‘Her wine was good and her beds were soft’: the mysterious and beguiling life of Dottie Wellesley

A tender, warm biography of Dottie Wellesley by her granddaughter charts the tangled love affairs and waspish literary feuds that peppered the life of one of Edwardian England’s most intriguing society figures, writes historian Katie Hickman

Dottie Wellesley (The Wellesley Family)

When Jane Wellesley was growing up, she was never allowed to meet her paternal grandmother. Dorothy (Dottie) Wellesley, 7th Duchess of Wellington, was rarely spoken about, even by her own son; and in a home crammed full of family photographs, there was not a single image of her. No surprise, then, that this mysterious, exiled figure would become an object of intense interest to her granddaughter – and the result is a tender memoir, Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit, out next Thursday.

Dorothy Wellesley (neé Ashton) was born in 1889 into a family that was no stranger to scandal (her maternal grandmother had been a notorious bigamist, eloping to Gretna Green when pregnant by her working-class lover). Dottie’s own decision to live separately from her husband, Gerry (they never divorced – and he may also have been gay), was in itself a scandalous departure from the norm, even without the fact that her many later liaisons would all be with women.

A poet of significance in her day, Dottie published numerous volumes of her work, and would gain (if controversially) an entry in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, at a time when women rarely got a look in (“Has Woman any really poetic talent?” read one headline of the day). She was also a patron of the arts, funding the Hogarth Press for many years, and a friend and muse to WB Yeats, to whom she was a frequent and generous hostess. But for all this, it is her turbulent love life that really fascinates us today.

The Wellesley family was always convinced that it was Dottie’s affair with Vita Sackville-West that caused her marriage to collapse. A convenient stop-gap between two of Vita’s more important affairs (Vita had just ended her notorious relationship with Violet Trefusis, and had not quite yet embarked on her affair with Virginia Woolf), Dottie does not seem to have been made particularly happy by their time together as lovers. “You have no idea now miserable I have made Dotz,” Vita once wrote to her husband, Harold Nicholson; but their friendship – despite Vita’s careless, and sometimes downright cruel treatment of her – would last her entire life.

Wellesley is particularly good at charting the complexities of her grandmother’s emotional world, particularly the rapidly revolving door of love affairs, quarrels, and jealousies, between Dottie, Vita, and Virginia, with whom Dottie was also for a time in love, and their frequently interlocking array of women friends and lovers. And what brilliantly bitchy pens there were to describe it all. Dottie “sizzled and spluttered like a herring on a fork”, wrote Virginia Woolf, “exposed to the torture of her books failure, her marriage’s failure, and various other failures”.

There may have been feuds, but there were tremendous loyalties, too. Wellesley describes how Dottie once stayed up all night with a shotgun across her knees, to protect another of Vita’s lovers, Mary Campbell, from her jealous husband.

Dottie Wellesley met WB Yeats in 1935. Although never his lover, she became not only his intimate friend, but also his last muse. Yates was a frequent visitor to her house Penns-in-the-Rocks in Sussex, a time of intensely satisfying productivity for them both. While some of Dottie’s more waspish friends believed that Yeats’ motives for befriending her may not have been entirely disinterested – not only was she very rich, but, to paraphrase Virginia Woolf again, her wine was very good, and her beds very soft – there is no doubt that he was a genuine admirer of her work. He considered her poem “Matrix” to be “perhaps the most moving philosophic poem of our time,” mentioning it alongside TS Eliot’s “The Waste Land” when he delivered the BBC’s annual National Lecture on Modern Poetry.

Despite the fact that their relationship would only last three and half years (Yeats died in 1939), there is no doubt that it was the great solace of Dottie’s life.

Dorothy Wellesley with her children Eliza and Valerian (The Wellesley Family)

Jane Wellesley’s account of her grandmother’s extraordinary life is written with enormous insight and warmth. As a bisexual woman, she was never going to have an easy life, despite her being born into a world of privilege. Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit is not just a family memoir; it’s a story for our times.

‘Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit: A Life of Dorothy Wellesley’ will be published by Sandstone on 22 June

Katie Hickman is a best-selling author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her latest book ‘Brave Hearted: the Dramatic Story of Women of the American West’ is now out in paperback