Violet ship

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Violet Schiff , maiden name Violet Zillah Beddington , (born August 20, 1874 in London , † July 2, 1962 ) was a prominent lady of the London and Parisian society after the turn of the century and a patron of art and literature.

Life

Violet was born as the youngest of eight children to the wealthy wool manufacturer and financier Samuel Beddington. Violet grew up in a music-loving family. In the family home at 21 Hyde Park Square, the stars of the time were guests during their performances in London, including Enrico Caruso , Nellie Melba and Giacomo Puccini . Paolo Tosti , music master of the royal family, was the singing teacher of the Beddington daughters.

Violet was courted by Arthur Sullivan, 33 years her senior, when she was 21 , but the relationship ended unhappily. In 1911 she married the British author and translator Sidney Schiff (1868-1944) after he divorced his wife, the American Marion Fulton Canine. Sidney published his work under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson . Like herself, he came from a wealthy family. Violet had grown up and raised in the Jewish faith, Sidney Schiff was also of Jewish origin, but he himself, like his mother, had been baptized in an Anglican.

The ships lived alternately in England, in Paris and in their house in Roquebrune . Since the 1920s they were close friends with Katherine Mansfield , Wyndham Lewis and TS Eliot , who were often their guests and with whom they exchanged lively letters. In 1934 the Schiffs moved into a house in Dorking in the south east of England. In August 1944 the house was hit by a German bomb. Violet was seriously injured in the attack, and Schiff died of heart failure two months later. Violet outlived her husband by 18 years.

Friendship with Marcel Proust

In 1919 the Schiffs, who had read Proust's novel “In Swanns Welt” [1913], “with enthusiasm”, met Proust for the first time in the Hotel Ritz . Proust then invited her to his apartment, the conversation lasted into the early hours of the morning, and contact, which was mainly maintained through letters, has not broken off since then. Proust dedicated the first edition of "Sodom and Gomorrah" [1921/22] to Sidney and Violet Schiff. He recommended Schiff to his publisher Gallimard , who brought out translations of Schiff's short stories and stories in his publishing house.

On May 18, 1922, Igor Stravinsky's ballet “Le Renard” premiered at the Paris Opera . The piece was produced by Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with Nijinsky in the lead role. At the invitation of the ship, Stravinsky, Diaghilew, Picasso and Proust then met for the premiere party with selected guests in a salon of the Hotel Majestic . The fifth guest of honor was James Joyce , who arrived at the party drunk and was later dropped off by Proust in his taxi at the hotel. The encounter between the two great authors, who, after hearing witnesses, spoke lively about their illnesses, had no personal or literary consequences.

Under his pseudonym Stephen Hudson, Schiff completed the translation of the last volume of the research into English after the translator Scott-Moncrieff died.

Correspondence

Violet and Sidney Schiff exchanged letters with Richard Aldington , Frederick Delius , TS Eliot , James Joyce , Aldous Huxley , DH Lawrence , Wyndham Lewis , Katherine Mansfield , Edwin and Willa Muir , the writer John Middleton Murry (1889–1957), Oskar Kokoschka , the painter John Nash (1893–1977), the Sitwells and with Sylvia Townsend Warner .

Violet's correspondence with Marcel Proust began shortly after she met him in April 1919 and ended on November 18, 1922, two months before Proust's death. 950 letters addressed to her by Proust and occasionally to her husband have been preserved.

Translations

Violet Schiff translated Raymond Radiguet's novel Le bal du Comte d'Orgel into English in 1952.

family

Violet's sister was the English novelist Ada Leverson , who had been close friends with Oscar Wilde since 1892 . He called her his "Sphinx" (or "Gilded Sphinx of Golden Memory"). Ada was one of the few Londoners who remained loyal to him even after his conviction. Her sister Sybil Seligman (1868-1936) had a brief affair with Giacomo Puccini in London in 1904. Sybil Seligman remained friends with Puccini all her life.

literature

  • Stephen Klaidman: Sydney and Violet: Their Life with TS Eliot, Proust, Joyce and the Excruciatingly Irascible Wyndham Lewis . London 2013. ISBN 978-0-385-53409-3
  • Richard Davenport-Hines: A Night at the Majestic: Proust & the Great Modernist Dinner Party of 1922 . London: Faber & Faber 2006. ISBN 978-0-571-22009-0
  • George D. Painter : Proust's lettres to Violet Schiff. In: British Museum Quarterly. Vol. 32. No. 3-4, 1968, pp. 68-74.
  • George D. Painter: Marcel Proust. A biography. 2 vols. Frankfurt a. M .: Suhrkamp 1996. ISBN 978-3-518-37061-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Moses (Beddington) Samuel Henry, Family
  2. ↑ George D. Painter
  3. ↑ British Museum Quarterly. Vol. 32, 1968.
personal data
SURNAME Ship, Violet
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beddington, Violet Zillah
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British art and literature patron
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH July 2nd, 1962