Moorehead Caroline - Iris Origo: marchesa of Val dOrcia

24. Pinsents chapel, built just below La Foce, where Antonio, Iris, Gianni and Elsa Dallolio lie buried

All this national feeling makes people so unhappy, wrote Bayard Cutting in his last letter to his wife Sybil, as he lay dying, about the future of their only child Iris. Bring her up somewhere where she does not belong, then she cant have it. Id rather France or Italy than England, so that she should really be cosmopolitan, from deep down She must be English now, just as shed have been more American if I had lived and not you. That is natural and right. But Id like her to be a little foreign too so that when she grows up she really will be free to love or marry anyone she likes, of any country, without it being difficult.

Iris was then seven. Sybil respected her husbands wishes, and her only daughter grew up far from both England and America. But this left her uncertain about where she belonged, with a precarious feeling about being a stranger, and with a need for and reliance on close and intimate friends as marked as the uneasiness she often felt in the company of acquaintances. It made her a very good friend, but it also made her restless. In her autobiography Images and Shadows, written when she was seventy, she recorded the sense of rootlessness and insecurity during my youth and the way that each uprooting was followed by a readjustment of my manners, and, to some extent, of my values. She became, each time, a different child.

With an American father, an English mother, and ancestors from Holland, France and Scotland, Iriss divided identity began at birth.