Vita Sackville-West

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.

Not to be confused with her mother, Victoria Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville.

The Honourable

Lady Nicolson

CH
Vita Sackville-West in 1924
BornVictoria Mary Sackville-West
(1892-03-09)9 March 1892
Knole House, Kent, England
Died2 June 1962(1962-06-02) (aged 70)
Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England
OccupationNovelist, poet, garden designer
NationalityBritish
Period1917–1960
Spouse
(
m. 1913)
ChildrenBenedict Nicolson
Nigel Nicolson
ParentsLionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville (father)
Victoria Sackville-West (mother)

She was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime and 13 novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her famous friend and lover, Virginia Woolf.

She had a longstanding column in The Observer (1946–1961) and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.

Biography

Antecedents
Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville. Vita's mother, circa 1885

Knole, the home of Vita's aristocratic ancestors in Kent, was given to Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century.[1] Vita was born there, the only child of cousins Victoria Sackville-West and Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville.[2] Vita's mother, raised in a Parisian convent, was the illegitimate daughter of Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville and a Spanish dancer, Josefa de Oliva (née Durán y Ortega), known as Pepita. Pepita's mother was an acrobat who had married a barber.[3]

Although the marriage of Vita's parents was initially happy, shortly after her birth, the couple drifted and Lionel took an opera singer for a mistress who came to live with them at Knole.[4]

Christened Victoria Mary Sackville-West, the girl was known as "Vita" throughout her life to distinguish her from her mother, also called Victoria.[5][1] The usual English aristocratic inheritance customs were followed by the Sackville-West family, preventing Vita from inheriting Knole on the death of her father, a source of life-long bitterness to Vita.[5][lower-alpha 1] The house followed the title, and was bequeathed instead by her father to his nephew Charles, who became the 4th Baron.

Early life

Vita was initially taught at home by governesses and later attended Helen Wolff's school for girls, an exclusive day school in Mayfair, where she met first loves Violet Keppel and Rosamund Grosvenor. She didn't befriend local children and found it hard to make friends at school. Her biographers characterise her childhood as one filled by loneliness and isolation. She wrote prolifically at Knole, penning eight full-length (unpublished) novels between 1906–1910, ballads, and many plays, some in French. Her lack of formal education led to later shyness with her peers, such as those in the Bloomsbury Group. She felt herself to be sluggish of mind and she was never at the intellectual heart of her social group.[8][9][10]

Vita in childhood

Vita's apparently Roma lineage introduced a passion for "gypsy" ways, a culture she perceived to be hot-blooded, heart-led, dark and romantic. It informed the stormy nature of many of Vita's later love affairs and was a strong theme in her writing. She visited Roma camps and felt herself to be at one with them.[3]

Vita's mother had a wide array of famous lovers, including financier J. P. Morgan and Sir John Murray Scott (from 1897 until his death in 1912). Scott, secretary to the couple who inherited and developed the Wallace Collection, was a devoted companion and Lady Sackville and he were rarely apart during their years together. During her childhood, Vita spent a great deal of time in Scott's apartments in Paris, perfecting her already fluent French.[3]

First loves

Vita debuted in 1910, shortly after the death of King Edward VII. She was wooed by Orazio Pucci, son of a distinguished Florentine family; by Lord Granby (later 9th Duke of Rutland); and by Lord Lascelles (later 6th Earl of Harewood), among others. In 1914, she had a passionate affair with historian Geoffrey Scott. Scott's marriage collapsed shortly thereafter, as was often the fallout with Vita's affairs, all with women after this point.[11][12]

Vita Sackville-West in 1913

Vita fell in love with Rosamund Grosvenor (1888–1944), who was four years her senior.[lower-alpha 2] In her journal, Vita wrote "Oh, I dare say I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find it out," but she saw no real conflict.[13]:29–30 Lady Sackville, Vita's mother, invited Rosamund to visit the family at their villa in Monte Carlo (1910). Rosamund also stayed with Vita at Knole House, at Murray Scott's pied-à-terre on the Rue Laffitte in Paris, and at Sluie, Scott's shooting lodge in the Scottish Highlands, near Banchory. Their secret relationship ended in 1913 when Vita married.[11][12]

Vita was more deeply involved with Violet Keppel, daughter of the Hon. George Keppel and his wife, Alice Keppel. The sexual relationship began when they were both in their teens and strongly influenced them for years. Both later married and became writers.[14]:148

Harold

Sackville-West was courted for 18 months by young diplomat Harold Nicolson, whom she found to be a secretive character. She writes that the wooing was entirely chaste and throughout they did not so much as kiss.[15]:68 In 1913, at age 21, Vita married him in the private chapel at Knole.[lower-alpha 3] Vita's parents were opposed to the marriage on the grounds that "penniless" Nicolson had an annual income of only £250. He was the third secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople and his father had been made a peer only under Queen Victoria. Another of Sackville-West's suitors, Lord Granby, had an annual income of £100,000, owned vast acres of land and was heir to an old title, the Duchy of Rutland.[15]:68

