1. VITA SACKVILLE -WEST

2. Victoria Sackville West
Parents’ Marriage 1890
Victoria Sackville West
Lionel Sackville West
Victoria was the daughter of Lionel’s uncle, the owner of Knole and Pepita, a Spanish dancer.

3. Childhood Vita was born on the 8th March 1892.
Her mother decided that this was the only time she would give birth.
By the end of 1904 Victoria would not allow Lionel into her bed.
And so Lionel began a series of affairs.

4. Knole
Vita was brought up at Knole, the great house in Kent. She felt that the house and its long history were hers. It would be a source of very great disappointment that she would not inherit it, it had to have a male heir, her cousin Edward.

5. Knole

6. Aristocrats
Vita was brought up among the aristocratic elite of Edwardian society.

7. Rosamund 1909
Her first love was Rosamund Grosvenor.
They met at Miss Woolf’s school and later shared a governess.
They stayed friends and Rosamund was a bridesmaid at her wedding
“Oh, I dare say I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find it out,"

8. At Miss Woolf’s she also met Violet Kepple
At Miss Woolf’s she also met Violet Kepple. Violet was the daughter of Alice Kepple, the mistress of Edward VII. He would visit in the afternoons and the children would have to hide away when he came downstairs. Vita and Violet had a love of books, history and France in common. In 1912 Violet came back to London after two years abroad. She made it clear that she still loved Vita.
Violet 1910

9. Knole 1910
Vita’s father inherited Knole from his uncle, who was also Victoria’s,(Vita’s mother) father.
Vita’s father’s inheritance was disputed by Victoria’s brother, Henry West, who claimed he was the legitimate son of Lord Sackville.
The court case and the details of Pepita and Lord Sackville’s relationship caused much gossip.
Henry’s case failed and Lionel inherited Knole.

10. Inheriting Knole

11. Sir John Murray Scott
In 1906 Lady Victoria Sackville- West began a relationship with Sir John Murray Scott
( Seery)
He was immensely wealthy, owning an apartment in Paris furnished with exquisite furniture, Marie Antoinette’s pavilion in the Bois de Boulogne, a hunting lodge in Scotland, the lease for Hertford House (the Wallace Collection).
He bought Victoria a house,
34, Hill Street, Mayfair.
He adored Victoria and Vita and promised to leave his wealth to Victoria to benefit Knole.

12. The Scandal of the Will 1913

14. Vita first met Harold Nicolson in 1910, when she “came out”.
He proposed to her in 1912.
“ I love him so much. Now there’s no doubt; at first, I loved him one day and not the next; but now I think of nothing but him; and I would go away with him tomorrow, even to Vienna; nothing frightens me.”

15. Marriage to Harold 1st October1913
“Harold was like a sunny harbour to me. It was all open, frank, certain; and although I never knew the physical passion I had felt for Rosamund, I did not really miss it.”

16. Constantinople 1913
“ Having expected Constantinople to be beastly, I find it lovely.”
In December she went to the English hospital where her pregnancy was confirmed.
Their life in Constantinople ended with the outbreak of
The Great War 1914.

17. Constantinople

18. Children
Benjamin born 7th August 1914

19. Long Barn
It was here that they began to create their first garden.
When he was working in London Harold would take the train back to Long Barn in the evenings.
They also had a house in London, partly funded by her mother.
182 Ebury Street

20. Father
Her father moved his lover Olive Rubens and her husband into the converted laundry at Knole,
Her mother was furious and left Knole, beginning a relationship with Lutyens and buying a house in Brighton.
The Sackville West marriage was in crisis.

21. Nigel born 19th January 1917

22. Harold’ s Illness November 1917
Harold had to tell Vita that he had contracted a venereal disease during a weekend away at Knebworth House.
He had also to explain that it was the result of a homosexual encounter and explain far more about that side of his nature that he had revealed before.
Vita fled to friends in Oxford.
Harold wrote her three letters whilst she was there.
She sent him a telegram expressing forgiveness.
But it forced her to reconsider her own sexuality.

23. Violet 18th April 1918
Harold and Vita were told they could resume a sexual relationship on April 20th 1918.
Then on the 18th April Violet came to Long Barn. Vita said “I talked out the whole of myself with absolute sincerity and pain.”
Violet declared her love for Vita.
Thus began the romantic affair that was to change their lives, “beginning life again in a different capacity.”
They went off to Polperro, Cornwall, for the first of their adventures together.

24. “Challenge” a novel
Together they wrote Challenge, depicting them selves as Julian and Eve.
Vita’s mother was horrified and forbade its publication in England.
Harold wrote in his letters to Vita how much he hated Violet for spoiling their relationship.
Vita began to wear corduroy breeches, outrageous costume for “drawing room wear” But her mother thought they suited her long legs.
Then Vita dressed as a man, met Violet in town, they took a train to Orpington and stayed the night in a bed and breakfast as man and wife.

