Violet Georgina MAXSE

Eigenschaften

Ereignisse

Eltern

Ehepartner und Kinder

Notizen zu dieser Person

Violet Georgina Maxse was the daughter of Admiral Frederick Augustus Maxse and Cecilia Steel . She married, firstly, Colonel Lord Edward Herbert Gascoyne-Cecil , son of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and Georgina Alderson , on 18 June 1894. She married, secondly, Sir Alfred Milner, 1st and last Viscount Milner , son of Charles Milner and Mary Ierne Ready , on 26 February 1921. She died on 10 October 1958. From 18 June 1894, her married name became Gascoyne-Cecil. She wrote the book My Picture Gallery. She was decorated with the Chevalier, Legion of Honour. From 26 February 1921, her married name became Milner. She was editor of the National Review between 1931 and 1948. She was invested as a Dame of Grace, Order of St. John of Jerusalem (D.G.St.J.).
----------------
Lady Violet Georgina Milner, Viscountess Milner (née Maxse) (1872 – 1958) was an English Edwardian society Lady and, later, editor of the political monthly, National Review. Her father was Admiral Frederick Maxse.
She was the wife of Lord Edward Cecil, son of the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury.
Lady Milner exchanged letters with the British statesman Lord Milner during his time in South Africa and alongside Violet Markham she established the Victorian League in 1901 to promote Milner's imperial vision. After Lord Edward's death in the Great War (1918), she married Lord Milner in 1921.
She took over as National Review editor after the death of her brother Leopold Maxse in 1932.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_Milner,_Viscountess_Milner (abgerufen am 27.10.2011)

-----------------
Milner [née Maxse], Violet Georgina, Viscountess Milner (1872–1958), imperial activist, was born on 1 February 1872 at 38 Rutland Gate, Brompton, London, the youngest surviving child of Admiral Frederick Augustus Maxse (1833–1900), a Crimean War hero, landowner, and maverick politician, and his wife, Cecilia Steel (1842–1918), an art-loving society beauty. When Violet was five, her parents separated. She lived mainly with her father, brothers, and sister: of these, (Frederick) Ivor Maxse became a leading First World War general and Leopold James Maxse a prominent journalist. She was educated by a succession of governesses organized by her father.

Violet Maxse was short and slender with an attractive, delicate-featured face and a challenging expression. Painting classes in Paris failed to make an artist of her, but there she acquired a passion for French culture and couture, and the lifelong friendship of the writer-statesman Georges Clemenceau.

Lord Edward Herbert Gascoyne-Cecil (1867–1918), whom she married on 18 June 1894, was the fourth, soldier, son of the prime minister, Lord Salisbury. Their first child, George, was born in the following year. They spent much of their early married life with the Salisburys at Hatfield House; this she found enthralling but oppressive—the incessant talk about the Anglican church dividing her, an atheist, from the religious Cecils. Her relationship with Edward, able but a late developer, deteriorated; his military service separated them for long periods. Accompanying him in July 1899 to South Africa, where he was Baden-Powell's chief staff officer and was besieged in Mafeking, she became a friend of such colonial heroes as Cecil Rhodes and Dr Jameson, and fell in love with Sir Alfred Milner (1854–1925), then high commissioner.

Violet and Edward Cecil returned home late in 1900. Their daughter Helen was born in May 1901. By then Edward was in Sudan, before entering Egyptian government service. Concerned for the children's health and disliking Egyptian life, Violet chose to live in England, seeing her husband only on his annual leaves. In 1906 she bought a derelict Jacobean manor, Great Wigsell, on the Kent–Sussex border, which she restored lovingly. She became a close friend of her neighbours Rudyard and Carrie Kipling and worked for the Victoria League, the National Service League, and other imperial causes. After Milner returned to England in 1905, such was their discretion, involving her later systematic destruction of compromising letters, that no hint of scandal attached to their friendship.

In August 1914, eighteen-year-old George Cecil, now a grenadier officer, went out to France and was killed two weeks later at Villers-Cotterêts. Edward was unable to return from Egypt for two years. His Christian words of consolation about an afterlife in which Violet could not believe drove them further apart. For the rest of her life she mourned George, visiting his grave yearly from 1918 to 1940 and after the Second World War, until she was too old to travel.

In 1917 Edward contracted tuberculosis. Violet was at his deathbed in a Swiss sanatorium the following December. In 1921 she published, without judicious editing, sketches of Egyptian life he had sent home, as The Leisure of an Egyptian Official. These amused her and many readers but struck others as patronizing.