The couple had an open marriage. Both Sackville-West and her husband had same-sex relationships before and during their marriage, as did some of the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, with whom they had connections.[16][17]:127 Sackville-West saw herself as psychologically divided into two: one side of her personality was more feminine, soft, submissive and attracted to men while the other side was more masculine, hard, aggressive and attracted to women.[17]

Harold had a series of relationships with men who were his intellectual equals, but the physical element in them was very secondary. He was never a passionate lover. To him sex was as incidental, and about as pleasurable as a quick visit to a picture-gallery between trains.[18]

Vita Sackville-West in 1916

Following the pattern of his father's career, Harold Nicolson was at various times a diplomat, journalist, broadcaster, Member of Parliament, and author of biographies and novels. After the wedding the couple lived in Cihangir, a suburb of Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of the Ottoman Empire. Sackville-West loved Constantinople, but the duties of a diplomat's wife did not appeal to her. It was only during this time that she attempted to don, with good grace, the part of a "correct and adoring wife of the brilliant young diplomat", as she sarcastically wrote.[15]:97[15]:95 When she became pregnant, in the summer of 1914, the couple returned to England to ensure that she could give birth in a British hospital.

The family lived at 182 Ebury Street, Belgravia[19] and bought Long Barn in Kent as a country house (1915–1930). They employed the architect Edwin Lutyens to make improvements to the house. The British declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, following Ottoman naval attacks on Russia, precluded any return to Constantinople.[15]:131

Long Barn, Kent

The couple had two children: Benedict (1914–1978), an art historian, and Nigel (1917–2004), a well-known editor, politician, and writer. Another son was stillborn in 1915.

Violet
Vita Sackville-West in her twenties, by William Strang, 1918

Sackville-West continued to receive devoted letters from her lover Violet Keppel. She was deeply upset to read of Keppel's engagement.[15]:131 Her response was to travel to Paris to see Keppel and persuade her to honour their commitment. Keppel, depressed and suicidal, did eventually marry her fiancé Major Trefusis, under pressure from her mother, though Keppel made it clear that she did not love her husband.[20]:62 Sackville-West called the marriage her own greatest failure.[20]:65

Violet in 1920

Sackville-West and Keppel disappeared together several times from 1918 on, mostly to France. One day in 1918 Vita writes that she experienced a radical 'liberation', where her male aspect was unexpectedly freed.[21] She writes: "I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday ... that wild irresponsible day".[21]

The mothers of both women joined forces to sabotage the relationship and force their daughters back to their husbands.[20] But they were unsuccessful. Vita often dressed as a man, styled as Keppel's husband. The two women made a bond to remain faithful to one another, pledging that neither would engage in sexual relations with their husband.[lower-alpha 4]

Keppel continued to pursue her lover to great lengths, until Sackville-West's affairs with other women finally took their toll. In November 1919, while staying at Monte Carlo, Sackville-West wrote that she felt very low, entertaining thoughts of suicide, believing that Nicolson would be better off without her.[17] In 1920 the lovers ran off again to France together and their husbands chased after them in a small two-seater aeroplane.[21] Sackville-West heard allegations that Keppel and her husband Trefusis had been involved sexually, and she broke off the relationship as the lesbian oath of fidelity had been broken.[17] Despite the rift, the two women stayed devoted to one another.

Persia

From 1925 to 1927, Nicolson lived in Tehran where Sackville-West often visited him. Sackville-West's book A Passenger to Tehran recounts her time there.[22]:30 The couple were involved in planning the coronation of Rezā Khan and got to know the six-year old Crown Prince Mohammad Reza well.[22]:31 She also visited and wrote about the former capital of Isfahan to see the Safavid palaces.[23]

Virginia Woolf
Portrait photograph of Virginia Woolf, 1927

Her relationship with the prominent writer Virginia Woolf began in 1925 and ended in 1935, reaching its height between 1925–28.[24]:195–214 The American scholar Louise DeSalvo wrote that the ten years while they were together were the artistic peak of both women's careers, owing to the positive influence they had on one another: "neither had ever written so much so well, and neither would ever again reach this peak of accomplishment".[24]:195–214[lower-alpha 5]

In December 1922, Sackville-West first met Virginia Woolf at a dinner party in London.[24]:197 Though Sackville-West came from an aristocratic family that was far richer than Woolf's own, the women bonded over their confined childhoods and emotionally absent parents.[24]:198 Woolf knew about Sackville-West's relationship with Keppel and was impressed by her free spirit.[25][lower-alpha 6][lower-alpha 7]

Sackville-West greatly admired Woolf's writings, considering her to be the better author. She told Woolf in one letter: "I contrast my illiterate writing with your scholarly one, and I am ashamed".[24]:202 Though Woolf envied Sackville-West's ability to write quickly, she was inclined to believe that the volumes were written too much in haste: "Vita's prose is too fluent".[24]:202[lower-alpha 8]

