{"id":129899,"date":"2018-10-10T11:00:36","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T15:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=129899"},"modified":"2018-12-04T16:55:10","modified_gmt":"2018-12-04T21:55:10","slug":"feminize-your-canon-violet-trefusis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/10\/10\/feminize-your-canon-violet-trefusis\/","title":{"rendered":"Feminize Your Canon: Violet Trefusis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Young Violet Trefusis<\/p><\/div>\n

Our monthly column\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0explores the lives of underrated and\u00a0underread female authors.<\/i><\/p>\n

\u201cO darling, aren\u2019t you glad you aren\u2019t me<\/em>?\u201d wrote Violet Trefusis to her pined-for lover, Vita Sackville-West, in the summer of 1921. \u201cIt really is something to be thankful for.\u201d On the face of it, Trefusis\u2014n\u00e9e Keppel\u2014didn\u2019t deserve anyone\u2019s pity. At twenty-seven, she was brilliant, beautiful, and privileged beyond compare. Both her grandfathers had titles: an earl on one side and a baronet on the other. She had grown up in various grand homes with frequent foreign trips, spoke French and Italian fluently, and planned to be a novelist. Influenced by Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti, she was an aesthete whose god was Beauty. \u201cIf ever I could make others feel the universe of blinding beauty that I almost see at times,\u201d she wrote, \u201cI should not have lived in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only black mark on Trefusis\u2019s illustrious background was the question mark over her father\u2019s identity. As was then customary among the upper classes, her parents had an open relationship. All through Trefusis\u2019s childhood her mother, Alice Keppel, was the mistress of Edward VII, whom the young Violet knew as Kingy. But he wasn\u2019t her father: her birth predated the relationship, a fact that didn\u2019t stop Trefusis dropping hints about her royal lineage. Nor was Alice\u2019s complaisant husband, the Honorable George Keppel, the father. The likeliest contender was William Beckett, a banker and Conservative MP whose nose Trefusis apparently had. \u201cWho was my father? A faun undoubtedly!\u201d she joked to Sackville-West. \u201cA faun who contracted a m\u00e9salliance with a witch.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Though monogamy wasn\u2019t prized by the Edwardian nobility, marriage was obligatory. Shortly after her twenty-fifth birthday, in June 1919, Violet was all but frog-marched down the aisle. The groom, Denys Trefusis, was a tall, blue-eyed war hero who, at least in the eyes of society, was a peerlessly desirable match. Violet liked him well enough. But wifedom held little allure, especially since she had no sexual interest in men. She had two heartfelt wishes: to be with Sackville-West (for whom, she declared, \u201cI would commit any crime \u2026 sacrifice any other love\u201d) and to earn the world\u2019s respect as a woman of letters. Life would provide only a tantalizing and inadequate taste of both. The young women\u2019s affair, which began in 1918, was a histrionic saga featuring thwarted elopements, sojourns in multiple European cities, and floods of delirious love letters. After a few years, the determined intervention of their embarrassed husbands and redoubtable mothers prevailed. Yet the scandal overshadowed Trefusis\u2019s entire life and fixed her in the public imagination, to quote the author Lorna Sage, \u201clargely as a picturesque figure of scandal and camp tragicomedy.\u201d<\/p>\n

While the Vita-and-Violet soap opera is firmly part of gay history, Trefusis\u2019s highly accomplished books, which include seven short novels and two memoirs, are forgotten and out of print. In an irony she wouldn\u2019t have appreciated, her literary immortality derives not from her own oeuvre but from her roles in other people\u2019s fiction. In Virginia Woolf\u2019s Orlando<\/em> (1928) Trefusis is the devilish Russian princess Sasha; in Sackville-West\u2019s Challenge<\/em> (1923) she is the coquettish jilter Eve. Later, as an eccentric society hostess, she inspired Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford\u2019s Love in a Cold Climate<\/em> (1949), a monstrous snob who, among other vanities, takes credit for putting India on the map: \u201cHardly any of one\u2019s friends in England had ever heard of India before we went there, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trefusis\u2019s fictionalized self-portrait in her razor-sharp 1935 novel,\u00a0Broderie Anglaise<\/em>, weaves a dizzying pattern of intertextual connections with Orlando<\/em> and Challenge<\/em>. When Sackville-West began writing Challenge<\/em>, her affair with Trefusis was at its height, and they joyfully collaborated on the Greek isle\u2013set story. Showing a modicum of discretion, Sackville-West cast herself as the male hero. Still, her mother blocked publication for fear of the gossip it would spark. The publisher, Collins, was paid by Lady Sackville-West to pulp the book, whose dedication was to be \u201cwith gratitude for much excellent copy to the original of Eve.\u201d Trefusis was incensed by the suppression, which she called \u201cabsurd, disloyal to me, and useless.\u201d Some solace came four years later, when Challenge<\/em> was published in the U.S., with a dedication in a Romany dialect that, translated, said: \u201cThis book is yours, my witch. Read it and you will find your tormented soul, changed and free.\u201d A UK edition didn\u2019t appear until 1973, after both women were dead.<\/p>\n

