Violet Trefusis

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Standard Name: Trefusis, Violet
Birth Name: Violet Keppel
Married Name: Violet Trefusis
Though VT is best known to literary history as a lover of English writer and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West , she wrote and published in a range of genres throughout her life, which spanned much of the twentieth century. These include diaries and letters, novels, memoirs, travel journalism, and radio broadcasting, composed in both English and French.
Title-page of "Poems and Tales", 1808, volume ii, by Elizabeth Trefusis, published with her name as "Miss Trefusis".
Head-and-shoulders portrait sketch of Violet Trefusis by William Bruce Ellis Ranken, 1919. Against a purple background, she looks straight at the viewer, wearing light purple dress and bright red lipstick. Her hair is chin-length, curly, and brown.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Rosita Forbes
An indefatigable name-dropper, RF wrote that the greatest, and most sensible, man she had ever met was Kemal Atatürk ; she then bracketed with him Franklin Delano Roosevelt .
Forbes, Rosita. Gypsy in the Sun. Cassell, 1944.
55-6
In Cairo she was always...
Material Conditions of Writing Vita Sackville-West
VSW began this work while alone in the country with her children, but still deeply affected by the turbulent after-life of her affair with Violet Trefusis . She finished it on 28 March 1921. Nigel Nicolson
Material Conditions of Writing Vita Sackville-West
VSW began working on Reddin in 1921, on a boat off Italy. Having rebuilt her marriage after her affair with Violet Trefusis , she wanted to voice her philosophy of life. At this date...
Publishing Vita Sackville-West
VSW 's Challenge, a novel based on her love-affair with Violet Trefusis , appeared in New York from George H. Doran ; it remained unpublished in Britain until 1974.
Nicolson, Nigel, and Vita Sackville-West. “Foreword”. Challenge, Collins, 1974, pp. 7-11.
7
Reception Frances Cornford
Her Epitaph for Everyman (My heart was more disgraceful, more alone, / And more courageous than the world has known . . . .) has been mistakenly attributed to Violet Trefusis .
qtd. in
Garner, Dwight. “In the Fast Company of Women on the Edge”. The New York Times, 4 Aug. 2011.
Textual Production Vita Sackville-West
In 1923 VSW was reviewing regularly for the Nation and Athenæum; she also contributed to The Observer, the London Mercury, and the New Statesman.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
3: 57
She wrote the entry on...
Textual Production Vita Sackville-West
VSW began on Challenge in May 1918, early in her affair with Violet, and wrote most of it in Monte Carlo when the two were there together, reading it to Violet in the evenings for...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Vita Sackville-West
As the title implies, the poems spring from two settings: those of Kent and of the Mediterranean. Many encode personal meanings about human relationships; many deal with country life and environments. Bitterness, written...

Timeline

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Texts

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