Violet: the story of the irrepressible Violet Hunt and her circle of lovers and friends - Ford Maddox Ford, H. G. Wells, Somerset Maugham and Henry James. Barbara Belford. 1990.

The daughter of a well-known watercolorist father and a novelist mother, Violet Hunt was born into a middle-class Victorian family. Precocious in an inhibited age, Violet charmed the young Oscar Wilde when she was only seventeen. Her first lover, at twenty-two, was George Boughton, a painter for whom she posed and a man only a few years younger than her father. After Boughton she attracted Oswald Crawford, a philandering diplomat and publisher, who gave her syphilis. After Crawford left her, she seduced Somerset Maugham and was in turn, seduced by H. G. Wells; at the same time she rebuffed the advances of Radcliffe Hall, who later wrote the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness.

Like her mother, Violet became a writer. She wrote seventeen novels, plus collections of stories, her memoirs of the Edwardian years, and a biography. At her salons she entertained Henry James, Rebecca West, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and Ford Maddox Ford.

In 1908 when Ford launched the English Review, a literary magazine that championed the work of new writers, Violet became his secretary, hostess, fund-raiser - and mistress. Their ten-year affair resulted in scandal, lawsuits and tabloid headlines.