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.
J. B. Priestley
, focussing on the noble-savage aspects of this story, complained that its characters do not really come from Borneo, they come from Rousseau
and cloud-cuckoo land.
Devlin, Polly, and E. Arnot Robertson. “Introduction”. Four Frightened People, Virago, p. vii - xix.
ix
Vita Sackville West
, however...
Friends, Associates
Naomi Royde-Smith
Another close friend of NRS
, J. D. Beresford
, a highly-regarded novelist, was also an important friend to Dorothy Richardson
, and a mentor and support to Macaulay as well as Royde-Smith, and such...
Family and Intimate relationships
Lady Margaret Sackville
Vita Sackville-West
was LMS
's second cousin: Queen Elizabeth I
had presented their common ancestor, Thomas Sackville
(a minor writer), with Knole, near Sevenoaks, the estate that Vita was barred from inheriting because of...
Textual Production
Dora Sigerson
DS
's last publication, eight years after her death, was Ernest Benn
's printing of twenty-one of her poems as a pamphlet in its Augustan Books of Poetry series.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Other poets in this series included...
Occupation
Edith Sitwell
It was well attended by women writers. Ivy Compton-Burnett
and Bryher
were there, and H. D.
and Vita Sackville-West
were among the other readers on the evening's programme. Dorothy Wellesley
was to have read also...
Literary responses
Edith Sitwell
Sitwell later wrote, the attitude of certain of the audience was so threatening that I was warned to stay on the platform, hidden by the curtain, until they got tired of waiting for me and...
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer
, with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Textual Features
Ali Smith
The volume features 101 different women writers, each publication emblematic of the year for which its author is featured. Its contents range from the title-inspiring Miles Franklin
's My Brilliant Career (1901) through Edith Wharton
Author summary
Ethel Smyth
All of ES
's writings are richly autobiographical. They provide an acute and open account of her experience as a woman entering a strictly delimited male field (in her case that of composing large-scale musical...
Collis, Louise. Impetuous Heart: The Story of Ethel Smyth. William Kimber.
57, 65, 174, 200
St John, Christopher. Ethel Smyth. Longmans, Green.
117-18
Intertextuality and Influence
Muriel Spark
Norman Page called attention to the parallel with William Golding
's Pincher Martin, another novel about psychic survival for some time after physical death, published seventeen years earlier.
Page, Norman. Muriel Spark. Macmillan.
86-7
An even more intriguing parallel...
Family and Intimate relationships
Christopher St John
CSJ
, smitten by Vita Sackville-West
, spent one passionate night—never repeated—with the object of her desire.
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin.
253
Textual Production
Christopher St John
CSJ
, Smyth's literary executor, published her Ethel Smyth
. A Biography, with additional chapters by Vita Sackville-West
and Kathleen Dale
.
British Book News. British Council.
(1959): 345
Auerbach, Nina. Ellen Terry: Player in Her Time. W.W. Norton.
In 1933 Vita Sackville-West
formally introduced CSJ
and Edith Craig
to Virginia Woolf
.Woolf was not as fascinated by St John as she was by Craig and Terry, and saw her as a burden on...
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.