Family History, Victoria Sackville-West, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated, 1987, 0140161562, 9780140161564, 315 pages. Evelyn Jarrold is a woman of irreproachable conduct who associates with the best of English society until she meets Miles Vane-Merrick, a rising Labour politician fifteen years her junior.
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Passenger to Teheran , Vita Sackville-West, Apr 15, 2007, Literary Criticism, 160 pages. In 1926 Vita Sackville-West travelled to Iran to visit her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was serving as a diplomat in Teheran. Her route was deliberately slow-paced - she ....
The Easter party , Victoria Sackville-West, 1953, Fiction, 239 pages. .
Seducers in Ecuador , Victoria Sackville-West, 1925, , 73 pages. .
In Your Garden , Vita Sackville-West, Victoria Sackville-West, 2004, Gardening, 237 pages. Covering the period 1946-50, In Your Garden is the first volume in a series of four anthologies of V. Sackville-West's articles, which are arranged according to the month in ....
Family history sources , United States. National Archives and Records Administration. Southeast Region, 2010, United States, 8 pages. .
All passion spent , Victoria Sackville-West, 1931, Fiction, 296 pages. .
Orlando A Biography, Virginia Woolf, Jan 1, 1995, Fiction, 162 pages. Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close ....
Portrait of a Marriage Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, Nigel Nicolson, Victoria Sackville-West, Nov 1, 1998, Biography & Autobiography, 249 pages. Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story ....
The Great Gatsby , F. Scott Fitzgerald, 2009, , 200 pages. .
Challenge , Victoria Sackville-West, 1923, , 297 pages. .
Jew SГјss a historical romance, Lion Feuchtwanger, 1935, Fiction, 534 pages. .
The Spelling Bee , Catherine Nichols, Mark Twain, 2007, Juvenile Fiction, 32 pages. A brief, simplified retelling of the episode in "Tom Sawyer" in which Tom cheats during the spelling bee, but later realizes he must make things right.. The Family He Needs , Lucy Clark, Mar 1, 2002, , 185 pages. .
Grey Wethers a romantic novel, Victoria Sackville-West, 1923, , 328 pages. .
The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life, her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf, and Sissinghurst Castle Garden, which she and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, created at their estate.
Vita Sackville-West was born at Knole House near Sevenoaks Kent, the only child of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville and his wife Victoria Sackville-West, who were cousins.[1] Her mother was the natural daughter of Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville. Christened Victoria Mary Sackville-West, she was known as "Vita" throughout her life, to distinguish her from her mother.
The usual English aristocratic inheritance customs were followed by the Sackville family,[2] which prevented Vita from inheriting Knole on the death of her father. The house followed the title and was bequeathed instead by her father to his nephew Charles Sackville-West, 4th Baron Sackville. The loss of Knole would affect her for the rest of her life; of the signing in 1947 of documents relinquishing any claim on the property, part of its transition to the National Trust, she wrote that "the signing... nearly broke my heart, putting my signature to what I regarded as a betrayal of all the tradition of my ancestors and the house I loved."[citation needed]
In 1913, at age 21, Vita married the 27-year-old writer and politician Harold George Nicolson (21 November 1886 – 1 May 1968), nicknamed Hadji, the third son of British diplomat Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock (1849–1928). The couple had an open marriage. Both Sackville-West and her husband had same-sex relationships, as did some of the people in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, with many of whom they had connections.[3]
These affairs were no impediment to the closeness between Sackville-West and Nicolson, as is seen from their almost daily correspondence (published after their deaths by their son Nigel), and from an interview they gave for BBC radio after World War II. Harold Nicolson gave up his diplomatic career partly so that he could live with Sackville-West in England, uninterrupted by long solitary postings abroad.
Following the pattern of his father's career, Harold was at different times a diplomat, journalist, broadcaster, Member of Parliament, and author of biographies and novels. The couple lived for a number of years in Cihangir, Constantinople, and were present, in 1926, at the coronation of Rezĕ Shĕh, in Tehran, then Persia. They returned to England in 1914 and bought Long Barn in Kent, where they lived from 1915 to 1930. They employed the architect Edwin Lutyens to make many improvements to the house.
The couple had two children: Nigel (1917–2004), a well known editor, politician, and writer, and Benedict (1914–1978), an art historian. In the 1930s, the family acquired and moved to Sissinghurst Castle, near Cranbrook, Kent. Sissinghurst had once been owned by Vita's ancestors, which gave it a dynastic attraction to her after the loss of Knole.[1] There the couple created the famous gardens that are now run by the National Trust.
