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Vita Sackville-West

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All Passion Spent

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All Passion Spent first appeared in 1931 under the imprint of the Hogarth Press, the independent publishing house run by Leonard Woolf and his wife Virginia. Vita Sackville-West had been Virginia Woolf’s lover and they remained good friends, yet they were rivals in literary popularity. Readers today might be surprised to know that Vita Sackville-West’s work around this time sold more copies than that of Virginia Woolf. Sackville-West had best-sellers with The Edwardians (1930) All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932) all of which which portrayed English upper-class manners and life in a critical and often satirical manner.

All Passion Spent

All Passion Spent – critical commentary

Biographical interpretation

Two years before the publication of this novel Vita Sackville-West had suffered the emotional shock of losing her beloved home at Knole when her younger brother inherited the title of Baron Sackville-West on the death of their father. She was passionately attached to the ancestral home, which was known as a calendar home – with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 12 entrances, and 7 courtyards. It was a disappointment, but the traditional laws of primogeniture meant that inheritance passed automatically to the eldest male heir – both property and title.

As a form of compensation for this disappointment, Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson bought the run down castle at Sissinghurst (Kent) and began its restoration into what is now a world-renowned country house and gardens. This experience might account for the issues of inheritance, property, and the attachment to particular houses that forms the substance of All Passion Spent.

Sackville-West is exploring the issues of spiritual empathy that Virginia Woolf had outlined in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Woolf’s principal characters Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith never meet each other, but their thoughts and attitudes are linked through a series of literary symbols and congruence of attitude, such that when Septimus-Smith commits suicide at the end of the novel, Clarissa Dalloway understands completely why he has done so.

Deborah, Lady Slane, and Mr FitzGeorge have a similar relationship – except the understanding is on his part. He had been struck by her (even ‘fallen in love with her’) as a younger woman when they met in India – he a rich young traveller, and she the wife of the Viceroy. Forty years later he meets her and in an amazing frank and revealing conversation explains how he understands the sacrifices she has made in her life – abandoning her aspirations to be a painter in order to become the wife of a politician.

FitzGeorge is a rich and spoilt bachelor who collects art objects, and Lady Slane is the wife of a very successful politician and diplomat, yet this scene is the artistic highpoint of the novel. Sackville-West does not supply any evidence as to how or why FitzGeorge should have this special insight into Lady Slane’s personal ‘tragedy’ (after all, he is a crusty old private bachelor) but if we as readers are prepared to suspend our disbelief, this is a plea for intuitive understanding and sympathetic recognition of shared values that transcends gender, class, and age group.

This notion is reinforced by the concluding scene of the novel when Lady Slane’s great grand-daughter reveals that she rejects the family’s greedy and acquisitive values and wishes to be a musician. Lady Slane sees her own early life reflected in the girl’s aspirations and feels reassured that this alternative, independent system of values is still alive – even though she dies at this point in the narrative.

Feminism

The feminist notions which pervade the novel should be easily apparent to most readers. Lady Slane has the glimmer of aspiration to an independent existence which comes to her as a young woman. She has the idea of becoming a painter. So far as we know, she does not make a single brush-stroke across a canvas – so there is no evidence that she is in possession of any creative potential: the whole idea goes unexamined. But this is not the point. Any such aspirations are completely ignored by the weight of family and social conventions which force her into a marriage.

Sackville-West does not take a simplistic attitude to this situation. Deborah Lee (to give Lady Slane her maiden name) does not love the man she marries, but she has a reasonably happy married life, has a large family, and is successful as wife to the Viceroy to India, but her socially unacknowledged personal ambition is rather like the grit in the oyster which produces the pearl that is her vision of an alternative life.

Satire

Sackville-West offers a vision of upper-class life that spares no criticism or satirical edge. The novel begins with a six page eulogy to the Earl of Slane who has just died, detailing his public service to parliamentary life in way that makes it quite clear he is a an unthinking nonentity who has done nothing in his life except what the tradition of his class laid before him.

Lady Slane has done the same thing during her lifetime, but the point of the novel is that she had the spark of something more creative within her. She has suppressed this impulse whilst raising her family, but she makes a bold move to express it at the end of her life when she has the opportunity, and she is happy to see the same seeds of creativity in her great-grand-daughter just before she dies.

