This book tells the story of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII, and her daughter Violet Trefusis, who was famous mostly for her lengthy and tortuous relationship with the writer Vita Sackville-West. Violet is the second, perhaps the main, subject of the book.

It can be viewed as a hatchet job on Vita Sackville-West, but the author undoubtedly sees this further biography in her rewarding series of lives of rich lesbians as a necessary corrective to 'Portrait of a Marriage', which is a memoir about and partly by Vita Sackville-West published by her son Nigel Nicholson – a memoir which promotes an image of Violet as sexual predator and destroyer of lives.

The reader may come to feel that the truth rests somewhere in the middle, and that a relationship between a woman who prized honesty in relationships whatever the consequences, and another who was pragmatic in the way she ordered her life and marriage, was bound to come to grief whatever the circumstances and age in which they lived. But there is value in having Violet's side of the story, and entertainingly told, although the reader may revolt in the end from the sheer excess in the lives portrayed – excess of emotion, excess of money, excess of manipulation, excess of self-importance.

The book is unfortunately somewhat biased in other ways. Its portrait of Alice Keppel is savage and largely unsympathetic, ascribing to her various personal failings which in reality reflected no more than her social class in a certain age (for example, the way she raised her children when they were young). The book is highly critical of Edward VII, and although there is certainly plenty of material for criticism, it gives insufficient weight to his better qualities - those which led to many tributes after his death, not just from friends such as Lord Esher but also those with a more objective position such as Edward Grey, the Liberal minister.

The book is also inaccurate in some aspects which are not about the main story. Julian Grenfell, who is mentioned in passing as an acquaintance, was no jingoist as stated, even though he loved and celebrated battle and had a sometimes savage personality. And at one point a letter to Lord Kitchener, said to be seeking his help in December 1916, is reproduced. That is odd, since he drowned in the 'Hampshire' sinking in June 1916. More careful editing would have helped make the book even better. ( )

I read this book in parallel with Nigel Nicolson's [b:Portrait Of A Marriage|25284865|Portrait Of A Marriage|Nigel Nicolson|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1428117640s/25284865.jpg|45011638] and the below review combines my thoughts on both books. (Review first published on BookLikes.)


Let the cat fight begin!

In the red corner, Diana Souhami, defender of Violet Trefusis. In the blue corner, Nigel Nicolson, son of Vita Sackville-West and representing her point of view.

No, I'm not going to try and write this as a ring report, but for the most part of reading both in parallel it has been as if I was watching a boxing match - with few punches held.

Both books focus on the lives of the two women at the time of their relationship. Although both books are good general biographies, it is really the relationship between Vita and Violet that gets all the attention. Of course, it is Vita's own manuscript - her detailed confession of the relationship with Violet - locked in a drawer which Nicolson discovered after his mother's death that caused Nicolson to write his book and so the focus on this part of Vita's life is entirely justified.

And it is a fascinating story - one which would even find its way into Orlando, Woolf's adoring mock biography of Vita - full of jealousy, confusion, passion, and struggle for control.

"Behind Violet’s love for Vita was contempt for the hypocrisy of marriage as she had seen it practised by her mother and the King. For herself she knew marriage would be a meretricious show. She wanted proof that Vita was dissembling too."
(Diana Souhami - Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

So, on one hand we have a book trying to vindicate Violet and attributing the misery of her emotional upheaval to Vita, on the other we have Vita crediting Violet's manipulation as the cause of of her emotional dependence on Violet.

"Then, when I had finished, when I had told her how all the gentleness and all the femininity of me was called out by Harold alone, but how towards everyone else my attitude was completely otherwise – then, still with her infinite skill, she brought me round to my attitude towards herself, as it had always been ever since we were children, and then she told me how she had loved me always, and reminded me of incidents running through years, which I couldn’t pretend to have forgotten. She was far more skilful than I. I might have been a boy of eighteen, and she a woman of thirty-five. She was infinitely clever – she didn’t scare me, she didn’t rush me, she didn’t allow me to see where I was going; it was all conscious on her part, but on mine it was simply the drunkenness of liberation – the liberation of half my personality. She opened up to me a new sphere. And for her, of course, it meant the supreme effort to conquer the love of the person she had always wanted, who had always repulsed her (when things seemed to be going too far), out of a sort of fear, and of whom she was madly jealous – a fact I had not realized, so adept was she at concealment, and so obtuse was I at her psychology."
(Nigel Nicolson - Portrait Of A Marriage)

As a result, neither comes across as particularly likeable and I found myself feel rather sorry for their husbands, Denys Trefusis and Harold Nicolson, who went to great lengths to both enable Violet and Vita to conduct their relationship and at the same time protect them from the destructive nature of their passions. ( )

I'd read Violet and Vita's letters to each other a few years ago, so I knew all the basics, but it was nice to get Mrs. Keppel's story as well. Violet and Vita always strike as so sad, because it's so much misery and heartbreak and emotional cruelness and desperation, all because they couldn't be together - both because society wouldn't recognize a lesbian couple, and because Vita couldn't bring herself to leave the safe haven of her husband and her home, no matter how much she loved Violet. The power of society and overbearing mothers.

Finishing it, I just kind of feel sad, because Vita really was Violet's once in a life time love, and she never really found anything to replace her, just kind of ended up becoming a parody of her mother and all of the values Violet had hated. ( )

I'd read Violet and Vita's letters to each other a few years ago, so I knew all the basics, but it was nice to get Mrs. Keppel's story as well. Violet and Vita always strike as so sad, because it's so much misery and heartbreak and emotional cruelness and desperation, all because they couldn't be together - both because society wouldn't recognize a lesbian couple, and because Vita couldn't bring herself to leave the safe haven of her husband and her home, no matter how much she loved Violet. The power of society and overbearing mothers.

Finishing it, I just kind of feel sad, because Vita really was Violet's once in a life time love, and she never really found anything to replace her, just kind of ended up becoming a parody of her mother and all of the values Violet had hated. ( )

A middle-aged woman walks into a Parisian drawing room, eccentrically dressed, very good jewels and her face caked with makeup. She is rich, clever, nasty and cutting. She is Violet Trefusis and regularly laughed at and mocked by her fellow English expatriates. And yet as this brilliant book reveals Violet was the walking wounded from a love affair with Vita Sackville-West, an object more deserving of pity and sympathy and the victim of upper class hypocrisy and prejudice.

Vita is one of the most dislikeable characters in this book. Yes she loved Violet but not enough to give up a life in England and elope with her to the continent. She wanted it all: respect, country house, famous garden, literary success, husband (unfaithful as often as she was), children and numerous affairs with men and women - she seduced Virginia Woolf and together they laughed at Violet behind her back. Shame on you Mrs woolf. The price for Vita's 'happiness' was the sacrifice of Violet to her gorgon of a mother, the sleek and discreet Mrs Keppel (Edward VII's mistress) who bent her daughter to her will, married her off and sent her into exile.

Souhami is firmly in the Violet camp and this book is a testament to a woman who tried to live happily and honestly but was thwarted at every turn by her lover and family. It is one of the saddest books but thank heaven we live in modern times!