Teaching People Manners

In 1921, Katherine Mansfield wrote a letter to Princess Bibesco which began, "I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I still live together." Scandalous as that is, it only scratches the surface of the glamorous and adventerous life of the daughter of a Prime Minister who became royalty. Support Noble Blood: — Bonus episodes, stickers, and scripts on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/noblebloodtales — Order Dana's book, 'Anatomy: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840578/anatomyalovestory' and its sequel 'Immortality: A Love Story https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250861016/immortalityalovestory' See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 0:00Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:05Speaker 01

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• 0:35Dana Schwartz?

  Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Mankey. Listener discretion advised.

• 0:45Dana Schwartz?

  Katherine Mansfield was a prolific writer and critic, packing a great deal of work into her short life. Before her death at age 34 in 1923, she had written dozens of short stories and poems, as well as over 100 pieces of literary criticism. A contemporary and close friend of Virginia Woolf, Mansfield is widely considered to be one of the greatest short story writers of the early 20th century. And still, one of her most intriguing pieces of writing came in the form of a very brief, very simple letter.

• 1:27Dana Schwartz?

  Here it is in its entirety, sent in March of 1921. Dear Princess Bibesco, I'm afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world. You are very young. Won't you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation? Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners. Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield.

• 2:07Dana Schwartz?

  It's hard to imagine any work of fiction or book review coming close to that in terms of sparking interest in so few sentences. It's so perfectly eloquent and mean in equal measure. "I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners." Perfect. It sounds like something from a Lost Noel Coward play, or a Miranda Priestly speech that ended up on a cutting room floor. But equally intriguing, at least in my mind, is the recipient, a princess. It's hard to imagine a royal being the recipient of such

• 2:46Dana Schwartz?

  elevated and eloquent shade. And so who was Princess Elizabeth Bibesco? And how did she find herself on the wrong side of the early 20th century literati? I'm Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood.

• 3:06Dana Schwartz?

  The story of Princess Elizabeth Bibesco is not so much a rags-to-riches story, but rather a privilege-to-more-privilege story. Her father was H. H. Asquith, a man who was, from more humble beginnings, but who rose through the ranks of Parliament to become Prime Minister of the United Kingdom when Elizabeth was 11 years old. Life as the Prime Minister's daughter thrust her into the spotlight, and Elizabeth quickly grew to love it that way. Her keen intelligence and social grace made quite an impression on the adults around her, and she was fearless in leveraging her position for the greater

• 3:49Dana Schwartz?

  good, as well as for a little extra attention of her own. When she was 12 years old, Elizabeth enlisted playwright George Bernard Shaw to write a play for a charity benefit, which she herself directed. By her teenage years, her charm and philanthropy were topics of discussion in national newspapers.

• 4:12Dana Schwartz?

  During World War I, a teenage Elizabeth wrote and performed in live shows for the troops. She also organized fundraisers to help out with relief efforts. She even acted in two silent war movies, directed by D.W. Griffith. If she were alive today, she would probably be characterized correctly as a nepo-baby-it girl. Elizabeth quickly became known among London high society as a spirited young multi-hyphenate who, as we'd soon see, inherited her family's talent for social climbing. Antoine Babescu was a Romanian prince and diplomat,

• 4:56Dana Schwartz?

  who by 1918 had found himself part of the social circle that included Elizabeth's father, Lord Asquith. At the time, he was 40 years old and in a serious relationship. But when he met the dazzling 21-year-old daughter of the then-former Prime Minister, Babescu's attentions shifted entirely. Elizabeth's mother, Margot Asquith, was thrilled by the match. She saw in Antoine the kind of continental sophistication her own family lacked, with breeding that far exceeded those from her own family. She also hoped he would have a calming effect on her daughter,

• 5:40Dana Schwartz?

  who'd already packed a lot of life into her 21 years. Elizabeth and Antoine were married on April 29, 1919, witnessed by a who's-who of British royalty and culture. Everyone from Queen Mary to Elizabeth's old collaborator, George Bernard Shaw, was in attendance. It was a union that would catapult Elizabeth from the daughter of a politician into actual European royalty, and all the glamour that came with it. The newlyweds settled into life in Paris, taking up residence in the Babescu Bibesco family townhouse.

• 6:24Dana Schwartz?

  It was here that Elizabeth would give birth to their only child, a girl named Priscilla, in 1920. It was also the place where she would be initiated into a world far more sophisticated than even her privileged upbringing had prepared her for. The Bibesco family moved in rarefied circles, their Parisian salon drawing the most celebrated artists and writers of the era. At its center was Antoine's mother, Helene Bibesco, renowned hostess and patron, who turned their home into a gathering place for the intellectual elite.

