LADY VIOLET POWELL, the widow of novelist Anthony Powell who has died aged 89, was a writer and critic of rare intelligence, deftness, subtlety and oblique wit.
A member of the literary Pakenham family - she was a sister of the late Earl of Longford - Violet Powell brought infectious qualities of lively curiosity and ironic enjoyment to both her busy life and more than a dozen books, which included three volumes of autobiography, as well as studies of such varied authors as Jane Austen, Somerville and Ross, Flora Annie Steel, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Margaret Kennedy and E M Delafield.
She also edited The Album of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, an illuminating pictorial companion to her husband's great 12-novel sequence. Lady Violet's own contribution to this 20th century masterpiece has tended to be underestimated, though undoubtedly her phenomenal memory, acute observation and insight into human nature played a major part in its creation.
Married for more than 65 years, the Powells formed a harmonious partnership. As Violet Powell described in Within the Family Circle, the second volume of her autobiography, their "conversation" had begun in September 1934, when they met at Pakenham Hall in Co Westmeath (the Pakenhams' Irish seat, now renamed Tullynally Castle) and happily carried on thereafter until her husband's death in the spring of 2000.
Although amateurish attempts at identifying real-life models for characters in his novels were anathema to Anthony Powell - who felt such crass guesswork betrayed a total ignorance of fiction writing - inevitably there have been those ready to assume that "Lady Isobel Tolland", the wife of Dance's narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, must be a portrait of Lady Violet Pakenham.
Certainly Lady Isobel is an impish, beady and sympathetic personality, with strong opinions and a remarkable knowledge of "obscure or forgotten fiction", and many of these characteristics bear a vivid resemblance to the novelist's wife.
The first reference to Isobel is suitably intriguing. "You might like Isobel," the gossipy Chips Lovell says to Nick. "I believe she is a bit of a highbrow when she isn't going to nightclubs."
And her entrance is electrifying: "The sound of girls' voices and laughter came from the passage outside. Then the door burst open, and two young women came boisterously into the room . . . The elder, so it turned out, was Susan Tolland; the younger, Isobel.
The atmosphere changed suddenly, violently. One became all at once aware of the delicious, sparkling proximity of young feminine beings. The room was transformed."
The normally reserved narrator goes on to add: "Would it be too explicit, too exaggerated, to say that when I set eyes on Isobel Tolland, I knew at once that I should marry her?"
In his memoirs, Anthony Powell was, characteristically, more circumspect. His first point of contact with Lady Violet Pakenham, he recalled, had occurred in the spring of 1934 when a voice on the telephone - giving "in tone the impression of a slightly disgruntled parlourmaid, not best pleased at being made use of as secretary by her employer" - invited him to come for a drink with Lady Pansy Lamb (Violet's eldest sister).
They became engaged that autumn and married in December. As Powell put it in his memoirs, "to speak unequivocally, [I] have never wished to be married to another woman".
Lady Violet Georgiana Pakenham was born on March 13 1912, the third daughter of Brigadier-General the 5th Earl of Longford, then commanding the South Midland Mounted Brigade and based in Oxfordshire, and his wife, the former Lady Mary Child-Villiers, daughter of the 7th Earl of Jersey.
Violet's second Christian name was after her Aunt Georgiana, Viscountess Gough, from whom she recalled her brother Frank (the future 7th Earl of Longford) hiding under the table, complete with his teacup.
"Where's Frank?" inquired Lady Gough, having witnessed young Pakenham's evasive action through the window. "Under the table, I suppose," she said, and picking up the tablecloth revealed that this indeed was where he was.
The Pakenhams were an Anglo-Irish family descended from Cromwellian settler stock and were then more celebrated for their exploits with the sword than with the pen.
Two of the brothers of the 2nd Earl of Longford (whose sister, Catherine, married the "Iron Duke" of Wellington), for instance, were Peninsular War generals - one of them was later killed at New Orleans in 1815 - and there were several other generals and admirals in the pedigree. (Lady Violet shared Anthony Powell's passion for genealogy and love of "looking people up" in works of reference.)
The 5th Earl was killed in action at Gallipoli in 1915; one of Lady Violet's earliest memories was wearing forget-me-nots in her hat at his memorial service in London.
In Five Out of Six (an allusion to her place in the family), her first volume of autobiography, she gives an evocative picture of her childhood in a largely feminine world of nannies, governesses and maids.
Relations with her mother were not rendered easier by Lady Longford's phobias about food, her unwillingness to catch trains, her avoidance of unedifying sights and her strange economies in her daughters' attire.
From an early age Lady Violet had a keen eye for eccentricity. "Uncle Bingo", a military bachelor, had once been to a dance given by his colonel and was so disillusioned that he never tried another party.
"Uncle Eddie" (the 18th Lord Dunsany), a mighty bearded poet and big game hunter, helped his nieces win a game of "beaver" against the family living opposite their house in Mayfair - in fact, the then Duke of York and the future Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother - by proclaiming a long-bearded priest he had spotted crossing Berkeley Square.
