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.
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...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
VW
conceived her book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning
's spaniel as a little escapade, light relief after the hard slog of writing The Waves. No doubt with memories of Sackville portraits for Orlando...
Twenty-five years after her death, Alice Meynell
: Prose and Poetry, Centenary Volume was published by Jonathan Cape
, with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West
.
After she became a marketable name, AU
received an offer from the Sunday Times to write a gardening column on the model of Vita Sackville-West
's, but she declined. She took up reviewing. Faced with...
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Marina Warner
MW
published Joan of Arc
: The Image of Female Heroism, her study of the legendary Maid of Orleans who became a fearless soldier, a martyr, and eventually a saint.
Warner's biography of Joan...
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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...
VW
travelled to Cambridge with Vita Sackville-West
to deliver a second Women and Fiction paper at Girton College
.
Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Editors Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillie, Hogarth Press.
3: 199
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Violet Trefusis
On 14 May 1918, four days after the end of her first romantic holiday with VT
, Vita Sackville-West
began writing her novel Challenge (titled Rebellion in its early stages). It is clearly based on...
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Penelope Mortimer
Besides reviewing television, PM
wrote both plays and screenplays for the small screen. She adapted for television both Colette
's Ripening Seed (a novel, translated into English by Roger Senhouse
, about a teenage boy's...
Textual Production
Dorothy Wellesley
Vita Sackville-West
supplied an introduction which takes a tone of slightly amused condescension towards these publications for the boudoir.
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.