The centuries unknown;
I dream; I do not weep.
VSW, ‘Sissinghurst’ from Collected Poems Vol. 1 (The Hogarth Press, 1933)
‘The trouble is that the best has always been published, and in this case the archive has been ransacked more than once … all biographers want unpublished material – what the French call ‘la joie de l’inédit’.’ These words, written to me by Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, reinforced what I already suspected, but made the task at hand seem more daunting. It is true, certainly, that the life and work of Vita Sackville-West have been thoroughly and expertly explored in Victoria Glendinning’s outstanding biography Vita (1983). The relationship between Vita and her husband, Harold Nicolson, has been documented by the publication of their letters, and more intimately still, in Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage (1973), a book that also offers frank insights into Vita’s relationships with other women, including Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, Mary Campbell, Hilda Matheson and Evelyn Irons. The letters of Virginia to Vita, edited by Mitchell Leaska (1984), reveal yet further the intimacy between these two remarkable women, and when in 1993 Suzanne Raitt published her excellent, in-depth analysis and critique of the friendship and working relationship between Vita and Virginia, it seemed that no further books could, or would, reveal any hitherto unpublished material on Vita.
However, with such a wide-ranging choice of books, letters and portraits to draw upon, it is still possible for the contemporary biographer to extract, here and there, a nugget of new information or a sliver of truth perhaps previously left unexplored; after all, the friendship between the two writers lasted for nineteen long and eventful years. There is still room here for some new argument; for instance, much has been made in nearly every biography about them of the ‘maternal protection’ that Vita offered Virginia, yet despite Virginia’s own admission that this was the case, Vita’s son, in his own biography of Virginia Woolf, categorically denies it.
Vita Sackville-West’s grandfather, Lionel Sackville-West, met but could not marry – she was already married – a Spanish gypsy dancer, Pepita, in 1858. They had seven illegitimate children together, one of whom, Victoria, was destined initially to take Washington society by storm, and then to return as mistress of Knole, the largest stately home in England.
When Lionel Sackville-West was appointed British Minister to Washington, his beautiful daughter Victoria joined him, to take on the role of hostess to the British Legation. As she was unable to speak English fluently, was naïve, convent-educated and, of course, illegitimate, the wives of the secretaries of state had many reservations about her appointment. But Victoria took charge of the situation as if she had been born to do it – her beauty quickly became legendary; men fell in love with her, proposed and were rejected on a regular basis. This continued for seven years until fate intervened, and Lionel was informed that he had succeeded his brother to become Lord Sackville. He was now expected to return to England and take his place at Knole.
His daughter, by now an experienced hostess, stepped into her next role, as Mistress of Knole, with very little need for readjustment. To ensure her future in the house that she loved, she married her first cousin, another Lionel Sackville-West; conveniently, he was the next heir to Knole. They married in the chapel in 1890 and by 8 March 1892 had their first and only child, a daughter. By being a girl, the child, named ‘Victoria Mary’ but nicknamed ‘Vita’, automatically became ineligible to inherit Knole, which would pass down the male line of the family. This was to become a huge sorrow and cause of much frustration to Vita who, from the moment she first staggered across the Green Court at the age of one, fell totally and irreversibly in love with this most romantic and historic of great houses.
Another source of frustration for Vita was her mother’s tendency to ignore her, belittle her or be absent from the important events of Vita’s life. Victoria started this habit from the very day of her daughter’s christening, claiming depression and staying in bed instead. The scene was already set for a difficult and fiery relationship between mother and daughter, and it was to last right until Lady Sackville’s death in 1936. Victoria was not a calm, reassuring mother, but an infuriating, temperamental and spiteful woman.
On better days, she could appear beautiful, loveable and great fun to spend time with; like Julia Stephen, Victoria was blessed with exceptional looks, the sort that begged to be captured on canvas or portrayed in photography. She was overly fond of clothes, shopping, jewellery and anything else that allowed her to exercise her vanity. So Vita, like Virginia, grew up in the shadow of a beautiful, revered mother who was always to be the central figure of the household.
