Wealth is no guarantee of happiness. Look at the Sackville-Wests

When Robert Sackville-West was writing Inheritance (2010), his history of Knole and the Sackvilles, he was ‘struck’, as he recalls in his new book, by the way that Sackvilles have ‘tended to take Italian or Spanish dancers as mistresses’. The most notable of these was Josefa Duran, the flamenco dancer known as ‘Pepita’.

A barber’s daughter, she was born in 1830 in the backstreets of Málaga — ‘Oh such a slum it is!’ observed her grand-daughter Vita Sackville-West, who wrote a biography of her, Pepita (1937). By the 1850s she was the toast of Europe, and in 1852 she began a liaison with Lionel Sackville-West, later the 2nd Lord Sackville, which lasted until her death in 1871. He bought her a house at Arcachon (‘one of Arcachon’s exclusive 19th-century villas’, as Robert Sackville-West puts it), and she bore him seven children, of whom five — Max, Victoria, Flora, Amalia and Henry — survived into adulthood.

In Orlando (1928), Virginia Woolf’s romance about Knole and Vita, a deed of marriage is ‘drawn up, signed, and witnessed between his Lordship, Orlando, Knight of the Garter, etc, etc, etc., and Rosina Pepita, a dancer…’ But there was no such deed between Lionel and Pepita, who in 1851 had married Juan Antonio de Oliva, a fellow dancer, from whom she separated that year.

Most popular

Arthur Roffey

Douglas Murray has been blacklisted in Berlin

In letters to Pepita and others Lionel referred to her as his wife, and he signed the birth certificates of several of their children as her husband, and Flora’s marriage certificate. But, as he acknowledged, it had not been his ‘habit in life to read documents carefully before I signed them’; and when pressed about his marital status, as he eventually was under oath, his responses were hopelessly muddled:

I never described Pepita as my wife… I will not swear I never described her as my wife… I don’t recollect ever saying that I was the legitimate father of Flora.