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.
Ancient Melodies opens with Sackville-West
's Orientalist vision of the author's writing and life. She writes, A long time back, that is to say in 1938-39, one of the many daughters of an ex-Mayor of...
Literary responses
Rosamond Lehmann
This book received very positive reviews from (among others) Elizabeth Janeway
in the New York Times, Elizabeth Bowen
in New Republic, Virginia Peterson
in the New York Herald Tribune, Simon Raven in...
After beginning her trip smoothly, Diana is surprised by a Sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan, who kidnaps and rapes her. But EMH
provides a troubling confluence of passion and male aggression, carefully blurring the line between...
Publishing
Mary Agnes Hamilton
Two years before this, Matheson had fired Hamilton from her position as BBC book reviewer, citing the poor quality of her reviews but also so that she could pull strings to get the slot to...
Literary responses
Radclyffe Hall
Though also supportive of its right to a place in the public realm, Vita Sackville-West
judged the some of the novel's elements negatively: around 1941, she described The Well as a loathsome example
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
277
and...
Friends, Associates
H. D.
After her move to England, Ezra Pound
introduced HD to his circle of friends, many of whom were important figures in the modernist movement. They included W. B. Yeats
, T. S. Eliot
,...
Textual Production
Rumer Godden
RG
was critical of the distaste with which English writers Osbert
and Edith Sitwell
or Vita Sackville-West
had regarded their American lecture audiences. About her coast-to-coast tour with her husband she later wrote, I took...
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
This saint had already attracted a number of English women writers: Evelyn Underhill
, Sheila Kaye-Smith
, and Vita Sackville-West
(the only one in Furlong's bibliography). A new edition of MF
's book appeared in 2001.
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
MF
begins her introduction with Saint Thérèse as exemplar of that style of traditional female sanctity which involves drastic self-abnegation, with Sackville-West
's attribution to her of niaiserie or sugariness, and with her own consequent...
Textual Production
Pamela Frankau
She says she began work on another play, called Can't Catch Me, when she looked at the beautiful face of Tyrone Power
and a thought crossed her mind: a man who escapes.
Frankau, Pamela. Pen to Paper. Heinemann.
171
Many...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Maureen Duffy
The play takes a biographical approach, as Woolf
, from the vantage point of imminent death, looks back over her past life. The only two other characters are Vita Sackville-West
and Sigmund Freud
; Duffy...
Intertextuality and Influence
E. M. Delafield
The diary abounds with references to contemporary literature, including several internal allusions to Time and Tide. The Provincial Lady engages in friendly rivalry over its competitions for readers and describes social encounters with the...
Education
Nancy Cunard
After NC
's mother left her husband and moved to London, Nancy became a regular pupil at Miss Wolff
's School in South Audley Street, where she had previously attended some classes.
The surname...
Reception
Nancy Cunard
Glowing reviews appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Nation, the New Statesman, and The Observer. After this success, NC
's mother began to act as her unofficial literary agent, and...