Lady Sackville seemed to love Vita as a baby, but as the baby grew into an awkward, gangly teenager, Victoria’s cruel tongue got the better of her on too many occasions. The gentle Lionel, tiring of his volatile wife, withdrew to the study, or outside to manage his huge estate, leaving Vita in the company of a mother who grew bored with her daughter’s company, or constantly picked fault:
I had very long legs and straight hair, over which Mother used to hurt my feelings and say she couldn’t bear to look at me because I was so ugly.
Vita analysed her relationship with her mother many years later when she wrote Pepita, the story of her ancestry. A pathetic picture is drawn of a little daughter desperate for affection from a mother who changed mood even faster than she changed her outfits:
How my mother puzzled me, and how I loved her! She wounded and dazzled and fascinated and charmed me by turns. Sometimes she was downright unjust, and accused me of things I had never done, lies I had never told.
It is hardly surprising that Vita, by the time she turned twelve, was spending many of her days alone in that huge house, roaming from one end to the other. She did not resent her loneliness, finding romance and inspiration in the stories of her ancestors, whose images still hang on the walls and staircases today. Knole is largely fifteenth-century, although older buildings on the site still exist, and has some three hundred and sixty-five rooms, although no one, including Vita, has ever been able to confirm this figure exactly.
The house sits in a great deer park, the gates of which open onto the small town of Sevenoaks. Vita used her favourite memories of the house in one of her novels, The Edwardians (1930), referring to it as a ‘mediaeval village’ that had one hundred chimneys and contained many small shops. There were at least fifty full-time servants in residence at Knole, working in a kitchen that was as high as a cathedral and many beautiful rooms, including three state bedrooms which were kept as museum pieces.
The Prince and Princess of Wales were regular guests while Vita was growing up; in the midst of all this splendour, the 12-year-old was writing passionate, rambling, historical novels. Elsewhere, in Kensington, London, a 22-year-old woman called Virginia Stephen was about to move to Bloomsbury, having made a name for herself as a professional reviewer and journalist for the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement whilst churning out descriptive travel pieces in the back of her diary. She had already suffered and survived the indignities that Vita was still to experience, attending smart social parties and balls in an agony of shyness and defiance, returning home with relief to read by the light of a candle.
Vita suffered similar tortures when she turned eighteen and was expected to make an appearance at all the best country-house balls:
The only good thing that could be said of me is that I wouldn’t have anything to do with my kind. Seeing that I was unpopular (and small wonder for a saturnine prig), I wouldn’t court popularity. I minded rather, and used to cry when I went to bed after coming home from a party, but I made myself defiant about it.
As Vita turned from a lanky teenager into a beautiful young woman, suitors from all the grandest stately homes appeared, to offer their hands in marriage, but Vita remained resolutely unimpressed. She turned them all down, even Lord Lascelles, the dashing heir to Harewood House, for by this time (1912) she had begun to fall in love wi
th Harold Nicolson, a junior official in the Foreign Office. Quiet and unassuming, but confident, handsome and with a boyish charm, he made an immediate impression on the 18-year old Vita when they first met at a dinner party in 1910:
Everything was fun to his energy, vitality and buoyancy. I liked his irrepressible brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile and his boyishness.
Harold was duly invited to Knole for a weekend, and he and Vita continued to meet at London parties. Her first letter to him is friendly, but not intimate:
I have been asked to ‘ask a man’ to dine on Thursday with Mrs Harold Pearson and go to a dance, so would you like to come? I promise you shan’t be made to dance!