Vita's first close friend was Rosamund Grosvenor (5 September 1888 – 30 June 1944), who was four years her senior. She was the daughter of Algernon Henry Grosvenor, (1864–1907), and the granddaughter of Robert Grosvenor, 1st Baron Ebury. Vita met Rosamund at Miss Woolf's school in 1899, when Rosamund had been invited to cheer Vita up while her father was fighting in the Boer war. Rosamund and Vita later shared a governess for their morning lessons. As they grew up together, Vita fell in love with Rosamund, whom she called 'Roddie' or 'Rose' or 'the Rubens lady'. Rosamund, in turn, was besotted with Vita. "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," she admits in her journal, but she saw no real conflict: "I really was innocent."[4]
Lady Sackville, Vita's mother, invited Rosamund to visit the family at their villa in Monte Carlo; Rosamund also stayed with Vita at Knole, at Rue Lafitte, and at Sluie. During the Monte Carlo visit, Vita wrote in her diary, "I love her so much." Upon Rosamund's departure, Vita wrote, "Strange how little I minded [her leaving]; she has no personality, that's why."[4] Their secret relationship ended in 1913 when Vita married. Rosamund died in 1944 during a German V1 rocket raid.
The same-sex relationship that had the deepest and most lasting effect on Sackville-West's personal life was with the novelist Violet Trefusis, daughter of the Hon. George Keppel and his wife, Alice Keppel, a mistress of King Edward VII. They first met when Vita Sackville-West was 12 and Violet was 10, and attended school together for a number of years.
The relationship began when they were both in their teens. Both later married. Vita and Trefusis had eloped several times from 1918 on, mostly to France, Sackville-West dressing as a man when they went out, as the French writer George Sand (Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, 1804–1876), had done some 100 years earlier when residing with the Polish musician Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) and her own two children on the Spanish island of Majorca in 1838 and early 1839.
The two women seem to have made a bond to remain faithful to one another, meaning that although both were married, neither could engage in sexual relations with her own husband. Sackville-West was prompted to end the affair when she heard allegations that Trefusis had been involved sexually with her husband, indicating that she had broken their bond. Despite the rift, the two women were devoted to one another, and deeply in love, and continued to have occasional liaisons for a number of years afterwards, but never rekindled the affair.
Vita's novel Challenge also bears witness to this affair: Sackville-West and Trefusis had started writing this book as a collaborative endeavour, and the male character's name, Julian, had been Sackville-West's nickname when passing as a man. Her mother, Lady Sackville, found the portrayal obvious enough to refuse to allow publication of the novel in England; but Vita's son Nigel Nicolson (1973, p. 194) praises his mother: "She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything… How could she regret that the knowledge of it should now reach the ears of a new generation, one so infinitely more compassionate than her own?"
The affair for which Sackville-West is most remembered was with the prominent writer Virginia Woolf in the late 1920s. Woolf wrote one of her most famous novels, Orlando, described by Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson as "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature", as a result of this affair.
Unusually, the moment of the conception of Orlando was documented: Woolf writes in her diary on 5 October 1927: "And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other" (excerpt from her diary published posthumously by her husband Leonard Woolf).
The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931) 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 lifetime of convention. This novel was dramatized by the BBC in 1986 starring Dame Wendy Hiller.
She is less well known as a biographer, and the most famous of those works is her biography of Saint Joan of Arc in the work of the same name. Additionally, she composed a dual biography of Saint Teresa of Õvila and Therese of Lisieux entitled The Eagle and the Dove, a biography of the author Aphra Behn, and a biography of her own grandmother, the Spanish dancer known as Pepita., the mother of many children by British diplomat and second Lord Sackville, Lionel Sackville-West, (1829–1908), as stated extensively above, running by 2010 at some 11 editions in English. For instance, the 1985 edition by Telegraph Books, (ISBN 9780897607858). The first edition was Doubleday Publishers, 1937. There was another by Amereon, date unknown, (ISBN 9780848811501).
^ Technically the Salic rules of agnatic male primogeniture; Bell, Mathew. Inheritance: The Story of Knole and the Sackvilles, By Robert Sackville-West. 'The Independent', 16 May 2010; Hughes, Kathryn. Love among the roses – Kathryn Hughes is touched by an unsentimental memoir 'The Guardian', 27 September 2008.
The core of this novel is a love affair between Miles, a 25 year old socially conscious aristocrat, and Evelyn, a 39 year old fashionable upper middle class widow; the business based family she has married into has just joined the aristocracy by way of a peerage. These are shifting times. While the pair are passionately in love they both have powerful domineering personalities and are essentially different. They clash and merge and make each other happy and unhappy. Evelyn is jealous and demanding but controls her nature as far as she can; she is always aware of the unconventional age gap and is less confident in Miles's world. Miles has many compartmentalised interests including his love for Evelyn, his estate (a replica of Sissinghurst), politics, his interesting friends and he will publish a well received book on economics. He is set to become a successful, popular politician. He is a Renaissance man, and Vita's favourite Elizabethan type (as she saw herself). As they drive for the first time to Miles's estate they pass a terrible accident and as they turn down the lane to the estate the `Private Road: No Thoroughfare' sign brings on more portents for Evelyn and the reader. Yes, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
"She unlike him, had nothing to do with her time except to wring pleasure out of it. Moreover, she was violently and painfully in love, never having really been in love before. When she had married Tommy Jarrold she had believed herself to be in love, because it was the orthodox thing to do when one became engaged; but she now discovered the difference." She has a lovely son, based on Ben, Vita's first born son.