This criticism of class attitudes extends to the whole Holland family. Lord Slane didn’t even like his children and his wife only felt sympathetic to two of them – the eccentric bachelor Fay and the awkward visionary Edith. But the rest of their children, all conventionally married, are revealed as grasping and hypocritical toadies who pretend to be concerned for their ageing mother but actually do not want the responsibility of looking after her for entirely selfish reasons.

All Passion Spent – study resources

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – Paperback – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon UK
All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – (Kindle) – Amazon US

All Passion Spent All Passion Spent – DVD – Amazon UK
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All Passion Spent – chapter summaries

Part I

On the death of Henry Holland, the Earl of Slane, the members of his large family are faced with the problem of what to do with their elderly mother, whom they regard as rather simple-minded. They discuss the issue of inheritance in a greedy and competitive manner, all the time protesting their lack of self-interest. They pretend to welcome the responsibility of looking after their mother, which they all secretly wish to evade.

The elderly bachelor son Kay Holland has dinner with an old friend FitzGeorge, who knew Lady Slane in India. There are preparations for a funeral in Westminster Abbey, during which time the mother assumes an unusual degree of authority. After the funeral she suddenly announces that she wants to live in a little house in Hampstead she saw thirty years before – and she doesn’t want any grand-children or her great-grand-children visiting. The family are all shocked – except Edith, who is delighted.

The mother gives away all her jewellery to her eldest son and his wife. She then travels by tube to Hampstead thinking about her late husband and how he didn’t really like his children, except for Edith. She feels a quasi-mystic union with the empty and dilapidated house. The eccentric owner Mr Bucktrout has similar ideas to those of Lady Slane on enjoying old age and avoiding young people. He approves of her as a tenant and is almost reluctant to set the rent.

The family are horrified by the casual nature of this tenancy. Lady Slane and her maid Genoux get on well with the craftsman Mr Gersheron, and Mr Bucktrout begins to present Lady Slane with flowers. They discuss his theories about the imminent demise of the world.

She realises that she has lived at one remove from understanding the world, but now feels more relaxed about it. She rejects the idea of strife and competition, and wishes only to enjoy the support and comforting presence she feels with Mr Bucktrout and Mr Gershon.

Part II

Lady Slane luxuriates in the comfort and solitude of the house and its garden. She looks back on her life and examines the forces that have shaped it. As a girl of seventeen she had a romantic ambition to be a painter, but under family and social pressures she became engaged to Henry Holland. The preparations for their marriage were like an arcane ritual which left her completely puzzled.

At the time, she was not in love with Henry, and she was very conscious that he would continue to enjoy all the freedoms of masculine life, whilst she would gain nothing as a woman except the responsibility of being eternally on hand to look after him. Nevertheless, she felt that she could not escape the weight of expectations placed upon her.

Henry became a faithful and patronising husband, and she became a devoted wife, even though she sacrificed all her ambition to fulfil her role as a wife and mother. She now wonders about the foundation of her own individuality, as a separate entity to her husband, and she questions the relative values of the life he has offered her and the potential life that he has taken away from her. Apart from her favourites Kay and Edith she feels that all her other children belong to Henry.

Part III

Lady Slane lives in seclusion in the Hampstead house with her maid Genoux. Her relatives call infrequently and great-grandchildren are more or less forbidden. She receives a visit from Kay’s friend Mr FitzGeorge who flatters her and brags about his collection of precious objects. He appreciates her almost as a work of art in her own right. He recalls their meeting in India and confesses that he fell in love with her, then moves on to criticise her husband. He reveals to her the truth about the sacrifice she has made in marrying. She admits that he is right, and they agree to remain friends.

Kay Holland notices that his friend FitzGeorge isn’t at the club so often, and is glad that he has stopped asking for an introduction to Lady Slane. But then FitzGeorge suddenly dies, leaving his valuable collection of art objects to Lady Slane. The family members immediately assemble with offers to ‘help’ her, their covetousness and self-interest flimsily masked by a completely insincere pretence of concern. Lady Slane consults Mr Brooktrout and devises a plan to donate the treasures to the nation’s museums.

The family are horrified. Lady Slane remains at a distance from them and keeps track of their doings via the services of a press-cuttings agency. Finally, she is visited by her great grand-daughter who bears her own name and wants to be a musician, rejecting the family’s conventional values. The two of them share an appreciation of independently-generated values and an understanding of each other which spans the generations. Following this meeting of minds Lady Slane dies at the age of eighty-eight.