Lady Violet was especially close to her maternal grandmother, Margaret Countess of Jersey, the founder of the Victoria League, whose biography she later wrote. At the entrance of an exhibition of Seurat's works, Lady Jersey silenced the talkative Countess of Oxford and Asquith by urging her: "Do go in - they really are too funny for words."
Eventually Lady Violet persuaded her mother to let her further her education away from a series of increasingly unsatisfactory governesses by attending St Margaret's School, Bushey, and Queen's College, Harley Street. She combined her love of art, literature and travel with enjoyment of riding to hounds and playing polo.
She wrote various articles on horses and equitation and, after marrying Anthony Powell and setting up home in Bloomsbury, she took over the "Mary Grant" column for the Evening Standard. This feature, which had been started by her sister, Lady Mary Pakenham (later Clive, and now the sole survivor of the six siblings), covered shops and their current stock.
In 1936 the Powells visited Russia to see the architecture and art galleries; and later in the 1930s they had a sojourn in California. Anthony Powell's fellow Hollywood scriptwriter, F Scott Fitzgerald, was much impressed by Violet's title ("I didn't know Mrs Powell was a duke"). Lady Violet's knowledge of films was as encyclopaedic as her grasp of literature and art.
During the Second World War Lady Violet was initially a volunteer nurse in the Port of London Authority River Emergency Service, and subsequently lived close to her husband's regimental postings in Wales and Northern Ireland.
After the war, the Powells made their base at Chester Gate, Regent's Park, before settling in a Regency country house near Frome in Somerset, where Lady Violet, a devout Anglican, was a stalwart of the church nearby, of the Women's Institute, the Conservative Party and other local organisations.
For many years she fought a doughty, if ultimately unsuccessful, campaign to prevent a neighbouring quarry from closing an ancient lane to the public.
In between books, the Powells would travel extensively, particularly on cultural cruises. Lady Violet wrote pithy diaries of their journeys interspersed with brilliantly drawn vignettes of the scenery and their fellow travellers.
Lady Violet's eye for detail constantly lit up her descriptions. An hotel in Sorrento, she noticed, offered "IXth Century Comfort".
As H D Ziman observed when reviewing Five Out of Six in The Daily Telegraph, Lady Violet had "a sense of social comedy qualified only by her affection. It would be difficult to portray with less malice or more mischief the eternal war of high-spirited children against grownups."
All her writing exhibited an irresistible flavour of dry humour which somehow blended sharpness with gentleness. In Substantial Ghost, her account of Maude ffoulkes, the Edwardian "ghost" writer, Lady Violet remarked that a Hapsburg princess "had got herself into a matrimonial tangle of such complexity that it was hard to see if she had two husbands or none".
In her biography of Lady Jersey, Lady Violet recorded that her much-travelled grandmother had called on the Nizam of Hyderabad after he had allegedly been flogged by some of his 4,000 women - "whether from sexual frustration or to get their pensions raised was not, it seems, known".
Lady Violet had a particular fondness for metaphors from the hunting field ("like a hound going into covert", she snuffles through a sales catalogue) and the games pitch ("bowling for a catch", she traps Evelyn Waugh into a snobbish pronouncement).
Her third volume of autobiography, The Departure Platform, abounds in worldly wisdom: "The girl who has just passed," remarked the author of a youthful neighbour in Regent's Park, "would get off with man, woman or child". It was Joan Collins.
Reviewing Lady Violet's study of E M Delafield, The Life of a Provincial Lady, E S Turner wrote in The Sunday Telegraph that this prolific novelist was "lucky to be analysed by an adept at detection and interpretation, one who picks her way nimbly, with a quietly amused eye, over the literary and social landscape".
As well as her own work - which included reviewing books for The Daily Telegraph, The Times Literary Supplement and Apollo - Lady Violet kept a close eye on Anthony Powell's projects, particularly after the novelist's health began to fail in the early 1990s. It was she who saw his three volumes of Journals through the press, and she also arranged the posthumous publication of his Writer's Notebook last year.
"I realise more than ever how much I depend on V, and the rest of my immediate family," Anthony Powell wrote in the last entry of his Journals on New Year's Eve 1992. With selfless devotion Lady Violet ensured that he was cared for at home over the next seven years until his death, aged 94.
In widowhood, Lady Violet remained active and alert as ever, amusing and amused to the last. She gave encouragement to the already flourishing Anthony Powell Society - keeping the author of a paper on the Powells' cats up to the mark - and shortly before her death was writing a book based on her travel albums.
She delighted, too, in the exploits of her great-grandchildren, whose boisterousness evoked memories of her own childhood so memorably described in Five Out of Six.
A most sympathetic person, Violet Powell had a great capacity for friendship and imaginative kindness.
She is survived by her two sons, Tristram, the television director, and John, who was formerly on the City staff of The Daily Telegraph.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1381467/Lady-Violet-Powell.html
