Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH (née Sackville-West; 9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.

Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.

She wrote a column in The Observer from 1946 to 1961 and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.

Biography

Antecedents

thumb|right|[[Victoria Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville|Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville. Vita's mother, circa 1885]]

Victoria Mary Sackville-West — called Vita, to distinguish her from her mother — was born on 9 March 1892 at Knole, the Kent home of Sackville-West's aristocratic ancestors. She was the only child of cousins Victoria Sackville-West and Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville. Vita's mother, the illegitimate daughter of Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville and the Spanish dancer Pepita (Josefa de Oliva, née Durán y Ortega), had been raised in a Parisian convent.

Although the marriage of Sackville-West's parents was initially happy, the couple drifted apart shortly after her birth. Lionel took a mistress, an opera singer who came to live with them at Knole.

Knole had been given to Thomas Sackville by Elizabeth I, in the sixteenth century. The Sackville-West family followed the English aristocracy's inheritance customs, preventing Vita from inheriting Knole upon the death of her father, which was a source of life-long bitterness for her. The house followed the title, and her father bequeathed it instead to his brother Charles, who became the 4th Baron.

Early life

Sackville-West was initially taught at home by governesses and later attended Helen Woolff's school for girls, an exclusive day school in Mayfair, where she met first loves Violet Keppel and Rosamund Grosvenor. She did not befriend local children and found it hard to make friends at school. Her biographers characterise her childhood as one filled by loneliness and isolation. She wrote prolifically at Knole, penning eight full-length (unpublished) novels between 1906 and 1910, ballads and many plays, some in French. Her lack of formal education led to later shyness with her peers, such as those in the Bloomsbury Group. She felt herself to be sluggish of mind and she was never at the intellectual heart of her social group.

upright|right|thumb|Vita in childhood

Sackville-West's apparently Roma lineage introduced a passion for "gypsy" ways, a culture she perceived to be hot-blooded, heart-led, dark, and romantic. It informed the stormy nature of many of her later love affairs and was a strong theme in her writing. Sackville-West visited Roma camps and felt herself to be at one with them.

Vita's mother had a wide array of famous lovers, including financier J. P. Morgan and Sir John Murray Scott (from 1897 until his death in 1912). Scott, secretary to the couple who inherited and developed the Wallace Collection, was a devoted companion and Lady Sackville and he were rarely apart during their years together. During her childhood, Vita spent a great deal of time in Scott's apartments in Paris, perfecting her already fluent French.

upright|thumb|Vita Sackville-West in 1913

Sackville-West fell in love with Rosamund Grosvenor (1888–1944), who was four years her senior. In her journal, Vita wrote "Oh, I dare say I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find it out," but she saw no real conflict. Lady Sackville, Vita's mother, invited Rosamund to visit the family at their villa in Monte Carlo (1910). Rosamund also stayed with Vita at Knole, at Murray Scott's pied-à-terre on the Rue Laffitte in Paris, and at Sluie, Scott's shooting lodge in the Scottish Highlands, near Banchory. Their secret relationship ended in 1913 when Vita married.

Marriage to Harold Nicolson

Sackville-West was courted for 18 months by young diplomat Harold Nicolson, whom she found to be a secretive character. She writes that the wooing was entirely chaste and throughout they did not so much as kiss. In 1913, at age 21, Vita married him in the private chapel at Knole. Vita's parents were opposed to the marriage on the grounds that "penniless" Nicolson had an annual income of only £250. He was the third secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople at the time. Another of Sackville-West's suitors, Lord Granby, had an annual income of £100,000, owned vast acres of land and was heir to an old title, Duke of Rutland. Sackville-West saw herself as psychologically divided into two: one side of her personality was more feminine, soft, submissive, and attracted to men while the other side was more masculine, hard, aggressive, and attracted to women. and bought Long Barn in Kent as a country house (1915–1930). They employed the architect Edwin Lutyens to make improvements to the house. The British declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, following Ottoman naval attacks on Russia, precluded any return to Constantinople. Sackville-West called the marriage her own greatest failure. She writes: "I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday... that wild irresponsible day". The couple were involved in planning the coronation of Rezā Khan and got to know the six-year old Crown Prince Mohammad Reza well.

