Violet Keppel (Trefusis)

Excerpts from the letters of Violet Keppel Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West and other written works

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

When I'm dead we'll always be together. My ashes will be scattered around the world. When I die I'll be able to travel for nothing.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

23 August 1920
And Vita – of course, it would too wonderful if Vita came here. She is so beautiful and clever.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

4 May 1920
I try in vain to drive this tyrannous, all-absorbing love from my heart, but it returns undaunted, imperishable, to rage and storm through me like the wind through a roofless house.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

19 April 1919
All my life I have been lonely. I never knew what it was to have companionship till I met you.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

22 July 1918
For 16 nights I have listened expectantly for the opening of my door, for the whispered ‘Lushka’ as you entered my room, and tonight I am alone. What shall I do? How can I sleep?

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

11 September 1910
If you are very good and we are not all drowned in the Red Sea, devoured by mosquitoes or carried off by monkeys I will bring you back some sapphires, pearls and rubies to have made into something for your outward adornment.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

9 May 1919
I want you, I desire you, in addition to everything else, as I have never desired anyone in my life.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

really, do understand, you exasperate me when you make yourself so – dumb! – excuse the epithet.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

1918
How you would adore this place!
The gardens are one mass of blue hydrangeas, and fuschias grow abundantly wild, as in Ireland. There are superimposed ‘layers’ of coastline, like the drop scene of a theatre . . . all wasted because you are not here to see it

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

5 May 1919
The more I think of marriage, the further removed from it I feel! It is an institution that ought to be confined to temperamental old maids, weary prostitutes, and royalties!

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

March 1919
Sometimes I am flooded by an agony of physical longing for you . . . a craving for your nearness and your touch. At other times I feel I should be quite content if I could only hear the sound of your voice.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

31 October 1910
Understand, Miss, that I am not afraid of you (only the Unforeseen frightens me)

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

8 July 1919
Men tiliche, I hardly slept at all last night. I thought of you

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

21 October 1918
All the frills and furbelows, conceits and coquetries have vanished utterly, leaving my love gloriously and brutally naked, to take or leave – as you will.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

8 October 1910
I am in the act of asking myself if I ought to reply to your question? A question furthermore most indiscreet and which merits a sharp reprimand. Reply, don’t reply, reply! Oh to the devil with discretion!

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

25 August 1918
I can’t exist without you, you are my affinity, the intellectual ‘pendent’ to me, my twin spirit.

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

I often think you're like Lady Macbeth. Or Judith

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

July 1919
I went to a horrible dance, and (thought I say it and shouldn't) I was what I consider quite the best-looking and the best-dressed person there –

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

4 December 1910
Unnecessary to tell you that I am of a sovereign laziness and that nothing less than a monsoon would make me abandon my divan

[Violet Keppel (Trefusis) @VioletKeppelBot]

5 November 1918
Good night, most beautiful –