Vivien Greene

Vivien Greene (; 1 August 1904 – 19 August 2003) was a British writer regarded as the world's foremost expert on dolls' houses. She was the wife of the distinguished novelist Graham Greene.

Early life

Vivien Dayrell-Browning was born in Rhodesia. She published her first book The Little Wings, a collection of poetry and prose, when she was fifteen; it had an introduction by G. K. Chesterton, who was a family friend. She began working for Basil Blackwell when she was fifteen.

Marriage, family and separation

Dayrell-Browning started a correspondence with Graham Greene in 1925. A staunch convert to Catholicism, she rejected his initial proposal of marriage because he was an atheist. Following his conversion, they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London. She then began seeking out other antique dolls' houses and furnishings with her friend the historian A. J. P. Taylor researching their history, and restoring the houses, filling the Greenes' rented home with her miniature world.

After Graham had abandoned his family, she travelled the world to add to her collection, becoming a noted authority in the field of antique dolls' houses between 1700 and 1900 and their social history and craftsmanship. The earliest item in her collection was a William-and-Mary house built in oak in about 1690 in the shape of a cabinet, suitable to be displayed in a drawing room. Dolls' houses were initially created as a status symbol, built as a replica of the owner's home or as an ornament on a staircase landing. Only after the 1840s were they intended for children. After her children left home, Greene began a personal mission to view, draw and catalogue any historic dolls' houses she could discover before they, and the great English country houses in which they were found, disappeared in the postwar world.

In 1962 she built the Rotunda as a doll's house museum in the grounds of her home near Oxford, incorporating the spiral staircase from the St James's Theatre.

Publications

The Little Wings: Poems and Essays (1921) (as Vivienne Dayrell) English Dolls' Houses of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (1955) Family Dolls' Houses (1973) Laurel for Libby: A Story with Cuts (1991) (reprinted 2006) The Vivien Greene Dolls' House Collection (1995) (with Margaret Towner)