Vivien Greene

For those of a similar name, see Vivian Green (disambiguation).

Vivien Greene (née Dayrell-Browning) (1 August 1904[1] – 19 August 2003) was the widow of the distinguished novelist Graham Greene and an authority on doll's houses.[2]

Early life

Vivien Dayrell-Browning was born in Rhodesia.[1] She had a difficult childhood. Her father had an affair and her mother left him, requiring Vivien at the age of fifteen to write him a letter ending their relationship.[3] In 1921, she published The Little Wings, a collection of poetry and prose written before she was fifteen.[4] It had an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, who was a family friend.

Marriage, Family and Separation

Vivien Dayrell-Browning started a correspondence with Graham Greene in 1925. They married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, North London. The Greenes had two children, Caroline (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936). Graham started an affair in 1946 with Catherine Walston, his Catholic goddaughter who was married to a wealthy man named Harry Walston. He publicly humiliated Walston and even had sex in the back of his Rolls-Royce with Catherine while Harry drove. Graham left his family in 1947, but in accordance with Roman Catholic teaching (Vivien was a convert, and Graham converted in order to marry her), the couple were never divorced and the marriage lasted until Graham's death in 1991. He had several other affairs and sexual encounters. "Once he had achieved his object and his wife was pregnant, he broke his marriage vows and became a serial adulterer with at least 47 prostitutes whose identities are known and with dozens more who remain unknown."[5]

"I want you so terribly," he wrote Vivien, but he believed she would not marry a non-Catholic and so Graham became a Roman Catholic on 26 February 1926. "My primary difficulty .... was to believe in a God at all," he later admitted. In later years Vivien remarked "With hindsight, he was a person who should never have married." Vivien refused to grant him a divorce. He remained estranged from his wife and children and remarked in later years "I think my books are my children."[5]

Doll House Collecting

During World War II, Vivien and her children lived in Oxford after their home in London had been bombed. At a local auction she was charmed by an old doll's house; she bought it and took it home on the bus with her. As the war dragged on and her marriage disintegrated, she devoted herself to restoring and furnishing the doll's house. Materials were scarce; she recalled scraping off old paint and wallpaper with shards of broken glass. "I needed a hobby, the wartime evenings in the black-out were long and dark, so I started to furnish the house, to make carpets and curtains for it."[6] She then began seeking out other antique dolls' houses and furnishings, researching their history, and restoring the houses, filling the Greenes' rented home with her miniature world.

After Graham had abandoned his family, she travelled the world to add to her collection, becoming a noted authority in the field of antique dolls' houses and their social history. Her notes record 1,500 dolls' houses that she examined in North America, Europe and South Africa. She even made the journey to Communist East Germany to research 19th century makers of miniature furniture. In the 1960s Greene gave her the money to build the Rotunda, a doll's house museum at her home near Oxford. By the mid-1990s, the Rotunda contained some 41 miniature castles, cottages and manors, all furnished down to the last tiny piece of porcelain. Her collection was auctioned off in London in 1998.

Death

Vivien Dayrell-Browning Greene died in Oxfordshire at the age of 99.[1][7]

Publications

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Richard Greene (ed.), Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. London: Little, Brown, 2007, p. 10 (citing her birth certificate).
  2. ↑ Norman Sherry, "Obituary: Vivien Greene", The Guardian, 23 August 2003
  3. ↑ Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene: Vol. 1, 1904–1939. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989, p. 475.
  4. ↑ Jessica Amanda Salmonson, "Girl Writers: Nathalia Crane, Vivienne Dayrell & Daisy Ashford"
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Thornton, Michael The decadent world of Graham Greene - the high priest of darkness Daily Mail UK 19 March 2008 Retrieved 17 SEP 2013
  6. ↑ Charlotte Cory, "Escape from the doll's house", The Independent, 29 November 1998.
  7. ↑ Danielle Demetriou, "Graham Greene's widow Vivien dies at 98", The Independent, 21 August 2003, like other obituaries, gets her year of birth and age at death wrong.