• 7:07Dana Schwartz?

  Among the regular visitors was none other than Marcel Proust, who'd formed a close friendship with Antoine long before Elizabeth had even entered the picture. Proust became utterly enchanted by the new Princess Bibesco, declaring her to be, quote, "probably unsurpassed in intelligence by any of her contemporaries." He was also taken by her physical beauty, comparing her to a figure in an Italian fresco. The author, a discerning recluse who rarely ventured from his home, would make late-night visits to the Bibesco townhouse, discussing literature with Elizabeth and gossiping with Antoine.

• 7:52Dana Schwartz?

  Elizabeth had clearly found her footing in this world of letters and high society, but not everyone in the literary world was quite so taken with the vivacious young princess. While she'd mastered the art of captivating influential men, she had also begun to make some rather powerful enemies of their wives.

• 8:19Dana Schwartz?

  To understand what would compel someone to write the scathing letter I read in this episode's introduction, let's take a look at the woman behind the pen. By 1921, the New Zealand author Katherine Mansfield had established herself as a strong voice in modern literature, dealing with topics like existentialism, sexuality, and her relationship to Christianity. She moved to London at age 19 and found herself in the orbit of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf became a close personal friend, and, like her more famous author friend, Catherine's personal life was decidedly unconventional.

• 9:04Dana Schwartz?

  She had romantic relationships with both men and women. Like many of her age, she struggled with her attraction for women. By the time her path crossed with Princess Bibesco's, Katherine Mansfield was married to a man, J.M. Murray, a literary editor and critic. Their relationship had been rocky from the start. They met in 1911, and by the time they finally married in 1918, they had gone through a string of breakups and reconciliations, with both Catherine and Murray pursuing other lovers during their times apart.

• 9:45Dana Schwartz?

  They were the early 20th-century equivalent of that toxic couple who couldn't seem to quit each other, as much as their friends might have wanted them to. There was also a third member of their relationship: Catherine's failing health. In 1917, she had been given a diagnosis of pulmonary tuberculosis, and by late 1920, the disease was steadily claiming more of her strength and mobility. She spent long stretches away from London, seeking treatment in warmer climates, while Murray remained at home ostensibly focused on his job as editor of a literary

• 10:28Dana Schwartz?

  magazine called The Athenian. Catherine, isolated by illness and sometimes geography, remained emotionally dependent on Murray, even as she knew he was incapable of fidelity. Her letters to him revealed that she clung to an idealized version of him, even as evidence mounted against her faith. Because even though Murray stayed behind for work, he also found plenty of time for extracurricular activities. That's where Princess Bibesco comes in.

• 11:06Dana Schwartz?

  During this period, Elizabeth Bibesco's own writing career was on the rise. She was eager to be recognized as a serious literary figure in her own right, a drive that started with those pre-teen stage productions and only grew stronger over time. This led her directly to J.M. Murray's orbit, when she began submitting stories to The Athenian. What started as a professional relationship quickly became something far more personal. It's worth noting that infidelity wasn't exactly foreign territory for the Bibesco marriage either.

• 11:47Dana Schwartz?

  Prince Antoine had already earned himself quite a reputation around London as what the writer and critic Rebecca West memorably called a "boudoir athlete." West, who had her own brief affair with the prince in 1927, recalled looking around the room at a French embassy party and realizing that every woman present had been Antoine's mistress at one time or another. No doubt Elizabeth Bibesco felt entitled to some romantic adventuring of her own. But for Katherine Mansfield, watching from her sick bed in the south of France,

• 12:29Dana Schwartz?

  the betrayals were becoming impossible to ignore or forgive. The situation reached a breaking point in December 1920, when Catherine's doctors insisted that, "For her health, she stop the exhausting work of writing reviews for her husband's literary magazine."

• 12:49Dana Schwartz?

  Left with nothing really to distract her, Catherine's attention turned to Murray's affairs, particularly the one with Elizabeth Bibesco. Catherine was forced to confront the humiliating reality that her husband, in this case, was conducting something much worse than merely a physical affair. The princess was positioning herself as a literary partner, asking for advice and guidance in ways that must have felt like a direct attack on Catherine's own professional relationship with her husband.

• 13:27Dana Schwartz?

