Nelle Tritton (Lydia Ellen Tritton) was the fifth of six children born to Frederick William Tritton, owner of the largest furniture business in Queensland, and his English born wife, Eliza Ellen nee Worrall. Nelle Tritton changed her name from Nell to Nelle while still at school; she attended Brisbane Girls' High School (later Somerville House). Tritton became involved in local drama activities and contributed verse to the Daily Mail and other journals. She danced with the Prince of Wales as a young woman and made several public appearances as an elocutionist. Richard Abraham asserts that Tritton was deeply affected by the sight of Australian troops departing for the war and yearned to travel. Her parents were dismayed by her decision to leave home in the early 1920s to take up journalism in Sydney and her departure for London in 1925.
Tritton toured the Continent and gained a reputation as an authority on international affairs. In Italy she read the The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff (1890), a Russian feminist and artist who gained her art education in France and produced a substantial body of work before dying of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. This was the beginning of a lifelong infatuation with Russians for Tritton. On 11 December 1928 she married Nikolai Nadezhin, a former member of the White Russian Army and a well known Russian baritone. He 'drank, flirted, and made scenes, and then spent whole nights kissing her feet in atonement.' (365) Tritton disliked his 'Russian egotism' and they were divorced in 1936. In the meantime she had taken work with Alexander Kerensky, the former prime minister in the 1917 Russian Provisional Government.
Tritton fell in love with Kerensky who did not at first reciprocate. In March-June 1939 she visited Brisbane where she lectured on international relations and continued her Russian lessons with M. I. Maximoff, Nina Christesen's father. Tritton and Kerensky were married at Martin's Creek, Pennsylvania on 20 August 1939 and took up residence in Paris. They left France in a harrowing trip shortly before the German occupation of Paris and arrived in New York on 12 August 1940. They were to remain in the United States until October 1945 when they travelled to Brisbane. Tritton had suffered ill health since 1944 and they stayed with her parents in the suburb of Clayfield until her death in April 1946.
Richard Abraham describes her last days: 'Kerensky slept on the veranda outside her room, while nurses tended her day and night. In February 1946, she suffered another stroke and her speech became confused. ... Her last weeks were a joyful Christian transfiguration, in which Kerensky saw a refuation of Tolstoy's chilling view of death in Ivan Ilyich.
(Source: Judith Armstrong, 'Tritton, Lydia Ellen (1899 - 1946)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 16, MUP, (2002): 409-410; Richard Abraham Alexander Kerensky: the first love of the Revolution (1987); Nina Berberova The Italics Are Mine (1969): 308-309).
See also the full Australian Dictionary of Biography Online entry. For Tritton, Nelle.