All Passion Spent – characters
Henry Holland the Earl of Slane, who has just died
Deborah, Lady Slane his widow
Kay Holland elderly son of the family, a bachelor
Mr FitzGeorge his friend, a bachelor art collector
William Holland another son, frugal and stingy
Lavinia William’s equally frugal wife
Genoux Lady Slane’s French maid
Mr Bucktrout eccentric owner of the Hampstead house
Mr Gorshon an eccentric craftsman and builder
Deborah Lee Lady Slane’s great-grand-daughter

© Roy Johnson 2016

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Portrait of a Marriage

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conjugal life a la Bloomsbury

Nigel Nicolson is the son of writer Vita Sackville-West and diplomat-politician Harold Nicolson. When his parents died he found a locked leather Gladstone bag in his mother’s study, cut it open, and discovered a diary containing an autobiographical account of her affair with Violet Trefusis. Portrait of a Marriage is made up of these diary entries, interspersed with his own explanations of what went on in those parts of the story his mother doesn’t cover.

Portrait of a Marriage It’s not really a portrait of a marriage at all until the final chapter. Harold Nicolson remains a vaporous non-presence throughout, and there is almost nothing about the relationship between them except for her protestations at ‘depending’ on him. The central issue is her passionate three-year fling that has her dressing up as a man, leaving her husband and children behind to ‘elope’ to France, and to live in Monte Carlo, gambling at the tables with money they didn’t have, whilst Trefusis was debating the wisdom of marrying her fiancé Denys, whom she didn’t love or desire.

It’s an amazing story, and most instructive in class terms. Husbands colluding with their wives’ lovers for the sake of money to keep estates solvent, whilst paternity suits raged to the tune of £40,000 (this in the 1900s).

I was also very struck by how much of Sackville-West’s literary style is similar to Virginia Woolf’s. She is a great fan of the stream of immediate memory, and a narrative couched in extended metaphors and rhapsodic interludes. There are lots of schooners breasting silvery waves with the wind full in their sails, and that sort of thing.

There’s nothing here that will be remotely shocking in the sexual sense to modern readers. ‘I had her’ is about as explicit as it gets. But the behaviour – duplicitous, self-seeking, naive, and hypocritical – is breathtaking. Vita Sackville West finally broke off the relationship with Trefusis because she thought she might have had some sexual connection with Denys Trefusis – the man she had recently married – whilst West had two children with Harold Nicolson. Actually, Violet Trefusis hadn’t had any such connection, having made it a condition of her marriage contract.

There’s a lot of utterly snobbish ancestor-worship to get through and Nicolson’s chapters are written in a creakingly old-fashioned manner: ‘She permitted him liberties but not licence’. In fact Nicolson fils seems as wrapped up in snobbery as his mother:

her real friends were souls, but real souls who had some breeding and a gun, who could make a fourth at bridge, and who knew the difference between claret and burgundy

I found it quite hard to keep my rage down when reading of the almost unbelievable concern for money, status, and class. The events are only just over a hundred years ago, and this account of them was written in the 1970s, but it was like reading about social dinosaurs.

The latter part of the book outlines West’s affairs with Geoffrey Scott and Virginia Woolf – both of which she recounted in detail to her husband. Their son makes the case that the bond between them was strong enough to outlast these affairs – which it did, though on the basis that they had no sexual relationship with each other.

Of course you don’t need a brass plaque on your door to realise why a child would want to portray his bisexual and adulterous parents in the best possible light, but I must say all this is sometimes difficult to accept calmly.

As time went on the affairs petered out and the Nicolsons settled down to a quieter life, the major part of which they spent separately – he in London, she in their house at Sissinghurst – which might account for the longevity of the union.

These were people who seemed to have separated out sex from marriage, who obviously cared for each other, and yet spent most of their time apart, writing endless letters saying how much they missed each other. They also made sure their children were kept out of the way at all times. Maybe there’s a lesson in there somewhere?

However, there is one very good thing to say for this memoir-cum-history. Anyone who wants a vivid, living example of the social values and the bohemian behaviour of the Bloomsbury Group need look no further. It’s all here.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage, London: Orion Books, 2004, pp.216, ISBN: 1857990609

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The Edwardians

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Vita Sackville-West’s best-selling novel

The Edwardians first appeared in 1930, and was a deliberate attempt on Vita Sackville-West’s part to write a best-seller. The amazing thing is that like so many of the other things she did in her rich and unusual life, she succeeded. It sold 20,000 copies in its first two months, outstripping the success of her friend, lover, and fellow author Virginia Woolf. It’s a story of the aristocratic milieu from which she herself sprang, and is a rich blend of sentimental nostalgia for a world which had almost disappeared by the time she came to write it, and a critical analysis of some of the reasons why that disappearance occurred.

