Description
Book SynopsisThe Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West.Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst. Glendinning documents Vita''s extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband Harold Nicolson, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs.Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.
Trade ReviewWhat each of us would look for in an ideal future biographer is what each of us looks for in an ideal doctor: sympathy, trustfulness and acute powers of diagnosis. All these three qualities are here present. Vita would undoubtedly have shared our approval and gratitude * Sunday Telegraph *
A biography that conceals nothing... gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction * Observer *
Surely the definitive biography. -- Harold Acton
Superb... much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience -- Fiona McCarthy * The Times *
It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life... superb -- Dervla Murphy * Irish Times *
Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be * Country Life *
Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning's Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West * Guardian *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Introduction to the New Edition Acknowledgements Family Tree of Sackvilles and Nicolsons Prologue Part I: Knole 1892–1913 Part II: Change and Challenge 1913–21 Part III: Explorations 1921–30 Part IV: Sissinghurst 1930–45 Part V: The Enclave and the Tower 1945–62
Notes and Sources Books by V. Sackville-West Index
