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.
When the novel was published under Vita
's name in America in 1924 (it remained suppressed in Britain until 1973), it featured a dedication written in Spanish Romany, the adopted language of central characters Julian...
Textual Production
Violet Trefusis
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.
v
Literary responses
Violet Trefusis
Her novels were lightly received and sometimes disparaged by readers. Alice Keppel
referred to her daughter's writing with inverted commas: (writing).
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
261
Late in VT
's career, Vita Sackville-Westaccused her of scribbling...
Author summary
Violet Trefusis
Though VT
is best known to literary history as a lover of English writer and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West
, she wrote and published in a range of genres throughout her life, which spanned much of...
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel details the literary and romantic triangles among writer Anne Lindell (a sketch to some extent inspired by VT
herself), the former lover of aristocrat John Shorne (Sackville-West
), who is having an...
Cultural formation
Violet Trefusis
VT
had minor erotic relationships with men, but her intimate experiences were dominated by lesbian affairs with author Vita Sackville-West
and other women. Though she did not formally indentify with any specific category or definition...
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel's action is set in Oxford.
Trefusis, Violet, and Victoria Glendinning. Broderie Anglaise. Translator Bray, Barbara, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
12, 22
There, Alexa meets Anne and quarrels with John over the truth of John and Anne's love affair and failed elopement. Alexa and John are reconciled...
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Trefusis
This engagement, like most in VT
's life, was short-lived: she ended it before the close of the year. (For his part, Gerald Wellesley proposed to Dorothy Ashton in 1914. Their marriage lasted until 1922...
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...
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...
Textual Production
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...
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
Reception
Augusta Webster
Although some readers disagreed with AW
's decision not to capitalize the first word of each line (a move that Vita Sackville-West
later recognised as a significant departure from established poetic practice, and that AW
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.