The Edwardians The principal characters are from a single grand family: Lucy a widowed baroness, Sebastian her young Duke-to-be son, his sister Viola, and the glamorous Lady Roehampton who becomes his mistress. But the main character is the Elizabethan house where they live – served by its small army of servants. What makes her account of the period artistically successful is that she divides the tensions in her own opinions between the various characters. All the positive portrayal of the Edwardian haute monde is given full force, but it is offset by the sceptical views of outsiders such as the explorer Leonard Anquetil who sees through the shallowness and pointlessness of the characters’ lives.

The writing is elegant, well-paced, witty, and vocabulary-rich without being intimidating – all qualities which West’s original publisher Leonard Woolf correctly predicted would make the book a best-seller. She’s rather a playful narrator, speaking to the reader, or pretending that there are things which must be left unsaid, out of deference to propriety:

“It makes one’s blood run cold, doesn’t it, to think of the hands one’s letters might fall into? I suppose it’s a letter to …” and here she uttered a name so august that in deference to the respect and loyalty of the printer it must remain unrevealed.

West keeps the narrative very firmly in her own hands as an omniscient narrator. And at times she is given to brief apercus which are like a watered-down version of Proust. The explorer Anquetil reflects on his brief invitation to a weekend party at the Great House:

For his own part, he felt convinced that he would never see Chevron again; the incident would be isolated in his life; he was too active for England ever to hold him long, and already he had other plans in preparation, but the short incursion into this strangely segregated world had surprisingly enriched him, as one is enriched by any experience one had believed to be entirely outside the scope of one’s sympathies, and which unexpectedly acquires a life of its own in a new reach of one’s comprehension.

The only plot as such is the succession of affairs embarked on by Duke-to-be Sebastian as he vainly attempts to break free from the weight of tradition in which the House, the Estate, and family expectations gradually engulf him. A much larger issue is the conduct of the entire class itself, and how it tries to preserve itself through property, marriage, and inheritance. This is satirically presented, and is counterbalanced by a surprisingly sympathetic view of the new and rising forces of the Edwardian era which, together with the imminent debacle of 1914-18 would virtually wipe it off the map altogether.

The novel offers a wonderfully rich lesson in the social history of a bygone world: not only the fine details of social ranking below and above stairs, but such arcana as the distinctions between a carriage, a victoria, and a brougham as modes of transport, plus the social niceties of giving offence whilst appearing to be polite by proffering two or three fingers instead of the full five when shaking hands.

Vita Sackville-West was herself an aristocratic snob of the highest order, but this novel is proof positive that gifted authors can rise above the limitations of their own opinions to create a picture of the world which is rich, complex, and even capable of expressing values which they themselves do not hold. Highly recommended.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians, London: Virago, 2003, pp.349, ISBN 0860683591

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The Heir

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Vita Sackville-West’s 1922 novella

Vita Sackville-West knew a great deal about ownership and inheritance. She was raised at Knole, a country estate in Sevenoaks, Kent which dates back to the sixteenth century. She felt very passionately about its traditions and importance, and was deeply grieved when on her father’s death it passed to her younger brother. She sought emotional compensation by buying a ruined castle at Sissinghurst and created one of the most celebrated English country gardens with her husband Harold Nicolson. Both properties are now run by the National Trust.

The HeirShe also wrote a celebrated poem, The Land, about her feelings for the traditions of pastoral life and culture (it won the Hawthorden Prize in 1926) and her passion for Knole was also transformed by her then lover, Virginia Woolf into the main setting for the fantasy romance, Orlando. This recent publication The Heir is a relatively early and little-known work which deals with all these issues of continuity, tradition, history, and ownership which are almost the predominant leitmotif of her whole life.

Mr Chase, an insurance salesman from Wolverhampton, inherits a house and estate deep in rural Kent/Sussex. Everyone from the probate solicitors downwards encourages him in a plan to sell up and retire on the proceeds. But the house and its history begin to grow on him.

It’s a long short story – or as some might claim a novella – and if there’s a weakness it’s that the pace of Chase’s conversion to enthusiastic traditionalist isn’t properly dramatised. He arrives at the property he has never before seen, and from then on all matters rustic are cast in the most glowingly positive light.