Sackville-West, 1926

As the two grew close, Woolf disclosed how she had been abused by her step-brother as a child.[lower-alpha 9] It was largely due to Sackville-West's support that Woolf began to heal from the trauma, allowing her for the first time to have a satisfying erotic relationship.[lower-alpha 10] Woolf purchased a mirror during a trip to France with Sackville-West, saying she felt she could look in a mirror for the first time in her life. Sackville-West's support gave Woolf greater confidence and helped her cast off her self-image of a sickly semi-recluse. She persuaded Woolf that her nervous ailments had been misdiagnosed, and that she should focus on her own varied intellectual projects; that she must learn to rest.[lower-alpha 11][24]:199[24]:200[24]:201

To help the Woolfs, Sackville-West chose their Hogarth Press to be her publisher. Seducers in Ecuador, the first Sackville-West novel to be published by Hogarth, sold only 1,500 copies in its first year. The Edwardians, published next, sold 30,000 copies in its first six months. The boost helped Hogarth financially, though Woolf did not always value the books' romantic themes. The increased security of the Press's fortunes allowed Woolf to write more experimental novels such as The Waves[24]:201 Though contemporary critics consider Woolf a better writer, critics in the 1920s viewed Sackville-West as more accomplished, with her books outselling Woolf's by a large margin.[20]:66–67[lower-alpha 12]

Sackville-West loved to travel, frequently going to France, Spain and to visit Nicolson in Persia. These trips were emotionally draining for Woolf, who missed Sackville-West intensely. Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, noteworthy for its theme of longing for someone absent, was partly inspired by Sackville-West's frequent absences. Sackville-West inspired Woolf to write one of her most famous novels, Orlando, featuring a protagonist who changes sex over the centuries. This work was described by Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson as "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature."[24]:204

There were, however, tensions in the relationship. Woolf was often bothered by what she viewed as Sackville-West's promiscuity, charging that Sackville-West's great need for sex led her to take up with anyone who struck her fancy.[24]:213 In A Room Of One's Own (1929), Woolf attacks patriarchal inheritance laws. This was an implicit criticism of Sackville-West, who never questioned the leading social and political position of the aristocracy to which she belonged. She felt that Sackville-West was unable to critique the system she was both a part of and, to a certain extent, a victim of.[24]:209–210 In the 1930s they clashed over Nicolson's "unfortunate" involvement with Oswald Mosley and the New Party (later renamed the British Union of Fascists),[lower-alpha 13] and they were at odds over the imminent war. Sackville-West supported rearmament while Woolf remained loyal to her pacifism, leading to the end of their relationship in 1935.[24]:214

Other lovers

One of Vita's male suitors, Henry Lascelles, would later marry the Princess Royal and become the 6th Earl of Harewood.[26]

In 1927 Sackville-West had an affair with Mary Garman, a member of the Bloomsbury Group and between 1929 and 1931 with Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC Talks Department.[27] In 1931, Sackville-West was in a ménage à trois with journalist Evelyn Irons and Irons's lover, Olive Rinder. Irons had interviewed Vita after her novel The Edwardians had become a best-seller.[28][29]

Sissinghurst
Main article: Sissinghurst Castle Garden
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent

In 1930 the family acquired and moved to Sissinghurst Castle, near Cranbrook, Kent.[30] It had once been owned by Vita's ancestors. This gave it a dynastic attraction as she was excluded from inheriting Knole and a title.[2] Sissinghurst was an Elizabethan ruin and the creation of the gardens would be a joint labour of love that would last many decades, first entailing years of clearing debris from the land. Nicolson provided the architectural structure, with strong classical lines, which would frame his wife's innovative informal planting schemes. She created a new and experimental system of enclosures or rooms, such as the White Garden, Rose Garden, Orchard, Cottage Garden and Nuttery. She also innovated single colour-themed gardens and design principles orientating the visitors' experience to discovery and exploration. Her first garden at Long Barn (Kent, 1915–1930) was experimental, a place of learning by trial and error and she carried over her ideas and projects to Sissinghurst, utilising her hard won experience.[30] Sissinghurst was first opened to the public in 1938.

Sissinghurst

Sackville-West took up writing again in 1930 after a six-year break as she needed money to pay for Sissinghurst. Nicolson, having left the Foreign Office, no longer had a diplomat's salary to draw upon. She also had to pay tuition for her two sons to attend Eton College. She felt she had become a better writer thanks to the mentorship of Woolf.[24]:204 In 1947 she began a weekly column in The Observer called "In your Garden", although she was not a trained horticulturalist or designer.[31] She continued the very popular column until a year before her death, and writing helped to make Sissinghust one of the most famous and visited gardens in England.[30][32][33] In 1948 she became a founder member of the National Trust's garden committee.[34] The grounds are now run by the National Trust.[30] She was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society.[35]

Writing

Portrait of a Marriage

In the early 1920s Sackville-West wrote a memoir of her relationships. In it she sought to explain both why she had chosen to stay with Nicolson and why she had fallen in love with Violet Keppel. The work, titled Portrait of a Marriage, was not published until 1973.[17] In the book she uses metaphors from nature to present her account as truthful and honest, describing her life as a "bog" and a "swamp", suggesting that her personal life was naturally unappealing and unpleasant.[17] Sackville-West stated that she wanted to explain her sexuality, which she presented as being at the core of her personality. She wrote that in the future "it will be recognized that many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted".[17]:128

