Vita Sackville-West archly prefaced her best-selling novel The Edwardians (1930) with an author’s note: “No character in this book is wholly fictitious.” Victoria Glendinning may at some point have been tempted to introduce her fine biography of Vita with the caveat, “No character in this book is wholly actual,” because this passionate woman’s engrossing life was continually out-distancing mundane probability.
Her father was the third Lord Sackville; her stunning mother, his cousin, was illegitimate, the product of a long liaison between the second Lord Sackville and a Spanish gypsy dancer known professionally as Pepita. (Lady Sackville delighted in saying that her own life had been like a novel.) Vita was raised at Knole, the magnificent English country house originally bestowed on the Sackvilles by Queen Elizabeth I; its rooms, alleged to number 365, included one with furniture of solid silver. Among her parents’ hordes of guests were members of royalty, domestic and foreign.
As a statuesquely handsome, extremely eligible young woman, she was besieged with proposals from wealthy, titled suitors but chose to wed in 1913 a relatively inconspicuous young diplomat, Harold Nicolson, by whom she would have two sons. Six years later, after her husband was forced to reveal his homosexuality to her because of a venereal infection, she embarked on a series of intense, often complicated lesbian relationships. Her marriage nevertheless survived these strains, remaining remarkably stable and emotionally satisfying for nearly a half century.
Precluded from inheriting her beloved Knole because she was female, Vita and her husband successively restored two nearby estates, Long Barn and Sissinghurst Castle, as their own homes, creating splendid gardens; the one at Sissinghurst greatly influenced English landscape design and is now part of Great Britain’s National Trust. Meanwhile, she wrote prodigiously. Her first work, a play, was privately printed when she was seventeen. By her death at seventy, she had produced more than fifty books of poetry, fiction, and biography; hundreds of articles, BBC broadcasts, and public lectures; and literally thousands of private letters. (In a 1927 diary entry, she exclaims, “God damn this energy, thank God for it.”)
Now, however, most of Vita’s published work languishes out of print and unread; she is probably best known today as the model for the title figure in her friend Virginia Woolf’s fantasy novel Orlando (1928). In 1973, Vita’s unconventional relationship with her husband was movingly detailed in her son Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage. A short study by Michael Stevens, V. Sackville-West: A Critical Biography, appeared the following year but was by Stevens’ own admission exploratory and incomplete. Thus, Glendinning’s book, undertaken at Nigel Nicolson’s invitation, represents the first full-scale life. As author of two well-received biographies of Vita’s contemporaries, the poet Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) and the novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), Glendinning is qualified for such a task; still, to impose plausible order on such a profusion of sensational material must have been challenging.
Glendinning emphasizes as an important key to Vita’s character the divided heritage exemplified in her parents. Her father—reticent, withdrawn, fond of the child he considered to be like him—represented the conservative, aristocratic English tradition of Knole and the Sackvilles. Her mother—charming, mercurial, supremely egocentric, given to theatrical gestures that later took bizarre, sometimes litigious forms (she even sued her own butler)—embodied the flamboyant strain of Spanish gypsies. Predictably, her parents proved incompatible, eventually separating. Vita’s alienated father had open affairs with other women, one of whom he installed on the grounds of Knole while Lady Sackville was still in residence. Vita’s mother retaliated through a succession of relationships with the likes of William Waldorf Astor, J. P. Morgan, and the architect Edwin Lutyens; she shored up the Sackville fortunes by inheriting nearly a half-million pounds from her admirer Sir John Murray Scott, whose will was contested in a scandalous court case. Her parents’ dissonant personalities were emblematic of the contradiction Vita continually perceived in herself between what she called her “cabbagy nature” and her “tempestuous side”—a division that ran through, and perhaps determined, much of her life.
Hence, in her own marriage Vita could be loving, loyal, and extraordinarily tolerant toward her husband, grateful for his devotion, and thoroughly convinced that she could not survive without him. At the same time, she considered marriage a claustrophobic condition demeaning to women, refused to support or even fathom Harold’s diplomatic and political ambitions, and lived apart from him for much of each year. Indeed, it was in the letters they wrote each other daily that they were closest, committing ardently to paper the affection they neither verbalized nor physically displayed in person; the correspondence, Glendinning shrewdly notes, was a “unifying process” that concurrently “legitimized their separateness.” Similarly, Vita could be an adoring, responsible mother to her sons but was absent from them for long periods (again, warm letters bridged the gap). At both Long Barn and Sissinghurst, the boys lived in a separate cottage; at Sissinghurst, though Harold and Vita had private sitting rooms, there was no area for the whole family.
