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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
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 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 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
qtd. in
Souhami, Diana. Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter. Flamingo, 1997.
277
and...
Literary responses Sylvia Townsend Warner
STW 's friend David Garnett seriously disapproved of the latter part of the book and the heroine's characterisation. However, Vita Sackville-West particularly liked the part of the story that Garnett criticised.
Harman, Claire. Sylvia Townsend Warner: A Biography. Chatto and Windus, 1989.
86
Literary responses Viola Tree
After the publication of VT 's book, Vita Sackville-West wrote to Woolf, how could you publish Viola? . . . I don't like you to sell your soul.
qtd. in
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
3: 268n1
Woolf replied, Why read memoirs...
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 Virginia Woolf
The original audience included Q. D. Roth (later Leavis) and Kathleen Raine . Women writers who later counted it an important influence on them included such disparate figures as Muriel Box and Rumer Godden ...
Literary responses Enid Bagnold
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
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 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 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...
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 Gertrude Bell
The author herself insisted that modesty apart her pen-pictures were astonishingly feeble. . . . I wish them not to be read.
qtd. in
Howell, Georgina. Daughter of the Desert: the Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell. Macmillan, 2006.
59
While Janet Hogarth said they had [c]harm but not actual achievement,
qtd. in
Brothers, Barbara, and Julia Gergits, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 174. Gale Research, 1997.
174: 6
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, 1997.
261
Late in VT 's career, Vita Sackville-Westaccused her of scribbling...
Literary responses E. Arnot Robertson
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, 1982, p. vii - xix.
ix
Vita Sackville West , however...

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

No bibliographical results available.