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“... Virginia Woolf, writing after ‘the most delicious luncheon of her life’ in the company of Vita Sackville-West, foresaw ‘that if we stay here for two days eating caneton en croûte and crème double, washed down by Bourgogne mousseux, we shall get dyspepsia.’ After more than two hundred pages of assiduously regurgitated appreciations of good ...”

“... angels – He sits on the edge of the bed and considers my symptoms like a judge,’ she wrote to Vita Sackville-West in 1929. ‘He brings home huge pineapples: he moves the gramophone into my room and plays until he thinks I’m excited. In short, I should have shot myself long ago in one of these illnesses if it hadn’t been for him.’ Given ...”

“... Her novel The Squire broke new ground as ‘a poetic vision of motherhood’, though it shocked Vita Sackville-West and made H.G. Wells feel he had been attacked ‘by a multitude of many-breasted women’. (Perhaps Lady Longford, with her self-proclaimed ‘addiction to motherhood’, enjoyed it?) As a playwright her love of bons mots earned her, on ...”

“... to die before starting on her career. Her book We Made a Garden, published in 1956 and admired by Vita Sackville-West, tells a less cosy story than the title implies. More autobiography than plant manual, it recounts a battle of the sexes played out in horticulture. In their garden at East Lambrook near Yeovil, Walter wanted paths, lawns and a ...”

“... them ungenerously, and enforced a servile hierarchy as strict as that depicted below stairs by Vita Sackville-West in The Edwardians. Like the Fabians, the Elmhirsts were unable to reconcile the competing claims of élitism and egalitarianism. Hence the ‘Dartington paradox’ which, as Michael Young admits, lies at the heart of their ...”

“... new caught on. A version more attuned to Bloomsbury tastes emerged at Sissinghurst in Kent, where Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Harold Nicolson, found the remains of a great courtyard house that had once played host to Elizabeth I. It was already in ruins when Horace Walpole saw it in 1752 and all that now survived was one low range of buildings ...”

“... on an audience. Hugh and Moggie were suggested by – but not modelled on – Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West. In 1968 Nicolson’s diaries had just been published with his passionate account of the fight against Appeasement in the Thirties and how, come the war, appeasers like Chips Channon conveniently forgot to eat their words about Germany ...”

“... she is playing parts. They are revealing in that they tell us which parts she chose to play. With Vita Sackville-West she played a rather childish game, simulating intimacy by adopting animal personae. ‘Well, my faithless sheep dog’ and ‘Yes, my clever colly,’ she wrote. She had earlier enjoyed playing the lover with ...”

“... about weird ménages. Here is another. Less kinky than the alliance between Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, it was even more remarkable. Very few men did not fall for Lady Diana in short order, but her devotion to her husband never wavered. The conundrum is made even more puzzling by the fact that it is not easy, at this distance, to be sure ...”

“... and Violet Paget (penname Vernon Lee); and streams of summer visitors including Edith Wharton and Vita Sackville-West. Though isolated from other children, and oppressed by a ‘long and dreary dynasty’ of governesses, her childhood ‘was not unhappy; it was merely disconcerting, in its swift alternations between excitement and tedium, between caviare ...”

“... Shah’s coronation in 1926 a totally English performance was insisted on down to the last detail. Vita Sackville-West found that ‘there was no point, however humble, on which [the Persians] would not consult their English friends.’ (Harold Nicolson was then Counsellor at the British Legation.) ‘They would arrive with little patterns of brocade and ...”

“... it is on the edge of final destruction. When Roy Campbell’s wife was seduced by the voracious Vita Sackville-West the poet went to his friend C.S. Lewis expecting sympathy. Lewis’s reaction on being told of the episode was fascinated silence followed by the brutal exclamation: ‘Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!’ Campbell’s male pride never ...”

“... hearing Stephen’s funny stories about his psychoanalyst. ‘On the whole,’ Spender wrote to Vita Sackville-West in 1931, after Isherwood had been prickly with him, ‘I’ve decided that the best thing is to stick through thick and thin to the best one can find in one’s fellow creatures, even though one is humiliated by having one’s weakness ...”

“... was to become The Years. No true imaginative process has occurred. Virginia Woolf simply looked at Vita Sackville-West as she looked at Bogey Harris, however much the former may be dressed up in a style and a fancy. There is nothing to be done with Orlando, beyond seeing her in this way, just as there is nothing to be done with Bogey Harris beyond seeing ...”

“... glimmering at the end of this dark tunnel.’ Inside, Harold Nicolson reviewed The Waves and Vita Sackville West, who seems to have had a whole page to herself, explained ‘How to plant and design beds’. By December the circulation had plummetted from 160,000 to under 20,000: the paper was losing £340 a week. ‘We shall win; or at least we shall ...”