By Christmas 1911, Harold was at Knole again, in love with Vita, who was hoping for a proposal before he left for Constantinople. They attended a ball at Hatfield House early in 1912, where Harold professed his love. This sent Vita into a panic, and she asked him to wait at least a year before marrying her. Lady Sackville later had a long talk alone with Harold, confirming that he and Vita could not be engaged for over a year. He then left straight away for his six months in Constantinople. Vita took to her bed, but eventually arose and continued the affair she had been having with Rosamund Grosvenor; it never occurred to her that there was anything amiss in writing miserable letters to Harold whilst spending the spring of 1912 in Florence with Rosamund. Harold returned from Constantinople newly determined to marry Vita, and stated that he wanted the wedding to take place in April 1913. Lady Sackville had other ideas, and the wedding did not take place until 1 October of that year. Although she had finally given the couple her blessing, Victoria did not attend the wedding, choosing instead to stay in bed all day, thus causing a mixture of relief and regret in her family.
The married couple took a train to Coker Court, the home of Dorothy Heneage who had decided to lend them her house for the start of their honeymoon, and they then spent their first month together in Constantinople. In September 1914, their first son, Ben, was born, and the Nicolsons returned to England and set up home at Ebury Street in London. Lady Sackville continued to cause them difficulties; furious that Vita wanted to christen the child ‘Benedict Lionel’ as opposed to ‘Lionel Benedict’, she caused terrible scenes at Knole until Vita was forced to concede to her mother’s wishes and christen the child as Victoria demanded. It made little difference – Vita immediately reverted to calling her baby ‘Ben’, and so Lady Sackville stormed off to London, where passionate, angry letters shot back and forth between herself and Vita; in many ways, their relationship was like that of two tempestuous, insecure lovers.
Shortly after the First World War began, Vita spotted and fell in love with a house deep in the heart of the Kent countryside, setting the pattern for the rest of her life. Long Barn, only a short drive from Knole, was the perfect setting for Vita and Harold to write in, with its long, low rooms hung with great oak beams. Here, for the first time in her life, Vita began to develop an interest in gardening. She was pregnant again, only four months after the birth of Ben, but the pregnancy was difficult and the baby was eventually several weeks overdue. On 1 November 1915, the doctors confirmed that the child she was carrying had died in her womb. Despite their terrible grief, this tragedy brought Vita and Harold onto a new level of emotional intimacy. Although the words that Vita chose in her autobiography to recall her love for Harold at this time could have been written by any young woman in love, in the context of her later life they inevitably recall the words used by Virginia Woolf in her suicide note to Leonard:
I should think it was hardly possible for two people to be more completely and unquestioningly happy. There was never a cloud, never a squabble. I knew that if Harold died, I should die too; it all made life very simple.
On 19 January 1917, Vita gave birth to her second son, Nigel, at Ebury Street. This time, for once, Lady Sackville was acquiescent on the subject of names and there were no arguments. By the end of the year, Vita was a published poet, with inclusions in Country Life and a volume, Poems of East and West, published by The Bodley Head, but her private life was becoming turbulent. Although her love for Harold remained strong, the revelation that he had contracted a venereal disease threatened to rock their happiness badly. Vita had thrown her soul and all her passion into the early years of their marriage, but this realization of Harold’s homosexuality had, unsurprisingly, a negative effect on the physical side of their relationship. Despite this blow, Vita continued to give him unconditional love and support, which goes some way to explaining Harold’s later, remarkable tolerance of her significantly more high-profile affairs with other women.
Vita hid her unhappiness behind hard work, rewriting and finishing Heritage, her first novel. Harold went back to the Foreign Office, which meant that he was often away during the week. Lonely and needing a shoulder to cry on, Vita opened up her heart one night to her childhood friend Violet Trefusis; Violet, who had been in love with Vita for years, saw this vulnerability as her chance to pounce, and the infamous affair that changed Vita’s life began at Long Barn on 18 April 1918.
