A Woman of No Importance - Sonia Purnell Page 0,1

and dancing to jazz. They rejected the one-sided restrictions of a traditional marriage and were taking a more active role in politics, not least because in 1920 (after a century of protests) American women had been granted the vote. Virginia looked around her: home life was stifling, but the world outside seemed to offer enticing new freedoms. And so—to her fiancé’s evident indignation—she ditched him. (It turned out to be the right call, as he later reputedly worked through three unhappy and adulterous marriages.)

Virginia may have shared her mother’s sense of vaulting ambition, but she began to direct it toward a career and exploring the world rather than bagging a feckless husband, however well-heeled. Barbara had had little choice in her youth but to work as a secretary; few other options were open to a single woman of modest fortune in the late nineteenth century. She was mystified by her daughter’s desire for a job away from home instead of a lifetime of married leisure, but Virginia’s regular family trips to Europe as a child and the influence of her crisply-dressed German nanny had inspired a hunger for independent travel. She had excelled at languages at school and dreamed of using them to meet what she termed “interesting” people by becoming an ambassador, apparently undeterred by the fact that such exalted positions had hitherto been reserved for men. Dindy was set on proving herself an equal in a masculine world and to that end, it was her doting father (to whom she was unusually close) who allowed her to spend the next seven years studying at five prestigious universities.

She had begun in 1924 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Radcliffe (now part of Harvard) but the bluestocking atmosphere bored her, and in 1925 she moved to the more metropolitan Barnard College in Manhattan, where she enjoyed the theaters on Broadway. She was still conscious, however, that after dispatching one suitor, she was expected to conform and quickly catch another suitable husband. She failed to find one. Nor did Virginia impress her tutors, who marked her down as “an average student” who failed to participate in campus life or turn up to physical education classes. French and math were her favorite subjects (she loathed Latin and theology), but although she left in “good standing” her grades were mainly Cs and she did not graduate. She knew she required a college education, but was now anxious to begin her life in the real world. Barnard was perhaps still too much like home for her to thrive.

Paris seemed to offer wider horizons and she persuaded her parents that she would do better if only she could go abroad. Like many well-to-do East Coast Americans before and after her, Virginia viewed the French capital as the elegant gateway to liberation. Hundreds of young Americans boarded Cunard liners for Europe every week, sending back word on how fashionable women in Paris—the so-called garçonnes—were positively expected to be independent, athletic, and androgynous in appearance, and to work and love as they pleased. So in 1926, the twenty-year-old Virginia also moved to the other side of the Atlantic, far from her mother’s wearying disappointment, to enroll at the École Libre des Sciences Politiques on the city’s Rive Gauche. At the height of the so-called Années Folles, in place of American Prohibition and racial segregation, she found a thrillingly diverse art, literary, and music scene that drew in such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway, and the legendary black dancer Josephine Baker (famous for her Charleston performances at the Folies Bergère and later for her service in the Resistance). In the cafés of Saint-Germain and the jazz clubs of Montmartre, Virginia met actresses, racing drivers, intellectuals, and budding politicians. The adventurous young woman from Baltimore smoked, drank, and danced with them all, far more enthralled by what she learned from her dazzling new friends than from her teachers. Here, at last, she felt free to be herself.

This freewheeling lifestyle continued when she moved in autumn 1927 to the Konsular Akademie in Vienna to study languages, economics, and the press. In contrast to her time in New York, she coasted in her classes, achieving the required grades with the minimum effort, and found plenty of time to revel in the city’s frantic party scene. Tall, slender, and now elegantly attired in the latest European fashions, Virginia attracted plenty of male attention, especially from a dashing Polish army officer named Emil, who escorted her on romantic walks along