Poet Dorothy Wellesley, 1935
photo by Lady Ottoline Morrell
Dorothy had an affair with Vita Sackville-West. Of course. But this affair was a more notable one in Vita’s history because it almost blew up into a tabloid scandal.
You see, at the time of her affair with Dorothy, she was also seeing Margaret “Pat” Dansey, whom she’d met after her ex-lover Violet Trefusis became Pat’s ex-lover (bear with me, people who don’t belong to the lesbian phone tree). Pat was the jealous kind, and when Dorothy began getting more of Vita’s attention:
[Pat] threatened scandal on a scale to dwarf anything caused by Violet. She had, she said, heard from Lilly, a servant of Vita’s, that Vita and Dorothy Wellesley had been seen ‘in a very amorous position, D. with no clothes on’…
She made specious threats, tried peculiar bribes. She said the newspaper Morning Post had changed hands and she was now a principal shareholder. She offered to send her chauffeur round to Vita with £10,000 in cash, realized from these shares. Vita’s acceptance of the money would console Pat and dissipate her feelings of bitterness and hatred. Vita, disconcerted, wrote to Lord Northumberland, owner of the Morning Post, to see what was behind this convoluted story. It was, he replied, a fabrication. “She never bought any shares in the Morning Post nor sold any. I can’t imagine why she has told you this story… she has endeavoured to impose upon you in the most shameless way.”
But Pat wouldn’t quit her obsessive ways. From one of Vita’s letters, 1922:
Pat informed me casual-like the other day that she had left me everything she possessed. It is rather difficult to know what to reply to such remarks. “Thanks awfully” seems inadequate; lack of interest seems ungrateful and excess of interest in poor taste. I lost my head and said I wished she would see another specialist. I really think she is the queerest fish I ever came across.
She also gave Vita a car, threatened suicide several times and barraged Vita with emotionally violent letters (“How miserable you made me and after my unhappiness you cruelly took me up again and then dropped me last summer with no fair explanation.”) for years. Did I mention that Pat had a long-term partner this whole time?
What could Vita do in bed that no one else before or since has been able to replicate, that’s what I’d like to know. ‘Cause finding the answer to that would explain away a lot of the batshit crazy reactions she inspired in her exes.
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