Something to Hide: The Life of Sheila Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt
By Penny Perrick Lilliput Press �12.00 256pps

THE Anglo-Irish poet Sheila Wingfield, Viscountess Powerscourt (1906-1992), is not at all widely read or known today, nor has she ever been, even in her comparatively limelit years somewhere between the late 1930s and the Beatles' first LP, when she was praised by Yeats and quite widely reviewed in all the right journals.

That could change now in this centenary year of the great WH Auden, when poetry is becoming quite fashionable again and Sheila's work . . . she wrote eight volumes of poetry and three of memoir . . . is getting a good airing, both in this well-researched biography and in Anne Roper's slightly overdramatised documentary screened on RTE One last Tuesday, where her work was championed quite convincingly by the Irish poet Eavan Boland, Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing programme at Stanford University in the US.

Lady Powerscourt was born Sheila Beddington in London, the second of three children of wealthy parents and an only girl.

By her own account, she had a miserable childhood and by the time she was an adult, both her brothers were dead. The eldest, her beloved Guy after whom she named her own youngest son, died in his early 20s after a long battle with TB. Her younger brother, about whom we know less, died later in a road traffic accident.

Sheila's mother, Ethel Mulock, was an exceptionally pretty, highly-strung Anglo-Irish Protestant who rode to hounds with as much enjoyment as she got from reading and admiring contemporary writers and from playing difficult pieces on the piano. She was a well-connected farmer's daughter and grew up at Bellair, a large, square, handsome Georgian house in Co Offaly, designed by Richard Cassels, a pupil of James Gandon.

After a whirlwind romance in Ireland, Ethel married a rich and dashing Anglo-French Jew, Lt Col Claude Beddington. Claude, who fought and was wounded in the Boer War, came from a philanthropic family of upper-middleclass merchants and London City traders, who had changed their name to Beddington from Moses in 1868, probably because they were tired of anti-Semitism.

The marriage enabled Ethel escape her family, the beautiful Bog of Allen and Ireland, all of which Sheila adored but her mother despised (along with all men, though the author gives no reason). In her short poem, 'Ireland' (1949), Sheila's love is palpable:

'This is the country/That has no desolation, no empty feel/(The pagan kings are always there)/In ruined abbey, ruined farmhouse, /Slab of cromlech, or a wheel/Travelling a bog road/Through Calary's too quiet air.'

Marriage to Claude enabled Ethel to hold literary and musical salons, to have her portrait drawn by John Singer Sargent and to shine briefly in the bright, liberal lights of Edwardian London, where the Celtic Revival was then in full swing and all things Irish . . .

including politics . . . were deeply fashionable and much discussed.

But the marriage soon soured and disintegrated, after which the young Sheila, who claimed her mother was very cruel to her . . .

belittling her in public, refusing to have her properly educated and making her go to parties dressed in grey serge and surgical boots . . .

never spoke to her again. Sheila became a substitute hostess and companion for her father, who loved to ride, sail, shoot and give exhausting parties and dinners.

Sheila loved her father, but he did not care for books and discouraged her from becoming a "reading girl", a potential Bluestocking who would not find it easy to catch a decent husband. So she read in secret, saying she'd always read in secret since deciding "to be a poet at the age of six". She got a big kick out of secrecy and it became a way of life. The habit began as a child, and was heightened by her habit of staying up through the night reading and writing. Exhausted by her father's dinners and wines, she started using cocaine, which you could buy over the counter at Harrod's.

Drugs . . . later morphine . . . and drink (white wine and vodka) became secret addictions that lasted all her life, and no doubt contributed to the failure of her marriage to Pat Wingfield, heir-inwaiting to the vast Powerscourt estate at Enniskerry, Co Wicklow.

That marriage began well enough too, although it was to some extent a marriage of convenience. They made a glamorous couple who were constantly in the newspapers of De Valera's bleak Ireland of the 1930s.

She was film-star beautiful, intelligent and very rich; Pat was considered handsome (it's difficult to judge with that moustache) and had a title and ancestral home to die for, though not enough money to keep it all up. At their engagement, Pat's father Mervyn, old Powerscourt, is said to have burst into the Kildare Street Club on Stephen's Green shouting "Hurray! He's done it! Pat's bagged one.

She's Jewish but she's rich!"

Though she was very much in love, and Pat was an attentive lover at first (her playful sketches of them cavorting naked testify to their pleasure in each other), their marriage also soured over time.

They had three children, including the botanical artist Grania Langrishe, of whom Sheila came to be very proud, though Langrishe says her mother was fairly horrid and stingy to her as a child. Sheila was also proud of her youngest son Guy, who was born profoundly deaf but learnt to speak very well and now does great work on behalf of deaf people all over the world.

Her eldest boy, heir to the Powerscourt title, is Mervyn, last heard of in Perrick's book slumped in the back seat of a car beside his ex-wife Wendy Slazenger, on their way with Sheila and Grania to the North of Ireland for Pat's cremation, as there was no crematorium in the Republic at the time. Sheila took her often monotonous duties seriously and also paid for and oversaw the modernising of Powerscourt. While it must have been lovely to have so many bathrooms and no leaking roofs, it was not a good idea to sweep away so many layers of interior history and introduce so many pastels and fitted carpets.

With the disintegration of her marriage, Sheila got tired of pouring money into Powerscourt and Pat, who farmed and gardened, starting selling off bits. First to go was the unrivalled view . . . the mountain and its powerful waterfall . . . sold to its current owners, the Slazengers, for �10,000. The same couple eventually bought the whole estate (many buildings and thousands of acres) for about �300,000.

Sheila is blamed for this, as she is for lots of other things that went wrong, but it's hard to see how it's her fault that Pat Wingfield sold his own ancestral home. No matter how strapped for cash he was at the time, it was a short-sighted and rather stupid move.

Sheila Wingfield was quickly disappointed in love and by her lack of literary success, craving recognition right until the end of her life, when she was muffled by morphine and living in a hotel maisonette by a lake in Switzerland, surrounded by nurses and doctors (she always got her drugs from obliging doctors in Ireland as well as abroad, docs who were paid well for their services).

While it was not easy for any woman writing at the time in Ireland, the grand lady of Powerscourt was not part of the pub scene down in Dublin which might have helped her career. That was lorded over by the boozy boyz of Irish literature, at the centre of which roared Kavanagh, Behan and the rest. Instead, she grew bitter and made things up, though who knows if she wasn't just hallucinating, given her diet of grilled fish, white wine, vodka, cocaine and morphine?

What Sheila Wingfield should have done was enjoy her addiction to the drink to the full, while exploiting one of her greatest eccentricities, which was to use an ambulance, staffed with a nurse, to go shopping in Switzer's of Grafton Street and to visit her friend and admirer, the collector Chester Beatty, who looked to her for advice on his exquisite purchases. She should have come roaring down to Dublin from the Wicklow Mountains in that ambulance, and gone drinking with the lads in McDaid's and the other pubs along the Strip.