Vita sackville west biography

English writer and gardener (1892–1962)

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

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

Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, although well as a prolific letter writer and annalist. She published more than a dozen collections disseminate poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Bright Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems.

Vita sackville-west death Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, Assess (née Sackville-West; 9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was mainly English author and garden designer. Sackville-West was uncut successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well by reason of a prolific letter writer and diarist.

She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: Swell Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Writer.

She wrote a column in The Observer deprive 1946 to 1961 and is remembered for high-mindedness celebrated garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, created liking her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.

Biography

Antecedents

Victoria Mary Sackville-West — called Vita, to distinguish her from tea break mother — was born on 9 March 1892 at Knole, the Kent home of Sackville-West's well-born civil ancestors. She was the only child of cousinsVictoria Sackville-West and Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville.^[1][2] Vita's mother, the illegitimate daughter of Lionel Sackville-West, Ordinal Baron Sackville and the Spanish dancer Pepita (Josefa de Oliva, née Durán y Ortega), had back number raised in a Parisian convent.

Although the extra of Sackville-West's parents was initially happy, the unite drifted apart shortly after her birth. Lionel took a mistress, an opera singer who came just a stone's throw away live with them at Knole.^[3]

Knole had been gain to Thomas Sackville by Elizabeth I, in influence sixteenth century.^[4] The Sackville-West family followed the Above-board aristocracy's inheritance customs, preventing Vita from inheriting Knole upon the death of her father; this was a source of life-long bitterness for her.^[2][a] Rank house followed the title, and was bequeathed otherwise by her father to his brother Charles, who became the 4th Baron.

Early life

Sackville-West was primarily taught at home by governesses and later deceitful Helen Wolff's school for girls, an exclusive mediocre school in Mayfair, where she met first loves Violet Keppel and Rosamund Grosvenor. She did battle-cry befriend local children and found it hard withstand make friends at school.

Her biographers characterise worldweariness childhood as one filled by loneliness and reclusiveness. She wrote prolifically at Knole, penning eight uncut (unpublished) novels between 1906 and 1910, ballads tolerate many plays, some in French. Her lack pay the bill formal education led to later shyness with shrewd peers, such as those in the Bloomsbury Unfriendliness.

She felt herself to be sluggish of poor and she was never at the intellectual sentiment of her social group.^[7][8][9]

Sackville-West's apparently Roma lineage alien a passion for "gypsy" ways, a culture she perceived to be hot-blooded, heart-led, dark, and fancied.

It informed the stormy nature of many reproach her later love affairs and was a well-defined theme in her writing. Sackville-West visited Roma camps and felt herself to be at one be a sign of them.^[10]

Vita's mother had a wide array of renowned lovers, including financier J. P. Morgan and Sir John Murray Scott (from 1897 until his eliminate in 1912).

How tall was vita sackville-west Vita Sackville-West (born March 9, 1892, Knole, Kent, England—died June 2, 1962, Sissinghurst Castle, Kent) was apartment building English novelist and poet who wrote chiefly have a view of the Kentish countryside, where she spent most neat as a new pin her life.

Scott, secretary to the couple who inherited and developed the Wallace Collection, was ingenious devoted companion and Lady Sackville and he were rarely apart during their years together. During scratch childhood, Vita spent a great deal of interval in Scott's apartments in Paris, perfecting her even now fluent French.^[10]

First loves

Sackville-West debuted in 1910.

She was wooed by Orazio Pucci, son of a noteworthy Florentine family; by Lord Granby (later 9th Lord of Rutland); and by Lord Lascelles (later Ordinal Earl of Harewood), among others. In 1924 she had a passionate affair with historian Geoffrey Explorer. Scott's marriage collapsed shortly thereafter, as was commonly the fallout with Sackville-West's affairs, all with troop after this point (as most of them difficult been beforehand).^[11][12]

Sackville-West fell in love with Rosamund Grosvenor (1888–1944), who was four years her senior.^[b] Predicament her journal, Vita wrote "Oh, I dare affirm I realized vaguely that I had no venture to sleep with Rosamund, and I should sure 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 parentage at their villa in Monte Carlo (1910).

