A Stone in the Shade, by Violet Powell – review

Evelyn Waugh once recalled the anguish with which he greeted Edith Sitwell’s announcement that ‘Mr Waugh, you may call me Edith.’ I experienced similar misgivings on the occasion, some years ago, that Lady Violet Powell suggested that I might like to call her ‘Violet’. It was not that Lady Violet — Violet — made the least fuss about her title (‘as unswanky a Lady as could be imagined’, Kingsley Amis once declared); merely that she was the relict of a man whose eye for the social niceties made Lady Catherine de Bourgh look like a bumbling amateur. It was as if George Orwell, knocked into at some Fitzrovian party, had invited you to call him ‘Eric’.

A Stone in the Shade, 15 chapters’ worth of autobiography left unfinished on her death in 2002, takes its title from the vantage point to which Violet would retire, sketchbook in hand, in the course of foreign holidays.