Running parallel to this at least superficially conventional life of quiet companionship was Vita’s tumultuous lesbian existence: passionate attachments involving risky deceptions and frequent excursions to romantic settings such as Cornish fishing villages, Alpine ice fields, and Italian villas. Her first, longest, and most destructive affair was with her childhood friend Violet Keppel (daughter of Florence Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress), following Harold’s confession of his own proclivity. Until then, Vita claimed, she did not know homosexuality existed, though she had previously experienced a very intense female friendship without sex. Once she and Violet parted, Vita readily entered into numerous relationships, sometimes conducting several at once. Surely her glamour, charm, and physical appeal are corroborated by the number of intelligent, capable women who fell in love with her virtually at first sight. Even Virginia Woolf, who could laugh at Vita’s slow mindedness and her literary ambitions, was captivated: “all about her is virginal, savage, patrician,” she reported, often comparing her to a ship in full sail.
Projecting herself into the masculine role in such relationships (she was “Julian” or “David”), Vita could be aristocratically self-centered to the point of ruthlessness. On all but one occasion it was she who determined when the affair was over; she would involve herself deeply only on a temporary basis. She was reluctant, however, to let go even after her emotion moderated, especially because she knew that all of her lovers deluded themselves into believing they were unlike the rest. She simply changed their status to that of what Glendinning calls “emotional pensioners,” recipients of nostalgic letters and friendly visits. After all, they had risked more than Vita had, who never gave the part of herself “that belonged to Harold and home, not after Violet.”
Glendinning speculates that in Vita’s “potential for ruthlessness, criminal carelessness and self-abandon may have lain her only chance of testing what genius she had.” Certainly, she never fully tested it in her books. As Woolf told her, there was “something reserved, muted” both in herself and in her writing, and Vita understood: “Something that doesn’t vibrate, something that doesn’t come alive. . . . It is the thing which spoils me as a writer. . . . It is what spoils my human relationships too, but that I mind less.” She wrote prolifically, fluently, seemingly without great struggle, though not without hard work and considerable self-discipline. In an age of literary experiment, she clung to traditional forms of poetry and fiction; despite her determination (“I will get myself into English literature. Somehow or other.”), her popularity, and the honors she won, such as the Hawthornden Prize for her long Vergilian poem The Land (1926), she came to see her work as dated, the output of a minor talent. Harold half despairingly suggested that she try to transfer some of the eccentricity out of her life and into her writing. Apparently she could not.
Her most sustained, influential creative enterprise was in fact her gardening. During their thirty-two years together at Sissinghurst, she and Harold transformed a ruinously neglected landscape into one of the most famous gardens in Great Britain. Harold provided the large-scale plans and had his pet projects such as the lime walk, but Vita predominately supplied the color, texture, and drama as well as the energetic daily supervision. It was a work of art continually in progress, the natural rhythms of which seemed both to inspirit and soothe her, so that in later years, quiet days gardening at Sissinghst became essential to her. Increasingly conservative politically, freed by the death in 1936 of the erratic, impossibly demanding mother whom she had nevertheless worshiped, she valued her solitude; Harold perceived that she had a “love of loneliness.” Even so, she generously opened Sissinghurst’s grounds to growing troops of visitors (many of them loyal readers of her gardening column that ran weekly in the Observer for twenty-five years) and made herself freely available to answer questions. Ironically haunted, however, by her lack of formal training, she enrolled six years before her death in a correspondence course in horticulture.
Rebellious and experimental yet traditional and respectable; aristocratic yet bohemian; passionately involved with life while simultaneously detached, almost ascetically withdrawn from it—in Vita, the conflict between gypsy élan and Sackville reserve was perpetually unresolved. It is Victoria Glendinning’s achievement to have rendered Vita Sackville-West’s life of complex contradictions so sympathetically and coherently in this long, superbly documented, and continually absorbing book. Glendinning conveys well the texture of the worlds through which Vita moved. She rightfully allows her subject’s strong personality to dominate, but the figures surrounding Vita, especially her flamboyant mother, are nevertheless concretely realized. Although Glendinning explicitly eschews writing a work of literary criticism, she tactfully uses Vita’s writing to illuminate her life, stimulating readers to explore her neglected oeuvre. Most impressive of all, Glendinning resists offering the facile psychological explanations of Vita’s character that many biographers would find irresistible; she generally lets her dense evidence speak fascinatingly for itself. “I would like [Vita’s] story to be read as an adventure story,” Glendinning explains in her preface. “I think she would like that too.” Readers of this excellent biography will wholeheartedly agree.