Because of Evelyn's sense of convention, age and her lack of confidence she requires unequivocal total love ('one never gets enough love') and cannot say yes to Miles's seemingly casual marriage proposals. Miles values his independence. The inevitable break happens; they have a cruel row. Can Evelyn rebuild her life without the man she adores? The poignant unexpected ending brought a tear in my eye.
The novel includes a sketch of the 'middle class' Jarrold family. They still hold onto Victorian and Edwardian conventions while Miles moves in more intellectual, less confined circles (including Viola, Sebastian and Leonard Anquetil from `The Edwardians'). Evelyn's son, heir to the Jarrold fortune, is influenced by Miles and even more progressive. The generational layers of social change are well captured.
I enjoyed reading `Family History' because of its glimpses of 1930s high society and the early days at Sissinghurst, and, its utilisation of biographical elements including the harmful nature of the passionate love Vita encouraged in her affairs. Important elements of the novel are drawn from the Vita and Violet experience as well as from her current passionate affair with Evelyn Irons -by now Vita had established a pattern. Victoria Glendinning's introduction calls the book a period piece. It was published in 1932 and the social background is of its time (and interesting for that) but the dynamics of the love story are easy to understand today. Recommended.
English poet and novelist, born into an old aristocratic family, proprietors of Knole House in Kent. Vita Sackville-West wrote about the Kentish countryside and she was the chief model for Orlando in Virginia Woolf's novel of that same title from 1928. Sackville-West's best known poem, THE LAND, was awarded the Hawthorne Prize in 1927. Victoria Mary Sackville-West was the only child of Lionel Edward, third Baron of Sackville, and Victoria Josepha Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, his first cousin and the illegitimate daughter of the diplomat Sir Lionel Sackville-West. She was educated privately. As a child she started to write poetry, writing her first ballads at the age of 11. "I don't remember either my father or my mother very vividly at that time, except that Dada used to take me for terribly long walks and talk to me about science, principally Darwin, and I liked him a great deal better than mother, of whose quick temper I was frightened." (from Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson, 1973) Vita's mother considered her ugly - she was bony, she had long legs, straight hair, and she wanted to be as boyish as possible.
Between 1906 and 1910 Sackville-West produced eight novels and five plays. CHATTERTON, A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS, was privately printed and appeared in 1909. In 1913 she married the diplomat and critic Harold Nicolson, with whom she lived a long time in Persia and then at the Sissinghurst Castle in Kent.
Sackville-West's father died in 1928 and his brother became the fourth Baron Sackville, inheriting Knole. Her husband decided in 1929 to resign from the foreign service and devote himself to writing. They purchased Sissinghurst Castle, a near-derelict house, and started to restore it. In the 1930s Sackville-West published The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent(1931), and Family History (1932) which were bestsellers and portrayed English upper-class manners and life. Pepita (1937) depicted the story of her grandmother, who was a Spanish dancer. Her passionate gardening was rewarded in 1955 by the Royal Horticultural Society. Sackville-West also wrote several books about gardening and kept a regular column at the Observer from 1946.
In 1946 Sackville-West was made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. She died of cancer on June 2, 1962. Harold Nicolson died six years later. Sackville-West believed in equal rights for women. She is best remembered for her novels but her most enduring work was perhaps the garden at Sissinghurst Castle, evidently the joint creation of Harold and Vita, and as Nigel Nicolson suggested the true Portrait of their marriage. Nicolson published in 1973 a book, Portrait of a Marriage, which was based on her parents' journals and notes, and described their private life and marriage. The book was made into a television mini-series in 1990, starring Cathryn Harrison, Janet McTeer and David Haigh. afraid amused asked believe better Biggleswade bored Bretton castle Charskaya Chevron House course Dan's dance dark darling dear dinner doctor door England Eton Eton College Evelyn Jarrold everything eyes father feel felt flat friends girl give glad gone Grandpapa Gregory hand handful of dust happy hate heart Hester ideas jokes knew laughed leave Leonard Lesley London looked lover Madame Louise Mason mean Miles Vane-Merrick mind morning morphia mother Mummy Munday never Newlands night nurse once Orlestone pain Papa Park Lane Paterson perhaps person pneumonia Portofino Privett quarrel realised remembered rhododendrons round Ruth Ruth's seemed smiled sorry southernwood stay suddenly suppose sure talk telephone tell thatt There's things thought told Tommy took turned Uncle Evan Uncle Geoffrey unhappy Vane Viola Anquetil William Jarrold woman women wondered worried young
The Hon Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf.