In December 1972, three months before Portrait went to press, Nigel Nicolson wrote to John Phillips warning him that quotation in the book from his father’s letters and mother’s diaries would ‘certainly put the reader against Violet’:
I cannot help that because I believe it to be true. Let her be a devil in a scarlet cloak for those two years, and think that a devil is more interesting and dramatic than a saint in wings.
Those who see through different eyes draw different portraits. I do not see Violet for those years as a devil in a scarlet cloak. And though Vita may well have been a successful wife as vouched for by her son and executor, her sexual prescription in Portrait of a Marriage was of little use to her women lovers who did not want to be marginalized or abandoned.
Violet wanted a context for her love. ‘I HATE,’ she wrote to Vita in 1920,
the furtiveness and dissimulation, the petty hypocrisies and deceits, the carefully planned assignations, letters that must be ‘given’ not posted. It revolts and nauseates me.
She wanted an open relationship with Vita, which was not a villainous desire. Context, for Vita and Harold was their property, gardens, work, friends, marriage, family. They each took same-sex lovers but made it a rule that these affairs were always on their own terms. They talked about their marriage in a BBC broadcast in 1929 – a year after The Well of Loneliness was judged obscene and banned – and said it was the greatest of human benefits, guided by a common sense of values, respect and give and take.
Portrait of a Marriage does not dwell on the litter of hurt lives left by Vita. She was magnificent and proprietorial but unavailable. Lovers wrecked existing relationships in the vain hope of being with her. Harold referred to the wreckage as her ‘muddles’.
Violet moved to France after her affair with Vita ended. Few people there knew about her past. Her husband Denys Trefusis, and Mrs Keppel’s husband George, in anger burned Vita’s letters to her, written between 1910 and 1920. Violet herself tore up those she considered indiscreet. She did not have the same eye to posterity as Vita and Harold. She was not methodical, calculating or even organized. But later letters from Vita to her have survived, written during the Second World War, and numerous references by her to Vita’s earlier letters make their content clear.
I hope I vindicate Violet in this story of adultery, royal and aristocratic families, dominant mothers and how not to conduct a lesbian relationship. Ironies unfurl in it, and a gulf between private life and public display. Mrs Keppel was ‘much toadied to’ by peers of the realm when she was with the King. Violet and Vita, when they partnered each other at a tea dance, were asked to leave the hotel. By way of bias I question why Portrait of a Marriage should be an acceptable story and Portrait of a Lesbian Relationship not.
* * *
It is a tribute to Nigel Nicolson’s generosity that he made material available to me and allowed me to quote freely from family papers, both published and unpublished. Most of these papers, in particular the letters and diaries of Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson and Lady Sackville, are at the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana.
I offer special thanks to Violet Trefusis’s executor, John Phillips. He helped me at every stage, answered the endless questions I put to him, suggested contacts and made unpublished material available to me, including letters from Alice Keppel to her husband George and to Violet. Most of Violet’s unpublished letters and papers are now at the Beinecke Library, Yale.
I thank Ian Anstruther for information about Pat Dansey; Félicité Potter and Phyllida Ellis for letters, papers and photographs of Denys Trefusis and the Trefusis family; Ann Ravenscroft-Hulme for facts and photographs I would not otherwise have found; Lady Cecilia and David McKenna, the Ducessa Franca Visconti, the Duc d’Harcourt, Cécile Wajsbrot, the Marquise de Chabannes La Pelice, Bernard Minoret, Anthony Allfrey, the Honourable Lady Mosley, Maggs Bros, the Earl of Listowel.
I acknowledge the gracious permission of Her Majesty The Queen to quote from material in the Royal Archives and for the republication of material which is subject to copyright. I also acknowledge the permission of the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives Trust to quote from papers in the Cassel archive housed at the Hartley Library, Southampton University.
I am grateful to my agent Georgina Capel, to Michael Fishwick and Rebecca Lloyd at HarperCollins and to Terence Pepper at the National Portrait Gallery.
To avoid cluttering the text, references, including specific copyright credits, are at the end of the book by opening phrase. Bibliographic sources are in these references too.
PART ONE
Queens and Heirs Apparent
ONE
At Christmas 1900 the Honourable Mrs George Keppel gave a Fabergé cigarette case to her lover Bertie, Prince of Wales and heir to the English throne. Made from three kinds of gold, enamelled in royal blue, over its cover front and back coiled a serpent contrived from diamonds. The head and tail of the serpent formed a knot. It was a symbolic gift from the Prince’s temptress, ‘La Favorita’, his ‘little Mrs George’.
Ten years later when Bertie – King Edward VII – died, his widow Queen Alexandra, mindful of the sexual link between her husband and Mrs Keppel, returned the cigarette case to her. In 1936, Mrs Keppel asked