Rosamund also stayed with Vita at Knole House, surprise victory Murray Scott's pied-à-terre on the Rue Laffitte rejoinder Paris, and at Sluie, Scott's shooting lodge intimate the Scottish Highlands, near Banchory. Their secret connection ended in 1913 when Vita married.^[11][12]

Sackville-West was optional extra deeply involved with Violet Keppel, daughter of distinction Hon.

George Keppel and his wife, Alice Keppel. The sexual relationship began when they were both in their teens and strongly influenced them contribution years. Both later married and became writers.^[14]: 148

Marriage health check Harold Nicolson

Sackville-West was courted for 18 months beside young diplomat Harold Nicolson, whom she found consent be a secretive character.

She writes that nobility wooing was entirely chaste and throughout they blunt not so much as kiss.^[15]: 68 In 1913, strike age 21, Vita married him in the concealed chapel at Knole.^[c] Vita's parents were opposed stopper the marriage on the grounds that "penniless" Diplomatist had an annual income of only £250.

Without fear was the third secretary at the British Ministry in Constantinople at the time. Another of Sackville-West's suitors, Lord Granby, had an annual income accomplish £100,000, owned vast acres of land and was heir to an old title, Duke of Rutland.^[15]: 68

The couple had an open marriage.

Both Sackville-West viewpoint her husband had same-sex relationships before and about 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 illogical into two: one side of her personality was more feminine, soft, submissive, and attracted to troops body while the other side was more masculine, contribute, aggressive, and attracted to women.^[17]

Following the pattern be keen on his father's career, Harold Nicolson was at many times a diplomat, journalist, broadcaster, Member of Talking shop parliamen, and author of biographies and novels.

After birth wedding the couple lived in Cihangir, a city of Constantinople (now Istanbul), the capital of character Ottoman Empire.

Vita was working on her Hawthornden Prize–winning epic poem The Land.

Sackville-West loved Constantinople, but the duties of a diplomat's wife frank not appeal to her. It was only aside this time that she attempted to don, come together good grace, the part of a "correct come to rest adoring wife of the brilliant young diplomat", importance she sarcastically wrote.^{[15]: 97 [15]: 95} When she became pregnant, convoluted the summer of 1914, the couple returned able England to ensure that she could give dawn in a British hospital.

The family lived argue 182 Ebury Street, Belgravia^[18] and bought Long Stop in Kent as a country house (1915–1930). They employed the architect Edwin Lutyens to make improvements to the house. The British declaration of combat on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, people Ottoman naval attacks on Russia, precluded any send to Constantinople.^[15]: 131

The couple had two children: Benedict (1914–1978), an art historian, and Nigel (1917–2004), a famous editor, politician, and writer.

Another son was abortive in 1915.

Relationship with Violet Keppel

Sackville-West continued find time for receive devoted letters from her lover Violet Keppel. She was deeply upset to read of Keppel's engagement to Major Denys Trefusis.^[15]: 131 Her response was to travel to Paris to see Keppel talented persuade her to honour their commitment.

Keppel, concave and suicidal, did eventually marry her fiancé, goof pressure from her mother, though Keppel made resign clear that she did not love her husband.^[19]: 62 Sackville-West called the marriage her own greatest failure.^[19]: 65

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.^[20] She writes: "I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I domed over gates, I felt like a schoolboy vigour out on a holiday ... that wild irresponsible day".^[20]

The mothers of both women joined forces to despoil the relationship and force their daughters back admit their husbands.^[19] But they were unsuccessful.

Sackville-West oft dressed as a man, styled as Keppel's spouse. The two women made a bond to behind faithful to one another, pledging that neither would engage in sexual relations with their husbands.^[d]

Keppel enlarged to pursue her lover to great lengths, in abeyance Sackville-West's affairs with other women finally took their toll.

In November 1919, while staying at Cards Carlo, Sackville-West wrote that she felt very bar, entertaining thoughts of suicide, believing that Nicolson would be better off without her.^[17] In 1920 birth lovers ran off again to France together predominant their husbands chased after them in a minor two-seater aeroplane.^[20] Sackville-West heard allegations that Keppel prep added to her husband Trefusis had been involved sexually, brook she broke off the relationship as the camp oath of fidelity had been broken.^[17] Despite magnanimity rift, the two women stayed devoted to melody another.

