Vita Sackville-West Research Articles

Owning a Room of One’s Own: On the Female Self-Construction in All Passion Spent

All Passion Spent is British novelist Vita Sackville-West’s masterpiece, an early work that embodies feminist ideas by telling the story of eighty-eight-year-old Mrs Slane, who rejects her children’s arrangement after her husband’s death and insists on choosing to live alone in a house of her own. The novel demonstrates how women under the patriarchal system are gradually being othered, as well as to get rid of this predicament, and explores the way out for women’s freedom and liberation. This work has been hailed as the novel version of the feminist manifesto A Room of One’s Own. The article mainly focuses on three aspects, namely the loss of the female self, the reconstruction of the female self and the inheritance of the female self in All Passion Spent, to explore the feminist thoughts in this novel. Vita not only intends to dig out the material and spiritual dilemmas faced by women but also her exploration and construction of female subjective status and female self, which provides women with a certain amount of spiritual power to know themselves, remake themselves, and realize their self-worth.

‘Forget it’s between two women’: negotiating a queer Virginia Woolf in Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia

ABSTRACT This article explores the gendered authorial negotiations at work in adaptations of Virginia Woolf’s works and celebrity image in screen media, focusing on a case study of Vita and Virginia (2018) directed by British filmmaker Chanya Button. The article discusses Button’s film’s textual and promotional strategies, considering how it adapts both Eileen Atkins’ 1995 play of the same name and original historical correspondence between Woolf and the writer Vita Sackville-West. It draws upon critical models of literary celebrity, the celebrity biopic, and the concept of adaptation networks to argue that Button’s strategic choices in cinematography and details of mise-en-scène formulate an ‘archival’ gaze in order to forge connections between Woolf and Button as gendered authorial and celebrity personas. This creates a visual dialogue between women authors across media and time. The article suggests that Button’s processes of adaptation work to destabilise the essential queerness of the epistolary material and literary celebrity images as a result of this archival technique. This produces a representation of queer desire that distances body and mind and privileges an intellectual romance above a physical, desiring and embodied queer sexuality. This ultimately reinforces rather than reframes or reimagines a popular image of Woolf’s literary celebrity, focused instead on her status as a melancholic, suffering figure.

Vita Sackville-West’s Botanical Transmissions: From Green Words of Advice in The Observer to Rhizomatic Networks

‘You really are a public benefactor’, Vita Sackville-West was told in 1951 by her editor from the Observer after he read some of the letters she received following up the weekly horticultural columns she wrote between 1946 and 1961. Drawing on these botanical articles, I wish to highlight how Sackville-West circulated her own ‘gardening philosophy » through the press, ultimately claiming her ‘territory’ compared to other gardening correspondents. Transmitting botanical knowledge stemmed from her own experiments in the gardens of Long Barn and Sissingurst, Kent. Such practicality reveals a humble approach: not only did Sackville-West embrace being an amateur, but she also aimed at reaching out to anyone interested in botany. Ultimately, I intend to underline how Sackville-West seeded networks of transmission and knowledge through her chronicles. Not only did she sometimes call for the reader’s advice and open her garden to visitors, but transmission became truly reciprocal as she was sent material by her readers, be it seeds, pieces of advice, or gardening reports.

A POLITICAL ‘HUMBUG’: DELIAN ANTIQUITIES AT SISSINGHURST CASTLE

In 1936 the author, politician and garden designer Harold Nicolson bought four, round antique altars and a Corinthian capital from the sale of Shanganagh Castle, Co Wicklow. Nicolson and his wife, Vita Sackville-West, placed these marbles in a garden compartment at Sissinghurst that was intended to evoke the landscape and antiquities of the Cycladic island of Delos. These are among the most important antiquities in the collections of the National Trust, yet their provenance and significance has been obscured by their presumed status as ‘mere’ ornaments to the celebrated gardens at Sissinghurst Castle. This paper traces the provenance of this group of antiquities back to Delos and their discovery by a hero of the Greek War of Independence. Historic context for Vita and Harold’s use of the altars as adornments to their garden will be examined in the context of earlier use of similar Delian altars in earlier garden design – the seventeenth-century ‘garden museum’ at Arundel House, Strand, London, or the eighteenth-century gardens at Wrest Park. Finally, entry of the Sissinghurst altars into British collections will be examined through a political lens and through Nicolson’s philhellenism.