Reflecting a certain ambivalence about her sexuality, Sackville-West presented her sexual desires for Keppel as both "deviant" and "natural", as if she herself was uncertain of whether her sexuality was normal or not, though the American scholar Georgia Johnston has argued that Sackville-West's confusion on this point was due to her wish to have this memoir published one day.[17] In this regard, Sackville-West wrote of her deep desire and love for Keppel while at same time declaring her "shame" about this "duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle".[17] At various times, Sackville-West called herself a "pariah" with a "perverted nature" and "unnatural" feelings for Keppel, who was portrayed as a tempting, if degrading, object of her desire.[17] Sackville-West called for a "spirit of candor" in society that would allow for tolerance of gay and bisexual people.[17] Much influenced by the theories promoted by sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, Sackville-West sometimes wrote of her sexuality as abnormal and wrong and due to some psychological flaw she was born with, portraying heterosexuality as the norm that she wanted, but failed to live up to.[17]

Several times, Sackville-West stated that she wrote Portrait of a Marriage for scientific purposes so people would be able to understand bisexual people, which would thus allow her, despite her self-condemnation, to present her sexuality as in some way normal.[17] Several of the sexologists Sackville-West cited, most notably Carpenter and Ellis, had argued that homosexuality and bisexuality were in fact normal, and despite her condemning herself, her use of a "scientific" approach backed up with quotes from Ellis and Carpenter allowed her to present her bisexuality as implicitly normal.[17]:127–128 Writing in the third person, Sackville-West declared "she regrets that the person Harold married wasn't entirely and wholly what he had thought of her, and that the person who loves and owns Violet isn't a second person, because each suits each other".[17]:128–129 Sackville-West presented her sexuality as part of the personality she had been born with, portraying herself as an accursed woman who should be the object of sympathy, not condemnation.[17]

In 1973, when her son Nigel Nicolson published Portrait of a Marriage, he was uncertain if he was going to be charged with obscenity, going to considerable lengths to stress the legitimacy of a love for a person of the same sex in his introduction.[17]:130–131 Despite portraying herself as in some way "deviant" because of her feelings for women, Sackville-West also wrote in Portrait of a Marriage of the discovery and acceptance of her bisexuality as a teenager as the joyous "liberation of half my personality", suggesting that she did not really see herself as a woman with "deviant" sexuality, as this statement contradicted what she had written at the beginning of the book about her "perverted" sexuality.[17]:131 Johnson wrote that Sackville-West, in presenting the lesbian side of herself in terms that depicted Keppel as evil and Nicolson as good, was the only way possible at the time to express this side of her personality, writing "even if annihilating herself seemed the only way she could present any type of acceptable self."[17]:131

The memoir was dramatised by the BBC (and PBS in North America) in 1990, starring Janet McTeer as Vita, and Cathryn Harrison as Violet. The series won four BAFTAs.[36]

Challenge

Sackville-West's novel Challenge (1923) also bears witness to her affair with Keppel: Sackville-West and Keppel had started writing this book as a collaborative endeavour. It was published in America but banned in the UK until 1974.[37]

The male character's name, Julian, had been Sackville-West's nickname when passing as a man. Challenge (first entitled Rebellion, then Enchantment, then Vanity and at some point Foam), is a roman à clef with the character of Julian being a male version of Sackville-West and Eve, the woman he desires so passionately is Keppel.[38][17]:133 Notably, Sackville-West in Challenge defends Keppel against several of the insults Nicolson had applied to her in his letters to her; for example Nicolson often called Keppel a "swine" and a "pig", and in the book Julian goes out of his way to say that Eve is neither a swine nor a pig.[17]:134 In the book, Julian says that "Eve is not a 'little swine', she just has the weaknesses and faults of femininity carried to the 9th degree, but is also redeemed by a self-sacrifice, which is very feminine".[17]:134

Reflecting her obsession with the Romany people, Eve is portrayed as a seductive Romany woman with an "insinuating femininity" that Julian cannot resist, calling him away from his political mission of winning independence on a fictional Greek island during the Greek war of independence.[14]:153–154 Nicolson wrote in a letter to his wife: "Don't please dedicate it to Violet, it would kill me if you did".[17]:134 When Challenge was published in 1924, the dedication was written in Romany reading: "This book is yours, honoured witch. If you read it, you will find your tormented soul changed and free".[17]:134 Throughout their relationship, Keppel was given to threatening suicide if Sackville-West left her, a character trait shared by Eve, who finally attempts to drown herself in the sea while Julian tries to come to her rescue.[17]:134 As Eve changes her mind about taking her life and tries to swim ashore as Julian swims out to her, it is too late and she is swept away by the tide to drown.[17]:134 The book's ending reflected Sackville-West's guilt about breaking her relationship with Keppel.[17]:134

Her mother, Lady Sackville, found the portrayal obvious enough to refuse to allow publication of the novel in England; but Vita's son Nigel Nicolson praises his mother: "She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything ... How could she regret that the knowledge of it should now reach the ears of a new generation, one so infinitely more compassionate than her own?"

