Wellesley, Dorothy Violet, Duchess Of Wellington

(1889-1956)

   Born at White Waltham, near Maidenhead, Berkshire, the daughter of Robert Ashton, she was educated at home, and after her father's death her mother married in 1899 the tenth Earl of Scarbrough. Dorothy married Lord Gerald Wellesley (later 7th Duke of Wellington), in 1914. She was editor for Hogarth Press of the Hogarth Living Poets series, and was editor of The Annual in 1929. W.B. Yeats (see entry) greatly admired her work and he included many of her poems in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. His Letters on Poetry to her were published in 1940, and one of his poems is "To Dorothy Wellesley." She lived much of her life at Sherfield Court (on the Hampshire-Berkshire border), then at Penns in the Rocks, Withyham, Sussex, where she died. She published more than ten books, including the biography of Sir George Goldie, founder of Nigeria (1934). Her autobiography, Far Have I Traveled, was published in 1952. Some of her poems: "April 1939," "As Lambs into the Pen," "Asian Desert," "Deserted House," "Lenin," "Maiden Castle," "Matrix," "Walled Garden."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Early Light: The Collected Poems of Dorothy Wellesley. Hart-Davis, 1955. The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Verse. John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright, eds. Faber and Faber, 1975. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. William Butler Yeats, ed. Oxford University Press, 1936. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th edition. Margaret Drabble, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). William Butler Yeats, "To Dorothy Wellesley" (http://plagiarist.com/poetry/3440). Women's Poetry of the 1930s: A Critical Antholog y. Jane Dowson, ed. Routledge, 1966.