Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter PDF Author: Diana Souhami
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1466883502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book 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.

Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter PDF Author: Diana Souhami
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1466883502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

Get Book

Book 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.

Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter

Mrs Keppel and Her Daughter PDF Author: Diana Souhami
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1780878818
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book

Book Description
Alice Keppel, lover of Queen Victoria's son Edward VII and great-grandmother of Camilla Parker-Bowles, was the acceptable face of Edwardian adultery. It was her art to be the King's mistress yet to laud the Royal Family and the institution of marriage. She partnered the King for yachting at Cowes and helped him choose presents for his wife Queen Alexandra while remaining calmly married to her complaisant husband George. But for her daughter Violet, passionately in love with Vita Sackville-West, romance proved tragic and destructive. Mrs Keppel used all the force at her command to repress the relationship. This fascinating and intense mother-daughter relationship highlights Edwardian and contemporary duplicity and double standards. It goes to the heart of questions about the monarchy, family values and sexual freedoms.

Mrs Keppel

Mrs Keppel PDF Author: Tom Quinn
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
ISBN: 1785901532
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 223

Get Book

Book Description
For Alice Keppel, it was all about appearances. Her precepts were those of the English upper classes: discretion, manners and charm. Nothing else mattered - especially when it came to her infamous affair with King Edward VII. As the King's favourite mistress up until his death in 1910, Alice held significant influence at court and over Edward himself. But it wasn't just Edward she courted: throughout her life, Alice enthusiastically embarked on affairs with bankers, MPs, peers - anybody who could elevate her standing and pay the right price. She was a shrewd courtesan, and her charisma and voracity ensured her both power and money, combined as they were with an aptitude for manipulation. Drawing on a range of sources, including salacious first-hand eyewitness accounts, bestselling author Tom Quinn paints an extraordinary picture of the Edwardian aristocracy, and traces the lives of royal mistresses down to Alice's great-granddaughter, the current Duchess of Cornwall. Both intriguing and astonishing, this is an unadulterated glimpse into a hidden world of scandal, decadence and debauchery.

Alice Keppel and Agnes Keyser

Alice Keppel and Agnes Keyser PDF Author: Raymond Lamont-Brown
Publisher: The History Press
ISBN: 0752473948
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book

Book Description
A detailed look at the two women in the life of Edward VII during his last years. Alice Keppel, youngest daughter of a Scottish retired admiral and MP emerged from obscurity in 1898 to become the publicly acknowledged mistress of the portly, fun-loving Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. Agnes Keyser, daughter of a prominent member of the Stock exchange, defied social expectations by not marrying, instead becoming involved in hospital charity work. Her twelve-year relationship with the king was much less in the public eye, but was just as important.

The Trials of Radclyffe Hall

The Trials of Radclyffe Hall PDF Author: Diana Souhami
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1497683343
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 259

Get Book

Book Description
Diana Souhami’s Lambda Award–winning biography is a fascinating look at one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing lesbian literary figures. Born in 1880, Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall was a young unwanted child when her parents put an end to their tempestuous marriage by filing for divorce. She had already made tentative forays into lesbian love when her father died, leaving her an heiress at eighteen. Her income assured, Hall moved out of her mother’s house, renamed herself John in honor of her great-great-grandfather, and divided her time among hunting, traveling, and pursuing women. She began to write—songs, poetry, prose, and short stories—and achieved success as a novelist, but it was with the publication of The Well of Loneliness in 1928 that Radclyffe Hall became an internationally known figure. Dubbed the “bible of lesbianism,” the book caused a scandal on both sides of the Atlantic. Though moralistic in tone, because of its subject matter it was tried as obscene in America and in the United Kingdom, where it was censored under the Obscene Publications Act. The Trials of Radclyffe Hall is a fascinating, no-holds-barred account of the life of this controversial woman, including her torrid relationship with the married artist Una Troubridge, who was Hall’s devoted partner for twenty-eight years.

Edwardian Daughter

Edwardian Daughter PDF Author: Sonia Keppel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book

Book Description


Wild Girls

Wild Girls PDF Author: Diana Souhami
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312366605
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book

Book Description
Wild Girls is the critically acclaimed true story of two wealthy American heiresses---one an artist, the other a writer---whose stormy, passionate love affair captivated Paris’s salon set between the wars. Natalie Barney and Romaine Brooks were rich, American, eccentric, and grandly lesbian. They met in Paris in 1915, and their relationship lasted more than fifty years, despite infidelity, separation, and temperamental differences. Romaine Brooks, a painter, was the product of an unhappy childhood and trusted no one but Natalie. Natalie Barney was passionate about life, sex, and love. Her Friday afternoon salons, attended by Gertrude Stein, and Colette and Edith Sitwell, were a magnet for social introductions and cultural innovations. Drawing from letters, papers, and paintings, Diana Souhami, the award-winning author of Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter, re-creates the lives and loves of this pair of dazzling and wild women. “Epic romance . . . smartly sex-positive and so good-naturedly shocking.” ---The New York Times Book Review “Real tenderness and pathos . . . not only entertaining but affecting reading.” ---The Washington Post “Their friends were the most bohemian, their parties the most risqué, their tortured love affair the most notorious in Europe. Diana Souhami tells a remarkable tale.” ---The Sunday Telegraph (UK)

A Book of Secrets

A Book of Secrets PDF Author: Michael Holroyd
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9781429969215
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction book of 2011 A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction title for 2011 On a hill above the Italian village of Ravello sits the Villa Cimbrone, a place of fantasy and make-believe. The characters that move through Michael Holroyd's new book are destined never to meet, yet the Villa Cimbrone unites them all. A Book of Secrets is a treasure trove of hidden lives, uncelebrated achievements, and family mysteries. With grace and tender imagination, Holroyd brings a company of unknown women into the light. From Alice Keppel, the mistress of both the second Lord Grimthorpe and the Prince of Wales; to Eve Fairfax, a muse of Auguste Rodin; to the novelist Violet Trefusis, the lover of Vita Sackville-West—these women are always on the periphery of the respectable world. Also on the margins is the elusive biographer, who on occasion turns an appraising eye upon himself as part of his investigations in the maze of biography. In A Book of Secrets, Holroyd gives voice to fragile human connections and the mystery of place.

Violet to Vita

Violet to Vita PDF Author: Violet Trefusis
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book

Book Description


Portrait of a Marriage

Portrait of a Marriage PDF Author: Nigel Nicolson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226583570
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Get Book

Book Description
Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story of her love affair with Violet Keppel Trefusis in 1920 is one of intrigue and bewilderment. In Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson combines his mother's vivid memoir of escapade with what he learned from copious family letters and explains the context of this romantic crisis. He also describes how Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson went on to live the rest of their lives in harmonious marriage.