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.
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...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
Yeats
found and valued in DW
's work both descriptive genius
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
and passionate precision.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Sackville-West
's considered judgement was that Wellesley was undisciplined, and that the philosophic freight which Yeats admired in her work...
Literary responses
E. Arnot Robertson
J. B. Priestley
, focussing on the noble-savage aspects of this story, complained that its characters do not really come from Borneo, they come from Rousseau
and cloud-cuckoo land.
Devlin, Polly, and E. Arnot Robertson. “Introduction”. Four Frightened People, Virago, p. vii - xix.
ix
Vita Sackville West
, however...
Literary responses
Edith Sitwell
Sitwell later wrote, the attitude of certain of the audience was so threatening that I was warned to stay on the platform, hidden by the curtain, until they got tired of waiting for me and...
Thomas McCarthy
wrote in the Cork Literary Review that this volume consolidates what is already an achieved and unique presence in Irish poetry. Her mind is astonishing—within her world Kafka
dines comfortably with Vita Sackville-West
.
The Gallery Press. http://www.gallerypress.com/home.html.
Literary responses
Charlotte Mew
May Sinclair
thought Madeleine magnificent, having depths & depths of passion & of sheer beauty.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
191
She also enjoyed the high Victorian melodrama of Mew's reading aloud.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
192
Despite her efforts to bring The Farmer's...
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...
Literary responses
Sylvia Townsend Warner
STW
's friend David Garnett
seriously disapproved of the latter part of the book and the heroine's characterisation. However, Vita Sackville-West
particularly liked the part of the story that Garnett criticised.
Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. Chatto and Windus.
86
Literary responses
Enid Bagnold
Responses to the novel were mixed. The feminist journal Time and Tide judged it a really important book, a mark in feminist history as well as a fine literary feat. Here at last is a...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Margaret Jourdain
(herself the author of many books in print) told the antiquarian Joan Evans
, Ivy has written a book and I expect it's very bad. We have decided I shan't read it and...
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...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
The Athenæum suggested that this was not a translation or even a paraphrase, but rather a metrical adaptation of a fantastic tale, told in verse which is well suited to its subject.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2424 (1874): 489
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Leonard Woolf's decision proved a mistake. The book was not only praised to the skies by young, advanced reviewers, but also made the secondary Book of the Month for May by the newly-formed Book Society
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
The first Dictionary of National Biography praised AW
's abilities as a poet and claimed a lasting place for her in the English poetic tradition, but by 1914 Watts-Dunton was complaining about her exclusion from...