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.
VT
's acquaintance Nancy Mitford
suggested that VT
should call this book Here Lies Madame Trefusis.
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo, 1997.
300
In a letter of July 1941, Vita Sackville-West
told Trefusis that she ought to dedicate this book...
Textual Production
Rumer Godden
RG
was critical of the distaste with which English writers Osbert
and Edith Sitwell
or Vita Sackville-West
had regarded their American lecture audiences. About her coast-to-coast tour with her husband she later wrote, I took...
Textual Production
Pamela Frankau
She says she began work on another play, called Can't Catch Me, when she looked at the beautiful face of Tyrone Power
and a thought crossed her mind: a man who escapes.
Frankau, Pamela. Pen to Paper. Heinemann, 1961.
171
Many...
Textual Production
Penelope Mortimer
Besides reviewing television, PM
wrote both plays and screenplays for the small screen. She adapted for television both Colette
's Ripening Seed (a novel, translated into English by Roger Senhouse
, about a teenage boy's...
Textual Production
Virginia Woolf
It its first six months it sold 8,104 copies in England (twice as many as To the Lighthouse) and 13,031 from Harcourt Brace
in the USA.
MW
published Joan of Arc
: The Image of Female Heroism, her study of the legendary Maid of Orleans who became a fearless soldier, a martyr, and eventually a saint.
Warner's biography of Joan...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Maureen Duffy
The play takes a biographical approach, as Woolf
, from the vantage point of imminent death, looks back over her past life. The only two other characters are Vita Sackville-West
and Sigmund Freud
; Duffy...
Travel
Virginia Woolf
VW
left London for a one-week tour of Burgundy with Vita Sackville-West
. During this trip they also spent time with painters Ethel Sands
and Nan Hudson
at their home at Auppegard near Dieppe.
Bishop, Edward. A Virginia Woolf Chronology. Macmillan, 1989.
115-16
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
516-18
Travel
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
travelled with Vita Sackville-West
to Egypt and India.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie, 1952.
179-90
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
153-5, 159-60
Travel
Dorothy Wellesley
DW
left England to travel via Russia to Persia (now Iran) with Vita Sackville-West
(who was on her second visit).
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
3: 319n1
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie, 1952.
190-215
Violence
Virginia Woolf
The Woolfs suffered in most of the ways that many civilians suffered from the early phases of the war. Their house at Rodmell lay (like Vita Sackville-West
's) beneath the flight-paths of German and Allied...
Violence
Violet Trefusis
Distraught, Vita
followed the honeymooning couple to the ParisRitz
and had a troubled reunion with Violet. Vita later wrote, I took her there, I treated her savagely, I made love to her, I didn't...
Violence
Violet Trefusis
Though she never explicitly mentions her love affair with Vita
, VT
blames herself for the marital troubles which she and Denys
suffered. I hasten to add that the fault was entirely mine. I was...