West writes elegantly on the house and its surrounding lands, putting the wide range of her architectural and horticultural vocabulary to full effect. But the sale must go on – driven by the greedy, materialist ambition of the chief solicitor. Chase suddenly realises that he has fallen in love with the property, and feels on the day of the auction that it is ‘like seeing one’s mistress in a slave market’.

It would be invidious to reveal how the drama unfolds, but it is resolved by Chase also realising that a life materially reduced is better than one without any passion. You might say that this is a form of wish-fulfilment on West’s part, but it is a work written with a lot of feeling, and one which it is good to see back in print again.

© Roy Johnson 2008

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Vita Sackville-West, The Heir, London: Hesperus Press, 2008, pp.92, ISBN 1843914484

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The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

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love, literature, and friendship Bloomsbury-style

The title of this book is letters to Virginia Woolf – but this is so misleading, that I have changed it for the title of this review. This is a fully reciprocated exchange between these two writers – both of letters and affection. And as in many love affairs the power passes from one to the other and back again. Their relationship began in 1923 around the time that Hogarth Press was publishing Vita Sackville-West’s improbably titled novel, Seducers in Ecuador.

Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia WoolfTheir early letters are friendly and flattering, with just a touch of flirtation which gives a hint of Things to Come. But once the deed is done, the flattery is replaced by practical arrangements for meeting up, plus a fear that their secret might have been uncovered by Clive Bell. The amazing thing is that for all the sexual pluralism and bisexuality of the Bloomsbury group, they went to a lot of trouble to preserve the semblance of respectability.

The second phase of the affaire is largely Vita’s travelogue as she journeys to join her husband Harold Nicolson in Tehran where he had been posted to the British Legation by the Foreign Office.

When she gets back to the UK, it’s a good thing we have editorial commentary, because you would not guess from the content of the letters that she had transferred her romantic affection to Dorothy Wellesley, just as later, whilst protesting in every letter how much she missed and was very much in love with Virginia, she was also in love with Mary, wife of South-African poet Roy Campbell – an affair which in true Bloomsbury style, she eventually tells Virginia all about.

There’s no detail of what or how much went on in physical terms between them, but to make up for this there is plenty of intelligent comment on the profession of literature passing between these two women who were after all both commercially successful authors. Virginia asks Vita about the difference between poetry and prose:

I don’t believe there is any, with all due respect to Coleridge … All too often the distinction leads people to think they may mumble inanities which would make them blush if written in good common English, but which they think fit to print if spilt up into lines.

In addition, we get all sorts of quaint period details: Hillaire Belloc buying 2,000 bottles of wine at twopence halfpenny a bottle [for younger readers, that’s one penny in today’s money]; six-day cycle racing in Berlin; Vita cutting down an oak tree for fuel during the General Strike; buying an island in the South Seas for five pounds; and Virginia engaged in the joys of early motoring:

Off for our first drive in the Singer: the bloody thing wouldn’t start. The accelerator died like a duck – starter jammed … At last we had to bicycle in and fetch a man from Lewes. He said it was the magnetos – would you have known that?…

Vita’s letters from Tehran are rich and entertaining, and she is much given to Proustian ‘reflections’:

I have come to the conclusion that solitude is the last refuge of civilised people. It is much more civilised than social intercourse, really, although at first sight the reverse might appear to be the case. Social relations are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together for purposes of defence; a gathering of bushmen or pygmies…

In the middle of all this, both women were writing and publishing at a prodigious rate: Vita’s long award-winning poem The Land and her two travel books, Passenger to Tehran and Twelve Days: Virginia’s Mrs Dalloway, The Common Reader, and To the Lighthouse.

The publication of Orlando made them both famous (“The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you”). Yet despite this, you can sense Virginia’s gradual withdrawal, hurt by Vita’s repeated ‘infidelities’ with other women. In the end, the older, less sexually experienced, and more talented woman retreated into her safer world of the intellect.

They continued to meet and correspond through the 1930s, but the sparkle had gone out of things. Vita moved on to relationships with BBC radio producer Hilda Matheson and others, and Virginia became the love object of pipe-smoking lesbian composer Ethel Smyth.