Relationship with Virginia Woolf

upright|right|thumb|Portrait photograph of [[Virginia Woolf, 1927]]

Sackville-West's relationship with the prominent writer Virginia Woolf began in 1925 and ended in 1935, reaching its height between 1925 and 1928. Though Sackville-West came from an aristocratic family that was far richer than Woolf's own, the women bonded over their confined childhoods and emotionally absent parents.

However, the two women reconnected in 1937 and remained close until Woolf's death in 1941.

Other lovers

One of Sackville-West's male suitors, Henry Lascelles, would later marry the Princess Royal and become the 6th Earl of Harewood.

In 1927, Sackville-West had an affair with Mary Garman, a member of the Bloomsbury Group; between 1929 and 1931, she maintained a relationship with Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC Talks Department. In 1931, Sackville-West was in a ménage à trois with journalist Evelyn Irons and Irons's lover, Olive Rinder. Irons had interviewed Sackville-West after her novel The Edwardians had become a best-seller.

Sissinghurst

thumb|upright|[[Sissinghurst Castle Garden, Kent]]

In 1930 the family acquired and moved to Sissinghurst Castle, near Cranbrook, Kent. It had once been owned by Vita's ancestors. This gave it a dynastic attraction as she was excluded from inheriting Knole and a title. Sissinghurst was an Elizabethan ruin and the creation of the gardens would be a joint labour of love that would last many decades, first entailing years of clearing debris from the land. Nicolson provided the architectural structure, with strong classical lines, which would frame his wife's innovative informal planting schemes. She created a new and experimental system of enclosures or rooms, such as the White Garden, Rose Garden, Orchard, Cottage Garden and Nuttery. She also innovated single colour-themed gardens and design principles orientating the visitors' experience to discovery and exploration. Her first garden at Long Barn (Kent, 1915–1930) was experimental, a place of learning by trial and error and she carried over her ideas and projects to Sissinghurst, using her hard won experience. She continued the very popular column until a year before her death, and writing helped to make Sissinghurst one of the most famous and visited gardens in England. In 1948 she became a founder member of the National Trust's garden committee. The grounds are now run by the National Trust.

Writing

Portrait of a Marriage

In the early 1920s Sackville-West wrote a memoir of her relationships. In it she sought to explain both why she had chosen to stay with Nicolson and why she had fallen in love with Violet Keppel. The work, titled Portrait of a Marriage, was not published until 1973.

Challenge

Sackville-West's novel Challenge (1923) also bears witness to her affair with Keppel: Sackville-West and Keppel had started writing this book as a collaborative endeavour. It was published in America but banned in the UK until 1974.

The male character's name, Julian, had been Sackville-West's nickname when passing as a man. Challenge (first entitled Rebellion, then Enchantment, then Vanity and at some point Foam), is a roman à clef with the character of Julian being a male version of Sackville-West and Eve, the woman he desires so passionately is Keppel.

The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent are perhaps her best-known novels today. In the latter, the elderly Lady Slane courageously embraces a long-suppressed sense of freedom and whimsy after a life-time of following convention. This novel was dramatised by the BBC in 1986 starring Dame Wendy Hiller. All Passion Spent appears to reflect Woolf's influence. The character of Lady Slane begins to truly live only after the death of her husband, a former prime minister. She befriends the servants of her estate, discovering the lives of people she had previously ignored.

A recently rediscovered work from 1922 "A Note of Explanation" was written specifically to be a part of the miniature collection of books within the doll's House, and tells the story of a sprite that inhabits the doll's house and re-tells several fairy tales from the point of view of the sprite, indicating how they had influenced the story.

The book was adapted for the stage by Emily Ingram under the title "A Sprite in the Doll's House" in 2019 and was performed in Edinburgh, at the Palace of Holyrood House as part of their Christmas festivities.

