Background
Vivien Dayrell-Browning was born in Rhodesia. Her father had an affair and her mother left him, requiring Vivien at the age of fifteen to write him a letter ending their relationship.
Vivien Dayrell-Browning was born in Rhodesia. Her father had an affair and her mother left him, requiring Vivien at the age of fifteen to write him a letter ending their relationship.
She had a difficult childhood. In 1921, she published The Little Wings, a collection of poetry and prose written before she was fifteen. At a local auction she was charmed by an old doll"s house.
She bought it and took it home on the bus with her.
Materials were scarce. She recalled scraping off old paint and wallpaper with shards of broken glass.
"I needed a hobby, the wartime evenings in the black-out were long and dark, so I started to furnish the house, to make carpets and curtains for lieutenant" She then began seeking out other antique dolls" houses and furnishings, 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 and their social history.
Her notes record 1,500 dolls" houses that she examined in North America, Europe and South Africa.
She even made the journey to Communist East Germany to research 19th century makers of miniature furniture. In the 1960s Greene gave her the money to build the Rotunda, a doll"s house museum at her home near Oxford. By the mid-1990s, the Rotunda contained some 41 miniature castles, cottages and manors, all furnished down to the last tiny piece of porcelain.
Her collection was auctioned off in London in 1998.
Vivien Dayrell-Browning Greene died in Oxfordshire at the age of 99.