2023-08-13 06:42:08
Vita Sackville-West lived on both sides of the pen. He caught her and surged out of her. The writer, who was born in 1892 at Knole Palace in Kent, gained fame in England in the first half of the 20th century through her poems, her gardening columns, and her novel the edwardians. The daughter of the Baron de Sackville managed to get her name to appear frequently on readers’ tables. And on the lips of the acquaintances of him. Her extramarital affairs made her raw material for gossip. The scandal, then, threatened to be double. Her lovers were women.
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Sackville-West was born in Knole, a 1,000-acre palace in western Kent. He was able to do it thanks to the efforts of his parents: when Victoria and Lionel, first cousins, married, they managed to keep the family name that shared the barony and the house of Knole tied together. Otherwise, the noble title would have shifted to another branch of the family. Victoria was the daughter of a Malaga bailaora, olive nuggetand of Lionel Sackville-West.
As his mother had already married in Madrid, his hereditary rights were questioned. With the union between cousins, the risk of loss evaporated. At least temporarily. When Vita’s turn came, Salic law caused the title to jump to another branch of the family. Her uncle Charles, her father’s brother, then became a baron.
love gives world
Among more than 300 rooms and with more than 60 people at the service of the palace, Vita received her first lessons. A governess saw to it that, a few years later, the writer arrived prepared at her school in Mayfair for her. When she landed, she was carrying even adult teachings in her backpack. In Knole”, says the biography Victoria Glendinning, she had discovered that her mother found her “ugly”, that she did not understand why she was so quiet and that she had no friends. She also learned that, like her father, she had extramarital affairs. Thanks to the trips that affaires implied for Victoria, however, Vita frequently visited France, Italy and Russia.
His education, points out the history teacher Jeanne A. Hopefully, took shape in Europe. The sentimental, too. Before meeting Harold Nicolson, her husband, Vita combined the attentions of her suitors with those of Rosamund Grovesnor. He had met her at school and since adolescence the relationship had turned into a romance. With Violet Keppel history repeated itself. They met in the classrooms and the harmony was instantaneous. After meeting her, Vita wrote a song regarding her. She was the first friend she had ever made.
It wasn’t until they got married, however, that they became lovers. Together they traveled to France to avoid the comments that bubbled up around them at dinners. They toured the Gallic country sometimes with Vita disguised as a man. Wearing pants, she called herself Julian and introduced herself as Keppel’s husband. His situation did not worry him. Sackville-West had explained that her relationship had rescued her from a “sheepish” life. Nicolson accepted it. The marriage had been left open through their dalliances. The writer’s husband, a diplomat, had warned her that a lover of hers had transmitted a venereal disease to him and that, therefore, he too should consult a doctor. Having lived together in Turkey and with two small children, the relationship began to accept visitors. His, masculine; theirs, feminine.
all in writing
The romance with Violet Keppel ended when he changed his last name to Trefussis. She walked down the aisle at the wish of her family, she agreed to the marriage. Her condition, she assured Sackville-West, had been her chastity. She would never have sexual relations with her husband. After a couple of escapes to France, where the husbands of both had gone in order to rescue them from the scandal, the writer discovered that her lover had lied to her. The Trefussis marriage had been consummated.
The women’s relationship broke down, but the friendship, says Nigel Nicolsonthe son of the writer, in Portrait of a marriage, was maintained by correspondence. Trefussis’s letters survive, collected in the book Violet to Vita. Before the relationship fell apart, she wrote: “My days are consumed by the helplessness of this desire for you, my nights are filled with insufferable dreams. I want you. I want you hungrily, madly, passionately. I’m starving for you. Not because of your physical part, but because of your company, your sympathy, the countless points of view that we share. I can’t exist without you. You are my affinity, my soul mate. I can’t help it and neither can you. We complete each other.” The Sackville-West letters ended up in the fire.
Later, among others, it would arrive Virginia Woolf. With her he shared letters, passions and editorial. The seal that the author of Mrs. Dalloway ran with her husband published the edwardians and sales forced him to give up manual printing. In half a year, Sackville-West had shipped 30,000 copies of his novel. Despite offers from other publishers, he decided to remain with the members of the Bloomsbury circle, a group of intellectuals in which the Woolfs stood out. The sentimental relationship between the writers, Virginia wrote, ended up worn out, like “a ripe fruit that falls from the tree.” She, however, came to wonder if, as she collects Love Letters: Vita and Virginia, I was in love with Vita. Although, in any case, she was not clear regarding “what is love”. Not even, at times, Woolf dared to saturate the verbs she used with Sackville-West: “Yes yes yes, yes I like you. I’m afraid to use the
stronger word.
On both sides of the pen In a dinner between couples, count Alison Bechdel, Woolf finished outlining the idea for one of his most celebrated works. In Vita she observed “passions from 500 years ago”. He asked for documentation of Knole Castle, which, like the title, had been stripped of him by Salic law, and in Woolf’s imagination he fermented. Orlando. The writer turned Sackville-West into a character who changed sex over the centuries, who had affairs with men and women, who traveled with nomads, who traversed Turkey. Even Vita’s lovers, such as Violet Keppel, disguised as Princess Sasha, appeared in the book. For Nicolson, it was the “most charming love letter in history.”
To alleviate Knole’s emptiness, the couple alternated seasons in the London neighborhood of Belgravia and in Kent. Long Barn served as a country house and Sissinghurst Castle as a laboratory. From his Sackville-West flower beds he established himself as a landscape designer. The columns he published in The Observer on flowers, plants and gardening stabilized his fame. A recurring section on the BBC and a radio tour of the United States, in which she spoke publicly regarding marriage, she reaffirmed her in the Anglo-Saxon world before in 1962 she died, in her castle, of abdominal cancer. .
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