Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter by Diana Souhami (people reading books .txt) 📗

Woolf’s tone. Orlando/Vita is slow-witted. He/she lives in a place that ‘is more like a town than a house’.

Lady Sackville was unimpressed. She regarded the book as an insult, called Virginia ‘that Virgin Woolf’ pasted a photograph of her in her own copy and captioned it:

The awful face of a mad woman whose successful mad desire is to separate people who care for each other. I loathe this woman for having changed my Vita and taken her away from me.

Virginia wrote Orlando at a time when Vita’s relationship with her mother had reached an all-time low. Lord Sackville died in 1928. Violet wrote Vita a loving note when she heard:

I know what a flawless companionship yours was, and often as a child was awed by your twin silences which I didn’t then realise arose from a perfect understanding of each other.

Lady Sackville became paranoid after his death and quarrelled with everyone. In the family lawyer’s office she screamed that Vita had stolen her pearls, she would stop every penny of her allowance, she wished her dead.

The following month Vita went alone to Knole in the evening and let herself in to the grounds with a master key:

I kept thinking that I should see Dada at the end of the long grass walks … But needless to say I saw nothing – nothing but the lilac in the dusk.

‘I must’ she wrote to Harold in a telling phrase ‘try to put Knole out of my heart as one puts a dead love.’

So Virginia’s gift of Orlando soothed. It took Knole and Violet out of Vita’s heart and put them on to the literary shelves. It was published to ‘great excitement’ in September 1928. Sales were ‘amazingly brisk’. By December it had gone into a third edition. In six months 8,000 copies were sold. It was a bestseller.

Publication coincided with the trial for obscenity of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. Virginia offered to testify in its favour though she thought it a ‘meritorious dull book’. It is the forlorn story of Stephen Gordon a ‘congenital invert’ who sees herself as a man trapped in a woman’s body. Orlando, by contrast, is a free spirit who time and gender cannot constrain. ‘Sapphism’ was topical. Virginia allied herself with the cause by going away alone with Vita for a week in France.

For Violet the book was a laceration, the perpetrating of a lie the more painful because of Virginia Woolf’s reputation. Yet again Vita was the hero and she, Violet, the evil fox. Broderie Anglaise was her retaliation. She read in Orlando that English was ‘too frank and candid a tongue’ for her. In French she was frank, candid and disparaging. She took for her title an untranslatable French term for a kind of English embroidery that consists of decorating holes. Her novel, decoded, is a swingeing rebuttal of Vita’s version of their affair as published in Orlando. In Broderie Anglaise Violet tells the world that Vita loved her equally and that Vita, not she, was the one who reneged on the arranged wedding day.

Far from spanning centuries and landscapes of the mind, the entire action of Violet’s novel takes place in a single afternoon in the London drawing room of the house where the writer Alexa/Virginia lives with her pipe-smoking literary uncle, Jim/Leonard Woolf. She and Lord Shorne/Vita, who lives with his domineering mother, are having a lukewarm affair. On the day of the novel’s action, Alexa is to have a visit from Shorne’s former lover Anne/Violet, who now lives in Paris. Shorne does not know of this intended visit.

Alexa is an awkward lover, ‘incomplete as a woman’, ‘an old maid’, a virgin, her bed ‘so small and shy’ you can scarcely find it in the bedroom. Her hair is thin (Violet was often commended by Vita for her ‘truly beautiful hair’), she has an ‘elderly neck’, is of indeterminate age with ‘no bloom to lose’.

Everything about her is cerebral, famous, she has beautiful hands, but she is too thin, uninterested in food, wears dowdy clothes, is ‘very Oxford’. She is ‘a piece of waterweed’, ‘a puff of smoke’. A fifteenth-century Flemish painter would, Violet wrote, have ‘portrayed her with a caged goldfinch and a carnation spotted with dew’.

Shorne is flattered ‘to be the lover of one of the most distinguished women in England’. But Alexa lives only in her books, writes with her brain, not her heart, and there is not a prostitute or royal bastard among her ancestors.

Lord Shorne has plenty of prostitutes and royal bastards among his ancestors. Tall, with ‘perfect self-assurance’, he is attractive to women, has ‘languid grace’, ‘latent fire’, is easy with the servants and a Rolls-Royce waits at his door. Despite his foreign mother, his English ancestry prevails. He has that ‘hereditary face which had come, eternally bored, through five centuries’. ‘Down the years, this face, [the Sackville face], has been painted by Moro, Van Dyck, Gainsborough.’ Again and again for her heroes Violet used this description of Vita.

Shorne admires Alexa’s mind but does not desire her. They are awkward together when they travel abroad. ‘Alexa admired the wrists and ankles of the Medici Venus, Shorne admired those of the chambermaid.’ He pursues Alexa only because she is unavailable. A formula underpins all his love affairs: ‘I advance, you retreat. You retreat, I advance.’ It was elementary, as old as the hills.’

The true relationship of his life was with his cousin Anne/Violet, ‘who knew everything without having had to learn anything, and who had been as expert at fifteen as Alexa was at thirty…’. Shorne, on his nineteenth birthday, told Anne he loved her. Love, for him, is possession. He said it ‘as if he were handling some familiar object’. All other women are passing fancies. Anne was the one who mattered. She now lives in France, is witty, has a tendency to put on weight:

Would he never manage to banish that ghost? Never have done with that slow unfurling love which had sapped his youth,