PART V

The Land and the Garden

‘The deepest roots of all are those one finds in one’s own home, among one’s own belongings.’

Vita to Ben Nicolson, 25 March 1932

‘IT WAS THE Sleeping Beauty’s castle with a vengeance, if you liked to see it with a romantic eye; but if you also looked at it with a realistic eye you saw that Nature run wild was not quite so romantic as you thought,’ Vita wrote in the autumn of 1950.¹ Her subject was her home of two decades, Sissinghurst Castle.

Vita first saw Sissinghurst on 4 April 1930, with Dorothy Wellesley, whose land agent Donald Beale had alerted her to its sale, and a thirteen-year-old Nigel. It goes without saying that she saw it with a romantic eye. April habitually inspired Vita to eulogy. It was the month when the Kentish country, ‘my own county’, looked ‘absurdly like itself’: ‘Cherry, plum, pear and thorn whiten the orchards and the hedgerows; lambs frolic; the banks are full of violets and primroses; the whole landscape displays itself as an epitome of everything fresh and innocent.’² Vita had recently bought four new fields at Long Barn; she had also learnt in March of a threat to Long Barn’s privacy in the form of a proposed chicken farm on land immediately adjacent.

There was nothing fresh at Sissinghurst in the meagre sunshine of that April afternoon: it was cold and muddy and wet. It had been for sale for two years: the rot had set in long before. In an instant, Vita fell ‘flat in love’. ‘Contact with beauty, for me, is direct and immediate,’ she wrote.³ Transfixed by a tower of pinkish Tudor brick, ‘like a bewitched and rosy fountain [pointing] towards the sky’, she told a sceptical Nigel that here was somewhere they would be happy.⁴ She telephoned Harold ‘to say she [had] seen the ideal house – a place in Kent near Cranbrook’, some twenty miles from Long Barn and Knole.⁵ For the simple reason that she did not see it like that, she did not describe to him with any accuracy the two tired cottages, the tower shorn of the adjoining buildings it had once adorned, the entrance arch with its shabby flanking ranges, the rusty bicycles and iron bedsteads that choked the moat, the woodland dark and overgrown. Her affections would never waver.

Vita was in a mood to fall in love with Tudor ruins. The emotional tumults of the last decade were fleetingly quelled; in her romantic life she had achieved stasis, a moment of calm. In all her relationships – with Violet, Dottie, Virginia, Mary and Hilda – intoxication lay behind her; Geoffrey Scott had died of pneumonia the previous August, alone in New York. Her attachment to Virginia ran deepest. Now, as she had written to Mary in a different context, Vita had begun to crave privacy above all: she described it as constantly under attack from ‘myriads of noisy urgencies’.⁶ ‘I shun all voices, shrink from every task,’ Vita had written in a sonnet to Mary included in King’s Daughter. She wanted to be alone. Where better than in a tower, surrounded by 450 acres of Kentish greensward?

Four weeks earlier, Vita had finished The Edwardians. Two years had passed since her father’s death and her final departure from Knole. Her novel was a symbolic undertaking, though she did not reflect on it as such and we should resist assuming that its completion provided her with closure or resolution; there would be no resolution to Vita’s misery at Knole’s loss. The Edwardians was a paean of sorts to an idealised version of her own upbringing. It celebrated not only the setting of her childhood in its fictionalised Knole, complete with heraldic leopards, faded tapestries and broad expanses of roof, but its ideological landscape too: that ‘good system’ of ‘a good understanding between class and class’, a feudal order of inherited overlordship described by Sebastian in reactionary mode as currently being destroyed by ‘too many people … too much industrialism’.⁷ Sebastian surely spoke for Vita.

Like much of her fiction, The Edwardians was an exercise in make-believe. She had spent busy days researching in the London Library; diligently she had applied herself to recreating the below-stairs hierarchies she remembered so vividly; she had plundered her memories of corsets, jewels and table settings, of Christmas presents for the estate children and even of George V’s coronation, which she had attended with her father – all in the interests of verisimilitude in this novel inspired by Orlando. But in the end, while Orlando offered its admiring audience a celebration of Vita, The Edwardians attempted instead no more than a picturesque divertissement and, again, an explanation of Vita for Vita’s benefit. The novel began as a whim – ‘Such a joke it will be,’ Vita told Virginia in February 1929:⁸ she proved incapable of taking either Knole or herself less than seriously. Writing was not an act of exorcism: Vita was as much in thrall to Knole as she had ever been. As Eddy Sackville-West wrote in his novel, The Ruin, published the following year, the house exercised a peculiar power over its children: ‘The pictures – the countless pictures – the china, the carving, the silver, the gold, the furniture – all possessed a composite soul with which to rule their masters.’⁹ Later The Edwardians embarrassed Vita. Even with the solace of Orlando, it did nothing to lessen the pangs she felt about expulsion from her personal Eden.