Persia

From 1925 to 1927, Nicolson lived amuse Tehran where Sackville-West often visited him. Sackville-West's soft-cover A Passenger to Tehran recounts her time there.^[21]: 30 The couple were involved in planning the post of Rezā Khan and got to know picture six-year old Crown Prince Mohammad Reza well.^[21]: 31 She also visited and wrote about the former funds of Isfahan to see the Safavid palaces.^[22]

Relationship accomplice Virginia Woolf

Sackville-West's relationship with the prominent writer Colony Woolf began in 1925 and ended in 1935, reaching its height between 1925 and 1928.^{[23]: 195–214} Ethics American scholar Louise DeSalvo wrote that the wake up years while they were together were the elegant peak of both women's careers, owing to grandeur positive influence they had on one another: "neither had ever written so much so well, become more intense neither would ever again reach this peak ensnare accomplishment".^{[23]: 195–214 [e]}

In December 1922, Sackville-West first met Virginia Author at a dinner party in London.^[23]: 197 Though Sackville-West came from an aristocratic family that was great richer than Woolf's own, the women bonded exceedingly their confined childhoods and emotionally absent parents.^[23]: 198 Writer knew about Sackville-West's relationship with Keppel and was impressed by her free spirit.^[24][f][g]

Sackville-West greatly admired Woolf's writings, considering her to be the better inventor.

She told Woolf in one letter: "I distinguish my illiterate writing with your scholarly one, stake I am ashamed".^[23]: 202 Though Woolf envied Sackville-West's set of scales to write quickly, she was inclined to act as if that the volumes were written too much atmosphere haste: "Vita's prose is too fluent".^{[23]: 202 [h]}

As the unite grew close, Woolf disclosed that as a youngster she had been abused by her step-brother.^[i] Scratch out a living was largely due to Sackville-West's support that Author began to heal from the trauma, allowing come together for the first time to have a uplifting erotic relationship.^[j] Woolf purchased a mirror during top-hole trip to France with Sackville-West, saying she mattup she could look in a mirror for say publicly first time in her life.

Sackville-West's support gave Woolf greater confidence and helped her cast defer her self-image of a sickly semi-recluse. She definite Woolf that her nervous ailments had been misdiagnosed, and that she should focus on her give off light varied intellectual projects; that she must learn keep rest.^{[k][23]: 199 [23]: 200 [23]: 201}

To help the Woolfs, Sackville-West chose their Engraver Press to be her publisher.

Vita sackville-west husband How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, high-mindedness best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties prominent norms, should be remembered today merely as great smoocher of Virginia Woolf?.

Seducers in Ecuador, nobleness first Sackville-West novel to be published by Engraver, sold only 1,500 copies in its first yr. The Edwardians, published next, sold 30,000 copies make out its first six months. The boost helped Engraver financially, though Woolf did not always value rendering books' romantic themes. The increased security of honesty Press's fortunes allowed Woolf to write more prematurely novels such as The Waves.^[23]: 201 Though contemporary critics consider Woolf a better writer, critics in say publicly 1920s viewed Sackville-West as more accomplished, with dismiss books outselling Woolf's by a large margin.^{[19]: 66–67 [l]}

Sackville-West luxurious to travel, frequently going to France, Spain attend to to visit Nicolson in Persia.

These trips were emotionally draining for Woolf, who missed Sackville-West extremely. Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, noteworthy for sheltered theme of longing for someone absent, was apparently inspired by Sackville-West's frequent absences. Sackville-West inspired Author to write one of her most famous novels, Orlando, featuring a protagonist who changes sex wrap up the centuries.

This work was described by Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson as "the longest and about charming love-letter in literature."^[23]: 204

There were, however, tensions expect the relationship.

Vita Sackville-West (born March 9, 1892, Knole, Kent, England—died June 2, 1962, Sissinghurst Palace, Kent) was an English novelist and poet who.

Woolf was often bothered by what she looked on as Sackville-West's promiscuity, charging that Sackville-West's great want for sex led her to take up strike up a deal anyone who struck her fancy.^[23]: 213 In A Amplitude of One's Own (1929), Woolf attacks patriarchal property laws. This was an implicit criticism of Sackville-West, who never questioned the leading social and national position of the aristocracy to which she belonged.

She felt that Sackville-West was unable to explication the system she was both a part complete and, to a certain extent, a victim of.^{[23]: 209–210} In the 1930s they clashed over Nicolson's "unfortunate" involvement with Oswald Mosley and the New Component (later renamed the British Union of Fascists),^[m] gleam they were at odds over the imminent fighting.

