Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter
A Biography
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Alice Keppel, the married lover of Queen Victoria's eldest son and great-grandmother to Camilla Parker-Bowles, was a key figure in Edwardian society. Hers was the acceptable face of adultery. Discretion was her hallmark. It was her art to be the king's mistress and yet to laud the Royal Family and the institution of marriage. Formidable and manipulative, her attentions to the king brought her wealth, power, and status. Her daughter Violet Trefusis had a long tempestuous affair with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, during which Vita left her husband and two sons to travel abroad with Violet. It was a liaison that threatened the fabric of Violet's social world, and her passion and recalcitrance in pursuit of it pitted her against her mother and society. From memoirs, diaries, and letters, Diana Souhami portrays this fascinating and intense mother/daughter relationship in Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Her story of these women, their lovers, and their lovers' mothers, highlights Edwardian - and contemporary - duplicity and double standards and goes to the heart of questions about sexual freedoms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Souhami (Gluck, Greta and Cecil) presents an engaging and sumptuously gossipy portrait of one of late Victorian and Edwardian England's most sparkling and notorious mother-daughter pairs: Mrs. George Keppel, lover of Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and her daughter Violet, flamboyant lover of Vita Sackville-West. Born Alice Frederica Edmonstone in 1869, Mrs. Keppel married a dull army officer but soon yearned to cut a figure in the beau monde. This she did with formidable panache. Then she caught the eye of the lascivious, portly prince of Wales, Bertie to his familiars, three decades her senior; what followed was a liaison that cast the realm into shock. "Mrs. Keppel," Souhami notes, "regarded adultery as a sound business practice." She takes us into a suffocating if gorgeous world, with its extravagant arrogance and waste, its weekend hunts and house parties at imperial country houses, while showing us the shrill persecution of homosexuals. Violet, born in 1894 to a father whose identity was never revealed to her, emerges as the intelligent, romantic, slightly crushed satellite of an overbearing, ruthless mother. Her relationship with Sackville-West is handled sympathetically and with nuance. Lavishly illustrated, pungent with luxurious detail and hardheaded investigation, this is popular history to relish.
