All about Eve

A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers

When Michael Holroyd was mooching round the V&A in the early Seventies, he saw a Rodin bust of a woman that sparked a long fascination. The subject was Eve Fairfax, daughter of an old Yorkshire family, whose fiancé Ernest Beckett MP had commissioned the piece in 1902 as a wedding present. The engagement didn't last but the sittings went on for eight years, by the end of which Eve and Rodin had developed a profound sympathy, the sculptor haunted by "the germ of your beauty and character that you had left in my heart".

Eve's mystique provoked strong responses that seem to have blighted rather than enhanced her happiness; the Duke of Wellington refused an invitation to a private meeting because, as he told her, "I quite recognise that you could give me pleasure that not one in a million could give. That makes me want you, but it also warns me not to want you." She remained unmarried, became impoverished and eventually went bankrupt, but retained one treasure, a vast album given her in 1909 by Diana Manners in which she recorded her career as serial guest and dependant, a book described with brilliant imaginative sympathy by Holroyd as "the reverse of a visitors' book: it is the visitor's book of collected hosts and their guests pinned to its pages It was like an anchor that she dragged from one harbor to another; it was also her daemon."

Searching for clues to Eve's life at Ernest Beckett's Villa Cimbrone near Ravello, Holroyd met fellow researchers, including an Italian lady whose identification with Beckett's illegitimate daughter Violet Trefusis is so strong that she has bought up the copyrights to Trefusis's novels and is attempting to control her posterity. The veteran biographer bonded with this character immediately, perhaps because said lady's eyes were burning into him at dinner. Then there is Catherine, illegitimate granddaughter of Ernest Beckett, who hoped to find an answer to her own parentage in the family archives. Holroyd's description of their perilous drive from the airport to the villa is a wonderful comic set-piece: " Do keep reminding me,' she reminds me, that they drive on the right.'"

Eve's Book ought to be on public display as a poignant symbol of the impenetrability of personal archives. In a rash moment, Eve donated it to the South African gallery which had bought her Rodin memorabilia, only to ask for it back a few years later. They didn't mind, having been disappointed in its contents. Eve, on the other hand, could hardly function without it. Aged 106, in 1977, she showed the unwieldy tome to a historian who had sought her out, saying, "It hasn't been a silly life, it's been a useful one. Anyone who saw the book could see that."