‘Her wine was good and her beds were soft’: the mysterious and beguiling life of Dottie Wellesley

A tender, warm biography of Dottie Wellesley by her granddaughter charts the tangled love affairs and waspish literary feuds that peppered the life of one of Edwardian England’s most intriguing society figures, writes historian Katie Hickman

Dottie Wellesley (The Wellesley Family)

When Jane Wellesley was growing up, she was never allowed to meet her paternal grandmother. Dorothy (Dottie) Wellesley, 7th Duchess of Wellington, was rarely spoken about, even by her own son; and in a home crammed full of family photographs, there was not a single image of her. No surprise, then, that this mysterious, exiled figure would become an object of intense interest to her granddaughter – and the result is a tender memoir, Blue Eyes and a Wild Spirit, out next Thursday.

Dorothy Wellesley (neé Ashton) was born in 1889 into a family that was no stranger to scandal (her maternal grandmother had been a notorious bigamist, eloping to Gretna Green when pregnant by her working-class lover). Dottie’s own decision to live separately from her husband, Gerry (they never divorced – and he may also have been gay), was in itself a scandalous departure from the norm, even without the fact that her many later liaisons would all be with women.

A poet of significance in her day, Dottie published numerous volumes of her work, and would gain (if controversially) an entry in the 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse, at a time when women rarely got a look in (“Has Woman any really poetic talent?” read one headline of the day). She was also a patron of the arts, funding the Hogarth Press for many years, and a friend and muse to WB Yeats, to whom she was a frequent and generous hostess. But for all this, it is her turbulent love life that really fascinates us today.