Sackville-West was fascinated with and often wrote about the Roma people. As the British scholar Kirstie Blair noted, for her: "Gypsies represent liberation, excitement, danger and the free expression of sexuality".[14]:141 In particular, the Roma women, especially Spanish Romany women, served as a symbol for lesbianism in her writings.[14]:141–142 As with many other women writers in this period, for Sackville-West, the Romany represented a social element both familiar and strange; a people perceived and admired as flamboyant romantics while at the same time viewed and hated as shifty, dishonest types; a rootless people who belonged nowhere yet could be found everywhere in Europe, serving as a symbol for a sort of unconventional femininity.[14]:142–143 The picture Sackville-West held of the Romany was much influenced by "Orientalism", as the Romany were believed to have originated from India. The idea of a people who belonged nowhere, existing outside of the values of "civilization", held genuine appeal to her as it offered up the possibility of gender roles different from those held in the West.[14]:144 Sackville-West was English, but she invented Romany ancestry for herself on the Spanish side of her family, explaining her bohemian behavior as due to her alleged "Gypsy" descent.[14]:142

Orlando

Woolf was inspired by Sackville-West to write her most famous novel, Orlando (1928), featuring a protagonist who changes sex over the centuries.[lower-alpha 14][lower-alpha 15] Reflecting Sackville-West's interest in the Romany, when Orlando goes to bed as a man and mysteriously wakes up as a woman in Constantinople (which is implied might have been the result of a spell cast by a Romany witch whom he married), it is at a Romany camp in the Balkans that Orlando is first welcomed and accepted as a woman, as the Romany in the novel make no distinctions between the sexes.[14]:157 Ultimately Woolf satirizes Sackville-West's Romany fetish, as Orlando, an English aristocrat, prefers not to live in poverty as part of wandering Romany caravan in the Balkans, because the call of a settled life of the aristocracy at a country house in England proves too strong for her, just as in real life Sackville-West fantasised about living the nomadic life of a Romany, but in reality preferred the settled life in the English countryside.[14]:158 Orlando, which was intended as a fantasy where the character of Orlando (a stand-in for Sackville-West) inherits an estate, not unlike Knole (which Sackville-West would have inherited as the eldest child if she had been a man), ironically marked the beginning of a tension between the two women.[24]:206 Sackville-West often complained in her letters that Woolf was more interested in writing a fantasy about her than in returning her gestures of affection in the real world.[24]:206[lower-alpha 16]

Family History

Sackville-West's 1932 novel Family History tells the story of Evelyn Jarrold, a rich widow who married into a family which owes its recent wealth and social position to the ownership of coal mines, and her ill-fated love affair with Miles Vane-Merrick, a much younger man with progressive social ideas. Evelyn Jarrold's husband, Tommy, died in the Great War, and she has nothing to occupy her apart from her son Dan, the Jarrolds' heir, who is away at Eton, social events and visits to her dressmaker. Vane-Merrick is a farming landowner and Member of Parliament, and is writing a book on economics. He represents new, progressive values and the male world of work and economic activity, and Evelyn Jarrold represents traditional values and the female world of family ties and social engagements.

The characters of Viola and Leonard Anquetil in Family History are socialists, pacifists and feminists, thinly veiled versions of Virginia and Leonard Woolf.[24]:212 In Orlando, Woolf allowed Vita to finally "own" Knole, and in Family History, Vita returns the gesture, as the Anquetils have children who turned out to be intelligent and decent people.[24]:212 Woolf had never had children and was afraid that she would have been a bad mother. In casting her fictional alter-ego as an excellent mother she was offering a "gift" to Woolf.[24]:212

Other work and achievements

Most of the novels were an immediate success (except Dark Island, Grand Canyon and La Grande Mademoiselle). All Passion Spent (1931) and Seducers in Ecuador (1924) sold especially well. Somewhat Ironically Seducers overtook her mentor's novel Mrs Dalloway at the top of the sales charts.[39]

The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent are perhaps her best-known novels today. In the latter, the elderly Lady Slane courageously embraces a long suppressed sense of freedom and whimsy after a lifetime of following convention. This novel was dramatised by the BBC in 1986 starring Dame Wendy Hiller. All Passion Spent appears to reflect Woolf's influence. The character of Lady Slane begins to truly live only after the death of her husband, a former prime minister. She befriends the servants of her estate, discovering the lives of people she had previously ignored.[24]:211 At the end of the novel Lady Slane persuades her granddaughter to break off an arranged marriage in order to pursue her career as a musician.[24]:211

Grand Canyon (1942) is a science fiction "cautionary tale" (as she termed it) about a Nazi invasion of an unprepared United States. The book takes an unsuspected twist, however, that makes it something more than a typical invasion yarn.[40]

The poetry remains the least known of Sackville-West's work. It encompassed epics and translations of volumes such as Rilke's Duino Elegies. Her epic poems The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) reflect an enduring passion for the earth and family tradition.The Land may have been written in response to the central work of Modernist poetry The Waste Land (also published by Hogarth Press). She dedicated her poem to her lover Dorothy Wellesley. A recording of Sackville-West reading it was released by Columbia Records.[41] [37][42] Her poem won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again in 1933 with her Collected Poems, becoming the only writer to do so twice.[34] The Garden won the Heinemann Award for literature.[37]

