1. Vita Sackville-West published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life.
59 Facts About Vita Sackville-West
1. 2.
Vita Sackville-West was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems.
3.
Vita Sackville-West was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.
4.
Vita Sackville-West wrote a column in The Observer from 1946 to 1961 and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.
5.
Vita Sackville-West was the only child of cousins Victoria Sackville-West and Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville.
6.
The Sackville-West family followed the English aristocracy's inheritance customs, preventing Vita from inheriting Knole upon the death of her father; this was a source of life-long bitterness for her.
7.
Vita Sackville-West did not befriend local children and found it hard to make friends at school.
8.
Vita Sackville-West wrote prolifically at Knole, penning eight full-length novels between 1906 and 1910, ballads and many plays, some in French.
9.
Vita Sackville-West felt herself to be sluggish of mind and she was never at the intellectual heart of her social group.
10.
Vita Sackville-West visited Roma camps and felt herself to be at one with them.
11.
Vita Sackville-West was wooed by Orazio Pucci, son of a distinguished Florentine family; by Lord Granby ; and by Lord Lascelles, among others.
12.
Vita Sackville-West fell in love with Rosamund Grosvenor, who was four years her senior.
13.
Lady Sackville, Vita Sackville-West's mother, invited Rosamund to visit the family at their villa in Monte Carlo.
14.
Vita Sackville-West was more deeply involved with Violet Keppel, daughter of the Hon.
15.
Vita Sackville-West was courted for 18 months by young diplomat Harold Nicolson, whom she found to be a secretive character.
16.
Vita Sackville-West writes that the wooing was entirely chaste and throughout they did not so much as kiss.
17.
In 1913, at age 21, Vita Sackville-West married him in the private chapel at Knole.
18.
Vita Sackville-West was the third secretary at the British Embassy in Constantinople at the time.
19.
Vita Sackville-West saw herself as psychologically divided into two: one side of her personality was more feminine, soft, submissive, and attracted to men while the other side was more masculine, hard, aggressive, and attracted to women.
20.
Vita Sackville-West loved Constantinople, but the duties of a diplomat's wife did not appeal to her.
21.
Vita Sackville-West continued to receive devoted letters from her lover Violet Keppel.
22.
Vita Sackville-West was deeply upset to read of Keppel's engagement to Major Denys Trefusis.
23.
Vita Sackville-West's response was to travel to Paris to see Keppel and persuade her to honour their commitment.
24.
Vita Sackville-West often dressed as a man, styled as Keppel's husband.
25.
In November 1919, while staying at Monte Carlo, Vita Sackville-West wrote that she felt very low, entertaining thoughts of suicide, believing that Nicolson would be better off without her.
26.
From 1925 to 1927, Nicolson lived in Tehran where Vita Sackville-West often visited him.
27.
Vita Sackville-West visited and wrote about the former capital of Isfahan to see the Safavid palaces.
28.
In December 1922, Vita Sackville-West first met Virginia Woolf at a dinner party in London.
29.
Vita Sackville-West greatly admired Woolf's writings, considering her to be the better author.
30.
Vita Sackville-West told Woolf in one letter: "I contrast my illiterate writing with your scholarly one, and I am ashamed".
31.
Woolf purchased a mirror during a trip to France with Vita Sackville-West, saying she felt she could look in a mirror for the first time in her life.
32.
Vita Sackville-West's support gave Woolf greater confidence and helped her cast off her self-image of a sickly semi-recluse.
33.
Vita Sackville-West persuaded Woolf that her nervous ailments had been misdiagnosed, and that she should focus on her own varied intellectual projects; that she must learn to rest.
34.
Vita Sackville-West loved to travel, frequently going to France, Spain and to visit Nicolson in Persia.
35.
Vita Sackville-West supported rearmament while Woolf remained loyal to her pacifism; this contributed to the distancing of their relationship in 1935.
36.
In 1927, Vita Sackville-West had an affair with Mary Garman, a member of the Bloomsbury Group; between 1929 and 1931, she maintained a relationship with Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC Talks Department.
37.
In 1931, Vita Sackville-West was in a menage a trois with journalist Evelyn Irons and Irons's lover, Olive Rinder.
38.
Vita Sackville-West created a new and experimental system of enclosures or rooms, such as the White Garden, Rose Garden, Orchard, Cottage Garden and Nuttery.
39.
Vita Sackville-West innovated single colour-themed gardens and design principles orientating the visitors' experience to discovery and exploration.
40.
Vita Sackville-West took up writing again in 1930 after a six-year break as she needed money to pay for Sissinghurst.
41.
Vita Sackville-West had to pay tuition for her two sons to attend Eton College.
42.
Vita Sackville-West felt she had become a better writer thanks to the mentorship of Woolf.
43.
Vita Sackville-West continued the very popular column until a year before her death, and writing helped to make Sissinghurst one of the most famous and visited gardens in England.
44.
Vita Sackville-West was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal from the Royal Horticultural Society.
45.
Vita Sackville-West wrote that in the future "it will be recognized that many more people of my type do exist than under the present-day system of hypocrisy is commonly admitted".
46.
Vita Sackville-West called for a "spirit of candor" in society that would allow for tolerance of gay and bisexual people.
47.
Vita Sackville-West was fascinated with and often wrote about the Roma people.
48.
The picture Vita Sackville-West held of the Romani was much influenced by orientalism, as the Romani were believed to have originated from India.
49.
Vita Sackville-West was English, but she invented Romani ancestry for herself on the Spanish side of her family, explaining her bohemian behaviour as due to her alleged "Gypsy" descent.
50.
Vita Sackville-West often complained in her letters that Woolf was more interested in writing a fantasy about her than in returning her gestures of affection in the real world.
51.
Vita Sackville-West represents new, progressive values and the male world of work and economic activity, and Evelyn Jarrold represents traditional values and the female world of family ties and social engagements.
52.
Vita Sackville-West befriends the servants of her estate, discovering the lives of people she had previously ignored.
53.
Vita Sackville-West dedicated her poem to her lover Dorothy Wellesley.
54.
Vita Sackville-West won it again in 1933 with her Collected Poems, becoming the only writer to do so twice.
55.
Vita Sackville-West thinks of herself as superior to the farmers who merely work the land without the time or the interest for poetry, all of which make it possible for her to have a deeper appreciation of nature.
56.
In 1947 Vita Sackville-West was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.
57.
Vita Sackville-West died at Sissinghurst in June 1962, aged 70, from abdominal cancer.
58.
Vita Sackville-West was cremated and ashes buried in the family crypt within the church at Withyham, eastern Sussex.
59.
Vita Sackville-West published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her life, listed here:.