On publication, however, The Edwardians did increase Vita’s spiritual ownership of the great house she had lost for ever on Lionel’s death. In the minds of the reading public, it reaffirmed her ‘possession’ of Knole, which she had established with Knole and the Sackvilles and Virginia had consolidated with Orlando. The novel also offered a partial verdict on her relationship with Violet. Vita was thinking of Mrs Keppel and Victoria when she described the older generation as ‘envious, spiteful and mercenary; arrogant and cold. As for us, their children, they leave us in complete ignorance of life, passing on to us only the ideas they think we should hold, and treat us with the utmost ruthlessness if we fail to conform.’¹⁰

Up to a point, Vita recognised her careful illusion for what it was. She also came to see that the Knole she had lost was in the process of being lost in another sense; that knowledge was anything but a comfort. On 30 May 1929, she recorded in her diary a trip to London with Eddy. He told her about the imminent sale of Hoppner’s portrait of the three children of the 3rd Duke of Dorset to Thomas Lamont of New York for £65,000. There would be other sales and other losses, including the Flemish tapestries depicting scenes of the Passion of Christ from Knole’s Chapel. Hoppner’s portrait had inspired page and bridesmaid costumes for Vita’s wedding: it was among her favourite of the Knole paintings. The tapestries had served as the backcloth to her marriage to Harold on a bright October afternoon two decades earlier. It was as if Vita’s memories were being dismantled, the stage-set of her life plundered and dispersed. For all its criticism of turn-of-the-century moral vacuity, The Edwardians celebrates an unpillaged Knole, an idyllic vision unsullied by rich New Yorkers or the outstretched arms of American museums (on 3 October 1929 the tapestries entered the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston).

In the mud of Sissinghurst, in a tract of Wealden Kent unspoiled by ‘too many people … too much industrialism’, Vita found a new focus for her romanticism. For her, Sissinghurst was indeed ‘the Sleeping Beauty’s castle with a vengeance’: she hoped it would never awaken to the full horror of the present, and its attraction lay in its ability to transport her into its timeless dream world. It became the tower she had told Victoria she longed for, somewhere to be alone with her books; like St Barbara’s tower, it became her sanctuary. Sissinghurst was a refuge from a world in which even Knole was vulnerable, a world of chicken farms and invasive new developments, a surrogate but not a replacement for the home of which she claimed as late as 1943 to be ‘too greatly moved by the merest thought of it to write or think of it with … objectivity’.¹¹ It was an appropriate setting for an existence Vita repeatedly rationalised through her own private myth-making and fables. As Vita would later describe gardening in wartime, her engagement with Sissinghurst was an exercise in ‘daring to find a world in a lost world,/ A little world, a little perfect world’.¹² Vita’s tower acquired the status of metaphor made reality. In a review of her Collected Poems, published by Leonard and Virginia in 1933, the New Statesman described Vita’s poetry as ‘a frontier tower on the border of a land that we are leaving behind. That land is the England which is vanishing; the England of a ripe and comely rural civilisation.’ Vita’s agreement was unqualified; in her tower she would hold on to her own (part-fictionalised) version of vanishing England.

Vita acted quickly. The next day, 5 April, she took Harold and Ben to inspect; two days later, she and Harold returned alone. Externally there was no garden, nothing but an old quince tree with ‘flat, pink-white blossoms’ and a ‘shrubby, woody old rose’.¹³ They discovered a nutwalk and Harold’s enthusiasm grew. The buildings which became the Nicolsons’ house were ruins. Euphemistically the sales particulars described them as ‘picturesque’: at first sight Harold labelled them ‘big, broken down and sodden’. The only liveable space on offer was mid-Victorian: Castle Farmhouse, with ten bedrooms, ‘well-matured grounds with lawn and rhododendrons’, walls ‘well-clothed with choice creepers’ and views of ‘the Towers of Sissinghurst Castle in the background’.¹⁴ It never crossed Vita’s mind to live there. Castle Farmhouse was ‘that horrid farmhouse’ in which she refused to sleep even during Sissinghurst’s restoration.¹⁵ For Vita the background became the foreground.

Primitive and derelict, the castle itself – last remnants of a large Tudor house built around a courtyard – had most recently offered patchy shelter to families of farm labourers. Vita’s assessment did not spare their feelings. ‘The slum-like effect produced by both man and Nature, was squalid to a degree. There was nothing but a dreadful mess of old chicken houses and wire chicken runs; broken down … fences; rubbish dumps where cottagers had piled their tins, their bottles, their rusty ironmongery and their broken crockery for perhaps half a century; old cabbage stalks; and a tangle of weeds everywhere.’¹⁶ The central gateway and the tower which today symbolise Sissinghurst were described by the agents as in passable repair;¹⁷ photographs show broken windows on the first floor of the tower but little other evidence of decay. Referring to this assortment of mismatched, apparently purposeless, structures, the surveyor instructed by Meynell & Pemberton, the Sackville solicitors, stated: ‘I understand that Mrs Nicolson proposes to occupy [these].’¹⁸ The dominant note was one of astonishment. Unlike Vita, the surveyor did not see the resemblance to Knole, with its courtyards, arches and towers, its leisurely unfolding of views, its promise of enclosure, of gates barred against the world; did not see, as Virginia and Leonard used to say to Vita, that she was ‘only really comfortable in a castle’.¹⁹