When Trefusis dreamed up Broderie Anglaise <\/em>(her fourth book, and written in French), she had read Orlando<\/em> and knew that Sackville-West, Woolf\u2019s then lover, had inspired its gender-shifting, centuries-spanning hero\/ine. And it would have been obvious that Woolf had mined their conversations about Trefusis to draw Sasha. In Trefusis\u2019s witty response of a novel, an esteemed novelist named Alexa Quince (a thinly veiled Woolf) is embroiled in a tortured dalliance with a handsome young aristocrat, John Shorne (Sackville-West in male guise), who longs for his former fianc\u00e9e, Anne (Trefusis). John has \u201ca hereditary face which had come, eternally bored, through five centuries,\u201d as well as Sackville-West\u2019s Mediterranean ancestry and a tyrannical, overbearing mother. Lady Shorne, who emerges as the tale\u2019s true villain, is characterized with words\u00a0identical to those applied, in Trefusis\u2019s memoir Don\u2019t Look Round<\/em>, to Lady Sackville-West: a woman of \u201cabout fifty,\u201d with a plump face and an \u201cadmirable mouth\u201d that is also \u201ccruel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The engine of Broderie Anglaise<\/em> is John\u2019s unhealthy obsession with Anne. Her sexual magnetism and physical charms, including hair that \u201cresists repose,\u201d take on mythic proportions. Alexa\u2019s own \u201cstraight, unenterprising hair,\u201d meanwhile, is so unresistant to repose that the ivory hairbrushes on her dressing table \u201chad acquired the sulky expression of objects kept for ornament rather than use.\u201d More cerebral than corporeal, Alexa has nevertheless been corrupted by the sybaritic environment of John\u2019s ancestral home, where she discovers<\/p>\n

that sensual pleasures did not reside, as she had supposed, in just one time-honoured act. It could exist in everything\u2014in the way someone lit a cigarette or peeled an apple. Sensual pleasure is an atmosphere, not an incident; a diffused, continuous state; a lens which is added to your vision at birth and which never leaves you until you die.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Alexa\u2019s best-selling novel, Conquest<\/em>, features a character based on Anne\u2014or rather, as with Orlando<\/em>, based on her ex\u2019s slanted portrayals of her. The tense denouement of Broderie Anglaise<\/em> occurs when, at last, the two women come face to face. In an exhilarating plot somersault, Conquest<\/em>\u2019s secondhand depiction is exposed as inaccurate, all three main characters are cast in a surprising new light, and the apparent target of Trefusis\u2019s score-settling shifts. The legendary Anne, it turns out, is all too human and certainly no great beauty. Alexa feels \u201cas if her artistic imagination had been insulted, and she naturally blamed John, the source of her delusion. She felt intuitively that he would have given Anne an equally flattering portrait of her, out of conceit and vainglory.\u201d We are all, in Trefusis\u2019s cynical perspective, mere accessories to one another\u2019s self-protective fabrications\u2014one of which, of course, is Broderie Anglaise<\/em> itself.<\/p>\n