Her epic poem Solitude, published by the Hogarth Press in October 1938 contains references to the Bible, Paracelsus, Ixion, Catullus, Andromeda, the Iliad and a Sabine bride, all of which were quite acceptable in the early 20th century, but were seen as anachronistic by 1938.[43]:409 The narrator of Solitude has an ardent love of the English countryside. Though the sex of the narrator is left ambiguous, implied at various points to be a man or a woman, it is made clear the narrator loved intensely a woman who is no longer present and who is deeply missed.[43]:409 At one point, the narrator's horror and disgust at Ixion, a brutal rapist, implies that she is a woman. At another point in the poem, her desire to free Andromeda from her chains and to make love suggests that she is a lesbian.[43]:412–413 The narrator compares the love of nature to the love of books, as both cultivate her mind. She thinks of herself as superior to the farmers who merely work the land without the time or the interest for poetry, all of which make it possible for her to have a deeper appreciation of nature.[43]:414

She is not well known as a biographer. The most famous of those works is her biography of Saint Joan of Arc in the work of the same name. Additionally, she composed a dual biography of Saint Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux entitled The Eagle and the Dove, a biography of the author Aphra Behn, and a biography of her maternal grandmother, the Spanish dancer known as Pepita.

Despite being a shy woman, Sackville-West often forced herself to participate in literary readings before book clubs and on the BBC in order to feel a sense of belonging.[43]:408 Her love of the classical traditions in literature put her out of favour with modernist critics and by the 1940s, she was often dismissed as a dated writer, much to her chagrin.[43] In 1947 Sackville-West was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Companion of Honour.[44]

Death and legacy
St Michael and All Angels Church, Withyham, where Sackville-West's ashes are buried

Vita Sackville-West died at Sissinghurst in June 1962, aged 70, from abdominal cancer.[45] She was cremated and ashes buried in the family crypt within the church at Withyham, eastern Sussex.[46]

Sissinghurst Castle is owned by the National Trust. Her son Nigel Nicolson lived there after her death, and following his death in 2004 his own son Adam Nicolson, Baron Carnock, came to live there with his family. With his wife, the horticulturalist Sarah Raven, they committed to restore the mixed working farm and growing food on the property for residents and visitors, a function that had withered under the aegis of the Trust.[47]

The film Vita and Virginia, with Gemma Arterton as Vita and Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia, had its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It is directed by Chanya Button and based on a play by Eileen Atkins, created from the love letters between Sackville-West and Woolf. The play was first performed in London in October 1993 and off Broadway in November 1994.[48]

Works

Poetry collections
  • Chatterton (1909)
  • A Dancing Elf (1912)
  • Constantinople: Eight Poems (1915)
  • Poems of West and East (1917)
  • Orchard and Vineyard (1921)
  • The Land (1926)
  • King's Daughter (1929)
  • Sissinghurst (1931)
  • Invitation to Cast out Care (1931)
  • Collected Poems: Volume 1 (1933)
  • Solitude (1938)
  • The Garden (1946)

Novels
  • Heritage (1919)
  • The Dragon in Shallow Waters (1921)
  • The Heir (1922)
  • Challenge (1923)
  • Grey Wethers (1923)
  • Seducers in Ecuador (1924)
  • Passenger to Teheran[49] (1926)
  • The Edwardians (1930)
  • All Passion Spent (1931)
  • The Death of Noble Godavary and Gottfried Künstler (1932)
  • Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour (1932) - short stories
  • Family History (1932)
  • The Dark Island (1934)
  • Grand Canyon[50] (1942)
  • Devil at Westease (1947)
  • The Easter Party (1953)
  • No Signposts in the Sea (1961)

Translations
  • Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino, by Rainer Maria Rilke trns. V. Sackville-West (Hogarth Press, London, 1931)

Biographies and non-fiction
  • "Aphra Behn: the Incomparable Astrea" (Gerald Howe 1927)
  • Passenger to Teheran (Hogarth Press 1926, reprinted Tauris Parke Paperbacks 2007, ISBN 978-1-84511-343-8)
  • Knole and the Sackvilles (1922)
  • Saint Joan of Arc (Doubleday 1936, reprinted M. Joseph 1969)
  • English Country Houses (William Collins, 1941, illustrated)
  • Pepita (Doubleday, 1937, reprinted Hogarth Press 1970)
  • The Eagle and The Dove (M. Joseph 1943)
  • Twelve Days: an account of a journey across the Bakhtiari Mountains of South-western Persia (first published UK 1927; Doubleday Doran 1928; M. Haag 1987, reprinted Tauris Parke Paperbacks 2009 as Twelve Days in Persia)
  • "Country Notes in Wartime", 1940, (The Hogarth Press, "These Country Notes were first published in 'The New Statesman and Nation')
gollark: It would take at least three seconds to stop them conflicting in a few ways.
gollark: In theory, I could run the ABR source code on Epicbot.
gollark: One thing per guild.
gollark: They can do that?
gollark: I don't think so.