25. To France “ a scintillating and romantic figure
or Mrs Nicholson who has written
some charming verse”
Violet’s mother wanted her to marry Denys Trefusis
to avoid a scandal.
While Harold was at the Paris Peace Conference Vita and Violet went to France from November 1918 to February They were thrown out of a hotel after dancing together as Julian and Eve. They returned from France when Vita was forced to come back for the children.
Harold discovered “Married Love” by Marie Stopes.
March 1919 Violet’s engagement to Denis is announced.
Vita promised Violet that she would not to have sex with Harold, and Violet married Denys on the understanding they too also would be celibate.
Vita could not bear to be in London for Violet’s wedding. She fled to Harold in Paris.
When Violet and Denys came to Paris Vita took Violet to a hotel and made love to her.

26. The continuing relationship
August 1919 – December In France. Harold had a new lover, the couturier, Edward Molyneux.
February Harold and Denys flew to Amiens to bring both their wives back. In the ensuing row Violet confessed to having had sexual relationship with Denys.
Vita and Victoria snatched time together in England. In July 1920 Violet was ill, Vita nursed her, but then said they were then separating for good.
Vita began her autobiography which was only published on her death.
In August 1920 there was a threat from Denys to annul the marriage.
January 1921 they were abroad again, but Denys was now threatening divorce. Even Vita was worried about a very public scandal
March 1921 the gossip closed some doors to Vita. Violet was sent abroad alone by her mother Mrs Kepple. The adventure was over.

27. Dottie 1922 & Geoffrey Scott
Vita had a long standing love affair with Dorethy Wellesley, Duchess of Wellington.
Geoffrey Scott was passionately in love with Vita. Vita was very ambivalent and ambiguous about their relationship. Harold’s despair was softened by his affair with Reginald Mortimer The affair with Scott ended when his wife wanted a divorce and threatened to cite Vita.

28. Virginia 1925 Their affair began in December 1925.
Virginia saw Vita striding into the fishmonger’s shop in Sevenoaks wearing pink and pearls, ‘with a candlelit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung’.
The vision in the fishmonger’s became a kind of password to intimacy. Virginia cited it whenever she wanted to remind Vita of their first night together, or when she needed to reassert her influence. Eventually it became a nostalgic fixture – an example of how Virginia liked to replay scenes and reclaim the past.
‘Aint it odd how the vision at the Sevenoaks fishmongers has worked itself into my idea of you?’
When she felt, in 1935, that the friendship was over, this vision remained: ‘There she hangs, in the fishmongers at Sevenoaks, all pink jersey & pearls; & that’s an end of it.’

29. “If you were in love with another woman, or I with another man, we should both or either of us be finding a natural sexual fulfilment which would inevitably rob our own relationship of something. As it is, the liaisons which you and I contract are something perfectly apart from the more natural and normal attitude we have towards each other, and therefore don’t interfere. But it would be dangerous for ordinary people. “
Letter from Vita to Harold after she had begun a sexual relationship with Virginia
‘What is the effect of all this on me?’ she asked herself after her first night alone with Vita at Long Barn, and replied, ‘Very mixed’. She knew that what attracted her in Vita was her ‘full breastedness’ and ‘voluptuousness’, her aristocratic manners and her capacity for lavishing the ‘maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone’. She knew that she would not stay fixed in her feelings for Vita (‘ one emotion succeeds another’). ‘Then I am – altogether so queer in some ways.’
Virginia quoted from her diaries

30. Vita travelled to Tehran via Baghdad & India 1926 to meet Harold
She met the British archaeologist Gertrude Bell in Baghdad who took her to meet the King Of Iraq
On her journey she wrote many letters to Virginia expressing her love and how much she missed her.
“ 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 all gone: I just miss you in a quite simple human way….It is incredible how essential to me you have become.”
“The funny thing is, that you are the only person I have ever known who was aloof from the more vulgarly jolly side of life. And I wonder whether you lose or gain, you, Virginia, because your are so constituted and have a sufficient fund of excitement within yourself…. You’ll think I am perpetually trying to pull you down from your pedestal, but I really like you best up there. Only it would be fun to transplant you, pedestal and all, just once…. Goodnight, darling, and remote Virginia.”

31. Vita Joined Harold in Tehran for the coronation of the Shah

32. Berlin 1928

33. “What a bloody place”
“ And what am I to say? ‘ A wife ‘ am to say, ‘should not only support but encourage her husband in his career’? I do not say that, but I say: ‘Darling, you know I would be wretched without my work’ ‘ Rubbish,’ she answers.
And then comes a letter from Virginia saying she feels almost ashamed of having a friend who is married to a man who will ( not may mark you) be an Ambassador.”
PS It did not prevent Vita from taking another lover in Berlin, an American author.

