Chez Sphinx
The Sphinx and her Circle. By Violet Wyndham. (Deutsch, 21s.) SL ENDER and expensive and not really substantial enough to make up a proper book. Still, this memoir of Ada Leverson by her daughter con- tains a number of charming anecdotes and is fairly informative about an author whose talents --- very apparent in the recent reprint of three of her novels—are once more becoming appreciated. The eldest daughter ' of prosperous, cultivated, partly Jewish parents, Ada was married at nine- teen to George Leverson, a City man twelve years her senior. The marriage was not particularly happy; George was unfaithful, and Ada had her own opportunities for consolation; Mrs. Wynd- ham drops a few hints about these, but is under- standably reticent. Among Ada's admirers was George Moore, who also keenly pursued the lady novelist known as John Oliver Hobbes. Thirty years later Ada and George Moore met again, but the meeting seems to have been rather diffi- cult. The core of Mrs. Wyndham's memoir, how- ever, is in her account of the devoted friendship that arose between Ada and Oscar Wilde. It seems to have been Wilde who encouraged Ada to write; he bestowed the nickname 'Sphinx' on her when she published a parody of his poem in Punch.
Another of Ada's admirers in the Nineties Was The young and romantic Prince Henri d'Orldans; the book includes a superb photograph of the Prince, standing with negligent grace in the midst of a cluttered interior, which has a quintessen- tially Proustian flavour. We read, too, that Ada spent regular holidays at Dieppe, that Mecca of Anglo-French bohemia in the Nineties, where she would almost certainly have met the Comte Robert de Montesquiou and Leon Delafosse, originals of Proust's Charlus and Morel. And Ernest Leverson„ 'occupied in attending race meetings, gambling at his clubs, or dashing over to Paris,' was a passionate Dreyfusard. The links with Proust's world seem rather strong, and Ada was a great admirer; some Proust scholar might like to see if any trace of the Leversons can be found in the vast population of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
BERNARD BERGONZ1
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