  The final straw came in early 1921, when Catherine intercepted one of Elizabeth's letters to Murray, a breathless plea begging him to "resist Catherine" and reminding him that "you swore nothing on earth should ever come between us." The letter revealed not just the depth of the affair, but Elizabeth Bibesco's apparent belief that she was engaged in some kind of romantic rescue mission, saving Murray from his invalid wife. Catherine's response was swift, devastating, and deserved. Let's hear it again, shall we? It is just almost too good.

• 14:12Dana Schwartz?

  "Dear Princess Bibesco, I'm afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of the things which is not done in our world. You are very young. Won't you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation? Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners. Yours sincerely, Katherine Mansfield."

• 14:44Dana Schwartz?

  Only a truly gifted writer could have crafted something so glacially polite that's also filled with barely-contained fury. Clearly, the missive was designed to put the passionate young princess in her place. But Catherine wasn't finished. She followed up with a second, longer response that revealed even more about the state of mind and her philosophy about love, art, and authenticity. The aftermath of those letters sent ripples through London's literary circles. Virginia Woolf, always one to enjoy a good bit of gossip, wrote about what she called

• 15:24Dana Schwartz?

  "the Bibesco scandal," with which London, so they say, rings. She described dinners where a miserable Murray poured out his heart, insisting that his affair with Elizabeth meant nothing to him, all the while declaring his absolute devotion to Catherine. Mansfield, meanwhile, described the princess to William Garrardi, an up-and-coming novelist, as "a most dreadful young person, very, very emotional." It's really a shame we didn't have reality television back then because this friend group was churning out Vanderpump Rules levels of drama.

• 16:06Dana Schwartz?

  For Catherine, the confrontation represented something larger than just marital strife. Her isolation and suffering due to her chronic condition helped her realize what was most important to her: writing. Perhaps her husband's affair with Elizabeth Bibesco wasn't just a betrayal to their marriage, but a threat to her entire literary world. Maybe she found the brazenness of the princess just to be a bit of a bridge too far. Maybe she was repelled by the passion of someone boldly declaring what they wanted with no thought given to the feelings of others.

• 16:47Dana Schwartz?

  Or maybe she simply didn't care for Elizabeth Bibesco's writing. Regardless of her exact reasons... Katherine Mansfield gathered the accumulated fury of her life's misfortunes and aimed straight for the princess. The fact that we have the letter at all suggests that she made a copy and possibly shared it with a close friend or two. I can certainly understand that. After all, who hasn't sent a friend screenshots of a particularly juicy text conversation, especially when someone is so articulate and so in the right?

• 17:29Dana Schwartz?

  For Katherine Mansfield, life post-letter was spent in search of a Hail Mary miracle cure for her tuberculosis. Her final years became a pilgrimage through alternative therapies and spiritual remedies, each one promising what the last had failed to deliver. This quest ultimately led her to the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau, France. This was the most outlandish place she'd tried yet, a transcendental commune of sorts under the guru-like leadership of a man named George Gurgiev, a mystic, spiritual teacher and choreographer.

• 18:12Dana Schwartz?

  If that sounds like a cult, well, you're not wrong. Her days were full of hard labor with little food and little sleep. But Catherine was convinced she had found something transformative. Sadly, she was right, though not in the way she had hoped. Catherine died of a pulmonary hemorrhage just three months after arriving at the institute, sparking an immediate controversy about whether the institute's extreme regimen had accelerated her death. She was just 34 years old. In a final indignity that somehow seems fitting for her turbulent relationship,

• 18:56Dana Schwartz?

  her husband J. M. Murray forgot to pay her funeral expenses. This resulted in Catherine being buried in a pauper's grave before the oversight was corrected and her remains could be moved to a more suitable resting place. Her death left Murray with the considerable task of editing and publishing the mountain of work she left behind, including two volumes of short stories, a novel, a collection of poems, and more. In death, Catherine's voice would reach far more readers than it ever had in life. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Bibesco was continuing to build a literary career of her own.

• 19:41Dana Schwartz?

  In 1921, she published her first collection of short stories, entitled "I Have Only Myself to Blame." The princess drew inspiration from the glittering Parisian society she now called home, capturing what one critic would later call the "buoyant charm, nonchalant wit, and sparkling decor of a rarefied world," though others would find her writing superficial, all glamour and no depth. She was a prolific writer, publishing novels, plays, short story collections, and more over the course of the next two decades.

• 20:24Dana Schwartz?