By this time, the relationship between Vita’s parents was also suffering, and all pretence of happiness had long since diminished, leaving a strained and artificial situation. Lady Sackville had been accepting vast sums of money from her devoted friend Sir John Wallace (‘Seery’), and was to inherit a large fortune upon his death. She had also opened an interior furnishings shop in London, and her life consisted of one endless round of shopping, spending, ordering and designing; the once-beloved Lionel felt hurt and ignored, finding consolation in his mistress, Olive Rubens. To Lady Sackville’s horror, he installed Rubens and her husband in apartments at Knole.
In 1919, when Lady Sackville finally, and unexpectedly, in a blaze of temper, left Knole forever, Vita and Lionel were truly stunned. Victoria, despite her temper, had been the lynchpin around which they all functioned. Vita watched in helpless grief as her mother stormed about, organizing the packing and servants. The departure from Knole of this vibrant, tempestuous woman, was almost like a bereavement, as it was in Virginia Stephen’s childhood home at 22 Hyde Park Gate, where her mother-figure had been the central, life-giving force behind everyday existence. Vita described her parents many years later in a manner that brings to mind something of the early years of marriage between Julia and Leslie Stephen:
I loved them both equally, though in different ways, my mother as the more brightly coloured figure, my father as the dear, steady, yet wistfully poetic one.
Lord Sackville remained at Knole and Victoria bought herself not one, but three adjoining houses in Brighton, which she had knocked into one enormous mansion. She then rattled around bad-temperedly in it with only her servants for company. Although she was proud of Vita’s Heritage when it came out in 1919, and proved herself a very pro-active publicist on her daughter’s behalf, Lady Sackville was outraged during the following year to read the proofs of Challenge. Vita had based this novel on her love affair with Violet Trefusis; Harold, for once agreeing with his mother-in-law, ensured that publication was postponed and that the book was never published in England. For the next two years, Vita tested to the limits the patience of both her mother and her husband. The affair with Violet was all consuming; any event that Violet did not attend was condemned by Vita as being ‘boring’. Violet had married Denys Trefusis at the very height of this affair, and the two women had then foolishly eloped to Amiens in France before their long-suffering husbands flew out and brought them home.
The passionate phase of Vita’s affair with Violet Trefusis finally subsided in 1921. Vita threw herself into her home, her work and her children. Her new collection of poetry, Orchard and Vineyard, came out in 1922. She turned thirty, retaining her striking beauty; in reminiscences by Lady Sackville, written that year, Vita is described as having a complexion that is ‘beautiful; so are her eyes, with their double curtain of long eyelashes’.
Another beautiful woman, Virginia Woolf, had turned forty tha
t same year, and her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, had recently become a friend of Vita’s. In November 1922 he handed Vita a copy of Jacob’s Room, which she confessed to having read with interest but slight bewilderment. She relayed her admiration back via Clive, and on 14 December 1922, the two women met at one of Clive’s dinner parties. Although Vita did not record her first impressions on paper, Virginia noted in her diary that she was ‘muzzy-headed’ following this meeting, but that Vita was ‘not much’ to her ‘severer taste’. A return invitation to Ebury Street was politely issued from Vita, for 19 December – this time Virginia did not record the event, but Vita, already falling under her spell, wrote about that same evening to Harold; the passage below gives a revealing portrait of Virginia Woolf, aged forty, and also an indication of Vita’s frank, accessible writing style:
Mrs Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big. She is utterly unaffected: there are no outward adornments – she dresses quite atrociously. At first you think she is plain; then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her. She was smarter last night; that is to say, the woollen orange stockings were replaced by yellow silk ones, but she still wore the pumps. She is both detached and human, silent till she wants to say something and then says it supremely well. She is quite old (forty). I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she’s asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.
Before the dinner at Richmond took place on 10 January 1923, Vita began to bombard Virginia with books for her to read, and the recipient duly noted this in her diary together with a summation of Vita as ‘the new apparition’. Their first dinner alone together passed without further comment from Virginia, but Vita was yet again both euphoric and resigned to her fate in this letter to Harold (who by now must have been hearing familiar warning bells):
Virginia Woolf's Women Page 18