IRIS ORIGO

War in Val d’Orcia

1947

“PORTRAIT OF A LADY” is the title of the profile that I wrote of Iris Origo, a borrowing from Henry James that is rather obvious but nonetheless fitting. The ladies in that great man’s life and in his novels were like Iris, connected to British peers and American millionaires. Highly cultivated, she was an old-fashioned bluestocking engaged in matters of the mind. Edith Wharton and Virginia Woolf both helped to start her literary career. Newly married, she and Antonio Origo, a Marchese, bought La Foce, a large house with an estate of 3,500 acres in Val d’Orcia, an unspoilt out-of-the-way valley south of Siena. Caroline Moorhead’s biography of Iris describes with the lightest of touches how between the wars Antonio was a Blackshirt and friend of Mussolini while Iris was presenting critics of Mussolini as heroic.

War in Val d’Orcia takes the form of a diary that reaches a climax in June 1944 when artillery starts to shell La Foce, partisans take up positions and German soldiers move into the house under the shadow of death and destruction. It falls to Iris as the Marchesa to take responsibility for the children of local villages, and she does so naturally, noblesse oblige as the French say. She and the children might well have been killed in the fighting. Danger did not bring fear with it and the happy ending, one feels, is well deserved. As the front line at last rolls on, a British Major is at the door asking, “Are you Marchesa Origo? The whole Eighth Army has been looking for you.” He brings the news that her cousin Ulick Verney of the Scots Guards is at GHQ only a few miles away. One sentence in particular shows how she has remained herself through the experience of war. “I wish very much that I had a clean frock to put on.”

More than reportage, this book is a lasting testimonial. When I asked her to sign War in Val d’Orcia, she did not hesitate. “To David Pryce-Jones who, unlike the author, possesses a copy of this book.”