Power and passivity in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent

Power and passivity in Vita Sackville-West's All Passion Spent

Du jardin clos d’Elizabeth von Arnim au jardin Arts and Crafts de Vita Sackville-West : l’être enraciné au jardin?

Cet article porte sur Elizabeth von Arnim et Vita Sackville-West et leur passion pour leurs jardins respectifs de Nassenheide et Sissinghurst. Non seulement les deux auteures entretenaient des parcelles ainsi que des parterres de fleurs, mais elles cultivaient également les dualismes. Von Arnim oppose constamment la demeure au jardin dans Elizabeth and her German Garden (1898), affirmant que la vie domestique est rythmée d’impératifs sociaux et genrés. Sackville-West, quant à elle, perçoit son propre jardin comme un « sanctuaire » et s’emploie à jardiner, activité considérée par ses contemporains comme la chasse gardée des hommes. De fait, les deux auteures-jardinières transgressent des perceptions patriarcales de l’espace, afin de redéfinir les contours du jardin. Cet article a donc pour objet l’approche jardinière adoptée par von Arnim et Sackville-West. En reproduisant les codes du manuel de jardinage, von Arnim dresse des listes de fleurs qu’elle plante dans son jardin, qui semble être un espace clos. Chez Sackville-West, le jardin paraît cependant moins clos qu’ouvert, de par la philosophie du mouvement Arts and Crafts qui informe le lieu et fait de la demeure et du jardin une unité. Bien qu’elles s’illustrent en horticulture, von Arnim et Sackville-West n’ont pas la même marge de manœuvre : tandis que Sackville-West trace son propre territoire, von Arnim dépend de jardiniers. La page permet alors de mettre en perspective l’accès au jardin : si Sackville-West ouvre le jardin à son lectorat, la prose fleurie de von Arnim construit un certain nombre de frontières au fil du texte. Le lecteur se heurte à une liste de fleurs qui fait du jardin un lieu opaque et touffu. Cette étude explore les liens qui se tissent entre sujet et jardin ; elle démontre que le jardin n’est pas seulement aménagé par le sujet, mais que ce dernier porte également le jardin en lui. Ainsi, l’enracinement au sein du jardin se révèle être une façon d’encadrer l’identité, et d’accorder, ou de refuser, l’entrée au jardin et l’accès au sujet.

Motifs of homosexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

AbstractTo avoid the stigma of societal dissaproval, love for somebody of the same sex has often been hidden from the declinatory views of the public; however, it has also been secretively transcribed into a broad spectrum of art. Virginia Woolf embroidered her homosexuality into the grotesque lines of Orlando. At the time, Woolf was engaged in an intense lesbian relationship with author Vita Sackville-West, who served as a model for the work’s main character. Woolf proclaimed her masterpiece “A Biography”, mirroring the duality of her own and Vita’s character, the perpetual beauty of the book’s hero, enduring for centuries, and his subtle gender transition. In the paper, we discuss some of the homosexual motifs in Orlando, which were formed by different influences, including the queer movement, ancient Greek literature and feminism.

Fictionalised Biography as a New Voice for Women’s Lives in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Flush

Virginia Woolf reflects on the vulnerability of women’s voices in her essay Three Guineas (1938). More specifically, in Three Guineas, Woolf uses the term ‘influence’, which, according to her, women lack because they have neither financial power nor education, rendering them inaudible. She argues that women remain ‘outsider[s]’ with ‘no right to speak’ (Woolf 2015, 116). By the end of the essay, the reader realises that Woolf has transformed this condition into a form of resistance by refusing to occupy a position in the male-dominated public sphere. In the 1920s, Woolf’s awareness of the inaudibility of women’s lives made her want to write a woman’s life herself, leading to Orlando and then to Flush. Both these fantasised biographies portray women: Orlando (1928) is a fantastical biography of her close friend Vita Sackville-West, and Flush (1933) tells the story of Elizabeth Barret Browning’s life through the biography of her dog. In contrast, Roger Fry is nonfictional. Why did Woolf choose to fictionalise her ‘woman’ biographies? This paper argues that, similarly to Woolf’s unconventional choice in Three Guineas to remain an ‘outsider’ to better fight gender inequality and militarism, fiction can be considered a political tool in that it allows for an alternative mode of biographical representation. Not only does Woolf’s use of fiction enable her to compensate for the lack of visibility of her feminine subjects, but she also develops a writing strategy capable of delivering an innovative, politicized representation of the women she depicted.

