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.
The first Dictionary of National Biography praised AW
's abilities as a poet and claimed a lasting place for her in the English poetic tradition, but by 1914 Watts-Dunton was complaining about her exclusion from...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
seems to have first met Hilda Matheson
just before the latter took over the role of central player in Vita Sackville-West
's love-life. But Matheson (director of talks for the BBC
, soon to...
At Penns during the Second World WarDW
wrote of her fear—An explosion. I thought of my son. (Oh, don't think!) I thought of Hilda
(she is safe)—but also of solitude, of her...
Friends, Associates
Dorothy Wellesley
Among these readers, Ruth Pitter
became a valued friend of DW
,
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
175
as she did too of Vita Sackville-West
. Another friend of Wellesley's later years was Sir Ifor Evans
.
Performance of text
Dorothy Wellesley
She dedicated this poem to the memory of her father
, and headed its first section with a quotation from the book of Genesis (And the Earth was without form and void; and darkness...
The contents are arranged in thirteen sections, from Romance and Poems on Love to Life and Death, War, and Night and Sleep. They come from twenty-seven poets, of whom only five are...
Textual Production
Dorothy Wellesley
Vita Sackville-West
supplied an introduction which takes a tone of slightly amused condescension towards these publications for the boudoir.
Travel
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
travelled with Vita Sackville-West
to Egypt and India.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
179-90
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
153-5, 159-60
Dedications
Dorothy Wellesley
This was her second volume in the Hogarth Living Poets series: number 16, and she inscribed it to Vita Sackville-West
.
Wellesley, Dorothy, and W. B. Yeats. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley. Macmillan.
57
Travel
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
left England to travel via Russia to Persia (now Iran) with Vita Sackville-West
(who was on her second visit).
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
3: 319n1
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
190-215
Reception
Dorothy Wellesley
W. B. Yeats
, then aged seventy, discovered DW
's writing in 1935 when he was ill in bed and was at work on The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He was feeling disillusioned...
Residence
Dorothy Wellesley
Having sold Sherfield Court, DW
went house-hunting with the help of Vita Sackville-West
and bought Penns in the Rocks at Withyham in Sussex.
The name is sometimes given as Penns on the Rocks.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
3: 487
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
158-9
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
The book did not impress Vita Sackville-West
, who called it just too awful. . . . A mixture of whining and boasting.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
371
DW
's Times obituary represented it as composed after a curious...