Vita and Harold spent most of April debating their purchase. Although Vita’s decision was instinctive, Harold vacillated. The shocked reaction of his mother, visiting in a downpour, proved a setback. Subsequently other early visitors would echo Lady Carnock’s reservations. Harold’s lover Raymond Mortimer remembered thinking Sissinghurst ‘a gloomy place in hideous flat country, with commonplace cottages and no view, [we] couldn’t think why they wanted it’; Virginia Woolf described ‘Vita’s tower; lovely pink brick; but like Knole, not much view, save of stables’.²⁰ For Vita, by contrast, acquisition was reflexive. It was Harold who rationalised the arguments for and against. Amid the rusting bedsteads and broken tools, the chicken wire, barbed wire and discarded fencing, the brambles, bindweed, bulrushes, couch grass and ground elder, Vita had glimpsed at once the vision of benign collapse in which creeping ivy bound together a tottering structure of chipped brick and crumbling casements, which she celebrated in her poem ‘Sissinghurst’, written that year: ‘Invading nature crawls/ With ivied fingers over rosy walls,/ Searching the crevices,/ Clasping the mullion, riveting the crack …’²¹

Vita felt something else besides: the tug of atavistic possessiveness. It was a pull like that she attributed to Peregrine Chase in The Heir, the novella she had written almost a decade ago. After spending his whole life in Wolverhampton, Chase finds that he rapidly becomes enmeshed in the house in the country which he has inherited from his last surviving aunt. In Vita’s romantic narrative, contrary to expectation, including his own expectation, Chase resists every (sensible) pressure to sell: he is motivated not by greed, acquisitiveness or snobbery, but drawn by ‘laws [that] were unalterable’ into ‘a rhythm that no flurry could disturb’,²² the unchanging rhythm of inheritance and single-family ownership. Chase has no choice but to remain at Blackboys: it is an act of fidelity and family piety occasioned by visceral promptings. Vita disguised her own greedy longing for all that she had decided Sissinghurst represented as similarly beyond her control. She was delighted when, on 6 May, her offer of £12,375 was accepted by telephone. At Victoria’s request the trustees were persuaded to advance £13,000 for the purchase. Victoria’s compliance was a sign of mother and daughter’s temporary amity.

For in Vita’s eyes Sissinghurst was a Sackville house. She and Harold discovered that the entrance arch was the work of Sir John Baker, purchaser of the site in 1533; the tower was a later addition by his more extravagant son, Sir Richard Baker. In 1554, John Baker’s daughter Cecily married Thomas Sackville, 1st Earl of Dorset: their marriage forged a link between Sissinghurst and Knole. The Bakers went on to entertain both Mary I and her sister Elizabeth I at Sissinghurst. Knole too boasted Tudor royal connections. Lord Dorset was among Vita’s most distinguished ancestors, appointed by Elizabeth I High Steward and Lord High Treasurer of England; Vita described him as a ‘grave and solemn personage’.²³ He was also the author, with Thomas Norton, of Gorboduc, a play of 1561 regarded as the first English drama written in blank verse. A political piece, it is concerned, like much of Vita’s writing, with questions of inheritance and female vigour: ‘Gorboduc, King of Britain, divided his realm in his lifetime to his sons, Ferrex and Porrex. The sons fell to division and dissension. The younger killed the elder. The Mother that more dearly loved the elder, for revenge killed the younger.’

Sissinghurst’s connection to Dorset and the Sackvilles through Cecily Baker enabled Harold to legitimise Vita’s decision to buy the house that, he recognised from the outset, would prove a costly and impractical drain on their resources; he estimated restoration costs at £15,000 on top of the purchase price. ‘It is most wise of us to buy Sissinghurst,’ he wrote to Vita on 24 April, after presenting all the arguments against its purchase (mostly financial or relating to the absence of amenities like hot water: in fact Sissinghurst in 1930 lacked mains drainage). ‘Through its veins pulses the blood of the Sackville dynasty. True it is that it comes through the female line – but then we are both feminist, and after all Knole came in the same way. It is, for you, an ancestral mansion.’²⁴ In April 1930, Vita’s concurrence was wholehearted. Sissinghurst, she remembered, ‘caught instantly at my heart and my imagination’;²⁵ it acquired a magic quality too, ‘the ivory tower/ Like a tall lily in the moonlight risen’.²⁶ Her fervour for the house included a measure of need: here at last was her distraction from her severance from Knole. That she could trace a line of descent from the house to herself and therefore claim it as a Sackville legacy, hers ‘by birthright far from present fashion’, made good the illusion.²⁷

For Vita as well as for Harold, Sissinghurst would become the joint venture of their lives. Its garden gave both immeasurable pleasure at the same time as providing an ideal arena for their distinct but complementary talents: Vita as plantsman, Harold as designer. Vita’s earliest motives, even if she did not pause to analyse them, were personal expediency. As in all things, her craving for ‘an ancestral mansion’ took no account of the Nicolson side of her marriage. Flanking the restored entrance arch she would display two coats of arms, those of the Sackville-Wests and the Bakers; Nigel Nicolson later described wheelbarrows, tools and farm equipment as ‘indelibly’ stamped with her own initials ‘V.S-W’. In all aspects of her life, Vita enjoyed possession, an affirmation of herself in the inarguability of ownership or the unquestioning loyalty of friends and lovers. To have enfranchised Harold’s family, however symbolically, and shared her possession, would have destroyed the version of Sissinghurst Vita first created for herself.