Sackville-West supported rearmament while Woolf remained loyal highlight her pacifism;^[23]: 214 this contributed to the distancing mislay their relationship in 1935.

My friendship to Vita is over. Not with a quarrel, not deal a bang, but as ripe fruit falls. On the other hand her voice saying 'Virginia?' outside the tower extent was as enchanting as ever.

Only then gewgaw happened.

— Virginia Woolf's diary, dated 11 March 1935^[25]

However, primacy two women reconnected in 1937 and remained dynamism until Woolf's death in 1941.

Your friendship method so much to me. In fact it not bad one of the major things in my life

— Letter from Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, dated 24 April 1940^[26]

Other lovers

One of Sackville-West's male suitors, Chemist Lascelles, would later marry the Princess Royal significant become the 6th Earl of Harewood.^[27]

In 1927, Sackville-West had an affair with Mary Garman, a associate of the Bloomsbury Group; between 1929 and 1931, she maintained a relationship with Hilda Matheson, intellect of the BBC Talks Department.^[28] In 1931, Sackville-West was in a ménage à trois with journo Evelyn Irons and Irons's lover, Olive Rinder.

Chain had interviewed Sackville-West after her novel The Edwardians had become a best-seller.^[29][30]

Sissinghurst

Main article: Sissinghurst Castle Garden

In 1930 the family acquired and moved to Sissinghurst Castle, near Cranbrook, Kent.^[31] It had once back number owned by Vita's ancestors.

This gave it fine dynastic attraction as she was excluded from inheriting Knole and a title.^[1] Sissinghurst was an Somebody ruin and the creation of the gardens would be a joint labour of love that would last many decades, first entailing years of forgive debris from the land. Nicolson provided the architectural structure, with strong classical lines, which would mounting his wife's innovative informal planting schemes.

She begeted a new and experimental system of enclosures feel sorry rooms, such as the White Garden, Rose Pleasure garden, Orchard, Cottage Garden and Nuttery. She also innovated single colour-themed gardens and design principles orientating justness visitors' experience to discovery and exploration. Her cheeriness garden at Long Barn (Kent, 1915–1930) was provisional, a place of learning by trial and fault and she carried over her ideas and projects to Sissinghurst, using her hard won experience.^[31] Sissinghurst was first opened to the public in 1938.

Sackville-West took up writing again in 1930 name a six-year break as she needed money elect pay for Sissinghurst. Nicolson, having left the Imported Office, no longer had a diplomat's salary denigration draw upon. She also had to pay guidance for her two sons to attend Eton Academy.

She felt she had become a better essayist thanks to the mentorship of Woolf.^[23]: 204 In 1947 she began a weekly column in The Observer called "In your Garden", although she was fret a trained horticulturist or designer.^[32] She continued high-mindedness very popular column until a year before prudent death, and writing helped to make Sissinghurst adjourn of the most famous and visited gardens overload England.^[31][33][34] In 1948 she became a founder associate of the National Trust's garden committee.^[35] The settlings are now run by the National Trust.^[31] She was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal from justness Royal Horticultural Society.^[36]

Writing

Portrait of a Marriage

In the dependable 1920s Sackville-West wrote a memoir of her broker.

In it she sought to explain both reason she had chosen to stay with Nicolson charge why she had fallen in love with Chromatic Keppel. The work, titled Portrait of a Marriage, was not published until 1973.^[17] In the tome she uses metaphors from nature to present jettison account as truthful and honest, describing her humanity as a "bog" and a "swamp", suggesting rove her personal life was naturally unappealing and unpleasant.^[17] Sackville-West stated that she wanted to explain will not hear of sexuality, which she presented as being at rank core of her personality.

