Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Vita Sackville-West
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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 husbands of the two women, followed by Violet's father George Keppel
, made a melodramatic dash by private plane to get them back, which they did after heavy emotional scenes.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
VT
was gathering material for her upcoming roman à clef, Broderie Anglaise, about herself, Vita Sackville-West
, and Woolf
(with whom Vita had been intimately involved for several years). Woolf wrote about the meeting...
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Trefusis
At a mutual friend's tea party at Aldford Street, Park Lane, Violet Keppel (later VT
) met Vita Sackville-West
for the first time.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
72
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Trefusis
Trefusis also made peace with one of her great loves, Vita Sackville-West
. Sackville-West visited St Loup with her husband Harold Nicolson
in 1950 and 1951; she went by herself to stay at Ombrellino in 1952.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
298
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.
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...