Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

by Victoria Glendinning

Overview

The Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West.

Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst.

In her Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs. Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780755650439
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	12/13/2022
Pages:	448
Sales rank:	527,114
Product dimensions:	5.15(w) x 7.75(h) x 1.25(d)

About the Author

Victoria Glendinning is a biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. Her biographies include A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography), Jonathan Swift, Leonard Woolf and a biography of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. Her novels include The Grown-Ups, Electricity, Flight and The Butcher's Daughter. She is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a CBE in 1998.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction to the New Edition

Acknowledgements

Family Tree of Sackvilles and Nicolsons

Prologue

Part I: Knole 1892–1913

Part II: Change and Challenge 1913–21

Part III: Explorations 1921–30

Part IV: Sissinghurst 1930–45

Part V: The Enclave and the Tower 1945–62

Notes and Sources

Books by V. Sackville-West

Index

Editorial Reviews

What each of us would look for in an ideal future biographer is what each of us looks for in an ideal doctor: sympathy, trustfulness and acute powers of diagnosis. All these three qualities are here present. Vita would undoubtedly have shared our approval and gratitude” —Sunday Telegraph

“A biography that conceals nothing... gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction” —Observer

“Surely the definitive biography.” —Harold Acton

“Superb... much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience” —Fiona McCarthy, The Times

“It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life... superb” —Dervla Murphy, Irish Times

“Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be” —Country Life

“Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning's Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West” —Guardian

From the Publisher

"Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning’s Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West."

The Guardian

"Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be."

Country Life

"It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life… superb."

Dervla Murphy

"Superb… much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience."

Fiona McCarthy

"Surely the definitive biography."

Harold Acton

"A biography that conceals nothing… gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction."

The Observer

"What each of us would look for in an ideal future biographer is what each of us looks for in an ideal doctor: sympathy, trustfulness and acute powers of diagnosis. All these three qualities are here present. Vita would undoubtedly have shared our approval and gratitude."

Sunday Telegraph