“Passengeriality”: Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran and the May Coup in Poland

Travellers’ discourses thrive on anecdotes. According to Stephen Greenblatt, they interpose between a series of similar, narrow experiences and a wider pattern they may indicate. This analysis deciphers how an anecdote from Passenger to Teheran (1926), the travelogue written by Vita Sackville-West, is not just an isolated flash but can indicate larger representational strategies. In her epic journey Vita Sackville-West travelled from London to Egypt, India, Persia, and then back to England, through Russia, Poland and Prussia; by boat, train and car. In the episode which is subject to a detailed analysis, the travellers were stopped at the Polish–East Prussian border and forced to leave the train. The consequences of what could be just an anecdote about an “unwelcome incident”, reverberate – as it turns out – far beyond the incidental because what is at stake at almost every border incident is a socio–political, geo–political, military and ideological reality. No matter whether such events are presented as adventures or in all seriousness, each border trouble has consequences beyond any “local moment”. To disclose some of the less obvious implications of the Polish–Prussian passage in Vita Sackville-West’s book is the aim of this essay.

“Passengeriality”: Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran and the May Coup in Poland

Travellers’ discourses thrive on anecdotes. According to Stephen Greenblatt, they interpose between a series of similar, narrow experiences and a wider pattern they may indicate. This analysis deciphers how an anecdote from Passenger to Teheran (1926), the travelogue written by Vita Sackville-West, is not just an isolated flash but can indicate larger representational strategies. In her epic journey Vita Sackville-West travelled from London to Egypt, India, Persia, and then back to England, through Russia, Poland and Prussia; by boat, train and car. In the episode which is subject to a detailed analysis, the travellers were stopped at the Polish–East Prussian border and forced to leave the train. The consequences of what could be just an anecdote about an “unwelcome incident”, reverberate – as it turns out – far beyond the incidental because what is at stake at almost every border incident is a socio–political, geo–political, military and ideological reality. No matter whether such events are presented as adventures or in all seriousness, each border trouble has consequences beyond any “local moment”. To disclose some of the less obvious implications of the Polish–Prussian passage in Vita Sackville-West’s book is the aim of this essay.

Od własności bytu do przedmiotu estetycznego: studium piękna w "Gottfried Künstler: A Mediæval Story" Vity Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West was an English Modernist writer, poet and gardener. In her short narrative Gottfried Künstler: A Mediæval Story (1932), a skater-artist Gottfried loses his memory due to an accident on ice and, as a result, becomes some-body else. The aim of this article is to prove that the work explores the development of the philosophy of beauty: negating classic theories, according to which beauty is grounded in being or nature, the story heads towards the contemporary concept of the aesthetic object, saying that beauty stems from art. The analysis of the story is divided into three parts: the exploration of being, the study of nature, and the discussion of the concept of the aesthetic object.

Farming and Agriculture in Literary Modernism

This article seeks to cultivate a better understanding of the influence of agriculture and farming on literary modernism. It begins with a brief analysis of agriculture in the work of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, before exploring the significance of farming in relation to Ford Madox Ford, John Middleton Murry and T. S. Eliot. Following on from this initial consideration of literary modernism and agriculture, it then proceeds to investigate Ezra Pound's position within environmental modernism, through exploring the influence of the organic husbandry movement on his social and political criticism. In particular, it examines Pound's active engagement with notable organic magazines of the period including the New English Weekly (to which Pound contributed over 200 pieces between 1932–1940 and authored its ‘American Notes’ in 1935) and the Townsman. Through an examination of Pound's affiliation with the organic movement, it will illustrate that their mutual agricultural concerns were invariably connected to the wider financial considerations of economic and monetary reform, including the social credit theories of Major C. H. Douglas.