On 26 February 1921 Violet and Milner married. They divided their time between his home, Sturry Court, near Canterbury, and 14 Manchester Square, London. In May 1925 he died, on return from South Africa, from a tsetse fly bite. When her brother Leo fell ill in 1929, the still grief-stricken Violet took over his editorship of the National Review, owned by their family since 1893. A controversial radical right-wing paper, the ‘Nat’ had recently lost money, but she restored its finances. For fifteen years after Leo's death in 1932 she travelled from Wigsell to London, even during the blitz and V1 raids, to see every issue into print. The American broadcaster Ed Murrow later declared that even more than Winston Churchill she represented the spirit of British wartime resistance. The ‘Nat’ had always been anti-German and under Violet it uncompromisingly opposed the appeasement of Hitler, attacking even Milner's old friends Lord Lothian and Geoffrey Dawson. She dismissed as futile the ‘internationalism’ of the League of Nations—‘this huge unwieldy affair’—to the annoyance of its champion, Lord Robert Cecil, her erstwhile brother-in-law. Milner's chief enemy had been Boer nationalism, so the ‘Nat’ took the black South Africans' part against racial discrimination.

After the Second World War, Violet Milner was renowned for maintaining at Wigsell the aristocratic standards of the bygone Edwardian era, at minimal cost. In her last years she broadcast recollections of her past including those of Milner, whose memory she sought to keep ever fresh. Her lively memoir My Picture Gallery (1951) told her story up to 1900. The fragmentary manuscript of a second volume is among her papers in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

Tough and strong-willed, articulate and argumentative, Violet Milner cared little about antagonizing those with whom she disagreed. Lord Edward's family were not fond of her, feeling she had treated him badly. Although her views on Britain's imperial destiny belonged to a vanished age, her zest, intelligence, courage, and sense of humour, which had attracted both her husbands, always drew friends, particularly writers and politicians, of every generation, to the end of her life. Her lunches at the Ladies' Empire Club and the Connaught Hotel, London, were stimulating, if alarming, for she expected informed, sparkling discussion. She died at Wigsell on 10 October 1958 and was buried beside Milner, her mother, and her sister in a monumental tomb, designed by Edwin Lutyens, at Salehurst churchyard nearby.

Hugh Cecil

Sources
The Times (11 Oct 1958) · The Times (15 Oct 1958) · V. Milner, My picture gallery (1951) · DNB · H. Cecil and M. Cecil, Imperial marriage: an Edwardian war and peace (2002)

Archives
Bodl. Oxf., corresp. and papers, incl. print-outs of four BBC broadcasts · Bodl. Oxf., further corresp. and papers · NRA, priv. coll., corresp. and sketchbooks | Hatfield House Muniments, letters to third marquess of Salisbury and family · Herts. ALS, letters to Lady Desborough · King's School, Canterbury, corresp. relating to gift of Sturry Court to King's School, Canterbury

Likenesses
photograph, c.1921, priv. coll. [see illus.] · M. Menpes, watercolour, priv. coll.; repro. in Cecil and Cecil, Imperial marriage · W. Sickert, sketch, repro. in Milner, My picture gallery · photograph, repro. in A. S. Williams, Ladies of influence: women of the elite in interwar Britain (2000)

Wealth at death
£26,268 12s. 3d.: probate, 1959

© Oxford University Press 2004–13
All rights reserved: see legal notice Oxford University Press

Hugh Cecil, ‘Milner , Violet Georgina, Viscountess Milner (1872–1958)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2006 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35039, accessed 16 July 2013]

Violet Georgina Milner (1872–1958): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/35039

Quellenangaben

Datenbank

Titel	Hoffmann aus Hirschberg (Schlesien) und Württemberg sowie Nebenlinien
Beschreibung	Vorfahren von Silvia-Theres Hoffmann (1947-2017), Ina-Kareen Hoffmann (1951-2011) und Ellen-Andrea Hoffmann (1954-2017)
Hochgeladen	2019-10-07 01:14:07.0
Einsender	Ralf Gräfenstein
E-Mail	graefe61@gmail.com
Zeige alle Personen dieser Datenbank

Herunterladen

Kommentare

Einen neuen Kommentar schreiben

Name
E-Mail
Webseite (optional)
Nachrichtentext

Um Missbrauch zu verhindern, lösen Sie bitte diese Aufgabe, indem Sie die Geburtsdaten aus beiden Einträgen eingeben.

Einen Kommentar schreiben.