Alexa and Anne\u2019s psychologically charged encounter was modeled on a visit Trefusis paid to Woolf in 1932. She wished to submit a novel, Tandem<\/em>, to Woolf\u2019s Hogarth Press, and to see in the flesh the woman who had captured her Vita\u2019s heart. \u201cLord what fun!\u201d Woolf wrote to Sackville-West. \u201cI quite see now why you were so enamoured\u2014then; she\u2019s a little too full, now; overblown rather; but what seduction!\u201d Tandem<\/em>, however, came out the following year from William Heinemann: Woolf wasn\u2019t as seduced as all that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Vita Sackville-West (left), Violet Trefusis (center), and Virginia Woolf (right)<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Inevitably, knowing the background of Broderie Anglaise<\/em> adds a layer of intrigue. But in its charm and originality the book stands on its own. Indeed, it was required to do so upon its original publication in France, where readers were innocent of the simmering subtext. As far as anyone can tell, neither Woolf nor Sackville-West read the novel. It goes unmentioned in their letters and diaries, and the English translation by Barbara Bray did not appear until fifty years later, in 1985. By then read as a frank riposte to Orlando<\/em>, it was admired for its literary qualities regardless. The novel \u201ccomes to life not because Trefusis is dealing with a real-life affair,\u201d adjudged Nicholas Shakespeare in the\u00a0Times <\/em>of London, \u201cbut because she succeeds in showing how passion totters on some very flimsy pedestals.\u201d The Guardian<\/em>\u2019s critic compared Trefusis to the nineteenth-century sensationalist Ouida, which he considered \u201cno mean praise.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trefusis\u2019s next book is another mordantly funny take on a doomed romance, this time written in English. Hunt the Slipper<\/em> (1937) follows the adventures of forty-nine-year-old Nigel Benson, an idle upper-class bachelor and ladies\u2019 man. His finely honed seduction techniques are \u201cboth Latin and pre-war (compliments, flowers, letters)\u201d and generally successful, despite his being neither tall, nor slim, nor handsome in the English fashion. \u201cSeemliness demanded,\u201d muses the narrator, \u201cthat he should inherit either his father\u2019s aquiline nose or his mother\u2019s corn-colored hair.\u201d But seemliness was outdone by a Bordelaise grandmother\u2019s powerful genes, and Nigel has black curls and a snub nose. A collector of pictures, he is \u201cfeminine\u201d and fluent in French, even though \u201cit looks fishy to speak French too well\u2014for a man at least.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nigel\u2019s sister and regular companion, Molly, doesn\u2019t share his \u201cFrenchness\u201d and is \u201cperpetually amused\u201d by it. In France, she notices, he naturally blends in, and even his clothes, which in England always look wrong\u2014\u201ceither too smart or not smart enough\u201d\u2014seem just right. In this Nigel reflects the author: Trefusis wanted to be French from the age of ten, when she got a French governess and visited her beloved Paris for the first time. \u201cMost girls of my generation were \u2018finished\u2019 in Paris,\u201d she writes in Don\u2019t Look Round<\/em>. \u201cI was begun there.\u201d The artist Jacques-\u00c9mile Blanche recalled that, as a child, Trefusis talked \u201cin Paris slang like the urchins of Montmartre.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nigel\u2019s serene voluptuary existence is disturbed when he falls in love with a friend\u2019s young wife, Caroline. His interest is piqued not at their first meeting, in an English drawing room, but at a Paris nightclub, where he spies her dancing with Melo Gabilla, a \u201cbeautifully made\u201d Chilean playboy:<\/p>\n

She looked dangerous and vigilant, as though she were pursuing some secret plan, as though she were bent over some chained missal in forbidden archives. Then suddenly she laughed up at her partner and her laugh triumphantly routed the purpose of her face, setting it at naught, putting you and it in the wrong. One saw then that she was in love with him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Trefusis\u2019s merciless descriptions of Melo are among the wryest lines in this novel brimming with Wildean aphorisms. \u201cSnobbishness, in one of its most primitive forms\u2014the form that most readily attacks the ingenuous\u2014thrived on him like a fungus \u2026 He was as careful as a film star about his circumference and only drank in public \u2026 He had misgivings about his chin, which was apt to become too emphatically blue from two o\u2019clock onwards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though it is \u201cchic in his circle\u201d to have an English mistress, Melo is put off by Caroline\u2019s lack of guile. She is too sincere, and too English, to affect the pose of heartlessness he deems essential to flirtation. Thus commences Nigel\u2019s multiphase ordeal. He agonizes until he gets what he wants: an affair with Caroline. Then he suffers from the \u201cstrain of always appearing youthful and full of \u2018go.\u2019\u2009\u201d More torture comes when Caroline wants to divorce her husband and marry Nigel, who can\u2019t face upending his well-ordered life. In the twisty climax to this ruthless comedy of manners and errors, everyone is robbed of happiness. As in Broderie Anglaise<\/em>, and in Trefusis\u2019s own life, romantic love is both perilous and chimerical.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Violet Trefusis<\/p><\/div>\n