The poetry remains the least known of Sackville-West's work. It encompassed epics and translations of volumes such as Rilke's Duino Elegies. Her epic poems The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) reflect an enduring passion for the earth and family tradition.The Land may have been written in response to the central work of Modernist poetry The Waste Land (also published by Hogarth Press). She dedicated her poem to her lover Dorothy Wellesley. A recording of Sackville-West reading it was released by the British Columbia label. Her poem won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927. She won it again in 1933 with her Collected Poems, becoming the only writer to do so twice. Her love of the classical traditions in literature put her out of favour with modernist critics and by the 1940s, she was often dismissed as a dated writer, much to her chagrin.

Death and legacy

thumb|St Michael and All Angels Church, [[Withyham, where Sackville-West's ashes are buried]]

Vita Sackville-West died at Sissinghurst in June 1962, aged 70, from abdominal cancer. She was cremated and ashes buried in the family crypt within the church at Withyham, East Sussex.

Sissinghurst Castle is owned by the National Trust. Her son Nigel Nicolson lived there after her death, and following his death in 2004 his own son Adam Nicolson, Baron Carnock, came to live there with his family. With his wife, the horticulturalist Sarah Raven, they committed to restoring the mixed working farm and to growing food on the property for residents and visitors, a function that had withered under the aegis of the Trust.

The film Vita and Virginia, with Gemma Arterton as Vita and Elizabeth Debicki as Virginia, had its world premiere at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It is directed by Chanya Button and based on a play by Eileen Atkins, created from the love letters between Sackville-West and Woolf. The play was first performed in London in October 1993 and off Broadway in November 1994.

Works

Fiction

Poetry

In her poetry, she often engaged themes of natural life and romantic love. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her life, listed here:

  • Timgad: [a poem] (1900)
  • Constantinople: eight poems (1915)
  • Poems of West & East (1917) (also credited as Mrs. Harold Nicolson)
  • The Land (1926)
  • King's daughter (1929)
  • Invitation to cast out care (1931)
  • Sissinghurst (1931)
  • Collected poems (1933)
  • Solitude: a poem (1938)
  • The Garden (1946)
  • Lost poem (or A Madder Caress) (2013)

Novels

  • Heritage (1919)
  • The dragon in shallow waters (1920)
  • Challenge (1920)
  • Grey Wethers: a romantic novel (1923)
  • Seducers in Ecuador (Hogarth Press, 1924)
  • The Edwardians (1930)
  • All Passion Spent (1931)
  • Family History (1932)
  • The Dark Island (1934)
  • Grand Canyon: A Novel (1942)
  • Devil at Westease: the story as related by Roger Liddiard (1947)
  • The Easter party (1953)
  • No Signposts in the Sea (1961)

Children's books

  • A Note of Explanation (written for Queen Mary's Dolls' House in 1924, published posthumously in 2017)

Short stories and novellas

  • Orchard and vineyard (1892)
  • The heir: a love story (1922)
  • To be let or sold (1930)
  • Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour, and other stories (1932)
  • The death of Noble Godavary and Gottfried Künstler (1932)
  • Another world than this ..: an anthology (1945)
  • Nursery rhymes (1947)

Plays

  • Chatterton: a drama in three acts (1909)

Non-fiction

Letters

  • Dearest Andrew: letters from V. Sackville-West to Andrew Reiber, 1951-1962 (1979)
  • The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (edited by Louise A. DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, Arrow, 1984)
  • Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (1992)
  • Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West 1910–1921 (edited by Mitchell A. Leaska and John Phillips, 1991)
  • Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West (compiled by her son Nigel Nicolson from her journals and letters, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973)
  • Love Letters: Vita and Virginia by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (introduction by Alison Bechdel Vintage Classics, 2021)

Biographies

  • Aphra Behn, the incomparable Astrea (Gerald Howe, 1927)
  • Andrew Marvell (1929)
  • Saint Joan of Arc (Doubleday 1936, reprinted M. Joseph 1969)
  • Pepita (Doubleday, 1937, reprinted Hogarth Press 1970)
  • The eagle and the dove, a Study in Contrasts: St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thérèse of Lisieux (M. Joseph, 1943)
  • Daughter of France: the life of Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de Montpensier, 1627-1693, La Grande Mademoiselle (1959)

