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...
Textual Production
Ling Shuhua
The Hogarth Press
published Ling Shuhua
's memoir Ancient Melodies, with an introduction by Vita Sackville-West
. Ling Shuhua dedicated the book to Virginia Woolf
and Sackville-West, with whom she conferred at different stages...
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...
Literary responses
Medbh McGuckian
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...
Textual Production
Alice Meynell
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
.
Christiana painted and kept a journal, which is described by Vita Sackville-West
as an unconsciously vivid picture of the little family's nomadic existence in France and Italy.
Meynell, Alice. “Introduction”. Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry, edited by Vita Sackville-West et al., Jonathon Cape, pp. 7-26.
10
At Genoa, Christiana Thompson proudly exhibited...
Meynell, Alice. Alice Meynell: Prose and Poetry. Editors Page, Frederick and Vita Sackville-West, Jonathon Cape.
27-34
and are revealing about the...
Occupation
Viola Meynell
Her first broadcast was, appropriately, on her mother, Alice Meynell
. The BBC director praised her for being the best first-time presenter he had ever seen. She followed up with programmes on Francis Thompson
,...
Textual Production
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 Features
Edna O'Brien
There are three characters in this text: Woolf
herself, appearing both in her youth and in maturity; The Man (who represents now her father Leslie Stephen
and now her husband Leonard Woolf
); and Woolf's...
Literary responses
Emily Jane Pfeiffer
In an essay on poetry of the 1870s, Vita Sackville-West
linked Peace to the Odalisque to the beginning of all this stirring about women's rights, and women's equality,
Sackville-West, Vita. “The Women Poets of the Seventies”. The Eighteen-Seventies: Essays by Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, edited by Harley Granville-Barker, Cambridge University Press, pp. 111-32.
116
as an exception to the general...
Friends, Associates
Ruth Pitter
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...
Reception
Ruth Pitter
RP
received more recognition during her lifetime from the bestowers of literary awards and from fellow-writers than from the critics. In 1955 she became the first woman to receive the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry...
Education
Kathleen Raine
KR
was very impressed by the occasion on which Virginia Woolf
, accompanied by Vita Sackville-West
, gave her paper A Room of One's Own to the Girton Literary Society
before its publication. She was...