Stephen Hudson was a pseudonym of the British novelist Sydney Schiff (1868 – 1944). He is now better remembered for his place as a piece in the social jigsaw around more celebrated artists. Scion of an international banking family, he divided his time mostly between London and the south of France. He was the host at a now-celebrated party in Paris on May 18, 1922, when Marcel Proust met James Joyce (without the slightest rapport), and other guests included Diaghilev, Stravinsky and Picasso. The occasion was the first night of Stravinsky's Renard. Schiff tried to get Picasso to paint a portrait of Proust, again abortively. At this period in the early 1920s he was in touch with major modernist figures. He was a patron of Wyndham Lewis's The Tyro, and bought his paintings, waiting four years for an unfinished portrait of Violet. Lewis "repaid" the support by satirizing Schiff as Lionel Kein in The Apes of God (1930). Schiff also introduced John Middleton Murry to Joyce; though Joyce later gave the impression that Katharine Mansfield, Murry's wife, showed more understanding of Joyce's Ulysses. He and Violet also befriended T. S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne. Earlier, in 1918, Hudson had helped finance the Osbert Sitwell publication Art and Letters. Later they knew Edwin Muir and Wilma. He kept up a long correspondence with Aldous Huxley, which has been published. He translated Proust, completing the Scott-Montcrieff version; Sodome et Gomorrhe II was dedicated to him and Violet. Céleste, a story of Schiff's, was published in The Criterion in 1924. In it Proust appears as the character Richard Kurt. Proust reciprocated by helping his novels achieve French translation. Hudson's siblings included a brother, Sir Ernest Schiff, and three sisters: Marie (Baroness de Marwicz, died 1948), Rose Georgette (Mrs Evelyn Morley, 1874-1962), and Edith (Countess Gautier-Vignal, mother of novelist Louis Gautier-Vignal). His second wife, Violet Beddington (1876-1962), was a daughter of Samuel Beddington, a wealthy Jewish wool merchant and real-estate investor, and his wife, the former Zillah Simon. She was a sister of British novelist Ada Leverson (1862–1933) and Sybil Seligman (1868-1936), a mistress of Giacomo Puccini.[1]