Harold is similarly absent from Vita’s poem about the house, in which she imagines it as a secret place lost in time, ‘where stirs no wind and penetrates no sound’; she dedicated the poem to Virginia. At times that comprehensive exclusion would extend to Harold in reality as well as in verse. If Vita’s writing was autobiographical, it was also frequently egotistical. As in her writing, so in her outlook. It was part of the cruel side of her nature inherited from Victoria, the side that loved dominance. Later, similar feelings found an echo in her portrait of Louis XIV’s cousin, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’, the subject of Vita’s last biography. ‘There was a touch of the bully in her, perhaps especially provoked when her feudal feeling for her provincial properties was involved.’²⁸ In Vita’s case it was unwitting, but nevertheless thoughtless.

At Long Barn, Vita and Harold had perfected first essays in fragmented family living: separate bedrooms, separate sitting rooms, separate studies or working rooms, a large, family drawing room and the shared space of the garden, with its tennis court and the swimming pool that Harold made out of a pond. The house was shaped by the same ideas that governed Vita and Harold’s marriage, as described in Vita’s last novel, No Signposts in the Sea: ‘Mutual respect. Independence … both as regards friends and movement. Separate bedrooms – no bedroom squalor … Separate sitting rooms if the house is large enough. Separate finances.’²⁹ Ben and Nigel had slept in a separate cottage a hundred yards from the main house, the cottage later borrowed by the Campbells: as young children, they joined their parents at six o’clock each evening in the company of their nanny or governess.

Sissinghurst would enforce a further degree of separation. Having discarded Castle Farmhouse, Vita and Harold found that they had bought nothing resembling a conventional house – as Nigel had said to Vita on 4 April 1930: ‘There’s nowhere to live.’³⁰ Instead there were two small cottages: the Priest’s House, once the Elizabethan garden banqueting house, and the South Cottage; the entrance range, in which, within the Tudor stables, they eventually recreated Long Barn’s Big Room in the form of the Library; and the tower, which became for Vita a domain-within-a-domain, her own private sanctuary, mostly, but not exclusively, barred to other people.

That Vita and Harold ever considered this curious agglomeration of unrelated living spaces as a home indicates a sea change in their approach to their own lives. As an adult Nigel Nicolson remembered Vita quoting from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet: ‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness. Love one another, but make not a bond of love …’³¹ That philosophy would be fully realised at Sissinghurst. The arrangement Vita and Harold devised mirrored that of Long Barn in its ‘separations’, the ‘spaces in its togetherness’. So, too, in its staffing levels of two gardeners (three from 1937), a chauffeur, a cook, Vita’s lady’s maid Louise Genoux, under-servants and secretaries for both Vita and Harold; the longest-serving of Vita’s secretaries, Miss Macmillan, known as Mac, stayed for twenty years, including a period in 1938 as Vita’s lover.³² Only one important detail differed: there was no guest room at Sissinghurst. Vita’s desire to escape ‘noisy urgencies’ prevailed. In her diary Virginia reported Vita telling her, on 26 March 1931: ‘We want to turn those stables into guest bedrooms: & build a library across the courtyard’.³³ In the event only the library was built, in 1935. The South Cottage would provide space for Vita and Harold’s bedrooms and Harold’s study; in the Priest’s House were separate sitting rooms for Ben and Nigel and a shared bedroom, a kitchen and the family dining room; Vita’s sitting room was in the tower, and the entrance range, in addition to the Library, accommodated Mrs Staples the cook and her family, and the family of Jack Copper, the chauffeur-handyman. And that was that. None of the buildings was connected: progress to and from meals, to and from bedroom, sitting room and dining room, was entirely at the mercy of the weather.

Vita and Harold had entertained extensively at Long Barn. After the weekend parties, the lunch and dinner parties, the stream of houseguests and Vita’s perpetuation in miniature of the Edwardian entertaining of Victoria’s Knole, Sissinghurst would embrace a different Knole. It was here, over the next thirty years, that Vita realised that fantasy of her father’s house she had described to Harold as long ago as 1912. ‘I am all alone here for the moment, and all this big house is mine to shut up if I choose, and shut out all the rest of the world by swinging the iron bars across all the gates. But instead of doing that I have locked all the doors of my own tower, and nobody will come near me till tomorrow morning, or even know whether I am still alive … And I think I have gone back five hundred years.’³⁴ There would be lunch guests at Sissinghurst, guests who came for tea and garden visitors, including, after its first official opening through the National Gardens Scheme on 1 May 1938, paying members of the public, Vita’s ‘shillingses’ – ‘the people I most gladly welcome and salute’.³⁵ Invitations to stay, which required Ben and Nigel’s absence, were altogether rarer. Sissinghurst became the symbol of Vita’s gradual withdrawal from the world.

