Books by Vita Sackville-West
Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings
Aristocrat, novelist, essayist, traveler, and lover of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West lived a fascinating and daring life on the periphery of the Bloomsbury circle. She wrote in an astounding variety of genres, including travel narrative, historical and literary studies, poetry, fiction, and essays, and is probably best known or her novels, The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and incomparable writings about English country houses and gardens. Here, for the first time, is an anthology that represents the full expanse of her interests and styles. Over half of the works, including intimate diaries and a dream notebook, have never been published. Edited by a foremost expert on the Bloomsbury circle, Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings provides the best and most accessible introduction to this unique writer.
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A Note of Explanation: An Undiscovered Story from Queen Mary's Dollhouse (Historical Stories, Stories from Famous Authors, Literary Books)
A Note of Explanation is a previously unknown work by iconic writer Vita Sackville-West. Written in 1922, it was recently rediscovered as a miniature book in Queen Mary's dollhouse in Windsor Castle. Witty and stylish, the story recounts the antics of a time-traveling sprite who inhabits the dollhouse. This illustrated, cloth-bound edition presents the story for the first time since 1924. Lovers of literature and history will rejoice in this irresistible collector's item and one-of-a-kind literary gift.
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The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
by Vita Sackville-West, Louise De Salvo, Mitchell Leaska
After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West, a British novelist married to diplomat Harold Nicolson, and Virginia Woolf began an intense and passionate relationship that lasted until Woolf’s death in 1941. In their correspondence, the women leave no aspect of their lives untouched: they record daily dramas, bits of gossip, the strains and pleasures of writing, and their mutual joy in each other’s company. This edition includes over 500 letters spanning 20 years; features 25 photographs, eight new to this edition; and has a new introduction and bibliography.
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Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: Love Letters (Vintage Classics)
by Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West
With an original introduction by Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home and creator of the "Bechdel Test."
"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 has all gone. I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way."
In 1922, the relatively unknown writer Virginia Woolf met the popular author, aristocrat—and notorious Sapphist—Vita Sackville-West. Virginia didn’t think much of Vita’s conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. In her diary she wrote: "But could I ever know her?" It was to be the start of nearly 20 years of correspondence, flirtation, literary inspiration, and deep friendship. Virginia would write her most playful novel, Orlando, for and about Vita, and their close bond would end only with Virginia’s tragic death in 1941.
Here is the true love story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, told through selected letters and diary entries, allowing us to hear these women’s complex and constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Passionate, witty, and lyrical, their writing gives us a vivid sense of their extraordinary lives: from Vita’s travels across the globe with her foreign diplomat husband, to Virginia’s gossip about parties with the Bloomsbury set; from their shared love of dogs and gardens, to their grief and fear as war breaks out across Europe.
These letters bring to life a relationship that—even a hundred years later—feels radical, relatable, and vital.
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English Country Houses
“There is nothing quite like the English country house anywhere else in the world.” So pronounces Vita Sackville-West in the beautiful essay that opens English Country Houses, a brief history of the English country house from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. People may know of Sackville West’s novels, or her passion for gardening, or her relationship with Virginia Woolf, but few know of her efforts to boost the morale of her beloved England during World War II.
Sackville-West spent her childhood years at Knole House, a stately country home that deeply influenced her life and work. In entertaining and accessible prose she brings a deep affection to the task of boosting the morale of a country beset by war. This volume in the Britain in Pictures series is a love letter to the elegant homes of the English countryside and served as a balm to a besieged country. Writing at the height of the Blitz, as cities lay in smoldering ruins after relentless bombing, Sackville-West demonstrates a yearning for the safety provided by these exceptional buildings.
We discover the architecture of the stately houses, with details conveyed in such entertaining and vivid prose that the buildings and surrounding areas come to life. The story is not just about the buildings, however, but also about the people who built and lived in them, from the most common of squires to the highest-born kings and queens. Equal parts architectural history and cultural history, this insider’s view is quintessentially British. Its elegant package, with a ribbon for bookmarking, makes it the perfect gift for any Anglophile.
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Twelve Days in Persia: Across the Mountains with the Bakhtiari Tribe (Tauris Parke Paperbacks)
A year after Vita Sackville-West first travelled to Iran - a journey described in the classic Passenger to Teheran - she returned to the land that had so captured her imagination. For twelve days, with her husband and three friends, she embarked on a difficult and often dangerous journey through the rugged and wildly-beautiful Bakhtiari Mountains of south-western Iran. It was a landscape that affected Sackville-West profoundly, inspiring what is arguably some of her most lyrical prose; in the same year she wrote her acclaimed poem, The Land. Interwoven with her magical descriptions of the landscape, she also wrote of her encounters with the Bakhtiari tribe as they embarked on their epic annual migration. The way of life of the Bakhtiari, a people claiming descent from Fereydun, hero of the Shahnameh, has now all but disappeared, the result of persecution by Reza Shah and the encroachments and temptations of modernity. Sackville-West's descriptions of their everyday life are thus a valuable and illuminating portrayal a vanished world. A book that reveals as much about its author as the country through which she travelled, Twelve Days in Persia is a classic of travel writing on Iran and a must-have for all Bloomsbury devotees.
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The Edwardians (Vintage Classics)
An instant bestseller when it was published in 1930, this glittering satire of Edwardian high society features a privileged brother and sister torn between tradition and a chance at an independent life.
Sebastian is young, handsome, moody, and the heir to Chevron, a vast and opulent ducal estate. He feels a deep love for the countryside and for his patrimony, but he loathes the frivolous social world his mother and her shallow friends represent. At one of his mother’s decadent house parties, Sebastian meets two people who shake his sense of self: Leonard Anquetil, a lowborn arctic explorer, who questions his mode of living; and Lady Roehampton, a married society beauty with a string of lovers, who breaks his heart. When Sebastian reaches the brink of despair, it is his self-possessed younger sister, Viola, who opens for them both a gateway to another world.
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All Passion Spent (Vintage Classics)
Irreverently funny and surprisingly moving, All Passion Spent is the story of a woman who discovers who she is just before it is too late.
After the death of elder statesman Lord Slane—a former prime minister of Great Britain and viceroy of India—everyone assumes that his eighty-eight-year-old widow will slowly fade away in her grief, remaining as proper, decorative, and dutiful as she has been her entire married life. But the deceptively gentle Lady Slane has other ideas. First she defies the patronizing meddling of her children and escapes to a rented house in Hampstead. There, to her offspring’s utter amazement, she revels in her new freedom, recalls her youthful ambitions, and gathers some very unsuitable companions—who reveal to her just how much she had sacrificed under the pressure of others’ expectations.
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