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.
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
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Rebecca West
Violet was recovering from her affair with Vita Sackville-West
, which had almost destroyed both their marriages.
Rollyson, Carl. Rebecca West: A Saga of the Century. Hodder and Stoughton.
56-7
Friends, Associates
Antonia White
In Chelsea AW
formed a friendship with the painter Eliot Seabrooke
, a large and centred personality
Dunn, Jane. Antonia White: A Life. Jonathan Cape.
72
who supplied an oasis of sanity in her life and helped her to sort out her opinions...
Friends, Associates
Amabel Williams-Ellis
Her political activities kept AWE
at the centre of London's socially-conscious literary circles. Guests at The Well of Loneliness tea-party included Virginia Woolf
, Rose Macaulay
, Vita Sackville-West
, G. B. Shaw
, and...
Violence
Virginia Woolf
The Woolfs suffered in most of the ways that many civilians suffered from the early phases of the war. Their house at Rodmell lay (like Vita Sackville-West
's) beneath the flight-paths of German and Allied...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
It its first six months it sold 8,104 copies in England (twice as many as To the Lighthouse) and 13,031 from Harcourt Brace
in the USA.
Though the story is sprinkled throughout with cleverly tailored allusions to the specifics of Vita Sackville-West
's life (such as the lawsuit about the inheritance of Knole), Woolf does not lose sight of the...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
VW
, dining at Clive Bell
's, met Vita Sackville-West
(and her husband Harold Nicolson
) for the first time.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan.
73
Reception
Virginia Woolf
Orlando set a new level in VW
's public reputation. The usual polarization of reviews was represented by J. C. Squire
in The Observer calling it a very pleasant trifle that would entertain the drawing-rooms...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
VW
visited Knole House and Long Barn with Vita Sackville-West
for the first time; they lunched at Knole with Vita's father, Lord Sackville
.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan.