Vivien Greene
Vivien Greene (née Dayrell-Browning; 1 August 1904 – 19 August 2003) was a British writer regarded as the world's foremost expert on dolls' houses. She was the wife of the distinguished novelist Graham Greene. Early life Vivien Dayrell-Browning was born in Rhodesia. As a child she spent her pocket-money collecting dolls' house furniture. She had a difficult childhood: her father had an affair and her mother left him, requiring Vivien at the age of fifteen to write him a letter ending their relationship. She published her first book The Little Wings, a collection of poetry and prose, when she was fifteen; it had an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, who was a family friend. She began working for Basil Blackwell when she was fifteen. Marriage, family and separation Dayrell-Browning started a correspondence with Graham Greene in 1925. A staunch convert to Roman Catholicism, she rejected his initial proposal of marriage because he was an atheist. Following his conversion, they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London. The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline (born 1933) and Francis Hugh (born 1936). Graham left his family in 1947 and they formally separated in 1948, but in accordance with Roman Catholic teaching the couple were never divorced and the marriage lasted until Graham's death in 1991. Dolls' house collecting During World War II, Vivien and her children lived in Oxford after their home in London had been bombed. At a local auction she was charmed by a derelict Regency town house which she bought for £5 and took home on the bus with her. As the war dragged on and her marriage disintegrated, she devoted herself to restoring and furnishing the doll's house. Materials were scarce; she recalled scraping off old paint and wallpaper with shards of broken glass. "I needed a hobby, the wartime evenings in the black-out were long and dark, so I started to furnish the house, to make carpets and curtains for it." She then began seeking out other antique dolls' houses and furnishings with her friend the historian A. J. P. Taylor researching their history, and restoring the houses, filling the Greenes' rented home with her miniature world. After Graham had abandoned his family, she travelled the world to add to her collection, becoming a noted authority in the field of antique dolls' houses between 1700 and 1900 and their social history and craftsmanship. The earliest item in her collection was a William-and-Mary house built in oak in about 1690 in the shape of a cabinet, suitable to be displayed in a drawing room. Dolls' houses were initially created as a status symbol, built as a replica of the owner's home or as an ornament on a staircase landing. Only after the 1840s were they intended for children. After her children left home, Greene began a personal mission to view, draw and catalogue any historic dolls' houses she could discover before they, and the great English country houses in which they were found, disappeared