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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies

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BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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Violet Trefusis
 
1894-1972
 
Across my life only one word will be written: “waste”—waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.
—VIOLET TREFUSIS
 
 
It was to be the wedding of the year. St. George’s Hanover had been booked, the invitations sent, the
Times
of London had reported on the impressive list of wedding gifts, including a diamond brooch from the king and queen, but London society wondered whether the bride would show up. There was an audible sigh of relief in the church when, wearing a gown of old Valenciennes lace over chiffon, Violet Keppel walked down the aisle on her father’s arm and became Mrs. Denys Trefusis. But before the thank-you notes were written, Violet was back in the arms of her lover. It was a scandal that people could only whisper about behind closed doors. For the lover that Violet Trefusis refused to abandon was another woman: the writer Vita Sackville-West.
 
There were two great loves in Violet Keppel’s life. The first was her mother, Alice Keppel, known as “La Favorita,” mistress of Edward VII for the last twelve years of his life. Violet and her sister, Sonia, from an early age were in awe of their vivacious and charming mother. Violet once wrote, “I wonder if I shall ever squeeze as much romance into my life as she had in hers.” Violet’s father, the Hon. George Keppel, was a rather shadowy figure in their lives, his chief job to stay discreetly out of the way.
Violet was ten when she met her second great love, Vita Sackville-West, at a party. Although Vita was two years older, they bonded over their mutual love of books and horses. Both also had glamorous, dominating mothers and complacent fathers. The two young girls attended school together and wrote each other when they were apart. Violet, from the beginning, idolized Vita and bombarded her with letters. When Violet was fourteen and Vita sixteen they traveled together to Italy, where Violet had been sent to perfect her Italian. Violet declared her love to Vita and gave her a Venetian doge’s lava ring she had wheedled from an art dealer when she was six. “I love in you what I know is also in me, that is, imagination, a gift for languages, taste, intuition, and a mass of other things. I love you, Vita, because I have seen your soul,” she wrote.
After the death of Edward VII in 1910, the Edwardian era was over and with it Mrs. Keppel’s reign as La Favorita. The new king and his queen ushered in a more conservative age with a less glittering court, at which Mrs. Keppel was not welcome. Practical as always, she took herself abroad as a sort of “discretionary” leave before reentering British society. Violet spent those years in Germany, Italy, and France, developing her fluency for languages.
Violet returned to England in 1913, dressed in the latest Paris fashions, to make her debut. With a glamorous, desired mother, it was difficult for Violet to feel as lovable, good-looking, or successful. Feeling she couldn’t compete with her mother, she determined to be as different as possible. Wanting to be the center of attention, Violet usually managed it with her gift for mimicry, her low, husky voice, and her large gray eyes. She became a terrific flirt, becoming engaged to several men, including the nephew of the Duke of Westminster.
But underneath the gay exterior, Violet was desperately unhappy. She found her mother’s world boring and straitlaced, full of old people talking about old ideas and obligations that she hated but was scared to defy. She had also never forgotten Vita. But their lives had gone in different directions. Vita had gotten married to diplomat Harold Nicolson and settled down to the life of a country matron, giving birth to two boys. She also adored her husband, whom she’d nicknamed “Hadji.”
In April 1918, Violet invited herself to stay with Vita at Long Barn, the Nicolsons’ home in the country, with the excuse that she was frightened by the threat of bombs in London. Vita was not too thrilled; they had seen little of each other during the war, and she thought they might end up bored with each other. Still, it would be impolite to refuse. One night Harold didn’t return from London, staying the night at his club. The two women spent the day together, tramping through the woods; Vita shared her dreams with Violet of being a great writer. She also shared a secret about her marriage: that Harold had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from a man he had had a brief affair with at a country house party. While Vita was initially shocked, she and Harold came to an understanding that they would both be allowed to pursue outside affairs as long as their own bond was paramount. That agreement was soon to be tested. That night, wearing a red velvet dress exactly the color of a rose, Violet once again declared her love, but this time Vita reciprocated. In her diary, which her son Nigel later published as part of his biography of his parents,
Portrait of a Marriage
, Vita paints Violet as a seductress that she couldn’t resist.
The two women became lovers, going off on holiday together to Cornwall. Emotionally, spiritually, and physically they were now united. It was a raging fire that threatened to torch everything in its path. Violet later wrote, “Sometimes we loved each other so much we became inarticulate, content only to probe each other’s eyes for the secret that was secret no longer.” They pretended to be gypsies and called each other Mitya and Lushka. They spent an increasing amount of time together, much to the dismay of Vita’s husband, Harold. In the autumn of 1918, Vita and Violet began work on
Challenge
, Vita’s romantic novel about the conflict between love and duty, in which she depicted herself and Violet as the lovers Julian and Eve. Vita took to wearing corduroy trousers; with her short hair, she looked like a man. Harold was incensed at the idea of Vita going off on holidays without him. She wrote him a letter, uncomplimentary toward Violet, telling him that she needed new experiences and horizons but it didn’t dim her love for him.
