When Pepita, Vita Sackville-West's book about her Spanish dancer grandmother, was published in 1937, the tangled circumstances of Pepita's muddled legacy were still fresh in the public memory. Pepita's daughter Victoria, Lady Sackville, Vita's mother, had died only the year before, the most prominent of five sad siblings whose pathetic attempts to secure their inheritance, indeed their very identity, are the subject of this book.
Born Josefa Duran in 1830 in the slums of Málaga, Pepita was famous for her waist-length black hair and tiny feet. She became the mistress of Lionel Sackville-West, later the second Lord Sackville, and bore him five children. The family was established in a comfortable house, the Villa Pepa, in the new spa town of Arcachon in south-west France. There, Lionel and Pepita went by the names of Count and Countess West. This apparently cosy set-up was beset from the first by complications. Illegitimacy was a stain: neighbours gossiped and tradesmen snooped; local children were forbidden to play with the Wests lest they be tainted by association. Vita had painted a picture of an extravagant passion between an English peer and a hot-headed Spanish Gypsy. The reality, as Robert Sackville-West's immaculately written account makes clear, was altogether more dismally prosaic, the story of "the crotchety courtesan and the perjurious peer". His vivid account of life at Arcachon, a watering hole inhabited by a temporary population of stateless in-betweeners, makes an airless backdrop to the events that unravelled after Pepita's death in childbirth in 1871.
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