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Graham Greene's widow Vivien dies at 98

Danielle Demetriou
Thursday 21 August 2003 00:00 BST
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Vivien Greene, widow of Graham Greene, died at her home in Oxfordshire on Tuesday aged 98.

Amanda Saunders, the daughter of the novelist's sister, who lives in Northamptonshire, said yesterday that her death felt like the end of an era. Graham Greene died in 1991.

Mrs Greene, a devout Catholic, married the novelist in 1927 at the end of an "intense" courtship during which he converted to Catholicism.

However, the complex moral ambiguities that so frequently marked the characters in his novels were never far from his day-to-day existence. As his belief in Catholicism began to wane, his unfaithful forays outside his marriage grew in equal measure.

Greene indulged in a string of affairs, to the chagrin of his long-suffering wife, with whom he had a daughter, Lucy, who later preferred to be called Caroline, now aged 69, and a son Francis, 66.

His final years were spent with his French mistress, Yvonne Cloetta, whom Mrs Greene met for the first time at Greene's funeral. She died earlier this year.

While the writer left Mrs Greene in 1947, the couple were never divorced, because of her devout Catholic beliefs, and she maintained a distinctly low profile.

In the later part of her life, she collected doll's houses which she displayed in an Oxford museum before they were sold at auction four years ago.

During a rare interview, one year after Graham Greene's funeral, she described her late husband as a "cold, unhappy man" with whom she endured "an intense but unhappy marriage which was to haunt him in his later years".

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