When Hunt the Slipper<\/em> was published, Trefusis had been living in France for nearly two decades, in exile from polite British society. Her marriage to Denys, which was sometimes civil, sometimes contentious, but generally empty, had ended with his death in 1929. At only thirty-nine, he had succumbed to chronic tuberculosis. During his final months he and Trefusis saw little of each other, and as a widow her life didn\u2019t much change. As well as a flat in Paris, she had a country house\u2014a medieval tower in the village of Saint-Loup, about fifty miles outside the city\u2014where she entertained friends such as Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, and Colette. She also spent time at her parents\u2019 vast house in Florence, the Villa dell\u2019Ombrellino, which she would inherit (and where she would die, at age seventy-seven). From L\u2019Ombrellino, writes Trefusis\u2019s biographer Henrietta Sharpe, there are \u201cendless photographs in Edwardian house party style, of glamourous and long-forgotten socialites, deposed royals about whom now few know, and fewer care, visiting Infantas and flowerlike debutantes with housemaid names, \u2018Cora,\u2019 \u2018Peggy.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

Behind all the cosmopolitan hedonism, contentment proved elusive for Trefusis. Her status was always murky, her identity uncertain. She was a member of the English aristocracy who didn\u2019t know who her real father was; she was a widow whose scandal-tainted mariage<\/em> was probably blanc<\/em>\u2014unconsummated; she was a lesbian obliged to conduct only discreet liaisons. Her most notable affair, after Sackville-West, was with Winnaretta Singer, the American sewing-machine heiress and French princess via marriage who had, quipped Woolf, \u201cravished half the virgins in Paris.\u201d<\/p>\n

The one identity Trefusis was determined to embrace was writer. \u201cI had been put into the world to write novels,\u201d she once said. But her vocation brought her scant acclaim. The closest she came to glory was in 1931, when her second French novel, Echo<\/em>, sold well and was nominated for the prestigious Prix Femina. The elliptical and gemlike tale of a young Parisian woman\u2019s visit to her relatives\u2019 Scottish castle, it lost by one vote to Antoine de Saint-Exup\u00e9ry\u2019s Vol de nuit<\/em>. The appeal of Trefusis\u2019s fiction was limited, perhaps, by its unusual blend of frivolity and darkness (she wasn\u2019t fond of happy endings) and its satirizing of a milieu\u2014the British aristocracy with their country estates, ossified social attitudes, and oblivious entitlement\u2014that was more commonly romanticized and revered. Her mischievous caricaturing of heterosexual courtship and undercurrents of androgyny may not, in the early twentieth century, have been as appreciated as they would be today. \u201cHer readers did not know,\u201d writes her biographer Diana Souhami, \u201cthat she coded into her work her experience of lesbian passion, emotional betrayal, self-division, riches as rivals and the leitmotiv of lost love.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the opinion of Trefusis\u2019s friend and executor, John Phillips, her writing has never been taken as seriously as it deserves because of inverse snobbery: \u201cIf she had been a coal miner\u2019s daughter, people would have said she was magnificent.\u201d This may be partly true, although Nancy Mitford, the daughter of a baron, is widely regarded as one of the greatest comic novelists of the twentieth century. Trefusis, who was jealous of Mitford\u2019s success, is not quite on her level. But in the market cornered by Mitford\u2014subversive tragicomedies on romance\u2019s wretchedness, against which privilege is no buffer\u2014Trefusis merits an enduring share. Instead she has fallen into the oblivion she feared when, struggling to finish her first novel, she wrote, \u201cAcross my life only one word will be written: \u2018waste.\u2019 Waste of love, waste of talent, waste of enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Emma Garman has written about books and culture for\u00a0<\/em>Lapham\u2019s Quarterly Roundtable,\u00a0<\/em>Longreads,\u00a0<\/em>Newsweek,\u00a0<\/em>The Daily Beast,\u00a0<\/em>Salon,\u00a0<\/em>The Awl,\u00a0<\/em>Words Without Borders, and other publications.\u00a0Read her previous\u00a0Feminize Your Canon<\/a>\u00a0columns, about\u00a0Violette Leduc<\/a>,\u00a0Dorothy West<\/a>, Rosario Castellanos<\/a>, and\u00a0Olivia Manning<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may know the love story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. But do you know the love triangle? 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