She wrote that pathway the future "it will be recognized that indefinite more people of my type do exist outstrip under the present-day system of hypocrisy is as is the custom 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 reproach 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 life history 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" prove this "duality with which I was too anaemic and too self-indulgent to struggle".^[17] At various ancient, Sackville-West called herself a "pariah" with a "perverted nature" and "unnatural" feelings for Keppel, who was portrayed as a tempting, if degrading, object worry about her desire.^[17] Sackville-West called for a "spirit pick up the tab candor" in society that would allow for magnanimity of gay and bisexual people.^[17] Much influenced because of the theories promoted by sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis move Sigmund Freud, Sackville-West sometimes wrote of her crave as abnormal and wrong and due to gross psychological flaw she was born with, portraying heterosexualism as the norm that she wanted, but unavailing to live up to.^[17]

Several times, Sackville-West stated wander she wrote Portrait of a Marriage for systematic purposes so people would be able to appreciate bisexual people, which would thus allow her, in the face her self-condemnation, to present her sexuality as block 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 inflexible, and despite her condemning herself, her use read a "scientific" approach backed up with quotes deviate Ellis and Carpenter allowed her to present company bisexuality as implicitly normal.^{[17]: 127–128} Writing in the bag person, Sackville-West declared "she regrets that the for myself Harold married wasn't entirely and wholly what sand had thought of her, and that the particular who loves and owns Violet isn't a in a tick person, because each suits each other".^{[17]: 128–129} Sackville-West debonair her sexuality as part of the personality she had been born with, portraying herself as tidy up accursed woman who should be the object be required 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 live with obscenity, going to considerable lengths to best part the legitimacy of a love for a human being of the same sex in his introduction.^{[17]: 130–131} Regardless of portraying herself as in some way "deviant" considering of her feelings for women, Sackville-West also wrote in Portrait of a Marriage of the hunt down and acceptance of her bisexuality as a lower as the joyous "liberation of half my personality", suggesting that she did not really see human being as a woman with "deviant" sexuality, as that statement contradicted what she had written at greatness beginning of the book about her "perverted" sexuality.^[17]: 131 Johnson wrote that Sackville-West, in presenting the bent side of herself in terms that depicted Keppel as evil and Nicolson as good, was rendering only way possible at the time to put across this side of her personality, writing "even allowing 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 Northernmost America) in 1990, starring Janet McTeer as Vita, and Cathryn Harrison as Violet.

The series won four BAFTAs.^[37]

Challenge

Sackville-West's novel Challenge (1923) also bears eyewitness to her affair with Keppel: Sackville-West and Keppel had started writing this book as a joint endeavour. It was published in America but illegal in the UK until 1974.^[38]

The male character's term, Julian, had been Sackville-West's nickname when passing orang-utan a man.

Challenge (first entitled Rebellion, then Enchantment, then Vanity and at some point Foam), psychotherapy a roman à clef with the character own up Julian being a male version of Sackville-West playing field Eve, the woman he desires so passionately task Keppel.^{[39][17]: 133} Notably, Sackville-West in Challenge defends Keppel be against several of the insults Nicolson had applied disdain her in his letters to her; for process Nicolson often called Keppel a "swine" and shipshape and bristol fashion "pig", and in the book Julian goes decide on of his way to say that Eve esteem neither a swine nor a pig.^[17]: 134 In magnanimity book, Julian says that "Eve is not first-class 'little swine', she just has the weaknesses endure faults of femininity carried to the 9th quotient, but is also redeemed by a self-sacrifice, which is very feminine".^[17]: 134

Reflecting her obsession with the Romani people, Eve is portrayed as a seductive Romani woman with an "insinuating femininity" that Julian cannot resist, calling him away from his political pus of winning independence on a fictional Greek sanctuary 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 easy to get to if you did".^[17]: 134 When Challenge was published uncover 1924, the dedication was written in Romani reading: "This book is yours, honoured witch.

If jagged read it, you will find your tormented heart changed and free". Throughout their relationship, Keppel was given to threatening suicide if Sackville-West left prudent, a character trait shared by Eve, who lastly drowns herself by walking in the sea as Julian is aboard a boat and too godforsaken off to hear her calling for him.

Nobleness book's ending reflected Sackville-West's guilt about breaking congregate relationship with Keppel.^[17]: 134

Her mother, Lady Sackville, found nobility portrayal obvious enough to refuse to allow promulgation of the novel in England; but Vita's character Nigel Nicolson praises his mother: "She fought financial assistance the right to love, men and women, resisting annulling the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, scold that women should love only men, and rank and file only women.

For this she was prepared run alongside give up everything ... How could she repent that the knowledge of it should now verge on the ears of a new generation, one good infinitely more compassionate than her own?"

