Vita Sackville-West’s childhood home, Knole, obsessed her, as did the fact that she couldn’t inherit it. The rules of primogeniture meant that the vast stately home went, instead, to a male cousin. Her love for, and loss of Knole had a strong influence on some of her works. [1]
Vita Sackville-West was a British writer, poet, and gardener, who was born on 9 March 1892, at Knole House in Kent, England. Knole, an ancestral home traced back to the Elizabethan writer Thomas Sackville, who is credited to have written the first English play in blank verse – Gorboduc, with Thomas Norton in 1561. She was the only child of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, the third Baron Sackville, and his wife Victoria.
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, known as called Vita, spent most of her early childhood at Knole House, a large country estate with a rich history. Her early years were marked by a privileged upbringing, but her parents’ marriage was unhappy, and they lived mostly separate lives. Young Vita was often left to her own devices and developed a strong imagination with a love of nature, spending much of her time exploring the gardens and grounds of Knole.
Brought up by nurses and governesses, Vita was a secretive, imaginative child. She spoke French by the age of seven and wrote poems, plays, and historical novels. Her parents disapproved of her concentration on writing, fearing she would become eccentric and too intellectually inclined, but Vita ignored their admonishment and composed three plays and a novel between 1906 and 1908, all in French. At age 12, she was sent to boarding school in Germany and later attended finishing school in Paris, where she developed a love of literature and the arts.
Sackville-West made her debut in 1910 and promptly had a series of relationships with both men and women. She was courted for 18 months by young diplomat Harold Nicolson, whom she found to be a secretive character, and in 1913, at the age of 21, they married. The couple had two children together and remained married for the rest of their lives, despite both having numerous same-sex affairs. Vita had a long and passionate relationship with the novelist Virginia Woolf.
A prolific writer, Sackville-West produced a wide range of works including novels, biographies, poetry, and gardening books, all characterized by her remarkable versatility and ability to capture the beauty and complexity of the world.