Sarah Gristwood - Vita & Virginia: The Lives and Love of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

INTRODUCTION

Vita Sackville-West kept two photographs on the desk of her writing room, high up in the Elizabethan tower at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. One was of her husband, the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson. The other was of the novelist Virginia Woolf. The brief physical passion Vita and Virginia shared was already over before Vita and Harold bought Sissinghurst in 1930, but Virginia told a friend, just months before her death, that apart from her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa, Vita was the only person she really loved.

The writing room was, and is still, a shrine to Vitas complicated, colourful life a room where salvaged treasures from her aristocratic past jostle souvenirs of her foreign adventures, and the tools of her trades as both a gardener and a writer. On the battered oak writing table itself, under the misty grandeur of a tapestry evoking her ancestral home of Knole, is an everyday jumble of pens and paper clips, spectacles and soil samples; a reproduction of a famous painting of the Bront sisters; a small vase of flowers on a block of lapis lazuli; the bound memoirs of a seventeenth-century heiress known as La Grande Mademoiselle; her amber cigarette holder; a set of Post Office scales; and a tiny calendar with pictures of Alsatian dogs. A small cupboard on the corner of the table once held a souvenir of her Spanish grandmother Pepita one of her dancing shoes.

Vita was often alone in this very private domain. Her sons entered it only half a dozen times in all their years at Sissinghurst. But, surrounded by echoes of those she valued, she would not have been lonely.

Everything in the room had meaning for Vita, from the photo of her beloved Alsatian Rollo to the turquoise ceramic clam shells she had bought on her travels in the East with Harold. (She gave one to Virginia to use as an ashtray.) From the blue glass given to her by her adored, difficult mother to the Chinese crystal rabbits that made their way into her most successful novel. From the box in which she kept press cuttings about Virginias books, to the small picture of the earlier Sackville lady who inherited Knole, as Vita herself longed to have done. Virginia Woolf always relished the aristocratic aspect of Vita: Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.

When Vita and Harold began the task of making the ruined Sissinghurst habitable, one of the first things they did was to knock through the wall from the tower room into the adjoining turret. Today, the octagonal turret room is lined with books from floor to ceiling. Books on plants and gardening, annotated by Harold in pencil and by Vita in coloured pens. Books on earlier writers, or earlier adventurous aristocrats, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Lady Caroline Lamb. Books on the occult or spiritual subjects, like Sir James Frazers classic The Golden Bough. And books on sexuality and gender identity, a hot topic of the 1920s and 30s, such as Havelock Elliss Psychology of Sex and Edward Carpenters The Intermediate Sex, on the cover of which Vita printed the word Middlesex.

Vita at her desk. She always dreamt of living alone in a tower with her books, and at Sissinghurst she fell in love with the bewitched and rosy fountain shooting towards the sky.

The view from Sissinghursts tower shows part of the Yew Walk and the Rose Garden, with the South Cottage where Vita and Harold slept.

Books written by Harold are in the writing room itself. A first copy of his biography of Tennyson, published in 1923, is inscribed as being presented to Vita Sackville-West by her lover Harold Nicolson. They had then been married almost a decade, and would be married for four decades more, their love unimpeded (except on one notable occasion) by the fact that both had affairs with their own sex.

The books Vita kept in her tower at Sissinghurst ranged in subject from gardening to geography, and travel to sexuality.

Beneath the many bookshelves of the turret room is a rough wooden cupboard. In it, after Vitas death, her son Nigel Nicolson found a battered leather Gladstone bag. Earlier, Vita had written to Virginia a laughing apology for sending her letter in an old envelope. She had lost, she said, the small stout key which unlocks not only my reputation but my stationery. For in the cupboard, in the Gladstone bag, Vita had left the memoir she wrote of her frantic affair with Violet Trefusis the one affair which, in the years immediately before she met Virginia, had almost overthrown her marriage.

Vitas relationship with Virginia, which began shortly after, was of a different calibre a relationship in which both Harold Nicolson and Virginias husband Leonard were supportive presences. The bond that endured between those two women was predominantly, though not exclusively, one of the heart, and of the mind.

Vita reverenced Virginias writing. I dont know whether to be dejected or encouraged when I read the works of Virginia Woolf. Dejected because I shall never be able to write like that, or encouraged because somebody can. Virginia was sometimes less complimentary about Vitas sleepwalking servant girl novels. Why she writes, which she does with complete competency and a pen of brass, is a puzzle to me. If I were she, I should merely stride, with 11 Elk hounds behind me, through my ancestral woods.

Today, indeed, Vita is remembered chiefly for the garden she created at Sissinghurst, rather than for the many words she herself spun, while Virginia Woolf appears on any list of modern literary greats. Yet in the late 1920s Vita Sackville-West was the inspiration for one of Virginia Woolfs most enchanting novels.

Orlando celebrates the Vita of the ancestors and the elkhounds, but it celebrates, too, Vitas venturesomeness, her adventures into sexual identity. Together, as well as separately, Vita and Virginia explored the question of what it meant to be a woman. And the story of the closeness they shared gives them both another claim on our attention today.