You who might have been, who might still be! one of the greatest figures of your century - a George Sand, a Catherine of Russia, a Helen of Troy, Sappho!. "You are made for passion, your perfectly proportioned body, your heavy lidded brooding eyes, your frankly sensual mouth. When Vita, whose career as a novelist had begun successfully, went to Paris with her husband, Harold Nicolson, Violet sent this excessively superlative letter after her: Vita's marriage and apparently contented domestic life infuriated Violet (as, later, Violet's marriage, insisted on by her mother, was to anger Vita). The letters move from a slow unveiling of Violet's feelings toward Vita to hysterical detonation when Violet decides that Vita must leave her husband and her two children and run away with her to Europe. Two years later they met again and Violet fell in love, despite the fact that, at the time, Vita was absorbed in a passionate affair with Rosamund Grosvenor. Violet met Vita when she was 16 and Vita two years her senior. Nonetheless she was feared and adored by her unstable daughter.
She was a marvelous hostess, a devoted lover, but a rigid and difficult mother. Violet Trefusis's life was, for the most part, shaped by her famous mother, Alice Keppel, the beautiful, accomplished and talented mistress of Edward VII. Now that we have the letters in their flaming entirety, I am forced to wonder whether Nicolson's use of them was not preferable to the full texts. His fine biography of his parents, Portrait of a Marriage (1973), drew upon the one-sided correspondence. Nigel Nicolson, Vita's son, found the letters in a locked Gladstone bag just after her death in 1962. Denys Trefusis, Violet's husband, in an understandable fit of jealousy, destroyed all of Vita's letters. And what is more unfortunate, the other side of the correspondence, the letters to which many of these are responses, do not exist. For one thing, Violet was a frenzied, almost apoplectic and uncontrolled letter-writer, so violently in love with the glamorous and (later) married Vita that her letters explode rather than explain or describe.
Leaska's 52-page introduction is the most interesting part of the book. IT IS, I suppose, a curious comment on this collection of passionate, overwrought letters written by Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West that Mitchell A.
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