Guides

  • Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) - a history of her ancestral home
  • Passenger to Teheran (Hogarth Press 1926, reprinted Tauris Parke Paperbacks 2007, )
  • Twelve Days: an account of a journey across the Bakhtiari Mountains of South-western Persia (first published UK 1927; Doubleday Doran 1928; M. Haag 1987, reprinted Tauris Parke Paperbacks 2009 as Twelve Days in Persia)
  • How does your garden grow? (1935) (Beverley Nichols, Compton Mackenzie, Marion Dudley Cran, Vita Sackville-West)
  • Some flowers (1937)
  • Country notes (1939)
  • Country Notes in Wartime (Hogarth Press, 1940)
  • English country houses (William Collins, 1941, illustrated)
  • The Women's Land Army (M. Joseph / Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, 1944)
  • Exhibition Catalogue: Elizabethan portraits (1947)
  • Knole, Kent (1948)
  • In Your Garden (1951)
  • In your garden again (1953)
  • Walter de la Mare and The traveller (1953)
  • More for your garden (1955)
  • Even more for your garden (1958)
  • Joy of Gardening: a selection for Americans (1958)
  • Berkeley Castle (1960)
  • Faces: profiles of dogs (Harvill Press, 1961, photographs by Laelia Goehr)
  • Garden Book (1975)
  • Hidcote Manor Garden, Gloucestershire (1976)
  • Une Anglaise en Orient (1993)

Translations

  • Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino, translated from the German of Rainer Maria Rilke by V. and Edward Sackville-West (1931)

In 1931, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's Hogarth Press published in London a small run of a beautiful edition of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies. This marked the English debut of Rilke's masterpiece, which would eventually be rendered in English over 20 times, influencing countless poets, musicians and artists across the English-speaking world.

Influences

  • Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1928)
  • Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West by Matthew Dennison (2014)

See also

  • List of Bloomsbury Group people

Notes

References

Sources

  • Carney, Michael: Stoker: The Life of Hilda Matheson, privately published, Llangynog, 1999.
  • Ghani, Sirus: Iran and the Rise of the Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power, I. B.Tauris, 2000.
  • Glendinning, Victoria: Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983.
  • Lord, Tony: Gardening at Sissinghurst, Frances Lincoln and National Trust, 2000.
  • Massingham, Betty: A Century of Gardeners, Faber & Faber, 1982.
  • Nicolson, Nigel: "Introduction", from A Passenger to Tehran, I.B Tauris, 2007.
  • Sackville-West, Vita: Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings, Preface by Nigel Nicolson, St. Martin's Press, 2015.
  • Souhami, Diana: Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter: A Biography, St. Martin's Press, 2014.

Further reading

  • Cross, Robert and Ann Ravenscroft-Hulme: Vita Sackville-West: A Bibliography, Oak Knoll Press, 1999.
  • Eberle, Iwona: Eve with a Spade: Women, Gardens, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, Grin, 2011.
  • Wolf, Peggy: Sternenlieder und Grabgesänge. Vita Sackville-West: Eine kommentierte Bibliographie der deutschsprachigen Veröffentlichungen von ihr und über sie 1930–2005. Daphne-Verlag, 2006.
  • Stevens, Michael : V. Sackville-West: A Critical Biography, Scribners, 1974.
  • Troutmann, Joanne: The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973.
  • Sackville-West family tree at National Portrait Gallery, London
  • Vita Sackville-West Encyclopedia.com
  • Vita Sackville-West Encyclopedia Britannica

;Letters

  • Vita Sackville-West's letters, diaries, notebooks, and correspondence Sissinghurst Castle, Kent
  • Vita Sackville-West Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
  • Vita Sackville-West's early diaries Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana
  • correspondence 1947-1961, from Vita Sackville-West to Grace Mountcastle Colby College

;Books

  • Fuller list of Vita Sackville-West's publications
  • Vita Sackville-West E. J. Pratt Library Victoria University, Toronto
  • Vita Sackville-West Modernist Archives Publishing Project