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Violet Mary Clifton was an English writer.
She married English landowner and traveller John Talbot Clifton in 1907 in Brompton Oratory, London, whom she had met in Peru. They lived in the Clifton family seat at Lytham Hall, Lancashire, Kylemore House in Connemara, Ireland, and then at Kildalton Castle on the Scottish island of Islay. After her husband died in 1928 in the Canary Islands on the way home from an abortive expedition to Timbuktu she had his body embalmed and accompanied it back to Scotland for burial,
Her biography of her colourful husband, published under the title The Book of Talbot, won the 1933 James Tait Black Prize. WH Auden praised the book in a review that appeared in the Criterion. In 1935 Nevill Coghill nominated her for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the prize was ultimately not awarded that year.
Her other books include Vision of Peru and Islands of Queen Wilhelmina, later reissued as Islands of Indonesia.
She died at Lytham Hall in 1961. John and Violet's son was the poet Harry Talbot de Vere Clifton, who squandered much of the families remaining wealth.
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