Skelton, who was born 100 years ago, features as “Melinda Paleface”, who is thought “far too young and pretty to live in London alone”. The death of Lord Weidenfeld earlier this year brought another little flurry of publicity for the woman once described as looking like “the youthful concubine of a legendary Mongol chieftain” along with lurid accounts of their brief yet tempestuous mid-1950s marriage.īut who was Barbara Skelton, and why should Waugh have gossiped about her, Powell finessed her into his novels and Weidenfeld schemed so craftily to displace her first husband, the literary critic-cum-editor Connolly, from the marital bed? Most of the answers can be found in her highly autobiographical first novel, A Young Girl’s Touch, published in 1956 at the height of the Weidenfeld/Connolly standoff, which tracks her erratic progress through the second world war. Will Cyril marry her? He is said to be consorting with Miss Skelton.” Nearly four decades later their mutual friend Anthony Powell was still filling his diaries with news of the journalists who had telephoned to inquire if Barbara was the model for A Dance to the Music of Time’s farouche, man-eating Pamela Flitton (“I replied with guarded affirmation”). Here is Evelyn Waugh, writing to Nancy Mitford early in 1950 with a bumper selection of the latest Grub Street scuttlebutt: “ G Orwell is dead, and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow.
B arbara Skelton’s trail runs through a certain type of 20th century literary life like a vein of quartz.
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