Alice keppel

Primary Sources

(1) Violet Keppel, Don't Look Round (1952)

No one had told me that Vita (Sackville-West) had turned into a beauty. The knobs and knuckles had all disappeared. She was tall and graceful. The profund, hereditary Sackville eyes were as pools from which the morning mists had lifted. A peach might have envied her complexion. Round her revolved several enamoured young men.

(2) Vita Sackville-West, Autobiography (1920)

I hate writing this, but I must, I must. When I began this I swore I would shirk nothing, and no more I will. So here is the truth: I was never so much in love with Rosamund as during those weeks in Italy and the months that followed. It may seem that I should have missed Harold more. I admit everything, to my shame, but I have never pretended to have anything other than a base and despicable character. I seem to be incapable of fidelity, as much then as now. But, as a sole justification, I separate my loves into two halves: Harold, who is unalterable, perennial, and best; there has never been anything but absolute purity i

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The Breathtaking Love Letters of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West

More than a decade before her love affair with Virginia Woolf, in an era when LGBT Pride was as laughable a concept as LGBT shame was culturally codified, English author Vita Sackville-West fell in love with another woman, the writer and socialite Violet Keppel, and the two embarked upon one of the most intense and turbulent affairs in literary history. The exquisite epistolary records of their relationship, which was later fictionalized in Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel Orlando, span more than a decade and are captured in Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West (public library) — an immensely moving addition to history’s most beautiful LGBT love letters, preserved at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, brimming with some of the most urgently, breathtakingly passionate uses of the English language.

Violet and Vita had been friends since childhood, but began forming an intense romantic bond during their teenag

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Violet Trefusis

English socialite and author (1894–1972)

Violet Trefusis (néeKeppel; 6 June 1894 – 29 February 1972) was an English socialite and author. She is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West that both women continued after their respective marriages. It was featured in novels by both parties; in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography; and in many letters and memoirs of the period roughly from 1912 to 1922. She may have been the inspiration for aspects of the character Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate and of Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium (1982).

Trefusis herself wrote many novels, as well as non-fiction works, both in English and in French. Although some of her books sold well, others went unpublished, and her overall critical heritage remains lukewarm.^{[citation needed]}

Early life

Born Violet Keppel, she was the daughter of Alice Keppel, who was married to George Keppel, a son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle. Members of the Keppel family thought her bio