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- Pirates at Play by Violet Trefusis (Presentation Copy)
Pirates at Play by Violet Trefusis (Presentation Copy)
TREFUSIS, Violet. Pirates at Play. London: Michael Joseph, 1950.
Third impression. Presentation copy, inscribed in French by the author to her friend, Marie Blanche [de Polignac]: ‘Pour Marie Blanche, ces Borgia bourgeois, son amie, Violette’.
Violet Trefusis (1894-1972) was a writer and a patron of the arts. She wrote novels (five in English, four in French), poems, essays, and plays. She is one of a handful of English authors who have written equally elegantly in English and in French. Violet was the daughter of Alice Frederica Keppel, mistress of King Edward VII, and great-grandmother of Queen Camilla.
As a young woman Violet had a passionate love affair with Vita Sackville-West. Both shaped by the aesthetic movement, they dreamed of dedicating their whole existence to Beauty. Violet’s letters to Vita show a courageous and rebellious young woman, her revolt a harbinger of Women’s Liberation. Undoubtedly inspired by what Vita had told her, Virginia Woolf would transform Violet into a Russian princess in Orlando.
The book is inscribed to Marie Blanche, daughter of French fashion designer Jeanne Lanvin, wife of Comte Jean de Polignac, and a relation by marriage to one of Violet’s lovers, Winaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac.
Pirates at Play, Violet’s final novel in English, is the story of a band of handsome Florentines on the lookout for rich mistresses.
8vo, original cloth. 232 pp. In attractive dust jacket by Philippe Jullian. Old faint stain to bottom of boards, pastedowns, and inside the dust jacket (slight edge-wear; 2 small tape repairs to inside dust jacket; spine lightly browned; in clear, removable protective sleeve). A good but still very attractive copy.