Despite Vita’s snobbery, her emotional cruelty and hauteur (“the BBC – which I look on as my pocket borough”) in the end I warmed to her sheer exuberance, her energy and inventiveness, her intelligence and creative impulse. This is a wonderfully stimulating record of exchanges between oustanding personalities which has quite rightly become a classic of its kind.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Louise de Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp.473, ISBN 1853815055

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Vita and Harold

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The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Harold Nicolson was a diplomat, a writer, and a politician, but he is best known for being married to Vita Sackville-West. They were both fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group. She too was a writer – indeed a best-selling author in the 1930s – but is best known as the woman who fell in love with and ran away with Virginia Woolf. Collectively, she and her husband are also best known for their rather unusual marriage and its arrangements which permitted them both to have lovers of the same sex whilst swearing their undying loyalty to each other. All this is recorded by their son in the equally famous account Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold is a selection from their personal correspondence.

Vita & HaroldThey wrote to each other voluminously (10,500 letters) throughout their long relationship – mainly because so much of it was spent apart. He worked in Persia whilst she stayed at home. Later, he had his rooms in Albany where he lived all week: she stayed in Sissinghurst writing and tending their gardens. The children were kept out of the way, and they met at weekends. In the meantime homosexual affairs flourished and they wrote to say how much they were missing each other.

The early letters are very playful and, it has to be said, full of the protestations of a deep friendship based on shared interests and understanding on which they later claimed the success of their marriage was built.

She is very understanding when he contracts a venereal infection from another male guest at a weekend party he attended with her as his new wife. He is more concerned but ultimately forgiving when she leaves him and their two children to ‘elope’ with Violet Keppel, who had just married Denys Trefusis.

She even writes to him from the south of France whilst he is attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 – complaining that the exchange rate had dropped before she could convert her pounds sterling. He was negotiating the terms of the Armistice, whilst she was getting ready to gamble away her money in Monte Carlo.

It’s an interesting lesson in how letters must be put into a historical and cultural context in order to be properly understood. Vita writes a letter declaring undying love for her husband – but you would never guess it was written on the very day that she went off for the last time with Violet Trefusis.

Although Vita was the more successful author, his letters are more entertaining – at moments given to (unintentional?) humour:

[On horticulture] Shrubbery is a great problem if one is to avoid the suburban…[On his younger son] I said that about masturbation he must put it off as long as he possibly could – and that then he must only do it on Saturdays…[On education] I said that co-education was calculated to make boys homosexual for life, whereas Eton was only calculated to make them homosexual until 23 or 24.

Vita on the other hand is often more philosophically reflective, even if her observations are laced with a breathtaking notions of superiority:

The whole system of marriage is wrong. It ought, at least, to be optional and no stigma attached if you prefer a less claustrophobic form of contact. For it is claustrophobic. It is only very, very intelligent people like us who are able to rise superior; and I have a suspicion, my darling, that even our intelligence…wouldn’t have sufficed if our temperamental weaknesses didn’t happen to dovetail as well as they do…In fact our common determination for personal liberty: to have it ourselves, and to allow it to each other.

Serene detachment and au-dessus de la mêlée – yet this is the woman who travelled all the way to Paris to seduce Violet Trefusis whilst she was on her honeymoon, and forebad her to have any sexual relationship with her new husband Denys.

It’s amazing how many important political events Harold was connected with. He was the only person to be present at the settlement of both world wars. And he knew just about everyone who was anyone. In the course of his busy life he hobnobs with James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Charles de Gaulle.

No doubt there are today people with unconventional marriages, bisexual relations, connections in high places, and lots of money – but this one offers a glimpse of a world which has gone by. And I somehow doubt that people in future will be reading the emails and text messages which have replaced the written letter as a means of communication.

© Roy Johnson 2001

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Nigel Nicolson (ed), Vita & Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910-1962, London: Phoenix, 1993, pp.452, ISBN: 1857990617

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Vita Sackville-West biography

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best-selling novelist, lesbian, and horticulturalist

Vita Sackville-West biographyVita (Victoria Mary) Sackville-West (1892-1962) was a prolific poet and novelist – though she is probably best known for her writing on gardens and her affair with Virginia Woolf. She was born into an aristocratic family in Knole, Kent. Her grandmother was the famous Pepita, a Spanish dancer of humble descent who had formed an illicit union with Lionel Sackville-West, the 2nd Lord Sackville. She was educated privately and became a striking if slightly eccentric figure, over six feet tall. As a child she started to write poetry, writing her first ballads at the age of 11. Her first published work, the verse drama Chatterton, was printed privately in 1909 when she was seventeen, and besides further volumes of poetry she wrote thirteen full-length novels (including a detective story) as well as books on biography, and history.