See also

Notes
  1. Salic rules of agnatic male primogeniture.[6][7]
  2. Rosamund was the daughter of Algernon Henry Grosvenor (1864–1907), and the granddaughter of Robert Grosvenor, 1st Baron Ebury.
  3. Nicknamed 'Hadji', or 'Pilgrim', by his father, he was the third son of British diplomat Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock.
  4. In a letter to Nicolson dated 1 June 1919 explaining why she would not leave Keppel, Sackville-West wrote: I never ought to have married you or anybody else; I ought just to have lived with you for as long as you wanted me ... I ought never to have married til I was thirty. I really think that is the best solution for people like me ... Women ought to have the freedom the same as men when they are young. It's a rotten and ridiculous system at present, it's simply cheating one of one's youth. It was all right for the Victorians. But this generation is discarding, and next will have discarded, the chrysalis.[17]:126
  5. In a letter to her son, Nigel Nicolson (Portrait of A Marriage), Vita Sackville-West wrote that the physical component of her famous affair with Virginia Woolf had consisted of two occasions when they went to bed together and even then, they may have only engaged in "bundling", since Vita was aware of Woolf's extreme emotional fragility and did not want to cause her a mental breakdown with a tempestuously sexual affair.[13]:206
  6. Leonard Woolf wrote "She [Sackville-West] belonged indeed to a world which was completely different from ours, and the long line of Sackvilles, Dorsets, Da La Warrs and Knole with its 365 rooms had put into her mind and heart an ingredient which was alien to us and at first made intimacy difficult".[24]:198
  7. Woolf wrote about meeting Sackville-West in 1925: "Vita shines in the grocer's shop in Sevenoaks ... pink growing, grape clustered, pearl hung ... There is her maturity and full-breastedness; her being so much full in sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs, her motherhood ... her in short being (what I have never been) a real woman".[20]:57
  8. Before going on her second trip to Persia in 1927, a chastened Sackville-West, wrote to Woolf: "I shall work so hard [on the next book], partly to please you and partly to please myself ... I treasure your sudden discourse on literature yesterday morning, a send-off to me, rather like Polonius to Laertes. It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually than anyone else, and for this alone, I love you ... You do like me to write well, don't you? And I do hate writing badly-and having written so badly in the past. But now, like Queen Victoria, I will be good".[24]:203
  9. A somber Sackville-West wrote in her diary: "After dinner, V.[irgina] read me her memoir of Old Bloomsbury and talked a lot about her brother".[24]:199
  10. Woolf told Sackville-West that she was the first person who had caused her to orgasm.[24]:199
  11. In 1925, Sackville-West wrote to Woolf: "Why do you give so much of your energies to the manuscripts of other people? You told me in London that you had at least six novels in your head but were being severe with yourself until you should go to Rodmell. Now you are at Rodmell and what of the six novels? Between Ottoline, Gertrude Stein, and bridal parties which cause you to faint, what time is there for Virginia?"[24]:200
  12. The extent to which Hogarth depended upon Sackville-West to stay in business was reflected in a letter Woolf sent her on 7 September 1930 saying: "What about your novel and your poems? I ask in no idle curiosity; I look upon you now as the Woolf bread-winner since I am more and more certain that my next novel won't win us even the penny bun".[24]:201
  13. An angry Woolf wrote to Sackville-West in August 1931: "Potto [their name for sex] expiring. What about Harold and Mosley? But don't write if it hurts".[24]:214
  14. Woolf documented the moment of the conception of Orlando: she wrote in her diary on 5 October 1927: "And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other" (excerpt from her diary published posthumously by her husband Leonard Woolf).
  15. Woolf felt she needed Sackville-West's permission to write Orlando, asking in a letter: "But listen, suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind ... Do you mind, say Yes or No?"[20]:59
  16. After finishing Orlando, Woolf wrote a letter to Sackville-West saying: "For Promiscuous you are and that is all to be said about it. Look in the Index of Orlando-after Pippin and see what comes next-Promiscuity passim".[24]:213 In another letter, Woolf warned Sackville-West: "Yes, you are an agile animal-no doubt about it-but as to your gambols being diverting ... I'm not so sure ... I'm a fair-minded woman. You only be careful with your gamboling or you'll find Virginia's soft crevices lined with hooks".[20]:66

