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.
Responses to the novel were mixed. The feminist journal Time and Tide judged it a really important book, a mark in feminist history as well as a fine literary feat. Here at last is a...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Margaret Jourdain
(herself the author of many books in print) told the antiquarian Joan Evans
, Ivy has written a book and I expect it's very bad. We have decided I shan't read it and...
Literary responses
Radclyffe Hall
Though also supportive of its right to a place in the public realm, Vita Sackville-West
judged the some of the novel's elements negatively: around 1941, she described The Well as a loathsome example
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
277
and...
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
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Leonard Woolf's decision proved a mistake. The book was not only praised to the skies by young, advanced reviewers, but also made the secondary Book of the Month for May by the newly-formed Book Society
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
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...
Literary responses
Emily Jane Pfeiffer
In an essay on poetry of the 1870s, Vita Sackville-West
linked Peace to the Odalisque to the beginning of all this stirring about women's rights, and women's equality,
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, pp. 111-32.
116
as an exception to the general...
Literary responses
Freya Stark
John Jock Murray
and Sir Sydney Cockerell
initially advised Stark against writing this book, urging her to remain in the travel genre rather than attempt philosophical writing. However, they apologized for their opinions when the...
Literary responses
Ivy Compton-Burnett
This novel made the best-seller list the month after publication; but at the end of the year it received the Bookseller's Glass Slipper award for books whose sales had not reflected their quality. Reviewers...
Literary responses
Violet Trefusis
Her novels were lightly received and sometimes disparaged by readers. Alice Keppel
referred to her daughter's writing with inverted commas: (writing).
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo.
261
Late in VT
's career, Vita Sackville-Westaccused her of scribbling...
Literary responses
Freya Stark
The text was published to rave reviews in the Sunday Times, the Observer, and other papers. For her piece in The Spectator, Vita Sackville-West
wrote an open letter to the author rather...
Literary responses
Rosamond Lehmann
This book received very positive reviews from (among others) Elizabeth Janeway
in the New York Times, Elizabeth Bowen
in New Republic, Virginia Peterson
in the New York Herald Tribune, Simon Raven in...
Literary responses
Gertrude Bell
The author herself insisted that modesty apart her pen-pictures were astonishingly feeble. . . . I wish them not to be read.
Howell, Georgina. Daughter of the Desert: the Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell. Macmillan.
59
While Janet Hogarth
said they had [c]harm but not actual achievement,
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 174. Gale Research.
174: 6
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...
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...