A lingering fascination with Violet Hunt usually concentrates on the entourage of literary friends and lovers who surrounded her brilliant, glamorous, sometimes scandalous life. Critics rarely choose to examine her voluminous contribution as a poet, journalist, and writer of short fiction and novels, probably because Hunt created her own fame as an obsessive talker, shocking Edwardian society with details about her unconventional love affairs. Indeed, Hunt's record as a strong-minded, freedom-loving feminist is impressive, and her forceful personality figured in characters of novels by W. Somerset Maugham, H. G. Wells, and Ford Madox Ford. Henry James called her his "Purple Patch" and his "Improper Person of Babylon." Oscar Wilde, who once proposed marriage to her, called Hunt "the sweetest Violet in England." She was friends with several generations of celebrities in the London literary scene at the turn of the twentieth century, but her reputation as a provocative...