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.
VT
and Vita Sackville-West
were persuaded to end their elopement of several days and return home from their intended new life at Amiens in France.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
105, 108
Trefusis, Violet. “Introduction”. Violet to Vita, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, Methuen, pp. 1-52.
34-6
Nicolson, Nigel, and Vita Sackville-West. Portrait of a Marriage. Futura.
143
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
When the novel was published under Vita
's name in America in 1924 (it remained suppressed in Britain until 1973), it featured a dedication written in Spanish Romany, the adopted language of central characters Julian...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Trefusis
This engagement, like most in VT
's life, was short-lived: she ended it before the close of the year. (For his part, Gerald Wellesley proposed to Dorothy Ashton in 1914. Their marriage lasted until 1922...
Intertextuality and Influence
Violet Trefusis
Broderie Anglaise may be read as the last of a variously-authored trilogy of novels featuring references to the affair between VT
and Vita Sackville-West
, following Vita's Challenge and Virginia Woolf
's Orlando (1928), both...
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Trefusis
VT
's powerful erotic connection to Vita Sackville-West
, whom she had met in childhood, continued in varying forms from 1910 onwards, but its most intense period began in 1918.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
97-8,127
Sackville-West and later biographers...
Reception
Violet Trefusis
Sackville-West
and Woolf
never read VT
's text: it did not appear in English until 1985, with Barbara Bray
's translation and Victoria Glendinning
's introduction.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
257
Glendinning, Victoria, and Violet Trefusis. “Introduction”. Broderie Anglaise, translated by. Barbara Bray and Barbara Bray, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
v, xvi
In a critical essay, Broderie Anglaise...
Cultural formation
Violet Trefusis
Alice Keppel
strongly disapproved of the relationship between Violet and Vita
for many reasons, including the threat posed by the growing scandal over it to Sonia Keppel
's upcoming marriage into a staunchly conservative English family.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
167-8
Textual Production
Violet Trefusis
VT
's acquaintance Nancy Mitford
suggested that VT
should call this book Here Lies Madame Trefusis.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
300
In a letter of July 1941, Vita Sackville-West
told Trefusis that she ought to dedicate this book...
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Trefusis
Unrealistically, she expected that Sackville-West
would somehow rescue her from this marriage, but when Vita stayed on with her husband Harold
at Versailles instead of intervening to stop the wedding, Violet wrote to her, [y]ou...