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 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...
Geniesse, Jane Fletcher. Passionate Nomad. Random House.
327
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
Fictionalization
Violet Trefusis
In addition to her role in Challenge, VT
appeared in several creative pieces by others. The most famous example is Virginia Woolf
's Orlando, which reimagines VT
as the seductive Princess Sasha, who...
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...