34. The Land Published1926 Vita completed her long poem “The Land”
It was even praised by Virginia and Leonard Woolf who usually thought her writing was not cerebral enough.
She received the
Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1927

35. "And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other. Its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind … Also, I admit, I should like to untwine and twist again some very odd, incongruous strands in you’” ‘
Virginia Woolf win her diary 1927
Orlando 1928
“The longest and most charming love letter in literature” Nigel Nicolson

36. Mary Campbell 1927
Mary was the wife of a poet Roy Campbell. They had come to live nearby to Long Barn. Mary fell in love with Vita and wrote about their affair in her diary describing the complexity and depth of her passion. Her husband found out and there were terrible jealous violent rows.
In 1928 Mary went to France with her husband leaving her children back in Kent. She continued to write to Vita.
Her husband would get his revenge in a biting poem The Georgiad in 1931 in which he satirised Vita, Harold, their gardening and even their dogs. ,

37. Hilda Matheson
Meanwhile Vita was in love again, this time with Hilda who was Director of Talks at the BBC. They met when Hila invited Vita to give a talk on poetry and then one with Hugh Walpole on The Modern Woman.
Ironically she invited Vita and Harold to give a talk on the radio on marriage.
Afterwards Vita wrote to Harold “Physical desire is the most misleading of all human emotions. I simply feel that you are me and I am you, what you meant by saying that you became the lonely me when we parted.”
When Vita went to Berlin Hilda wrote to her frequently and Vita had to ask her to be more discreet because of the boys.
Hilda and Vita went on a walking holiday Val d’Isere together. Virginia was jealous.

38. Sissinghurst 1930
Vita and Harold saw Sissinghurst Castle in It was a complete ruin, but they fell in love with it and decided to restore it as their home.
Recreating its garden became their great cause.

39. Evelyn Irons 1931
Her next love was Evelyn Irons, the Woman’s Page editor of the Daily Mail. Vita invited her down to Sissinghurst for the night.
“I stood in front of the fire in your room at Sissinghurst, looking at you and thinking that I had fallen in love with you, not dreaming that you would ever be in love with me, and yet feeling tremendously happy and excited….Strewth but you looked so sweet in your little dressing gown.”
But this was all complicated by Evelyn being in a relationship already with Olive Rinder, so began a three sided affair.
It would end with Evelyn going off with another woman, leaving Vita to care for Olive who had TB.

40. Ben’s sexuality1933 & 1948
In 1933 when Ben was 18 he wrote a series of letters to his parents expressing his concerns about his sexuality.
Vita wrote to him, as did Harold
“ promiscuity is essentially cheap and sickening… cheap, easy, vulgar, lowering. A real prostitution of oneself.”
Then Vita about Ben in 1948
“and meanwhile there might be a scandal which might involve both his jobs, the Palace and the Burlington and there he would be stranded, having lost his career for the sake of a clever little boy who is not worth the sacrifice.”

41. Death of Virginia 1941 by Vita
Leonard came home to find a note saying she was going to commit suicide and they think she drowned herself as they found her stick floating on the river. He says she has not been well for the last few weeks and was terrified of going mad again. He says “ It was, I suppose the strain of the war and finishing her book and she could not eat or rest.
“Why oh why did he leave her alone, knowing all this? He must be reproaching himself terribly poor man. They have not yet found the body.
I simply can’t take it in, that lovely mind, that lovely spirit. And she seemed so well when I last saw her, and I had a jokey letter from her only a couple of weeks ago.
She must have been quite out of her mind or she would never have brought such sorrow and horror on Leonard and Vanessa.
Vanessa has seen him and says he was amazingly self controlled and calm, but insisted on being left alone. I cannot help wondering if he will follow her example. I do not see him living without her” .

42. Mother Vita had a tempestuous, complex relationship with her mother.
She could be tremendously generous,
buying Vita luxuries, jewels, cars, houses.
She could refuse to talk to her for months
over trivialities like the name of their
first child.
She told the boys when they were about 15 and 13 about the family scandals and accused Vita of stealing the family silver.
But she could also be very supportive.

43. Harold and work
Vita did not appreciate Harold’s work as a diplomat, she hated life as a diplomat’s life and apart from their time in Constantinople refused to live abroad with him, though she did visit.
She nagged him into giving it up. He hated being without a career, though he wrote some important books.
Eventually after being without a proper career he found some fulfilment in politics and the National Trust.
He did not get a seat in the House of Lords because Vita got a Companion of Honour, though he did become a KCVO.

44. Harold and Marriage
This was not a conventional marriage.
What they had was a deep bond of love which enabled
them to sustain that marriage through all its difficulties.
They wrote to each other every day, sometimes more
than once. Those letters enabled them to discuss problems they found difficult in person and constantly to re-establish and confirm that love.
“I do not think one could conceive of a love more exclusive, more tender, or more pure than I have for you. It is absolutely divorced from physical love, sex now. I feel it is immortal”

45. Some of her writings

46. June 2nd 1962
Harold was in the South Cottage writing a review when Ursula, soon after one o’clock, after opening Vita’s windows to the Weald went across the garden to look for him.
“ Ursula comes to tell me. I pick some of her favourite flowers and lay them on her bed”