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.
CSJ
and Edith Craig
hosted a reading of The Land performed by its author, Vita Sackville-West
.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
251
Leisure and Society
Enid Bagnold
Vita Sackville-West
described EB
's method of getting round petrol rationing at the beginning of 1941: She has a phaeton built in 1880 in which she drives herself about . . . . The horse...
Intertextuality and Influence
Violet Trefusis
Broderie Anglaise may be read as the last of a variously-authored trilogy of novels featuring references to the affair between VT
and Vita Sackville-West
, following Vita's Challenge and Virginia Woolf
's Orlando (1928), both...
Intertextuality and Influence
Penelope Lively
Personal reflections on plants are one of her subjects here, along with gardening history, her varied experiences of being in gardens, and writers who have preceded her in touching on or immersing themselves in the...
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...
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
Lady Anne Clifford
LAC
made a great impression on Sackville-West
and Woolf
: on the former for her family associations, on the latter for her symbolic possibilities. In Donne after three Centuries and again in her last, unfinished...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Muriel Spark
Norman Page called attention to the parallel with William Golding
's Pincher Martin, another novel about psychic survival for some time after physical death, published seventeen years earlier.
Page, Norman. Muriel Spark. Macmillan.
86-7
An even more intriguing parallel...
Friends, Associates
Gertrude Bell
Vita Sackville-West
stayed with GB
in Baghdad; during the visit she discussed Bell by letter with her friend Virginia Woolf
.
Howell, Georgina. Daughter of the Desert: the Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell. Macmillan.
502
Winstone, Harry Victor Frederick. Gertrude Bell. J. Cape.
RP
knew T. S. Eliot
well enough to enjoy a courtly encounter with him at a bus stop, but she felt his great innovations had not necessarily been a good thing for English poetry, and...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
Since VW
moved in a variety of social circles, her range of literary acquaintance was very wide. Her associates included such established, celebrated writers as Thomas Hardy and Henry James
, popular authors such as...