Una Troubridge

Una Troubridge left an admiral to live with Radclyffe Hall for twenty-eight years, translated Colette into English, and is the subject of one of the best-known lesbian portraits of the century. She was a sculptor by training, studied at the Royal College of Art, and married Admiral Ernest Troubridge at twenty-one, having a daughter by him. She met Hall in 1915, left the marriage, and stayed with her until Hall died in 1943 - through The Well of Loneliness and its banning, through Hall's long affair with the Russian nurse Evguenia Souline, which Troubridge endured rather than accepted, and through the cancer that killed her. Romaine Brooks painted her in 1924 in a monocle, an Eton crop and a stiff wing collar, with two dachshunds, and the picture became a defining image of how a certain kind of woman chose to be seen between the wars; Troubridge is said to have disliked it. She translated six of Colette's novels, which are the versions through which English readers met her for decades, and she published a memoir of Hall in 1961. She converted to Catholicism with Hall in 1912 and spent her last years in Rome, where she died and is buried; she had wanted to be buried with Hall at Highgate and it did not happen. She kept diaries that are a primary source for the whole circle. Her husband Ernest Troubridge was court-martialled and acquitted over the escape of the Goeben in 1914, which was a separate scandal entirely. She bred and showed dachshunds seriously and won prizes. She sculpted a bust of Nijinsky that is in the National Portrait Gallery.

• Lived: 1887 CE – 1963 CE
• Nationality: British
• Roles: artist, writer