Biography In May 1974, Sheila Wingfield, having invited her daughter and son-in-law to join her for a weekend at Claridges Hotel in London, arranged for pre-dinner dry martinis to be sent to their room.
No sooner had the drinks arrived than "the phone rang with instructions from Sheila that they were not to be drunk since they had not been mixed properly". It took four efforts before the martinis were deemed satisfactory.
This small anecdote tells a great deal about Sheila Wingfield's character, especially a lifelong preoccupation with retaining tight control over the people and events around her. In the late 1980s she wrote to her younger son Guy, by then in his forties and settled in California, reminding him that "I am, and always have been, the person who pays out the cash for you".
Money, of course, can bestow great authority on its possessor, and because Sheila Wingfield was wealthy, as well as beautiful and talented, she was frequently able to get her own way. Yet no matter how hard she tried, or how much she spent, one thing always eluded her: contentment. Penny Perrick's intelligent and sympathetic biography tells the story of a difficult woman forever uncomfortable with herself, gliding with supposed assurance between different worlds but unable to settle or find ease in any of them.
After becoming Viscountess Powerscourt, for example, and moving into the splendour of one of Ireland's most palatial houses, she was keen to distance herself from her Jewish antecedents, though aware her paternal grandfather had changed his surname from Moses to Beddington. Likewise she disseminated ever-more elaborate myths about both her mother and husband in which they were depicted as villains determined to belittle and crush her efforts to achieve creative satisfaction. The latter, according to Sheila, was a philistine who had informed her soon after their marriage that she was to have no contact with "literary scum". Surviving correspondence quoted by Perrick suggests that this was far from the case and that even if Pat Wingfield was not especially interested in books or reading he raised no objections to his wife being so.
Ultimately, she needed to find an explanation - as does her biographer - for why success and acclaim as a poet remained elusive. "She's too keen to publish and be reviewed", wrote a friend in April 1937, "but that may be naiveté." If this were the case, the trait never left her; in old age she was still keen to be published and reviewed, and prepared to pay from her own ample funds to ensure that came about. In 1983, at the age of 77, when her Collected Poems appeared, she wrote to the publisher asking if the Times Literary Supplement could be persuaded to give the book a full-page review: "I think they did it for Seamus Heaney and it made him at once."
Sheila Wingfield didn't just want to be a writer: she wanted to be publicly acknowledged as such. Perrick presents sound and convincing arguments for a neglect that, both during her subject's lifetime and afterwards, owed something to the issue of gender as well as to a certain amount of inverted snobbery. In popular perception, after all, poets are not meant to be affluent aristocrats and Viscountess Powerscourt was inevitably regarded in some quarters as a dilettante, albeit one with undeniable abilities. Because, contrary to the self-perpetuated legend of victimhood, she did receive some attention, and her work was admired, appreciated and anthologised. The magnificently-titled Beat Drum, Beat Heart was described by Herbert Read as "the most sustained meditation on war that has been written in our time", while A Kite's Dinner was selected in 1954 as the quarterly Poetry Book Society choice. But it was never enough, and no amount of letter writing or expenditure on her part could improve the situation. What she failed to understand was that, with a handful of exceptions, the audience for poetry has been in steady decline over the past century. And, just as importantly, her style of writing - cool, terse, replete with classical allusions, decidedly unpastoral - is unlikely ever to attract the broad readership she craved; popularity is a suspect measure of aptitude. In a late poem she wrote: "We die the moment that we start to learn/Just what we are, just where to turn". Somehow even in death that moment of learning seems to have evaded Sheila Wingfield.
Robert O'Byrne is an author and journalist. He is currently writing a history of Dublin's Gaiety Theatre and a biography of the late Desmond Leslie
Something to Hide: The Life of Sheila Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt By Penny Perrick Lilliput Press, 238pp. €16