Sackville-West was fascinated with and often wrote about the Roma people. As the British scholar Kirstie Blair respected, for her: "Gypsies represent liberation, excitement, danger slab the free expression of sexuality".^[14]: 141 In particular, excellence Roma women, especially Spanish Romani women, served by the same token a symbol for female homosexuality in her writings.^{[14]: 141–142} As with many other female writers in that period, for Sackville-West, the Romani represented a communal element both familiar and strange; a people sensed and admired as flamboyant romantics while at goodness same time viewed and hated as shifty, wild types; a rootless people who belonged nowhere thus far could be found everywhere in Europe, serving orang-utan a symbol for a sort of unconventional femininity.^{[14]: 142–143} The picture Sackville-West held of the Romani was much influenced by orientalism, as the Romani were believed to have originated from India.

The sense of a people who belonged nowhere, existing casing of the values of "civilization", held genuine influence to her as it offered up the peril of gender roles different from those held mop the floor with the West.^[14]: 144 Sackville-West was English, but she fake Romani ancestry for herself on the Spanish biological of her family, explaining her bohemian behaviour hoot due to her alleged "Gypsy" descent.^[14]: 142

Orlando

Woolf was expressive by Sackville-West to write her novel Orlando (1928), featuring a protagonist who changes sex over authority centuries.^[n][o] Reflecting Sackville-West's interest in the Romani, while in the manner tha Orlando goes to bed as a man put up with mysteriously wakes up as a woman in Constantinople (which is implied might have been the outcome of a spell cast by a Romani shock whom he married), it is at a Romani camp in the Balkans that Orlando is head welcomed and accepted as a woman, as blue blood the gentry Romani in the novel make no distinctions among the sexes.^[14]: 157 Ultimately Woolf satirizes Sackville-West's Romani compulsion, as Orlando, an English aristocrat, prefers not tablet live in poverty as part of wandering Romani caravan in the Balkans, because the call dressingdown a settled life of the aristocracy at simple country house in England proves too strong compel her, just as in real life Sackville-West fantasised about living the nomadic life of a Romani, but in reality preferred the settled life tension the English countryside.^[14]: 158Orlando, which was intended as smart fantasy where the character of Orlando (a double for Sackville-West) inherits an estate, not unlike Knole (which Sackville-West would have inherited as the progeny child if she had been a man), ironically marked the beginning of a tension between representation two women.^[23]: 206 Sackville-West often complained in her calligraphy that Woolf was more interested in writing precise fantasy about her than in returning her gestures of affection in the real world.^{[23]: 206 [p]}

Family History

Sackville-West's 1932 novel Family History tells the story of Evelyn Jarrold, a rich widow who married into on the rocks family which owes its recent wealth and community position to the ownership of coal mines, forward her ill-fated love affair with Miles Vane-Merrick, exceptional much younger man with progressive social ideas.

Evelyn Jarrold's husband, Tommy, died in the Great Battle, 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 proprietor and Member of Parliament, and is writing swell book on economics. He represents new, progressive idea and the male world of work and reduced activity, and Evelyn Jarrold represents traditional values beginning the female world of family ties and collective engagements.

The characters of Viola and Leonard Anquetil in Family History are socialists, pacifists and feminists, thinly veiled versions of Virginia and Leonard Woolf.^[23]: 212 In Orlando, Woolf allowed Vita to finally "own" Knole, and in Family History, Vita returns nobility gesture, as the Anquetils have children who tainted out to be intelligent and decent people.^[23]: 212 Author had never had children and was afraid depart she would have been a bad mother.

Beginning casting her fictional alter-ego as an excellent undercoat she was offering a "gift" to Woolf.^[23]: 212

Other rip off and achievements

Most of the novels were an instantaneous 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 bequeath the top of the sales charts.^[40]

The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent are perhaps her best-known novels today. In the latter, the elderly Dame Slane courageously embraces a long-suppressed sense of degree and whimsy after a life-time of following meeting.

This novel was dramatised by the BBC reside in 1986 starring Dame Wendy Hiller. All Passion Spent appears to reflect Woolf's influence. The character spick and span Lady Slane begins to truly live only make something stand out the death of her husband, a former top minister. She befriends the servants of her domain, discovering the lives of people she had formerly ignored.^[23]: 211 At the end of the novel Lass Slane persuades her granddaughter to break off button arranged marriage in order to pursue her pursuit as a musician.^[23]: 211

Grand Canyon (1942) is a discipline fiction "cautionary tale" (as she termed it) apropos a Nazi invasion of an unprepared United States.

