Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Vita Sackville-West
-
Standard Name: Sackville-West, Vita
Birth Name: Victoria Mary Sackville-West
Nickname: Mar
Self-constructed Name: Vita Sackville-West
Self-constructed Name: V. Sackville-West
Married Name: Victoria Mary Nicolson
Self-constructed Name: Julian Sackville-West
Self-constructed Name: David Sackville-West
Styled: the Honourable Victoria Mary Sackville-West
VSW
wrote prolifically and almost obsessively from her childhood in the early twentieth century. She began with poems, plays, and fiction about her family's romantic links to English history. As an adult she used these genres to describe or transform her own complicated love-life: lesbian relationships, triangular relationships, love between masculine women and feminine men. Her best-known poems, The Land and The Garden, create classically-descended georgic from the traditional labour of the Kentish countryside, and the related art of gardening. Many novels (some she called pot-boilers) use conventional style to delineate upper-class society, but she also made forays (first inspired by Virginia Woolf
) into the experimental. She wrote history, biography, travel books, diaries, and letters. She was a popular and productive journalist, both in print and on the radio, whose topics included literature, gardening, and the status of women (though she refused the label of feminist). Her gardening writings and her actual gardens remain her best-known works. Her masterpiece, the Sissinghurst gardens, are the most-visited in Britain.
In 1933 Vita Sackville-West
formally introduced CSJ
and Edith Craig
to Virginia Woolf
.Woolf was not as fascinated by St John as she was by Craig and Terry, and saw her as a burden on...
death
Christopher St John
Vita Sackville-West
—although St John's death brought her the horrifying discovery of the love-journal recording their relationship—wrote to The Times celebrating her as a roaringly rumbustious character in the grand tradition of English eccentrics.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(29 October 1960): 8
Material Conditions of Writing
Christopher St John
In the 1930s when CSJ
was in love with Vita Sackville-West
, she wrote a love journal about their relationship as well. After her death, Vi Pym
found this text among other diaries while sorting...
Literary responses
Freya Stark
John Jock Murray
and Sir Sydney Cockerell
initially advised Stark against writing this book, urging her to remain in the travel genre rather than attempt philosophical writing. However, they apologized for their opinions when the...
Literary responses
Freya Stark
The text was published to rave reviews in the Sunday Times, the Observer, and other papers. For her piece in The Spectator, Vita Sackville-West
wrote an open letter to the author rather...
Geniesse, Jane Fletcher. Passionate Nomad. Random House.
327
Education
Iris Tree
Sometime after 1904, IT
and her next elder sister, Felicity, began attending Miss Wolff
's day school, an unconventional school held at the private home of Miss Wolff at South Audley Street, London. There...
Literary responses
Viola Tree
After the publication of VT
's book, Vita Sackville-West
wrote to Woolf, how could you publish Viola? . . . I don't like you to sell your soul.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
3: 268n1
Woolf replied, Why read memoirs...
Textual Production
Violet Trefusis
VT
published Broderie Anglaise, a roman à clef written in French and based partly on reconsideration of the web of relationships linking herself, Vita Sackville-West
, and Virginia Woolf
.
Glendinning, Victoria, and Violet Trefusis. “Introduction”. Broderie Anglaise, translated by. Barbara Bray and Barbara Bray, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
v
Literary responses
Violet Trefusis
Her novels were lightly received and sometimes disparaged by readers. Alice Keppel
referred to her daughter's writing with inverted commas: (writing).
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
261
Late in VT
's career, Vita Sackville-Westaccused her of scribbling...
Author summary
Violet Trefusis
Though VT
is best known to literary history as a lover of English writer and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West
, she wrote and published in a range of genres throughout her life, which spanned much of...
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel details the literary and romantic triangles among writer Anne Lindell (a sketch to some extent inspired by VT
herself), the former lover of aristocrat John Shorne (Sackville-West
), who is having an...
Cultural formation
Violet Trefusis
VT
had minor erotic relationships with men, but her intimate experiences were dominated by lesbian affairs with author Vita Sackville-West
and other women. Though she did not formally indentify with any specific category or definition...
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel's action is set in Oxford.
Trefusis, Violet, and Victoria Glendinning. Broderie Anglaise. Translator Bray, Barbara, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
12, 22
There, Alexa meets Anne and quarrels with John over the truth of John and Anne's love affair and failed elopement. Alexa and John are reconciled...