[5] From her mother's second marriage, she had a younger half-sister, Josephine Leishman Dodds,[6] who married Squadron Leader Hugh Glyn Laurence Arthur Brooking, the King's Messenger, in 1949.

[8] Her books included a biography of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle, and his wife, Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle, a biography of Louisa Baring, Lady Ashburton, the Scottish art collector and philanthropist, and a book about the friendship of art critic John Ruskin and Pauline, Lady Trevelyan.

[15] In 1956, she met David Craig, the general manager in Italy for the British European Airways and began an affair which led to Lady Clarke divorcing Sir Ashley in 1960.

[12] Virginia was photographed by Cecil Beaton and was friendly with critic and biographer Percy Lubbock, writer Osbert Sitwell and essayist Max Beerbohm.

She turned 100 in January 2017, but her health was poor by this point, and biographer Richard Dorment described her as "tired of living"; she eventually chose to stop eating and died on 22 September 2017.