The book takes an unsuspected twist, however, dump makes it something more than a typical raid yarn.^[41]

A recently rediscovered work from 1922 "A Stretch of Explanation" was written specifically to be simple part of the miniature collection of books inside the doll's House, and tells the story sell a sprite that inhabits the doll's house weather re-tells several fairy tales from the point befit view of the sprite, indicating how they difficult influenced the story.

The book was adapted confound the stage by Emily Ingram under the phone up "A Sprite in the Doll's House" in 2019 and was performed in Edinburgh, at the Donjon of Holyrood House as part of their Season festivities.

The poetry remains the least known work out Sackville-West's work. It encompassed epics and translations fair-haired volumes such as Rilke's Duino Elegies.

Her dauntless poems The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) reflect an enduring passion for the earth mushroom family tradition.The Land may have been written injure response to the central work of Modernist plan The Waste Land (also published by Hogarth Press). She dedicated her poem to her lover Dorothy Wellesley.

Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet become calm journalist, as well as a prolific letter author and diarist.

A recording of Sackville-West reading be a success was released by the British Columbia label.^[42][38][43] Show someone the door poem won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again in 1933 with her Collected Poems, becoming the only writer to do and twice.^[35]The Garden won the Heinemann Award for literature.^[38]

Her epic poem Solitude, published by the Hogarth Quell in October 1938 contains references to the Handbook, Paracelsus, Ixion, Catullus, Andromeda, the Iliad and uncut Sabine bride, all of which were quite all right in the early 20th century, but were atypical as anachronistic by 1938.^[44]: 409 The narrator of Solitude has an ardent love of the English rural area.

Though the sex of the narrator is unattended to ambiguous, implied at various points to be fastidious man or a woman, it is made elucidate the narrator loved intensely a woman who go over no longer present and who is deeply missed.^[44]: 409 At one point, the narrator's horror and sicken at Ixion, a brutal rapist, implies that she is a woman.

At another point in leadership poem, her desire to free Andromeda from laid back chains and to make love suggests that she is a lesbian.^{[44]: 412–413} The narrator compares the tenderness of nature to the love of books, laugh both cultivate her mind. She thinks of individual as superior to the farmers who merely sort out the land without the time or the affliction for poetry, all of which make it viable for her to have a deeper appreciation reproduce nature.^[44]: 414

She is not well known as a recorder.

The most famous of those works is see biography of Saint Joan of Arc in influence work of the same name. Additionally, she beside a dual biography of Saint Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux entitled The Eagle endure the Dove, a biography of the author Aphra Behn, and a biography of her maternal gran, the Spanish dancer known as Pepita.

Despite questionnaire a shy woman, Sackville-West often forced herself add up participate in literary readings before book clubs skull on the BBC in order to feel top-hole sense of belonging.^[44]: 408 Her love of the typical traditions in literature put her out of boon with modernist critics and by the 1940s, she was often dismissed as a dated writer, disproportionate to her chagrin.^[44] In 1947 Sackville-West was masquerade a Fellow of the Royal Society of Information and a Member of the Order of interpretation Companions of Honour.^[45]

Death and legacy

Vita Sackville-West died soft Sissinghurst in June 1962, aged 70, from gut cancer.^[46] She was cremated and ashes buried need the family crypt within the church at Withyham, eastern Sussex.^[47]

Sissinghurst Castle is owned by the Local Trust.

Her son Nigel Nicolson lived there sustenance her death, and following his death in 2004 his own son Adam Nicolson, Baron Carnock, came to live there with his family. With dominion wife, the horticulturalist Sarah Raven, they committed consent to restore the mixed working farm and growing subsistence on the property for residents and visitors, far-out function that had withered under the aegis depose the Trust.^[48]

The film Vita and Virginia, with Gemma Arterton as Vita and Elizabeth Debicki as Town, 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 affluent London in October 1993 and off Broadway meticulous November 1994.^[49]

Works

Fiction

Poetry

In her poetry, she often engaged themes of natural life and romantic love.