It became the house in which Vita was able at last to ‘lose myself within a slumber/ Submerged’: dream made reality.³⁶ It was a feature of the place she recognised from her first visits. Once, she had retreated into the past in her novels and plays. Within the coloured covers of Murray’s exercise books, she had imagined herself among vanished heroes, including members of her own family. On 20 June 1911, she had posed for the photographic company Speaight Ltd, dressed in a hybrid version of cavalier costume: gauntlets, an extravagant sash, puff sleeves slashed and laced. There had been tableaux, masques, the Persian play in Knole’s Great Hall, Shakespeare in the rain; Orlando gave Vita the possibility of vicarious time travel at will. At Sissinghurst, Vita confined conscious historical role play to her biographies of Joan of Arc, St Teresa, Saint Thérèse, ‘La Grande Mademoiselle’. Given the objectivity required of nonfiction writing, her submersion was necessarily lesser. Instead, she contrived an illusion of past and present merging that she interpreted as intrinsic to the atmosphere of Sissinghurst. It resembled the feeling she had experienced at Knole as a child, alone by candlelight amid the long shadows and dusty glitter of galleries and state rooms. Vita considered Sissinghurst’s Tudor buildings timeless – as emblematic as Knole itself or the Avebury stones which dominate the physical and mental landscape of her novel, Grey Wethers. ‘The heavy golden sunshine enriched the old brick with a kind of patina, and made the tower cast a long shadow across the grass, like the finger of a gigantic sundial veering slowly with the sun,’ she wrote in the first novel she completed in her tower room.³⁷ Like Knole, Sissinghurst existed for Vita as a physical presence, a force and powerful too.

In the decoration of the Library, as in Long Barn’s Big Room, Vita returned to the dark wood and Jacobean dash of the home of her childhood. With its Sackville portraits, candle sconces and seventeenth-century chairs of blackened cane and needlepoint, with its farm, its tenants, its ancient brewhouse and woodland Wealden setting, Sissinghurst became Vita’s new inheritance. It belonged to her alone: Harold never legally shared its ownership. On the cusp of her fortieth birthday, established in her tower like a spider at the centre of a web, Vita would exchange some of Orlando’s amorous skittishness for a role closer to that of Lady Anne Clifford, landowner and matriarch. As Virginia Woolf had noted, Vita was an astute and competent businesswoman; there were limits to her romantic spirit.

As ever Vita signalled the direction of her thinking in her writing. With The Edwardians finished she quickly embarked on a novel which, like its predecessor, examines the nature of personal choice. The Edwardians had highlighted the inescapability of Sebastian’s destiny as Chevron’s heir: Vita’s focus in All Passion Spent is on Deborah Slane’s role as Victorian wife. ‘Even had she been in love with [Henry], she could see therein no reason for foregoing the whole of her separate existence. Henry was in love with her, but no one proposed that he should forego his.’³⁸ Among the novel’s themes are renunciation of worldly riches and love for a house. Vita herself would never manage the former – in her writing, her diary, her letters and her speech she was continually possessive – ‘I’, ‘my’ and ‘mine’ pepper statements on everything from jewellery to England – but she could and did empathise wholeheartedly with the latter.

Octogenarian widow Lady Slane is externally modelled on Harold’s mother: her character is closer to Vita’s. Following the death of her distinguished husband, a former viceroy of India, Lady Slane withdraws from her attentive but worldly family to the relative seclusion of a house in Hampstead with which she had fallen in love thirty years earlier (the house itself is inspired by Keats’s house, which Vita had visited with Virginia). Without regret she divests herself of jewellery and possessions, shedding the uniform of the wife of a great man; trophies and trinkets fail to move her. Her intensest emotion is reserved for her new house, which displaces not only former glories but her family too. Lady Slane’s challenge is to justify her choice of the Hampstead house over nearer ‘claims’. This passionate engagement with a building, added to a tendency to imbue it with human characteristics, is Vita’s own trait. Assessing her ecstatic response to the landscape of Persia four years earlier, Vita had admitted the extent to which places, not people, affected her: ‘These brief but frequent fallings-in-love gave me cause for serious anxiety; such vibrations of response ought, I felt, to be reserved for one’s contact with human beings, nor should nature have a greater power than human nature to excite and to stir the soul … The external world had too much importance for me; my appreciation was altogether too painfully vivid.’³⁹ In consigning this response to the past, Vita misleads her reader: it remained indelibly part of her psyche. Disingenuously she refers to ‘cause for serious anxiety’; nothing in her subsequent behaviour suggests she repented of this tendency in herself. ‘The external world’ of landscape, building and place remained critically important to Vita. She allows the heroine of her novel to be overwhelmed by the small house in Hampstead just as she herself was overwhelmed by Knole and had since succumbed to Sissinghurst; the novel invites the reader’s judgement of those who criticise Lady Slane: ‘Duty, charity, children, social obligations, public appearances – with these had [Lady Slane’s] days been filled.’⁴⁰ It was the very formula Vita herself had resisted in her marriage to Harold the diplomat, the formula Harold’s mother had more successfully embraced. Within the context of the novel, it is as much a plea for individual freedom as a feminist manifesto. In the emotions to which it gives rise and its symbolic place in her affections, Lady Slane’s house in Hampstead is another Knole, another Sissinghurst.

Work at Sissinghurst began on Vita’s tower, a clear statement of priorities. Against its walls Vita planted a climbing rose called ‘Richmond’ and clumps of rosemary. Even before contracts were signed, she had made sorties from Long Barn; invariably this proprietorial woman planted something during her visit, staking out her territory in lavender bushes. But it was inside the tower rather than its surrounds where work started in earnest; in the short term, garden plans were confined to ‘large paper sheets ruled into squares’.⁴¹ On 12 July, Vita recorded her decision to use the room on the first floor of the tower as her writing room. Once the dividing wall between the two spaces had been knocked through, she saw that she could accommodate a small library in the octagonal turret adjoining it (initially referred to by Vita as ‘the oratory’⁴²).

