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Vita Sackville-West (1892 - 1962)
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 Saint
Joan of Arc by
Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West wrote Saint Joan of Arc in
1936 at the age of forty-four, and had, at that point, already
been writing for thirty years. At fourteen, Sackville-West
published her first book, and at fourteen Joan of Arc first heard
the voices. Joan was seventeen when she took command of the armies
of France--a peasant girl in the early fifteenth century in charge
of a nation's forces. At nineteen she was captured by the British
and tried as a witch by a church court. Before her twentieth
birthday she was burned at the stake. In 1920 she was canonized by
the Roman Catholic Church as a saint. In a clever, brisk voice,
Vita Sackville-West tells the triumphant story of a French peasant
girl raised in a country torn apart by the Hundred Years' War who
rose from poverty to military greatness. With dazzling insight and
clarity, Sackville-West breathes new life into Joan of Arc's
beautiful and tragic story.
Vita
and Virginia : The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and
Virginia Woolf by
Suzanne Raitt
This book examines the creative intimacy between
Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, interpreting both their
relationship and their work in the light of their experience as
married lesbians. The contradictions and conflicts of their
situation are worked out through the construction of different
narratives of femininity, in letters, novels, diaries, and other
texts. Vita and Virginia looks at the two women's continual
renegotiation of what it means to be female, and suggests that the
mutual exchange of different versions of "womanhood" is
crucial to the development of their friendship. Orlando, for
example, was Virginia Woolf's way of threatening Sackville-West
with the extent of her own knowledge about her, as well as the
celebratory love-letter it is usually assumed to be. The book also
offers readings of both women's autobiographical texts, and a
long-overdue study of Vita Sackville-West's work as a biographer
and a novelist. Emphasizing also wider contexts, this study
examines the links between homosexual desire and literary
innovation, public politics and private lives. It provides an
invaluable perspective on the relations between sexuality and
feminism in modernism.
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By Petri Liukkonen
Excerpt:
English poet and novelist, born into an old
aristocrstic family, proprietors of Knole House in Kent. Vita
Sackville-West wrote about the Kentish countryside and was the
chief model for Orlando in Virginia
Woolf's novel of that same title from 1928. Her best known
poem, THE LAND, celebrates the Kentish countryside and was awarded
the Hawthorne Prize in 1927...
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From The Knitting Circle
In 1913 she married the diplomat Harold Nicolson
and travelled with him to Persia which is described in Passenger
to Teheran, 1926. They had two sons, Nigel and Benedict. Their
marriage survived despite his homosexuality and her own lesbian
affair with Virginia
Woolf who she met in 1922.
While engaged to Harold Nicolson she had a
passionate secret love affair with Rosamund Grosvenor.
When married she caused a scandal by having a
very public affair with Violet Keppel. Their affair continued
after Violet married and became Violet Trefusis in 1919. The
affair reached a climax when they went away together to Paris, and
Denys Trefusis and Harold Nicolson sought them out and persuaded
their wives to return to their homes. The affair was fictionalised
in Vita Sackville-West's novel Challenge, (1924), with
Julian representing Vita Sackville-West.
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From sappho.com
Letters hosted on this site:
Excerpt:
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I
composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare
hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a
quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb
letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps
you wouldn't even feel it. And yet I believe you'll be sensible of
a little gap. But you'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it
would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite
stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was
prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a
squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have
become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these
things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any
the more by giving myself away like this --But oh my dear, I can't
be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that.
Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people
I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken
down my defences. And I don't really resent it...
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By Suellen Cox, Coordinator of Bibliographic
Instruction, University Library, CSU Fullerton
This page lists bibliographies.
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The collection
represents the first survey of the Vita Sackville-West manuscripts
in the Sissinghurst Collection. It includes over 200 works of her
published poems, plays, novels, non-fiction works including her
family history, travel, works and the talks she gave on BBC radio,
as well as a collection of her husband's diaries, plays and
war-time letters.
Many of her relationships with both men and
women are portrayed in her work, the most famous being with
Virginia Woolf, who celebrated her as "Orlando" the
eponymous hero/heroine of her novel. Some of the items included in
this collection are: a collection of juvenilia, poems and stories
dealing with her schooldays, much of which is written in French;
unpublished novels including Ciry and Lily (1910), Behind
the Mask (1910) and The Dark Days of Thermidor; a
collection of impassioned verse written to Mary Campbell (wife of
poet Roy) between the years 1926 and 1930; the original working
manuscripts of many of her novels including Heritage and The
Dragon in Shallow Waters; working notes for The Edwardians
and All Passion Spent; the manuscripts of her famous
non-fiction works Passenger to Teheran and her biography of
Aphra Behn; and, gardening notes made while planning the
splendid Sissinghurst Garden.
In addition, the correspondence collection
includes not only the letters of Vita Sackville-West, but also
those of her husband Harold Nicolson to E.M. Forster, Rosamund
Lehmann and Clive Bell, and notes for his biography of Tennyson,
his biography of George V, and his diaries from 1910 to 1961...
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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