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.
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...
Dedications
Dorothy Wellesley
This was her second volume in the Hogarth Living Poets series: number 16, and she inscribed it to Vita Sackville-West
.
Wellesley, Dorothy, and W. B. Yeats. Selections from the Poems of Dorothy Wellesley. Macmillan.
57
Travel
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
travelled with Vita Sackville-West
to Egypt and India.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
179-90
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
153-5, 159-60
Reception
Dorothy Wellesley
W. B. Yeats
, then aged seventy, discovered DW
's writing in 1935 when he was ill in bed and was at work on The Oxford Book of Modern Verse. He was feeling disillusioned...
Travel
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
left England to travel via Russia to Persia (now Iran) with Vita Sackville-West
(who was on her second visit).
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
3: 319n1
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
190-215
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
The book did not impress Vita Sackville-West
, who called it just too awful. . . . A mixture of whining and boasting.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
371
DW
's Times obituary represented it as composed after a curious...
Residence
Dorothy Wellesley
Having sold Sherfield Court, DW
went house-hunting with the help of Vita Sackville-West
and bought Penns in the Rocks at Withyham in Sussex.
The name is sometimes given as Penns on the Rocks.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
3: 487
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
158-9
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...
Education
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
was educated at home. Vita Sackville-West
thought this unfortunate, as she could have benefited from the discipline of school and the intellectual stimulus of a university.
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.
Dorothy, however, later recalled how her Luxembourgeois...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
's husband was a secretary in the Diplomatic Service; he told her that some day he would like to be an architect.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
119
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 49
Vita Sackville-West
remarked that the couple do squabble...
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
133
In the years after the war she formed her important...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
's great literary friendship with Vita Sackville-West
incorporated an erotic affair, carefully concealed by both. Wellesley delighted in sharing travel and other activities with Sackville-West, and minded deeply when she was replaced in Vita's...
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Wellesley
Woolf was jealous of DW
's past affair with Vita Sackville-West
, and saw their continuing intimacy as an irritant in her own relationship with Vita.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press.
4: 36
Family and Intimate relationships
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
seems to have first met Hilda Matheson
just before the latter took over the role of central player in Vita Sackville-West
's love-life. But Matheson (director of talks for the BBC
, soon to...