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
'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
Education
Iris Tree
Sometime after 1904, IT
and her next elder sister, Felicity, began attending Miss Wolff
's day school, an unconventional school held at the private home of Miss Wolff at South Audley Street, London. There...
Education
Violet Trefusis
VT
(then Keppel) began attending Helen Wolff
's School for Girls in South Audley Street, London, with her sister Sonia Keppel
and her friend Vita Sackville-West
.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
85
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...
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...
Education
Nancy Cunard
After NC
's mother left her husband and moved to London, Nancy became a regular pupil at Miss Wolff
's School in South Audley Street, where she had previously attended some classes.
The surname...
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
Dedications
May Crommelin
She dedicated it to Lady Nicolson
, Who told me the greater part of Kinsah's story, and without whose kind help it would not have been written.
Lady Nicolson was later Lady Carnock, and mother-in-law...
death
Enid Bagnold
She was cremated and her ashes interred at Rottingdean. At a memorial service held in November, John Gielgud
read the lesson and Vita Sackville-West
's son Nigel Nicolson
gave the address. EB
's papers...
death
Gertrude Bell
While the public record states that her death was accidental, there was speculation that she had intended the overdose. Lionel Smith
told Vita Sackville-West
that she committed suicide. Her recent biographer, Georgina Howell
, believes...
death
Christopher St John
Vita Sackville-West
—although St John's death brought her the horrifying discovery of the love-journal recording their relationship—wrote to The Times celebrating her as a roaringly rumbustious character in the grand tradition of English eccentrics.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(29 October 1960): 8
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...
Cultural formation
Violet Trefusis
Alice Keppel
strongly disapproved of the relationship between Violet and Vita
for many reasons, including the threat posed by the growing scandal over it to Sonia Keppel
's upcoming marriage into a staunchly conservative English family.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.