Vita Sackville-West
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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
) 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.
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Biography
used both Julian and David as names under which she passed as male. She also used these names in correspondence with her female lovers.
was usually referred to formally as the Honourable (on account of her father's baronetage). After Harold Nicolson received the Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1953, however, they became Sir Harold and Lady Nicolson.
detested being called Lady Nicolson, both because the award was not quite what she would have wished for her husband, and because she hated being known by her married name.