember her – her niece Lady Cecilia McKenna, the Contessa Visconti who knew her in Florence – told me I could not imagine the scale of her entertaining, the lavishness of her houses, the silver, the servants, the dinners for seventy.
Violet saw her mother as ‘luminous’, ‘resplendent’, ‘dazzling’, a paragon of romance. But her mother had impressive practicality. Confident, assertive, determined, she was not going to stand by while her daughter became declassé and a social pariah and tarnished the family name.
Mrs Keppel and the King conducted their extra-marital relationship with discretion, propriety and unwavering confidence. Violet described herself as struggling with frightening emotions in uncharted waters. There were no rules for her sort of love, no discussion of it.
The law neither condoned nor condemned. A move to legislate was made in 1921. A Tory MP, Frederick Macquister, proposed a clause ‘Acts of Gross Indecency by Females’ to the Criminal Law Amendment Act. In the House of Commons he deplored the decline in female morality, averred that lesbianism induced neurasthenia and insanity, debauched young girls, threatened the birth rate and was due to an abnormality of the brain. His clause was passed. Pat Dansey, Violet’s go-between, wrote to Vita:
One thing I did urgently want to call your attention to was ‘The Criminal Law Amendment Bill’ and the clause that was inserted in the Bill at the third reading. It only makes me implore you to be careful for your own sake as well as Violet’s.
She need not have feared. The debate moved to the House of Lords. Their lordships speculated on the effect of breaking silence. Lord Desart of Desart Court, Kilkenny, former Director of Public Prosecutions, said:
You are going to tell the whole world there is such an offence, to bring it to the notice of women who have never heard of it, never thought of it, never dreamed of it. I think this is a very great mischief.
Lord Birkenhead, Lord Chancellor, concurred:
I am bold enough to say that of every thousand women, taken as a whole, 999 have never even heard a whisper of these practices. Among all these, in the homes of this country, the taint of this noxious and horrible suspicion is to be imparted.
It was not a crisp debate. The clause was rejected. The underlying directive ‘don’t talk about it’ prevailed.
Vita Sackville-West in 1920 wrote her account of her affair with Violet Trefusis, then locked her ‘confession’ away in a leather bag. Neither wrote openly about it after it reached its stormy end. They talked of together writing ‘a better Well of Loneliness’ but this did not happen. Both wrote roman à clefs about their love for each other but coded these in heterosexual show for the sake of their mothers, husbands and reputations.
Vita died in 1962, Violet ten years later. Some months after Violet’s death, Nigel Nicolson, Vita’s son and executor, published his mother’s confession, her De Profundis as he called it. In a decade of knowing about the manuscript he had not shown it to his father, Harold Nicolson, who died in 1968, or to Violet. It was not, in his judgement, a story to be aired while either was alive.
He interpolated his mother’s account of 20,000 words, with 50,000 words of his perspective on it and gave his book the title Portrait of a Marriage, not Portrait of a Lesbian Relationship which was how she had written her story. He set her affair with Violet into the context of the subsequent years of her long, peaceable and supportive marriage to Harold Nicolson. He offered the book as a ‘panegyric’ to his parents’ marriage and called the story, in his introduction to the 1992 reissue, the triumph of love over infatuation. ‘It is a love story, not the love between Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis, as many people assumed, but between Vita and my father Harold.’ The hero of the story is his father, whom he described as rock-like and angelic and whose determination and understanding saved the marriage.
Violet is the ‘villainess’. ‘Remember that Violet was evil’ he said to me when I visited him at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent in 1993 to talk about this book. In his introduction to a collection of his parents’ letters to each other he wrote of Violet’s ‘pernicious influence’ and ‘cynical wickedness’. In letters to Violet’s executor, John Phillips, he wrote of her ‘intolerable conduct’
