frame 38 June 2023
Blue Eyes and a Wild Heart
Jane Wellesley on Dorothy Wellesley
We are delighted to share this piece from producer and writer Jane Wellesley, whose remarkable book Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit charts the life and times of Dorothy Wellesley, lover of Vita Sackville-West, confidante of Yeats, and recorder of the Bloomsbury Group.
‘In 1936 W. B. Yeats cited my grandmother as having written “perhaps the most moving philosophic poem of our time”. Yet by the time she died twenty years later, Dorothy Wellesley had become invisible to the public, and isolated from her family. I was five when she died, yet she never met me, or saw me. As I grew up, she was rarely talked about, and, in a house that was filled with family photographs, there were no images of her. Gradually it became clear that even in death she was not a welcome presence, that she had been exiled. Of course I became fascinated by her, precisely because of this alienation. Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson were among the very small group of people to attend the interment of my grandmother’s ashes. ‘I feel how wasted that fierce little life was and how little anybody cares,’ Harold wrote in his diary. This book is my attempt to redress that view.’
With that short ‘Epilogue’ I set out my stall for Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit: A life of Dorothy Wellesley. When I was very young all I knew about my grandmother was that she was poet, and perhaps she would have been content with that. In some respects Dorothy Wellesley was complicit in her shadowiness: whether by her own hand, or another’s, she destroyed most of her personal papers. My aunt Eliza believed she burnt them, and so I have this disturbing image in my mind of ‘Dottie throwing letters onto the fire – disturbing because they would have been from an extraordinary cast of twentieth-century characters whose words I would have thrilled to read, none more so than those of Virginia Woolf. Among the roll call of others whose letters would have met the same fate were, Gerald Berners, Ottoline Morrell, Hugh Walpole, Walter de la Mare, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Ethel Smyth, May Sarton, and John Betjeman. Thankfully the letters from Yeats escaped the flame, since they were edited by my grandmother, and published in 1940, the year after he died. Though she would never have used the words, she could claim to have been the great poet’s last muse.
Dottie with Valerian, 1916
‘Dottie’ (a nickname she never liked but most of her friends called her, though not Yeats who always called her Dorothy) met Virginia through Vita Sackville-West, whose affair with Dottie wrecked my grandparents’ marriage. I imagine that there would have been a big pile of letters from Vita, since she remained in Dottie’s life up until her death. Did the women have a pact about destroying their correspondence? I came across only one letter from Dottie to Vita in the Sackville-West archives – no doubt wrongly filed. Fortunately I was able to find, scattered round the world in various libraries and university archives, a few other letters from Dottie to some of her friends, but I was always left with only half the conversation. Her few letters to Virginia revolved round a trip that Vita and Dottie made together to Persia in 1927, and were written in part to reassure Virginia – another of Vita’s lovers – that all was well with Vita. It was also through Vita that my grandmother met Hilda Matheson, one of the pioneering women of the early years of the BBC. Hilda too was one of Vita’s lovers, and when that affair ended in the early 30s, she and Dottie began a relationship, and she moved into a house on the Sussex estate, Penns-in-the-Rocks, owned by my grandmother. Dottie was devastated when Hilda died in 1940, aged only fifty-two.
As for images, it is a melancholy reflection that there were no photographs of my grandmother in the houses I grew up in, particularly since I came across an album which contained some enchanting pictures of her with my father Valerian when he was a toddler. Strangely however, I could not track down any of Dottie as a bride at her 1914 wedding to Lord Gerald Wellesley. It was quite a high profile social event, in St Bartholomew the Great church in London’s Smithfield, and crowds gathered to glimpse the heiress Dorothy Ashton marrying a younger son of the Duke of Wellington. (Many years later, in 1943, ‘Gerry’ would unexpectedly inherit the Dukedom, and since he was separated but not divorced from Dottie, she became a Duchess.) There were vivid descriptions in the press of her wedding gown of ‘soft white and gold brocade’, her tulle veil held in place by a wreath of orange blossom and myrtle leaves. But a trawl through newspaper archives could only yield a single hazy image, taken from a distance, of a couple who I would never have guessed were my grandparents. Did Dottie forbid the taking of photographs? She certainly disliked being photographed, and as she got older she shied even further from the lens, and was rarely pictured without a hat pulled firmly down to obscure much of her face.
Dorothy Wellesley with Vita Sackville-West, 1929
In her 1952 memoir, Far Have I Travelled, Dorothy Wellesley covers the ground she trod, but reveals scarcely anything about the important relationships in her life. Her final collection of poetry, Early Light, was published three years later, not long before her death. Was she carefully curating how future generations would judge her – framing her legacy so that it would rest entirely in her work? In stark contrast to the personal papers, all the reviews of my grandmother’s poetry or the books she edited, were carefully kept, and ended up in an old leather suitcase stored by my aunt in her attic. I suspect that I was the first person to read them since the day they were stashed in large brown envelopes, some bearing my grandmother’s handwritten note about the contents.
Poetry is a constant, even a silver, thread that runs throughout the span of my grandmother’s life – writing it, reading it, promoting it. A friend and fellow poet of the time, Ruth Pitter, wrote of the corpus of her work being ‘touchingly impressive. It speaks of a gift faithfully cultivated in spite of odds, of a devotion, a pursuit of one purpose, a professional seriousness, enthusiasm, perseverance, which should be honoured. She was generous to other poets, and interested in them too; far more than most of us.’ Pitter wrote too of my grandmother being ‘damaged’ and ‘damaging’. There is no doubt that her dependence on alcohol and prescribed drugs blighted her life, particularly in the latter years, but she never stopped writing, and gardening. Her poems about nature are among her best.
Dorothy Wellesley flouted the conventions of her class and gender, unable, and unwilling, to accept the patriarchal rules that her upbringing and marriage sought to impose on her. Sometimes reckless, often vulnerable, she was both a crusader and a casualty, silently censored for the unconventionality of her life, for her bisexuality, even for her independence. She was a woman ahead of her time. I hail her wild spirit and wish that our lives had overlapped long enough for me to have met her.