Author: Vita Sackville-West
Profile: Vita Sackville-West was an English author, novelist, poet and a garden designer. She was born in Knole House, Kent, England and died in Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England. Harold Nicolson is her spouse. Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson is popularly known as Vita Sackville-West.
Not only was she a successful poet, novelist and journalist but also a creative diarist and letter writer. Thirteen novels and more than a dozen poetry collections have been published by her during her whole life.
Vita was born in Kent at the home of Vita’s aristocratic ancestors and was the only child. Her grandmother was an acrobat and Spanish dancer and Lionel her father began living with his mistress. The girl Victoria Mary Sackville-West was called ‘Vita’ so that she could be distinguished from her mother (who was also known as Victoria). As her father followed English aristocratic inheritance customs, Vita was unable to inherit Knole after her father’s death which caused bitterness for her all her life.
Vita Sackville-West had been the inspiration for the protagonist, Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolf, her famous lover and friend. In The Observer (1946-1961) she has had a longstanding column. She is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst created with Sir Harold Nicolson, her husband.
Writing style: Vita Sackville-West’s genre is Georgic Poetry.
Published Texts:
Works
Poetry collections
1909 – Chatterton
1912 – A Dancing Elf
1915 – Constantinople: Eight Poems
1917 – Poems of West and East
1921 – Orchard and Vineyard
1926 – The Land
1929 – King’s Daughter
1931 – Sissinghurst
1931 – Invitation to Cast out Care
1933 – Collected Poems: Volume 1
1938 – Solitude
1946 – The Garden
Novels
1919 – Heritage
1921 – The Dragon in the Shallow Waters
1922 – The Heir
1923 – Challenge
1923 – Grey Wethers
1924 – Seducers in Ecuador
1926 – Passenger to Teheran
1930 – The Edwardians
1931 – All Passion Spent
1932 – The Death of Noble Godavary and Gottfried Kunstler
1932 – Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour – short stories
1932 – Family History
1934 – The Dark Island
1942 – Grand Canyon
1947 – Devil at Westease
1953 – The Easter Party
1961 – No Signposts in the Sea
Translations
Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino
Biographies and non-fiction
1927 – ‘Aphra Behn: the Incomparable Astrea
1926 – Passenger toTeheran
1922 – Knole and the Sackvilles
1936 – Saint Joan of Arc
1941 – English Country Houses
1937 – Pepita
1943 – The Eagle and The Dove
Twelve Days: an account of a journey across the Bakhtiari Mountains of South-western Persia
1940 – Country Notes in Wartime
Awards and Acknowledgements:
1927 – Awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature (for The Land – her pastoral epic)
1933 – Awarded the Hawthornden Prize for her Collected Poems