References
  1. Sackville-West (2015) p1
  2. Cannadine, David (1994). Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. pp. 224–241. ISBN 0300059817. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
  3. Sackville-West (2015) p2
  4. "More family history from Knole and Sissinghurst", The Spectator, Anne Chisholm, 16 April 2016
  5. Sackville-West (2015) pxiv
  6. Bell, Matthew. Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles, By Robert Sackville-West. 'The Independent', 16 May 2010;
  7. Hughes, Kathryn. "Love among the roses – Kathryn Hughes is touched by an unsentimental memoir", The Guardian', 27 September 2008.
  8. Sackville-West (2015) pXiii
  9. Sackville-West (2015) pp1-2
  10. Rose, Norman,Harold Nicolson Random House, 2014, pxxx
  11. Sackville-West (2015) p3
  12. Rose, Norman,Harold Nicolson Random House, 2014, ppxxxi - xxxxii
  13. Nicolson, Nigel; Sackville-West, Vita (1998) [1973]. Portrait of a Marriage. The University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-58357-0.
  14. Blair, Kirstie (Summer 2004). "Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf". Twentieth Century Literature. 50 (2): 141–166. doi:10.2307/4149276. JSTOR 4149276.
  15. Dennison, Matthew (June 2015) [2014]. Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. William Collins. ISBN 978-0007486984.
  16. Glendinning (Knopf, 1983) p436
  17. Johnston, Georgia (Autumn 2004). "Counterfeit Perversion: Vita Sackville-West's 'Portrait of a Marriage". Journal of Modern Literature. 28 (1): 124–137. doi:10.1353/jml.2005.0018. JSTOR 3831782.
  18. Spartacus Educational Biography, quote from Portrait of a Marriage (1973)
  19. 182 Ebury St, Blue Plaque, English Heritage]
  20. Smith, Victoria (Summer 2006). ""Ransacking the Language": Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf's Orlando". The Journal of Modern Literature. 29 (4): 57–75. doi:10.1353/jml.2006.0050. JSTOR 3831880.
  21. Sackville-West (2015) p4
  22. Milani, Abbas (June 2012). The Shah. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230340381.
  23. Nicolson (2007)p20
  24. DeSalvo, Louise (Winter 1982). "Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf". Signs. 8 (2): 195–214. doi:10.1086/493959. JSTOR 3173896.
  25. Nicolson, Nigel Virginia Woolf, London: Penguin, 2000 page 87.
  26. Sackville-West and 6th Earl of Harewood, sparknotes.com; accessed 17 October 2014.
  27. Charlotte Higgins "What can the origins of the BBC tell us about its future?", The Guardian, 15 April 2014
  28. Lewis, Paul (30 April 2000). "Evelyn Irons, War Reporter, Is Dead at 99". New York Times. Retrieved 15 January 2012. |section= ignored (help)
  29. Brenner, Felix (25 April 2000). "Obituary: Evelyn Irons". The Independent. London.
  30. Garden Designer Vita Sackville-West, Great British Gardens
  31. Guardian "Vita Sackville-West's Notebook: teaching resource from the GNM archive July 2013 ".1 July 2013
  32. Lord (2000) pp. 67, 100
  33. Macmillan Biography
  34. National Trust. Vita biography
  35. Poetry Foundation biography
  36. "Masterpiece Theatre Portrait of a Marriage Parts I-III", Variety, 17 July 1992
  37. Spartacus Educational Biography
  38. Sackville (2015) p5
  39. Sackville-West (2015) p13
  40. Pan Macmillan, Grand Canyon
  41. Catalogue of Columbia Records, Up to and including Supplement no. 252 (Columbia Graphophone Company, London September 1933), p. 375. This was on four 78rpm sides in the Columbia Records 'International Educational Society' Lecture series, Lecture 98 (Cat. no. D 40192/3).
  42. Sackville-West (2015) pp13-14
  43. Nagel, Rebecca (September 2008). "The Classical Tradition in Vita Sackville-West's Solitude". International Journal of the Classical Tradition. 15 (3): 407–427. doi:10.1007/s12138-009-0048-z. JSTOR 25691245.
  44. "The London Gazette Issue 38161 published on the 30 December 1947. Page 31 of 42". London Gazette. 30 December 1947.
  45. Who's who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II, Psychology Press, 2001, Volume 1 p390
  46. Wilson, Scott. Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons, 3d ed.: 2 (Kindle Locations 41300-41301). McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers. Kindle Edition.
  47. "A happy return to manure". The Economist. 2 October 2008. Retrieved 2 October 2008.
  48. "Elizabeth Debicki, Isabella Rossellini Join Virginia Woolf Biopic Vita & Virginia" Variety 23 August 2017
  49. "Passenger to Teheran".
  50. "Grand Canyon".

Sources
  • Carney, Michael: Stoker: The Life of Hilda Matheson, privately published, Llangynog, 1999
  • Ghanī, Sīrūs & Ghani, Cyrus: Iran and the Rise of the Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power, London: .B.Tauris, 2000
  • Glendinning, Victoria: Vita. A Biography of Vita Sackville-West, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1983
  • Glendinning, Victoria: Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983
  • Lord, Tony (2000). Gardening at Sissinghurst. Frances Lincoln & National Trust.
  • Nicolson, Nigel: "Introduction" from A Passenger to Tehran, London: I.B Tauris, 2007
  • Sackville-West, Vita: Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings, Preface by Nigel Nicolson, St. Martin's Press, 2015

Further reading
  • Robert Cross and Ann Ravenscroft-Hulme: Vita Sackville-West: A Bibliography (Oak Knoll Press, 1999); ISBN 1-58456-004-5
  • Eberle, Iwona: Eve with a Spade: Women, Gardens, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Grin, 2011); ISBN 978-3-640-84355-8
  • Peggy Wolf: Sternenlieder und Grabgesänge. Vita Sackville-West: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie der deutschsprachigen Veröffentlichungen von ihr und über sie 1930–2005. (Daphne-Verlag, Göttingen, 2006); ISBN 3-89137-041-5
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