Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

Souhami (Gluck, Greta and Cecil) presents an engaging and sumptuously gossipy portrait of one of late Victorian and Edwardian England's most sparkling and notorious mother-daughter pairs: Mrs. George Keppel, lover of Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VII) and her daughter Violet, flamboyant lover of Vita Sackville-West. Born Alice Frederica Edmonstone in 1869, Mrs. Keppel married a dull army officer but soon yearned to cut a figure in the beau monde. This she did with formidable panache. Then she caught the eye of the lascivious, portly prince of Wales, Bertie to his familiars, three decades her senior; what followed was a liaison that cast the realm into shock. ""Mrs. Keppel,"" Souhami notes, ""regarded adultery as a sound business practice."" She takes us into a suffocating if gorgeous world, with its extravagant arrogance and waste, its weekend hunts and house parties at imperial country houses, while showing us the shrill persecution of homosexuals. Violet, born in 1894 to a father whose identity was never revealed to her, emerges as the intelligent, romantic, slightly crushed satellite of an overbearing, ruthless mother. Her relationship with Sackville-West is handled sympathetically and with nuance. Lavishly illustrated, pungent with luxurious detail and hardheaded investigation, this is popular history to relish. (June)