Introduction

KM met Violet Schiff via her husband, Sydney (see Introduction above, p. 561), at their home in Roquebrune in the South of France in early April 1920. Within weeks, the trio was communicating nearly every day, and KM had written to JMM that ‘at present, I love Violet Schiff’ (11 April 1920).

Born Violet Beddington, Violet Schiff was the youngest of a large, cultured and well-connected Jewish family. She could boast two luminaries among her ancestors – one is the seventeenth-century Portuguese–Spanish crypto-Jewish medical professor, Baltazar Orobio de Castro. After fleeing the Inquisition in Málaga, De Castro changed his given name to Isaac and established himself as a respected member of the Jewish community in Amsterdam; he is remembered for his theological debates with the likes of Spinoza and Locke. Violet’s maternal grandfather was Sir John Simon (1818–97), the second Jew to be admitted to the English Bar, in 1842, and the first to sit as a judge, from 1858. Simon was elected to Parliament in 1868, in which role he served for twenty years. He was known for his advocacy for oppressed Jews and was knighted in 1886. Her paternal grandfather, Henry Moses, was a successful wool merchant and property investor, who changed his name to Beddington after the town in Surrey. He was so successful that his son Samuel – Violet’s father – did not need to work for his livelihood, though he did also invest in real estate. In December 1861, Samuel married Zillah Simon, a talented pianist who filled their Hyde Park Square home with prominent musical figures of the day, generally setting an empty place at the dinner table in case a famous friend dropped in.

Violet was the youngest of eight children, with two of her sisters keeping similarly illustrious company: Sybil was the intimate friend and sometime lover of Giacomo Puccini, while Ada wrote witty articles for Punch as well as six novels, and is remembered for her loyal friendship to Oscar Wilde, who nicknamed her ‘Sphinx’. It was Sybil who, via Sydney’s sister Edith, introduced Violet to her future husband at a performance of La Bohème in the summer of 1909, leading to their marriage two years later, shortly after his divorce was finalised.