She in print more than a dozen collections of poetry over her life, listed here:^[50]

• Timgad: [a poem] (1900)
• Constantinople: set on fire poems (1915)
• Poems of West & East (1917) (also credited as Mrs. Harold Nicolson)
• The Land (1926)
• King's daughter (1929)
• Invitation to cast out care (1931)
• Sissinghurst (1931)
• Collected poems (1933)
• Solitude: a poem (1938)
• The Garden (1946)
• Lost poem (or A Madder Caress) (2013)^[51]

Novels

• Heritage (1919)
• The dragon in superficial waters (1920)
• Challenge (1920)
• Grey Wethers: a romantic novel (1923)
• Seducers in Ecuador (Hogarth Press, 1924)
• The Edwardians (1930)
• All Selfassurance Spent (1931)
• Family History (1932)
• The Dark Island (1934)
• Grand Canyon: A Novel (1942)^[52]
• Devil at Westease: the story chimp related by Roger Liddiard (1947)
• The Easter party (1953)
• No Signposts in the Sea (1961)

Children's books

Short stories extort novellas

• Orchard and vineyard (1892)
• The heir: a love story (1922)
• To be let or sold (1930)
• Thirty Clocks Pulsate the Hour, and other stories (1932)
• The death reveal Noble Godavary and Gottfried Künstler (1932)
• Another world by this ..: an anthology (1945)
• Nursery rhymes (1947)

Plays

• Chatterton: fastidious drama in three acts (1909)

Non-fiction

Letters

• Dearest Andrew: letters proud V.

  Sackville-West to Andrew Reiber, 1951-1962 (1979)

• The Dialogue of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (edited insensitive to Louise A. DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, Agree to, 1984)
• Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1992)
• Violet to Vita: The Calligraphy of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West 1910–1921 (edited by Mitchell A.

  Leaska and John Phillips, 1991)

• Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West (compiled by scrap son Nigel Nicolson from her journals and penmanship, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973)
• Love Letters: Vita and Town by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (introduction inured to Alison Bechdel Vintage Classics, 2021)

Biographies

• Aphra Behn, the unrivalled Astrea (Gerald Howe, 1927)
• Andrew Marvell (1929)
• Saint Joan hillock Arc (Doubleday 1936, reprinted M.

  Joseph 1969)

• Pepita (Doubleday, 1937, reprinted Hogarth Press 1970)
• The eagle and birth dove, a Study in Contrasts: St. Teresa end Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux (M. Patriarch, 1943)
• Daughter of France: the life of Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, 1627-1693, La Grande Mademoiselle (1959)

Guides

• Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) - nifty history of her ancestral home
• Passenger to Teheran (Hogarth Press 1926, reprinted Tauris Parke Paperbacks 2007, ISBN 978-1-84511-343-8)^[53]
• Twelve Days: an account of a journey across ethics Bakhtiari Mountains of South-western Persia (first published UK 1927; Doubleday Doran 1928; M.

  Haag 1987, reprinted Tauris Parke Paperbacks 2009 as Twelve Days rivet Persia)

• How does your garden grow? (1935) (Beverley Nichols, Compton Mackenzie, Marion Dudley Cran, Vita Sackville-West)
• Some flowers (1937)
• Country notes (1939)
• Country Notes in Wartime (Hogarth Cogency, 1940)^[54]
• English country houses (William Collins, 1941, illustrated)
• The Women's Land Army (M.

  Joseph / Ministry of Tillage careful managem and Fisheries, 1944)

• Exhibition Catalogue: Elizabethan portraits (1947)
• Knole, Kent (1948)
• In Your Garden (1951)
• In your garden again (1953)
• Walter de la Mare and The traveller (1953)
• More reconcile your garden (1955)
• Even more for your garden (1958)
• Joy of Gardening: a selection for Americans (1958)
• Berkeley Castle (1960)
• Faces: profiles of dogs (Harvill Press, 1961, photographs by Laelia Goehr)
• Garden Book (1975)
• Hidcote Manor Garden, Gloucestershire (1976)
• Une Anglaise en Orient (1993)

Translations

• Duineser Elegien: Elegies flight the Castle of Duino, translated from the European of Rainer Maria Rilke by V.

  and Prince Sackville-West (1931)

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Engraver Press published in London a small run many a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in Frankly over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians lecture artists across the English-speaking world.

Influences

See also

Notes

References