‘In Process of Fabrication’: Queer Time and Trans* Selves in <em>Orlando</em> and <em>Transparent</em>

Virginia Woolf wrote the novel, Orlando (1928), during a decade of radical rethinking of gender, sexuality and models of selfhood. This essay considers some of the many contexts for Orlando in the 1920s, including Woolf's relationship with Vita Sackville-West; the sexological theories of Magnus Hirschfeld, founder of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin; and the unconventional lives of members of the Bloomsbury circle, many of whom were aware of and sceptical about sexological developments in Berlin as well as in the UK. The essay interprets Orlando in the lineage of transgender readings of the novel, and follows J. Halberstam's use of the term trans* to indicate the novel's refusal to ‘situate transition in relation to a destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity’. While the character Orlando miraculously transforms from a man into a woman, the modernist narration illustrates that the self is perpetually in process, in transition, and cannot be corralled into binary gender categories. The plot of the novel challenges normative ‘reproductive time’ in favour of 'queer time' through its fantastical qualities, including experiments with temporality such as compression, elongation, and demonstration of interior vs. social time. The essay ends by reading Orlando in conjunction with Jill Soloway's television series, Transparent (2014-19), to demonstrate how Woolf's novel prepares for contemporary investigations and representations of trans* worlds on the cusp of the 2020s.

The Women’s Land Army (1944): Vita Sackville-West’s Non-Fictional Wartime Writing

Recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in Vita Sackville-West’s life, with the publication of a new biography by Matthew Dennison (Behind the Mask, 2014), about thirty years after Victoria Glendinning’s authoritative one, Vita (1983). Her love life and her skills as a gardener have been explored by critics such as Sarah Raven, Suzanne Raitt or Karyn Sproles. However, her fiction and her non-fiction remain underexplored by academic criticism even as her novels The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), her award-winning poem The Land (1926), her travel writing (Twelve Days in Persia, 1927) and her work on her garden, Sissinghurst, remain quite popular.This paper means to focus on a little-known work of non-fiction Vita Sackville-West published towards the end of the Second World War, The Women’s Land Army (1944). It came out two years after Grand Canyon (1942) – a work of speculative fiction staging the victory of the Nazis in the United States after they had won the Second Word War – and three years after Country Notes in Wartime (1941), a collection of essays that were first published in The New Statesman and Nation from August 1939 until 1941. The Women’s Land Army draws our attention to the lives of the women who joined the WLA during the Second World War. The status of this book is discussed here: is it mere propaganda, a historical document, or a piece of modernist writing? Raising such questions about the status of this non-fictional narrative helps to place the author within a modernist literary context.

Supposing the Germans “Defeated Great Britain in the Present War”: Freud’s Death Drive on Three Levels of Narrative Communication in Vita Sackville-West’s Grand Canyon

Supposing the Germans “Defeated Great Britain in the Present War”: Freud’s Death Drive on Three Levels of Narrative Communication in Vita Sackville-West’s Grand Canyon

Museum quality: Katherine Philips, Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville-West and the queer early/modern

ABSTRACTThis essay tracks the poetics and erotics of queer early/modern association as a discontinuous it-narrative. Beginning with Keats’ well-known letter in praise of Katherine Philips and the documented bookplate of Violet Trefusis in a notable copy of Philips’ Poems (1667), I retell the story of an infamous modernist sapphic scandal for my own purposes: the tragic history of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West viewed through their privileged immersion in Renaissance places, objects and texts. Continuing this line of sapphic assemblage, I explore forms of attachment imbricated in the everyday life and textual practices of these queer early/modern lovers and their readers. Sometimes fragmentary and speculative, overwhelmingly generative or done to death, these bits and pieces of textual evidence disclose a ‘queer deep love’.