Bookshelves were built along the two window walls of Vita’s writing room and a working fireplace across a corner; there was a single radiator. The majority of her books were housed in floor-to-ceiling shelves in the turret. Here, once the dust had settled, she kept her notes and manuscripts, including those exercise books filled with neat, hand-written drafts of the unpublished novels and plays of her childhood. There were books of Elizabethan history, literary criticism and literary biography, Vita’s growing collection of gardening books and books about sexuality and gender, including, by 1937, seven volumes of Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex, which Harold also read.⁴³ Most were inscribed ‘V.N.’ or ‘Vita Nicolson’. At the time of Vita’s purchase, walls of the tower room were papered. Vita’s first act of beautification at Sissinghurst was to strip away the layers of ‘hideous’ Victorian wallpaper and replace it with distemper. The distemper was never applied. ‘I found the old brick so pretty that I left it all rough as it was, the colour of pot-pourri,’ Vita explained, ‘a sort of half-pink, half-grey, and mottled.’⁴⁴ Aesthete Stephen Tennant, visiting in December 1945, described it as the colour of ‘squashed ripe pomegranates’.⁴⁵ And so it remained, unchanged until her death. When builders mistakenly plastered the walls of her bedroom in the South Cottage, Vita insisted they strip off the plaster to reveal the ancient brick beneath.

Vita’s first night at Sissinghurst was spent not in her bedroom, where the builders also uncovered ‘the most lovely, huge, stone Tudor fireplace’, but in the turret room. By mid-October it was wired for electricity; cardboard sheets shielded the windows from wind and rain. Vita took her dogs with her from Long Barn. The following night Hilda joined her and gardened all day, the next night Harold. Weeks later Vita and Harold spent their first night in the South Cottage.

That night Harold’s lack of enjoyment, coloured by the all-pervasive anxiety he felt as a result of unhappiness with his change of career (Harold quickly decided he loathed working for the Evening Standard), contrasted with Vita’s bluffness in the face of overwhelming discomforts. Harold made light of the night’s experiences in a humorous radio broadcast made soon afterwards; his diary tells a different story. Vita’s character dominates the broadcast. Harold calls her ‘Edith’: she is commanding, capable and dismissive of his difficulties. Without apparent regret, he presents himself to listeners as a man ‘not born to be a settler’s husband’: damp logs, fragile crockery, a well reluctant to yield water and his least favourite picnic food successively defeat him. Edith–Vita, by contrast, revels in ‘the mellow light of candles’ and provides soda water with which to clean their teeth; Harold mislays the syphons. Edith–Vita is forthright, decisive, controlling. Harold fails in every task he attempts, including preparing their simple breakfast of coffee and boiled eggs. Edith–Vita is sanguine: neither Harold nor Vita flourished in the absence of domestic help (Vita once protested at ‘being asked to produce various domestic utensils which I do not even know by name’⁴⁶) and, as Vita had written earlier, she required few creature comforts to feel at home: ‘my own house, dogs, and servants; my luggage … unpacked. The icebox … in the kitchen, the gramophone on the table, and my books … on the shelves.’⁴⁷ Affection between the couple is at best implicit. Beneath the humour are suggestions of role reversal and an easy assumption of mastery on Vita’s part. It was not the whole truth. Later Harold dismissed himself as ‘the most incompetent man since Noah’.⁴⁸

Vita did not immediately sell Long Barn, despite its drain on the couple’s diminished resources once she had renounced her allowance from Victoria. To Virginia she wrote of the cost of Long Barn’s upkeep, but Virginia was puzzled by the Nicolsons’ inability to retrench. For two years, Vita, Harold, Ben and Nigel lived between the two houses: they moved into Sissinghurst on 9 April 1932. Two years later Vita sold Long Barn to Victoria for £8,000 (Victoria would return it to Vita in her will). The house was let. On a visit in October 1934, Vita noted with sadness the first tenant ‘making every room as hideous as possible’.⁴⁹ Nine years and several tenants later, in the winter of 1943, Vita sold the house, along with many of its contents, including three thousand books. Harold regretted its loss. In his diary he associated it with ‘all the happy days of youth’.⁵⁰ He was fifty-seven years old. Given his marked unhappiness during much of Vita’s affair with Violet, his memory played him false. Although she did not know it at the time, during the sale Vita lost her key to the garden gate at Knole.

By the spring of 1932, restoration work on Sissinghurst, though unfinished, had progressed apace, and Vita and Harold were able to start laying out the garden they had been planning throughout what Vita called the ‘impatient’ intervening period. Much of their first two years had been devoted to clearance work. The moat wall was revealed hidden under rubbish. They laid rudimentary paths, sited a handful of borders and planted trees. In 1932, they increased their tree planting. ‘We had to get on with the hedges. We planted hornbeam where we couldn’t afford yew; and we also planted an avenue of young limes in a rough place and left them to look after themselves.’⁵¹