  Her work garnered international attention, and she even had a novel serialized in The Washington Post. Yet, despite her productivity, Elizabeth found herself perpetually dismissed by the literary establishment.

• 20:41Dana Schwartz?

  The tensions that had erupted over the Mansfield-Murray affair crystallized a broader cultural divide between the Bloomsbury intellectuals, with their serious modernist sensibilities, and Elizabeth's more fashionable continental approach to both life and marriages and literature. In the 1930s, the princess reached out to Virginia Woolf for support while putting together an anti-fascist exhibition in London. Harking back to her teenage tenure as a wartime organizer, Elizabeth drew from her well of celebrity contacts. But Virginia Woolf was no George Bernard Shaw.

• 21:26Dana Schwartz?

  Woolf was suspicious of Elizabeth's politics, particularly around feminism, or, as she called it, "the woman question." After a brief terse exchange, Woolf made it clear that, in her view, the princess remained as shallow and politically naive as ever.

• 21:49Dana Schwartz?

  There's no denying Elizabeth Babelisco made enemies during her life, but her writing deserves to be evaluated on its own terms. Her work serves as a snapshot of a specific time in history, a breathy, deceptively sincere counterpoint to the Bloomsbury Group's existentialism. Years later, the English writer Elizabeth Bowen would write a more generous assessment of Babelisco's writing than many of her contemporaries. She noted that Elizabeth Babelisco's characters, "seem to be the inhabitants of a 'special milieu' in which the more ordinary taboos of feeling and breaks on speech do not operate."

• 22:35Dana Schwartz?

  Elizabeth wrote of privileged people with big feelings, people who came through the First World War utterly changed and unsure where they fit in. Those who survived became obsessed with the minutia of everyday life, taking nothing for granted. Her characters followed their hearts, just as she had in real life, with all the fallout that came along with it. In the end, perhaps the real tragedy isn't that Elizabeth Bibesco was dismissed by her more serious literary contemporaries, but that she was born into the wrong era entirely. In our current age of social media and personal branding, her instinct for self-promotion

• 23:20Dana Schwartz?

  and her talent for "turning life into art" might have made her a sensation. Instead, she found herself caught between two worlds: a princess who wanted to be taken seriously as an artist in an age that prized solemn intellectualism; a girl called out and ostracized for an affair in a circle where it was nearly the norm. Katherine Mansfield, no doubt, got the last word in their famous exchange, but hopefully history has softened a bit on Princess Bibesco, a woman whose greatest crime may have been saying the quiet part out loud.

• 24:02Dana Schwartz?

  That's the story of Princess Elizabeth Bibesco, but keep listening after a brief sponsor break for a bit more of the princess's glamorous life.

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  To rising stars like Alex Warren.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  You know, a song is a story and the verse is setting the scene. And for me at least, it's allowing me to be personal and vulnerable with the audience. Whether it's about my wife and I'm being vulnerable about her or it's about, you know, my parents, I'm being vulnerable to them. And it's almost like a cinematic piece in a way where each song tells that beautiful story.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  It's gonna be one hell of a trip. Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 26:57Dana Schwartz?

  Throughout her literary career, Elizabeth Bibesco maintained a second job as ambassador's wife. She remained married to Antoine Bibesco despite his affairs and hers for the entirety of her life, and the Babescos moved around with Antoine's work, first to Washington, DC, and later Madrid. When World War II began, the family returned to Romania, where Elizabeth would spend her final years. She died in 1945 at just 48 years old and was buried in the Bibesco family graveyard. Her grave is inscribed with the last line of one of her collections of poetry.

• 27:39Dana Schwartz?

  "My soul has gained the freedom of the night." It's the perfect inscription and one last reminder to her lifelong commitment to main character energy. Perhaps the most telling detail about Princesses Bibesco's life comes from her obituary in The New York Times. Quote, "She narrowly escaped death in 1928 when an airplane in which she was making a tour of Near East relief work crashed on a rocky beach in Greece. The plane somersaulted three times, pitching passengers over a cliff into the sea." End quote. This, to me, is one of the most compelling arguments for a more empathetic reframe of

• 28:24Dana Schwartz?

  the princess's life. She wasn't just an architect of chaos. Sometimes the drama sought her out.

• 28:39Dana Schwartz?

  Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manke. Noble Blood is hosted by me, Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and research by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Courtney Sender, Amy Height, and Giulia Malani. The show is edited and produced by Jesse Funk, with supervising producer Reema Il Kehaly, and executive producers Aaron Manke, Trevor Young, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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• 29:47Dana Schwartz?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.