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.
Having sold Sherfield Court, DW
went house-hunting with the help of Vita Sackville-West
and bought Penns in the Rocks at Withyham in Sussex.
The name is sometimes given as Penns on the Rocks.
Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Editors Nicolson, Nigel and Joanne Trautmann, Hogarth Press, 1975–1980, 6 vols.
3: 487
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Wellesley, Dorothy. Far Have I Travelled. James Barrie, 1952.
158-9
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel was written in English and is set in Spain. VT
's biographer Diana Souhami suggests that VT wrote herself into this piece as Cécile, an innocent young wife, Vita Sackville-West
as both...
Textual Features
Dorothy Wellesley
The contents are arranged in thirteen sections, from Romance and Poems on Love to Life and Death, War, and Night and Sleep. They come from twenty-seven poets, of whom only five are...
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
When the novel was published under Vita
's name in America in 1924 (it remained suppressed in Britain until 1973), it featured a dedication written in Spanish Romany, the adopted language of central characters Julian...
Textual Features
Phyllis Bottome
In March 1928, Vita Sackville-West
and Woolf exchanged letters about a story by PB
in which Woolf
appears as the character Avery Fleming. Sackville-West, who met Bottome in Germany, noted that she wrote the story...
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel details the literary and romantic triangles among writer Anne Lindell (a sketch to some extent inspired by VT
herself), the former lover of aristocrat John Shorne (Sackville-West
), who is having an...
Textual Features
Violet Trefusis
The novel's action is set in Oxford.
Trefusis, Violet, and Victoria Glendinning. Broderie Anglaise. Translator Bray, Barbara, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.
12, 22
There, Alexa meets Anne and quarrels with John over the truth of John and Anne's love affair and failed elopement. Alexa and John are reconciled...
She relates how in reading for the anthology she made discoveries and underwent conversions—one result of which had to be the jettisoning of some early choices whose phantoms later, for her, haunted the volume...
Textual Features
Edna O'Brien
There are three characters in this text: Woolf
herself, appearing both in her youth and in maturity; The Man (who represents now her father Leslie Stephen
and now her husband Leonard Woolf
); and Woolf's...
Textual Features
Virginia Woolf
Though the story is sprinkled throughout with cleverly tailored allusions to the specifics of Vita Sackville-West
's life (such as the lawsuit about the inheritance of Knole), Woolf does not lose sight of the...
Textual Features
Ali Smith
The volume features 101 different women writers, each publication emblematic of the year for which its author is featured. Its contents range from the title-inspiring Miles Franklin
's My Brilliant Career (1901) through Edith Wharton
Textual Features
E. M. Hull
After beginning her trip smoothly, Diana is surprised by a Sheik, Ahmed Ben Hassan, who kidnaps and rapes her. But EMH
provides a troubling confluence of passion and male aggression, carefully blurring the line between...
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer
, with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...