She was born Dorothy Violet Ashton at Maidenhead. She was the daughter of Colonel Robert Ashton of Croughton, Cheshire (himself a second cousin of the 1st Baron Ashton of Hyde), descended from wealthy cotton manufacturers, and his wife (Lucy) Cecilia Dunn-Gardner (later Countess of Scarbrough), and stepdaughter of the 10th Earl of Scarbrough.
B. A certain distance was called for due to Dorothy"s (family nickname "Dotty") sometimes erratic and demanding behavior. This relationship, a key stabilizer in both their lives, ended tragically with the death of Hilda during a routine thyroid operation. The Duchess of Wellington died at Withyham in Sussex.
As Dorothy Wellesley, the name she took after her marriage to Lord Gerald Wellesley, she was the author of more than ten books, mostly of poetry, but including also Sir George Goldie, Founder of Nigeria (1934), and Far Have I Travelled (1952). Yeats scholar R. F. Foster, however, has written that she was "a moderately accomplished if minor poet" though adding that "the quality of some of her work has been vindicated by time".
Quotations: You must sacrifice everything and everyone to your poetry"".