In 1913 she married the diplomat and critic Harold Nicolson, with whom she lived briefly in Persia and then at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. They had two children, who became the art critic Benedict Nicolson and the publisher Nigel Nicolson. At first she played her role as a dutiful wife, but then her husband admitted that he had a male lover. The marriage survived nevertheless.

She herself caused something of a scandal by having a very public affair with Violet Keppel, the daughter of Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress. Their affair continued even after Violet married and became Violet Trefusis in 1919. It reached a climax when the two women ‘eloped’ to Paris. Their husbands Denys Trefusis and Harold Nicolson chartered an aeroplane and travelled to Paris together to persuade their wives to return home.

Vita fictionalised the episode in her novel Challenge, with Julian representing Vita Sackville-West. The book was thought at the time to be so sensational and provocative that it was suppressed in Britain by both Vita’s and Violet’s parents, who feared an explosive scandal. It was, however, accepted in America, and published there in 1923.

That same year the art critic Clive Bell introduced Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, and the two became lovers, travelling to France and Italy on holiday together the following year. Much of this relationship is recorded in the voluminous exchange of letters between these two formidable women. Woolf used Vita as the model for the central figure in her novel Orlando, and indeed early editions of the book carried pictures of Vita in costumes appropriate to the story.

Vita also had affairs with Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC Talks Department, and Mary Campbell, married to the poet Roy Campbell. Vita’s father died in 1928 and his brother became the fourth Baron Sackville-West, inheriting Knole.

This was a terrible though inevitable blow to Vita. She was passionately attached to the family seat and the long tradition that it represented, but she knew that as a female offspring she could not inherit. Interestingly, in a letter to her husband she described her attachment to the building in terms of a lesbianism which directly recalls her behaviour towards Violet Trefusis:

My voluntary exile from Knole is very curious. I think about it a lot. I feel exactly as though I had had for years a liaison with a beautiful woman, who never, from force of circumstances, belonged to me wholly; but who had for me a sort of half-maternal tenderness and understanding, in which I could be entirely happy. Now I feel as though we had been parted because (again through force of circumstances and owing to no choice of her own) she had been compelled to marry someone else and had momentarily fallen completely beneath his jurisdiction, not happy in it, but acquiescent. I look at her from far off; and if I were wilder and more ruthless towards myself I should burst in one evening and surprise her in the midst of her new domesticity. But life has taught me not to do these things.

In 1929 her husband decided to resign from the foreign service and devote himself to writing and politics. They purchased Sissinghurst Castle, a near-derelict house, and started to restore it. The garden was designed from scratch and copiously stocked with plants by Vita and Harold themselves. Sissinghurst is now a tourist attraction, having been transferred to the National Trust.

In the 1930s she published The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932) which portrayed English upper-class manners and life. All these books were published by the Hogarth Press (which was run by Leonard Woolf) and all of them became bestsellers. It might seem slightly surprising to us in the twenty-first century to realise that her books were much more popular than Virginia Woolf’s during the latter’s lifetime.

She recorded her own feelings about the relationship between person and place in The Land (1926) – a pastoral poem of 2,500 lines which was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and brought her the literary prestige for which she had long yearned.

This success inspired her to write a companion piece called The Garden. This was not completed and published until after the war, in 1946. She thought the poem ‘not a patch on The Land‘, but many people now see it as a finer work altogether. It won the Heinemann prize, and she spent the whole £100 prize money on azaleas for the garden.

Vita Sackville-WestAfter the war she became something of a recluse, devoting herself to gardening and writing. Her classic English Country Houses records her passionate interest the history of the English country house from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, and of the people who built and lived in them from common squires to kings and queens. Much of this was fuelled by her passionate attachment to Knole, which she had not inherited.

Her interest in gardening was rewarded in 1955 by the Royal Horticultural Society. She also wrote a regular gardening column at the Observer from 1946. That year she was also made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. In the latter years of her life she lived rather reclusively, and devoted herself largely to her gardens and home. She died of cancer on June 2, 1962. Harold Nicolson died six years later.

Vita’s son Benedict eventually found out about his mother’s (and his father’s) dual sexual nature when he was informed of it bluntly at the age of eighteen by his grandmother. Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973) gives the full story of this period of the Nicolsons’ lives, taken from an autobiographical manuscript found in a locked briefcase after Vita’s death (which he cut open with a knife).