Melancholia in Vita Sackville-West’s Hogarth Press Novels

Author Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) has been understood as an author who celebrates in both prose and verse the institution of the English country estate, in part because of her personal attachment to her family’s Kentish house, Knole. The four popular novels that Vita Sackville-West published with the Hogarth Press during the early 1930s—The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), Family History (1932), and The Dark Island (1934)—are no exception, save for their particular focus on the agnatic inheritance of both aristocratic title and estate along with the female subject’s exclusion from that system. While the first pair of novels entertain the possibility of mediated success in obtaining the loved object, either the estate itself or an effective substitute, the latter works become melancholically resigned to the restrictions that effectively disinherit the aristocratic eldest daughter. This escalating melancholia, often Freudian in its narrative presentation, directs the novels’ successive focus less toward the act of mourning the loss of the country house, of some version of Knole either real or imagined, and more to the vexing inability to both acknowledge the disinheritance and mourn the loss. In fact, the melancholic dynamic threatens to erase each of Sackville-West’s protagonists, and as her novels detail the advancing impact of this disinheritance, the female characters face literal extinction. Thus, the celebratory stance so often attributed to Sackville-West is, in these works, a far more critical and essentially abject perspective that demands compensation.

Bloomsbury in Berlin: Vita Sackville-West's Seducers in Ecuador on the German Literary Marketplace

Vita Sackville-West is now best known as Virginia Woolf's muse, as a horticultural journalist, and as the creator of Sissinghurst's gardens. Yet during her lifetime, her works were translated energetically into German and she was cast in some German literary journals as a leading figure on the European interwar and post-war literary scene. This essay analyses how Sackville-West's short story, Seducers in Ecuador (Hogarth Press, 1924), made its 1929 debut in Germany as ‘Verführer in Ecuador’ in the journal Die neue Rundschau [The New Review]. This offers an interesting case study not only of how a work could change its medium through translation – from a free-standing novella to a short story in a literary journal – but also its context through the new set of juxtapositions and cultural associations it acquired by being absorbed into German periodical culture. The function of small magazines in promoting new ideas or forms of art has been well researched in the context of British modernist writing, but little attention has been paid to the reception of translations of such work in European journals. Yet they often functioned as important promotional conduits and were influential in shaping how authors gained footholds in foreign markets.

Relatos de viagens de escritores europeus a Persépolis: Vita Sackville-West, Robert Byron, Annemarie Schwarzenbach Nicolas Bouvier e Higinio Polo

In this essay I use some models linked to the geocritic approach in reading texts by authors so different as Vita Sackville-West, Robert Byron, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Nicolas Bouvier and Higino Polo dealing with their visits to Persepolis in Persia/Iran. I will consider their respective travelling and writing contexts. The texts testimony the links between the geographical space and their observers, provoking an individuation of the space, always settled between the reality itself and the subjective apprehension and the fiction linked to the writing process. The landscapes offer their margins, their resistances provoking a reaction by the traveler and writer, thus creating a new textual space. These will be read in different contexts, other literary spaces, which do not have to correspond exactly to the spaces interiorized by the authors, but created in a dialogue through texts.

The Bloomsbury Short Story

This article examines the importance of the short story form for the Bloomsbury writers and how their aesthetic theories influenced its composition, structure and content. Often overlooked in the history of the genre, the Bloomsbury short story has a claim to be an important aspect of the twentieth-century accounts of the short story form. Attention to Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, E.M. Forster and others, such as Arnold Bennett and D.H. Lawrence, indicates their widespread engagement with the genre and the ways in which they treated it from fragmented conversation, as in Woolf’s “The String Quartet,” to Foster’s employment of linear narrative detail in “The Road from Colonus.” Formal experiments with syntax, imagery, and vocabulary and prose rhythm exhibit the seriousness of the short story for Bloomsbury authors. The influence of the Russians is particularly important with Chekov dominating the reading and writing of Woolf, Mansfield, Lawrence and others. The very form of publication—mostly journals and magazines—is also crucial in shaping the length and structure of the short story. Attention to experimentation, as well as renewal, of the genre balances the impact of the short story on writers today and the question of a successor to the efforts and achievements of Bloomsbury’s authors. A reading of the short stories of Julian Barnes explores this possibility.