Vita Sackville-West

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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.
Three-quarter-length painting of Vita Sackville-West by William Strang, 1918. She is shown from the side but turning her face to the viewer, seated, against a plain wall. She is wearing a yellow skirt, a flowing green jacket, and most strikingly a broad-brimmed red hat over short dark hair. One hand holds a book. Kelvingrove Art Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
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...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Wellesley
In Rome during the First World War, DW became a friend of two scholars, Geoffrey Scott , and Gerald Tyrwhitt, later Lord Berners .
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...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Wellesley
This friendship led to others for DW , for on Yeats's later visits she invited people to meet him, including Lord David Cecil , Sir William Rothenstein , Rex Whistler , H. A. L. Fisher
Occupation Dorothy Wellesley
At Penns during the Second World WarDW wrote of her fear—An explosion. I thought of my son. (Oh, don't think!) I thought of Hilda (she is safe)—but also of solitude, of her...
Friends, Associates Dorothy Wellesley
Among these readers, Ruth Pitter became a valued friend of DW ,
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie.
175
as she did too of Vita Sackville-West . Another friend of Wellesley's later years was Sir Ifor Evans .
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.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2424 (1874): 489

Timeline

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Texts

Sackville-West, Vita. The Garden. Michael Joseph, 1946.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Heir. Heinemann, 1922.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Land. Heinemann, 1926.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Land. Heinemann, 1948.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Editors DeSalvo, Louise and Mitchell A. Leaska, Hutchinson, 1984.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Editors DeSalvo, Louise and Mitchell A. Leaska, William Morrow, 1985.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Marie Curie Hospital. Tay Press, 1946.
Jullian, Philippe et al. The Other Woman. Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
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, 1929, pp. 111-32.
Sackville-West, Vita. The Women’s Land Army. Michael Joseph, 1944.
Sackville-West, Vita. Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour. Doubleday, Doran, 1932.
Sackville-West, Vita. Twelve Days. Hogarth Press.
Jullian, Philippe et al. Violet Trefusis: Life and Letters. Hamish Hamilton, 1976.
Sackville-West, Vita, and Harold Nicolson. Vita and Harold. Editor Nicolson, Nigel, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992.