Vita Sackville-West biography

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014

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Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

by

best-selling author, horticulturalist, and lesbian

Vita Sackville-West is best known these days as the woman who had an affair with Virginia Woolf, and maybe also as the woman who ‘eloped’ with Violet Trefusis. She’s also famous for being one half of a doubly bisexual relationship with her husband Harold Nicolson – recorded by their son in Portrait of a Marriage. What’s not so well known is the fact that she was also a best-selling author, and that in the post-1940 era she made herself a doyenne of writing on the English garden.

Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-WestThe first part of Victoria Glendenning’s account of Vita’s life is dominated by her equally unconventional parents, both of whom maintained barely-concealed love affairs. Sackville-West pére moved his lover and her own husband into the family home at Knowle. Mrs Sackville-West seemed to have kept her 25 stone admirer Sir John Scott more at arm’s length, but sufficiently close that she inherited from him a large capital sum, houses, and a Paris flat full of antique furniture.

Vita’s youth was a mixture of foreign travel (and languages) romantic crushes on the Renaissance, and life at the top of the social ladder. Many readers will be surprised by one thing for sure – her enormous application and productivity where writing was concerned. Youthful novels poured from her, plus poems and plays, some written in languages other than English.

Her Sapphism began early, with both Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Keppel, though she finally did the expected thing and married Harold Nicolson. They quickly produced two children, who were housed in a separate building at their first home in Long Barn.

When Harold Nicolson announced that he had veneral disease, she switched her attentions back to Violet Keppel. Vita dressed in men’s clothing as ‘Julian’ and they booked into hotels together as man and wife. Wot larks!

But when Violet married Denys Trefusis, things started to go wrong. For a start, Vita was jealous, and forbad Violet to have sex with her new husband. She even intercepted Violet on her honeymoon, took her to a hotel, and had sex with her to make the point. The two women eventually eloped to France and were only brought back home when their husbands flew out in a small plane to stop them, and the affair then gradually fizzled out.

Only to be replaced by one with the architect Geoffrey Scott. She shared these problems with her mother, who was meanwhile having an affair with another archtiect, Edwin Lutyens. There were also trips to Persia to visit husband Harold who was posted there – at the same time as he was also visited by his lover Raymond Mortimer.

Her well-known love affair with Virginia Woolf appears to be a sincere enthusiasm on both their parts, but when Virginia shied away from making their relationship a full-blown adventure (a la Violet Trefusis) Vita turned her attentions to Mary Hutchinson, the wife of South African poet Roy Campbell. Meanwhile, she won the Hawthornden prize for her long poem The Land.

She followed that up with best-selling novels The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, bought a near-ruined castle in Kent, and set up her husband with his own flat in London.

There were many other lovers, but then gradually, following the death of her mother in 1936, she started to become something of a recluse. She poured her creative energy into the development of Sissinghurst and its now-famous gardens.

She and Harold continued to live separately, take holidays separately, and wrote to each other every day saying how much they missed each other. Sissinghurst survived the war, and she continued writing in a number of genres, but gradually, as she got older, she focussed all her attention on horticulture and became quite well known as the gardening correspondent of The Observer.

However, it would be a mistake to imagine that her physically demanding nature was curbed in any way. As Gelendenning observes, a propos one of her later passions:

Vita was never without love or the physical expression of love. Her great adventure was never over.

In all this tale, you need to be able to stomarch enormous amounts of upper-class snobbery, vanity, and pure greed. In her own family, there were two major law suits involving contested wills and claims to inheritance. And you also need to be reasonably tolerant to the biographer.

Because despite its having the appearance of a scholarly piece of work, Gelendenning’s method is quite amateurish. Passages from other texts are quoted for their shock value to pad out the drama almost like a stream of consciousness, without giving any indication of their sources. She doesn’t stoop to anything as demanding as page references, and she mixes scenes from West’s fiction with historical fact as if they both had the same value and status.

Despite these technical shortcomings however, this is something of a page-turner. In addition to sometimes reading like an Evelyn Waugh novel, the quasi-aristocratic-cum-bohemian lifestyle is so astonishing that it’s bound to be of interest to us lesser mortals. As Glendenning says of Vita’s own mother: “physical fidelity was not greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes”.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Victoria Glendenning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985, pp.430, ISBN 014007161X

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