Gossip about the two women wormed its way into all the smart drawing rooms in London. Mrs. Keppel worried that her eldest daughter was in danger of ruining herself. She had no problem with what people did behind closed doors, but appearances must be maintained. She didn’t understand the new generation, who, having survived a war, had no interest in living as their parents had. Violet was unrepentant despite the gossip that was buzzing through London society. She was obsessed with Vita, spending her days in agony until the next time she could see Vita or would receive a letter from her. She and her mother fought when Mrs. Keppel caught her writing to Vita. “I hate lies,” she wrote to Vita. “I’m so fed up with lies.” Violet’s dream was for Vita to leave Harold and go off to France with her to live openly as a couple.
In the meantime, Mrs. Keppel determined that it was time Violet got married. Society dictated that no matter what one’s proclivities were, one still got married, particularly in the case of upper-class women who depended on marriage for support. Violet had no skills to support herself with independently; her only income was the allowance Mrs. Keppel gave her. No marriage, no allowance.
She even had the perfect candidate in mind, Major Denys Trefusis. The son of an old aristocratic family, he was twenty-eight and attractive, with reddish gold hair and blue eyes. An officer in the Royal Horse Guards, he had served heroically during the war. Awarded the Military Cross for his services during the war, Denys was tall, handsome, kind, and intelligent, with a sardonic wit similar to Violet’s own. Violet met him in London when he was on leave and she had written him lively, chatty letters while he was at the front, seducing him by post.
Mrs. Keppel began actively promoting the match, hoping that marriage would settle her. Violet saw Denys as a way to get her mother off her back and to goad Vita to leave Harold, but she didn’t intend to marry him. Vita, however, hoped that Violet would gain more freedom by marrying. Harold Nicolson, trying to be a good and reasonable husband, suggested that Vita buy a little weekend cottage in Cornwall where she could do whatever she wanted, and he wouldn’t ask questions. This was exactly the type of life that Violet abhorred and wanted nothing to do with, a life of secrets and hypocrisy.
Denys proposed to Violet but she put him off. Instead, she and Vita went off to Paris for ten happy days. They attended the opera, ate in the cafés. They made a striking pair, Violet delicate and feminine, Vita tall with the elegance of a handsome boy. Instead of returning home, they went off to the south of France. In Monte Carlo, they scandalized everyone by dancing together at a tea dance at their hotel. Violet tried to extract promises from Vita that they would stay together indefinitely, threatening to kill herself if she didn’t agree; these scenes would repeat whenever Vita tried to escape. But Vita didn’t try too hard. Harold Nicolson later wrote to Vita, “When you fall into Violet’s hands, you become like a jellyfish addicted to cocaine.” The pair didn’t return for four months.
If Violet wouldn’t save herself, then Mrs. Keppel would do it for her. She sprang into action, demanding that Violet stop dithering and marry Denys. The engagement was announced after Denys agreed to Violet’s condition that the marriage would remain unconsummated. He was genuinely in love with Violet and was prepared to let her have her way. Nigel Nicolson suggests in
Portrait of a Marriage
that Denys may also have been partially impotent, which would explain why he agreed to her demands, or perhaps he just thought that eventually the affair with Vita would peter out. Violet was in a quandary. Her life was about to become the very thing that she loathed. She wrote to Vita, panic-stricken, “Are you going to stand by and let me marry this man? It’s unheard of, inconceivable. You are my whole existence.”
On the day of her wedding, she wrote to Vita, “You have broken my heart, goodbye.” Vita went off to Paris with Harold to keep herself from stopping the wedding. The marriage was doomed from the beginning. The newlyweds went to Paris for their honeymoon and ran smack into Vita and Harold. Vita met Violet at the Ritz, where they resumed their relationship. “I treated her savagely. I had her. I didn’t care, I only wanted to hurt Denys,” Vita wrote later. She promised Violet that in the autumn they would go away together. The next day, the two women confronted Denys with the truth about their relationship. Leaving Violet to deal with the wreckage of her marriage, Vita went off to Geneva with Harold.
The marriage between Violet and Denys continued to disintegrate as she heaped emotional abuse on the poor man, declaring that she would never care for him. He began tormenting Violet by burning her letters from Vita and checking her alibis whenever she went out. Denys was starting to show signs both of post-traumatic stress syndrome and tuberculosis. Violet didn’t want to stay with him but it would have looked bad if she had abandoned a sick husband. A compromise was reached that nothing would be done about the marriage until after her sister Sonia’s wedding. Her fiancé’s family was already against the marriage because of Mrs. Keppel’s affair with the late king. A scandal now would ruin everything.
Vita again told Violet that she would elope with her, that she would leave her old life behind. Finally the day came for the two women to leave. While Violet went ahead, Vita encountered Denys, who was looking for Violet, while she was waiting for the boat to France at Dover. The two struck up an unlikely friendship, which strengthened on the boat. In Calais, Violet refused to return with Denys. Harold Nicolson caught up with them in Amiens to complete the unhappy foursome. Accusations were flung, including that Violet was unfaithful to Vita with Denys, which Violet denied. The whole thing was too much for the two women. Finding that they were trapped on either side, Vita folded up her tent and returned with her husband to London. Although the affair continued intermittently for a year, the handwriting was on the wall. While Vita was everything to Violet, Vita had a life independent of her, with Harold, their sons, her gardening for which she would also become famous, and her writing. Violet felt she had been beaten by the bounds of convention.
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
4.5Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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