The gay duchess

A N WILSON Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit: A Life of Dorothy Wellesley

By Jane Wellesley Sandstone Press £30

The story of the Royal Family – George VI, the Little Princesses and Queen Elizabeth – all having the giggles when listening to T S Eliot read from The Waste Land is well known.

What I had not appreciated until reading this wonderful biography was that this occurred during a gala evening, at which poets aimed to raise money for the Free French during the Second World War. The Sitwells, Eliot, Stephen Spender and Walter de la Mare were all there. And the final poet on the bill was Dorothy Wellesley, married to the future Duke of Wellington.

No one has heard of her now, but she was regarded by W B Yeats not only as a friend, but also as a good, philosophical poet. He included her work in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Yeats was dead by the time of the royal evening.

Dottie was in a sad place. Her marriage to Gerry Wellesley had broken up acrimoniously. She had fallen in love with Vita Sackville-West, never exactly a recipe for happiness, and with Hilda Matheson, who organised highbrow talks on the wireless, and was responsible for that glorious series Britain in Pictures

Hilda was dead by the time of the royal gala evening. (Dottie wanted to be buried in the same grave as Hilda, with the inscription ‘Amica amicarum’.) Dottie was lonely and, at the prospect of reading poetry to the philistine royals, nervous.

The evening was, for her, a disaster. She took a little too much to drink. Her fellow poets stopped her going on stage, physically restraining her as she shouted.

She was eventually seen sitting on the pavement outside, banging the stones with her stick, before being taken off in a taxi by Vita and pals. She felt the embarrassment of it keenly, especially when she realised that ‘everyone’, including the Queen, thought her humiliation hilarious.

Dorothy Wellesley has not had a good press. Very rich, she helped to bankroll the Hogarth Press, paying the Woolfs to keep their poetry list alive. She paid for 24 volumes of poetry to be published.

The only mention she gets in Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf, however, is ‘Dottie Wellesley was dotty, and wrote poetry much admired by W B Yeats. Leonard could not stand her.’

This wise, generous book, by her granddaughter, puts the record straight.

It tells the story of a highly intelligent girl brought up in the stultifying world of the Edwardian rich. She came out – as a deb, but she could not come out as one who loved her own gender.

Her friend Hilda wrote to Vita, ‘I loathe the need for furtiveness and secrecy. I find it comprehensively absurd and I have to keep reminding myself that it is considered antisocial and immoral and it makes me fairly blaspheme.’

The sheer stultifying tedium of that world is well evoked by Jane Wellesley.

Dottie, while keeping up appearances, managed to pursue a worthy career as a writer and a poet. She met Yeats when he was an old man and she was in middle age.

Jane Wellesley writes, ‘As 1935 was drawing to a close, my grandmother’s relationship with Yeats had changed her life. “You have said to me more than once that you felt you must rebuild things around our friendship,” she wrote to WB. “I was too moved to answer. You are the Master of us all. You understand that I could not answer? Perhaps you are too modest and too great a man to realise what our friendship has meant to an obscure poet.” ’

A third in their friendship was her Great Dane, Brutus. She wrote, ‘Lord of the house, open the door with thy shoulder!/ The poet Yeats has given unto thee /In his Last Poems some immortality/ To bay in fancy’s hour the moon again. /But never by moonlit rock or spirit glade/ Shall we three walk again.’

In the lonely last years of her life, she was befriended by John Betjeman.

Since finishing this book – so touching, so honest, so well written – I have been reading Dorothy Wellesley’s poems and, yes, Yeats was right. She was a great poet. Try the one called Mother. Or her masterpiece, Genesis.

Yet she is omitted from all the anthologies, and no one teaches her in schools.