Elizabeth Bibesco
Elizabeth (Asquith) Bibesco (1897-1945) was an English writer, one of many who were famous in their own day but are now mostly forgotten.
The first child of Herbert Henry Asquith (Prime Minister of England from 1908-1916) and his second wife Margot, Elizabeth was a precocious child and a youth thrust into the limelight at 10 Downing Street. It is said that she and her brother would throw things from the third floor windows at the suffragettes shackled to the railings below.
During World War I she was given opportunity to do "good works", often organizing and performing in matinees for the soldiers. Her first known literary effort was a duologue called "Off and On" performed with Nelson Keys in 1916 at the Palace Theatre.
In 1919 she married Prince Antoine Bibesco (1878-1951), the Rumanian envoy in London, a man twenty-two years her senior. She gave birth to her only child, Priscilla, the next year. They resided at the Bibesco townhouse on the Quai Bourbon in Paris, situated on the Seine with a view including Notre Dame cathedral. The walls of the house were decorated with huge canvases by Vuillard. Prince Bibesco was a life-long friend of Proust and the story of the introduction of his fiancee to Proust is both humorous and poignant.
Her husband fostered Elizabeth's literary development. She wrote three collections of short stories, four novels, two plays and a book of poetry. All of these works have a "continental" sensibility. They deal almost entirely with a kind of love in which the heroines would ponder the least gesture of a man until it took on the proportions of an emotional event with lasting implications, while the heroes spent their time in mute surrender at the feet of remote and disdainful women. "One young poet had described her soul as a fluttering, desperate bird, beating its wings on the bars of her marvellous loveliness," is a sample of her prose style ("Pilgrimage", 1921).
Her stories, which by 1940 were considered merely fashionable, flimsy stuff with no lasting significance, can now be seen as the illumination of a class of people who were made irrelevant by the First World War but who refused to accept their irrelevance.
Elizabeth Bibesco was connected (especially in the mind of the media) with Virginia Woolf and Katharine Mansfield, neither of whom treated her well in their letters, especially after a liaison between Elizabeth and Mansfield's husband, John Middleton Murry.
Elizabeth travelled the world with her husband in his capacity as Romanian envoy, first to Washington (1923-1926) and then to Madrid (1927-1931). She was in Romania during World War II, and she died there in 1945 at the age of 48. Her death was the final sorrow for her mother who died within months of her daughter's passing.
Bibesco is known through two portraits by Augustus John (from 1919 and 1924). The first shows her as a vivacious debutante in a fur or feather stole, and the second as a rather melancholic princess, wearing a mantilla given to her father by the Queen of Portugal and holding in her hand one of her own books. An illustration of the first painting can be found in John's autobiography "Chiaroscuro".