Vivienne M. Dayrell-Browning 1905 - 2003
Vivienne M. Dayrell-Browning , Catholic. After her separation from her husband, in 1948 she moved to Grove House, Oxford. A wronged wife's retreat (Filed: 26/11/2003) Vivien Greene moved to Grove House after separating from her husband Graham. The 1830s villa, where she built up a valuable collection of dolls' houses, is now for sale, reports Caroline McGhie If ever a house could be said to be a last chapter in a marriage, then this is it. For it was to Grove House in Oxford that Graham Greene's wife Vivien removed herself after they separated in 1948. He paid for her to build a rotunda attached to the house in which she kept her remarkable collection of historic dolls' houses, and she lived here until she died in August this year at the age of 98. It is now for sale. Vivian Greene: when Graham Greene received an honorary degree at Oxford, he did not invite her The story of Grove House forms an extraordinary coda for anyone who has read Greene's novel The End of the Affair, or who has seen the recent steamy film version starring Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore. So many events in the Greenes' marriage are echoed in the book - it was dedicated to Catherine Walston, wife of the Labour peer Harry Walston, with whom Greene began a six-year affair in 1946. The Greenes' house at that time overlooked Clapham Common, as did Sarah's in the book; and while Vivien was evacuated to Oxford with the children during the war, Greene himself stayed put. This house was bombed but Greene was spared because he was in another woman's bed. Vivien later said: "Graham's life was saved by his infidelity." The withdrawal of his heroine Sarah, and her decision to give herself to Roman Catholicism, mirrors the withdrawal of Vivien early on in their own romance when, as a young woman, she decided she could not accept Greene because of his lack of belief. There followed an ardent but celibate courtship, Greene's conversion, and a passionate early marriage in which they referred to each other as Pussy and Tiger. As Norman Sherry, Greene's biographer, wrote on Vivien's death, she had hoped for a post-war reconciliation but it never came. "I once asked her if she had ever taken a lover, and she replied that no, that was something she could never do. Graham's long-standing love of Catherine Walston, later Lady Walston, she accepted as inevitable - she had already lost him." The wounded wife rarely takes centre stage in the novel or the film, but in the real world she must continue to survive and build a life. Vivien Greene came to Grove House, a pretty 1830s villa built for the mother of the vicar of the church of St Mary the Virgin. And here, while Greene went on writing and romancing, she created a miniature world of her own that she could control. She travelled the world to build a collection of exquisite historic dolls' houses, and by the mid-1990s the rotunda contained more than 40 miniature castles, cottages and manors. All were perfectly furnished, even down to the porcelain teacups. She became an undisputed authority on this Lilliputian world, and a book about her collection, The Vivien Greene Dolls' House Collection, was published in 1995. Grove House has "an air of faded grandeur", says William Kirkland, who is handling the sale for Cluttons. "The window frames need painting, the carpets are threadbare, the kitchen is 1950s, so it needs money spending on it. But Vivien Greene created so much in the way of art and romance there, with murals on the walls and one whole bedroom full of pictures of cats. A lot of fun has been had." The property has four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a self-contained one-bedroom flat, the extraordinary two-storey rotunda, nearly one-and-a-half acres of gardens, old stables and stores, and is priced at £975,000. 'An air of faded grandeur': Grove House The house sits in the Iffley conservation area about a mile from the city centre, and, as a Regency building in a city full of Victorian and Edwardian houses, it is unusual. "It seems always to have attracted literary types. Not only did Lewis Carroll visit it several times to see a friend called James Rumsey, but the writer Sir George Forrest lived here and wrote the lives of Lord Roberts and Lord Clive here," says Kirkland. "It has been something of a literary magnet." Greene was apparently bewildered by the growing dolls' house collection and, according to the art critic John Rothenstein, while Vivien "was attending to the needs of multifarious tiny, fragile objects, Greene looked on with a detached eye". He continued to hurt her, possibly unwittingly, for when he received an honorary degree at Oxford, he didn't ask for her to be invited. The new owner of Grove House will have to find another use for the rotunda. Two of Vivien's dolls' houses and a large collection of dolls are going into Bonhams' Christmas sale (020 7393 3900) on December 4 - an 18th-century George II house called The Wire Cabinet with a guide price of £4,000 to £6,000, and a pair of 19th-century semi-detached houses called Waterloo Villas with a guide of £2,000 to £3,000. # Cluttons (01865 728000) (Nov 2003).
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