Volume 44, Number 18 · November 20, 1997
Blue Fingernails
By Noel Annan
Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse
by Jessica Douglas-Home
Harvill(distributed by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 342 pp., $28.00
Violet Gordon Woodhouse, who died at seventy-seven in 1948, was the most admired English harpsichordist of her time; for much of her life she presided over a ménage of four adoring men, and she fascinated many of the prominent writers and musicians she came to know. In her well-written biography of Woodhouse, her great-niece Jessica Douglas-Home has much to say about her family's odd history. She begins by reminding us what was expected of a conventional, well-to-do, middle-class Victorian wife. She would be judged by what carriage and horses she kept, by her dressmakers and milliners, by her delicacy—her skin protected by a parasol, her hands by gloves, her chores smoothed by servants and her cares by her husband, to whom she deferred on all questions of morality and politics. When her sons came to marry, their brides must be of a suitable social class, British, at a pinch American or European, but unquestionably Caucasian. In the days of colonies and Empire, to be allied to a family with 'blue fingernails,' the mark of a past misalliance with natives, was unthinkable.
Review, 2712 words
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