“I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in [Virginia], because of the madness.”
TRQ: Vita Sackville-West, Born March 9, 1892
Novelist, diarist, poet and journalist, who inspired Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography, was born in Kent at Knole, the home given to the family by Queen Elizabeth I in the sixteen century. Although her lineage prevented her from inheriting Knole later in life, Sackville-West revelled in the home’s famous gardens that triumphed over its sombre Victorian architecture. Lonely and isolated as a child, Sackville-West took to writing a series of novels, ballads and plays while living at home.
Described as pansexual, Sackville-West had intense affairs with both men and women throughout her life. When Sackville-West began attending Helen Wolff’s exclusive day school for girls in Mayfair, she soon fell in love with Violet Keppel and Rosamund Grosvenor. Her affair with Keppel continued on during her marriage to Harold Nicholson, her gay husband. Her relationship with Keppel was tumultuous and only came to an end once Nicholson, having learned of Keppel’s desire for both women to divorce their husbands, acted to protect their reputations.
Both Sackville-West and her husband would have a number of same-sex relationships throughout the course of their marriage. Equivalent to an open marriage, Sackville-West and Nicholson’s relationship has been described as a peaceful polyamory. Together they had two children, Benedict and Nigel.
Nicholson largely encouraged his wife’s relationship with Virginia Woolf, who was not one to involve herself in many affairs. Unusual for her, Woolf initiated the relationship and expressed the desire to Vita for a romance. In Orlando, Woolf draws on Vita’s own sexual fluidity to bring to life a protagonist who, switching between sexes over the course of centuries, is able to eventually inherit his home in a way that Sackville-West could not.
A shy member of the Bloomsbury Group, Sackville-West continued to be a prolific, award- winning writer, and those years of her involvement with Woolf would be some of her most productive. In 1925, she won the Hawthornden Prize for The Land. Known for writing of her life, gardening, and Knole, Sackville-West also wrote The Edwardians, a work of critical fiction on aristocratic privilege, and All Passion Spent, on the power of female agency. Written during WWII, her science fiction novel The Grand Canyon, was the first to present a dystopian future in which the Nazis defeat the United States.
Sackville-West and Nicholson’s loving marriage lasted for decades. Suffering from cancer towards the end of her life, Sackville-West wrote a letter to her husband in which she shares, ‘Oh what a very unexpected letter to write to you suddenly. You won’t like it, because you never like to face facts… Anyhow, I love you, much more than I loved you on October 1, 1913, and that is something more than most people can say after 45 years of marriage.”
Sackville-West died at the age of 70, on June 2, 1962 at Sissinghurst, the castle that she herself created in Kent.
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