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.
Thomas McCarthy
wrote in the Cork Literary Review that this volume consolidates what is already an achieved and unique presence in Irish poetry. Her mind is astonishing—within her world Kafka
dines comfortably with Vita Sackville-West
.
qtd. in
The Gallery Press. http://www.gallerypress.com/home.html.
Literary responses
Charlotte Mew
May Sinclair
thought Madeleine magnificent, having depths & depths of passion & of sheer beauty.
qtd. in
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
191
She also enjoyed the high Victorian melodrama of Mew's reading aloud.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
192
Despite her efforts to bring The Farmer's...
Literary responses
Dorothy Wellesley
The book did not impress Vita Sackville-West
, who called it just too awful. . . . A mixture of whining and boasting.
qtd. in
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
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
qtd. in
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, 1990.
and passionate precision.
qtd. in
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...
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
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, 1929, pp. 111-32.
116
as an exception to the general...
Material Conditions of Writing
Violet Trefusis
VT
often wrote privately about her intimate experiences and perceptions. When, during the summer of 1920, in the midst of the controversy surrounding her relationship with Vita Sackville-West
, she was sent to Scotland with...
Material Conditions of Writing
Christopher St John
In the 1930s when CSJ
was in love with Vita Sackville-West
, she wrote a love journal about their relationship as well. After her death, Vi Pym
found this text among other diaries while sorting...
Occupation
Viola Meynell
Her first broadcast was, appropriately, on her mother, Alice Meynell
. The BBC director praised her for being the best first-time presenter he had ever seen. She followed up with programmes on Francis Thompson
,...
Occupation
Dorothy Wellesley
At Penns during the Second World WarDW
wrote of her fear—An explosion. I thought of my son. (Oh, don't think!) I thought of Hilda
(she is safe)—but also of solitude, of her...
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...
Occupation
Virginia Woolf
Once the press was repaired they printed their handbill. Their first book (Two Stories, containing Virginia's The Mark on the Wall and Leonard's Three Jews) had to be set up and printed...
Occupation
Virginia Woolf
The Press, which began as therapy and for the purpose of publishing the works of its owners, grew into a major engine of modern culture and thought.
Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. Chatto and Windus, 1996.
371-3
Its political interests were served by enlightened...
Occupation
Virginia Woolf
In October 1928 VW
addressed in turn the students of the two Cambridge women's colleges: first Newnham
, then Girton
. She developed these lectures on women and writing into A Room of One's Own...
Performance of text
Dorothy Wellesley
She dedicated this poem to the memory of her father
, and headed its first section with a quotation from the book of Genesis (And the Earth was without form and void; and darkness...