The substitution of hornbeam for yew on grounds of cost was important. That year the continuing loss of Vita’s income from the Sackville estates, added to the shortfall caused by Harold’s decision in 1931 to leave the Standard (‘that urinal of futility’, as he dismissed it) in order to edit Action, the newspaper of Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party, combined to create an unaccustomed and, to Harold, deeply troubling hole in their finances. The New Party journal folded after the party’s disastrous electoral defeat in October 1931, leaving Harold unemployed. In her role as secretary-cum-manager Hilda Matheson pointed out the acuteness of the problem. At £6,000 a year, the couple’s outgoings were double their income. Harold himself also owed £3,000 in income tax, with further debts of another £800.⁵² At the beginning of 1932, Vita and Harold had £300 in the bank between them to support two houses in the country, the flat in King’s Bench Walk and two boys now at Eton. Happily the discovery of Sissinghurst had coincided with a burst of creative energy on Vita’s part, which showed no sign of abating. Although her literary earnings could not rival Victoria’s giving power, the period proved both fertile and lucrative. For diversion there would be gardening. Vita took comfort from her conviction that gardening was ‘the daughter of painting’; that association raised it ‘from the rank of a fiddle-de-dee hobby to the royal dignity of a serious pursuit’.⁵³

As Vita had intended, The Edwardians, published on 29 May 1930, became a bestseller. On 27 June, in its roundup of ‘the books most in demand from the Times Book Club’, the Spectator placed The Edwardians at the head of its list. It sold 30,000 copies in its first six months and netted for Leonard and Virginia, its publishers, a profit of £2,000 in the first year. For the Woolfs, this boon came on top of a doubling of Virginia’s literary earnings since publication of Orlando two years previously.⁵⁴ On 13 August 1931, Vanessa’s husband Clive Bell described to a friend the improvements made to Monks House with revenues from Orlando and The Edwardians: ‘Monks is now a place fit for socialists to live in – electric light, central heating, a Frigidaire and two WCs. And all paid for by Virginia and Vita which makes it more romantic.’⁵⁵

For their part, in December 1930, Vita and Harold had allocated £125 of recent income to make a lake: the money was spent on damming the nearby stream and flooding two meadows to the south of the house. ‘It was a creation romantic beyond my hopes,’ Vita wrote. ‘Extravagantly I ordered a boat from the Army and Navy Stores.’⁵⁶ They found they were able to cut corners. The wisterias they planted that year were sent over from Victoria’s house in Streatham, which she would shortly leave; foxgloves came from the nearby woods, tracked down by Harold and transplanted in an old pram. For Harold, Sissinghurst’s garden, and its all-consuming demands on his time and energy, provided a necessary distraction. On 20 March 1932, of a morning devoted to the usually uncongenial task of weeding the delphinium bed, he wrote: ‘I cannot get a job and am deeply in debt. I foresee no exit from our financial worries. Yet Vita and I are as happy as larks alone together. It is a spring day. Very odd.’⁵⁷ It was as Vita would claim at the beginning of her second long poem, The Garden, written during the Second World War: ‘Small pleasures must correct great tragedies.’ Thinking of her own gardens at Long Barn and Sissinghurst, she described a garden as ‘a miniature endeavour/ To hold the graces and the courtesies/ Against a horrid wilderness’. In the summer, the Nicolsons plundered Vita’s royalty cheques to pay for a family holiday in Italy. In five days in Portofino, Harold returned to his continuing preoccupation with diplomacy. He wrote a comic play about diplomatic life, The Archduke, which was never performed. Later, the joint proceeds of The Edwardians and All Passion Spent contributed substantially to Ben and Nigel’s school fees.⁵⁸

‘We must not forget the unparalleled prestige the aristocracy enjoy among the middle and working classes in England, even today,’ Violet Trefusis wrote in her novel Broderie Anglaise; ‘nor the eagerness with which those classes seize upon everything the privileged class does, applauding and admiring all their exploits, like a child at a circus.’⁵⁹ So it proved not only with The Edwardians but its successors All Passion Spent and Family History, published in successive years. Though the later novels did not match The Edwardians’ undilutedly aristocratic flavour – nor the scale of its commercial success – both offered Vita’s readers snapshots of a world that was uniquely her own, in the case of Family History a portrait of Vita’s elder son Ben in the guise of the seventeen-year-old Dan and a fictional castle that resembles Sissinghurst in every essential: ‘They passed through an archway beneath the tower and came out on a cleared space with an old orchard beyond. The dark shape of a cottage rose up, and other walls, all of the same Tudor brick. Miles’ castle seemed to consist of isolated buildings, connecting walls and the dark background of the country lands. It was very lonely.’⁶⁰ In 1931, All Passion Spent sold 15,000 copies in its first year and earned the Hogarth Press £1,200. Leonard described it as the best novel Vita ever wrote. On 12 October 1932, Virginia wrote to Vita with the news that 6,000 copies of Family History had been sold pre-publication. ‘My God! And my fingers are red and wheeled with doing up parcels incessantly … Orders pouring in – we all working till 7.30 – thought we were just finished – then a last batch of orders discovered hidden in a drawer another hours work – clerks panting – telephones ringing carriers arriving – parcels just finished in time to catch the vans – Oh Lord what it is to publish a bestseller …’⁶¹ From now on the bulk of Vita’s income from writing would be diverted towards Sissinghurst.

Vita was working at a considerable rate. Her three biggest-selling novels were produced at yearly intervals; Harold too wrote a book a year between 1931 and 1937. It was against this background of shared hard work that the garden at Sissinghurst was created. At the same time, although her position was increasingly precarious since Hilda’s departure from the BBC, Vita continued until October 1932 to review fiction and nonfiction for her radio broadcasts and to contribute articles to a range of publications. In addition to The Listener, these included the Spectator, Week-end Review, Life and Letters and the Graphic. ‘My own production has become simply terrific (in quantity I mean, not quality),’ she wrote. ‘I never stop writing stories and articles … I must make the most of it while the fit is on me – but they are cheap stuff.’⁶² Once he had agreed to take over its editorship in June 1931, Harold invited Vita to contribute ‘a weekly article containing hints to the amateur gardener’ to the New Party’s Action.⁶³ Although her efforts were to be unpaid, it was the beginning of Vita’s horticultural journalism and led to a series of Friday evening gardening broadcasts for the BBC and, in the summer of 1938, a short radio series about the gardens of the West of England. Reflecting her own inclinations, Vita’s Action contributions included ‘Flowers that are like Dutch paintings’, ‘Irises possess every virtue but one’ and ‘Flowers you must sniff very closely’.

She also continued to write poetry and featured in numerous anthologies, among them Poets of Our Time and Younger Poets of Today, both published in 1932. The previous year Vita’s translations of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien were published as Elegies from the Castle of Duino and widely reviewed. Vita had conceived the idea during her visit to Harold in Berlin in the spring of 1928. She was encouraged in the project by the American wife of a Berlin-based British journalist, Margaret Voigt, who rapidly became Vita’s lover. Following Vita’s return, Margaret visited her at Long Barn: in this instance familiarity bred detachment on Vita’s part and Margaret’s fantasy that Vita was her aristocratic lover ‘David’ was of brief duration. Vita did not allow sexual disillusionment to interfere with her work. Instead she completed her translations in collaboration with her cousin Eddy. The book was published under both Vita and Eddy’s names, though Vita was the more highly regarded, commercially successful of the pair.

Previously, discussing Aphra Behn, Vita had suggested ‘the fact that she wrote is much more important than the quality of what she wrote. The importance of Aphra Behn is that she was the first woman in England to earn her living by her pen.’⁶⁴ Had she revisited those words in the early 1930s, Vita must have found in them a prophetic ring.

Her output was prodigious: in the short term, quality kept pace with quantity. Struggling with the ending of Challenge during the turbulence of her relationship with Violet, Vita had confessed to Harold her conviction of her own limitations: ‘I shall never write a good book; at least, I might write dozens of quite good books, but I shall never write a great one. And to be great is the only thing that really counts, whether for books or people.’⁶⁵ There is poignancy in the accuracy of this self-assessment, also in the vehemence of Vita’s characteristic longing for greatness.

Vita won a large popular following both for her novels and her poetry. Orlando and her radio broadcasts conferred a degree of fame; her striking looks added to her distinctive appeal. Her appearance in the early 1930s as guest of honour at speech day at Tonbridge County School for Girls inspired cheering and autograph-hunting on the part of the assembled girls; a horrified headmistress lamented that ‘such unwarranted and vulgar scenes had never been witnessed at Speech Day’.⁶⁶ Yet despite The Land’s award of the Hawthornden Prize, the Heinemann Prize in 1946 for The Garden, respectful and often enthusiastic reviews and impressive sales figures for a number of her books, Vita would stake no lasting claim to unequivocal greatness through writing. In 1922, the Spectator’s reviewer of Orchard and Vineyard claimed, ‘Miss Sackville-West has interesting thoughts, but she does not make very good poems out of them.’⁶⁷ A decade later the same magazine reached a different conclusion: ‘Her poetry does not merely describe nature; it does not merely express her feeling: she describes, and in what she writes Nature and her feeling are one.’ Subsequent readers have tended to agree with the first assessment and much, though not all, of Vita’s poetry has failed to achieve longevity. Posthumously, as in the second half of her career, her reputation as a poet suffered as a result of her allegiance to the forms and focuses of so-called Georgian poetry: orderliness of rhyme and rhythm and an anti-modernist agenda of pastoralism, romance and detachment from the quotidian. She once described herself as ‘so out of touch with poetry as it is being written today’⁶⁸ and, partly regretfully, as ‘a damned out-moded poet’.⁶⁹

Vita’s reputation as a novelist reflects in the same way her avoidance of formal experimentalism, her sensationalism and her particular brand of non-realism, alongside her perceived fixation with the ramifications of class. Posterity has mostly disdained Vita’s prose fictions. Her son Ben described her as ‘a remarkable writer manqué’, her ‘true quality’ concealed beneath her ‘snobbery, the assumptions of superiority’; but Ben, whose relationship with Vita was latterly vexed to the point of collapse, is a highly subjective commentator.⁷⁰ Vita was only concerned for her poetry. In her own mind she was quite clear about the different spheres occupied by poetry and fiction. ‘A poet’s dream costs nothing; yet is real,’ she wrote in The Garden.⁷¹ In response to a letter from a member of the public protesting about the secondary role accorded to poetry in her radio broadcasts, Vita wrote gratefully on 9 May 1930: ‘I would gladly exchange novels for poetry, but what about the great British Public which enjoys the former more than the latter? … I get plenty of letters, but few people ask for more poetry. That’s their loss.’⁷²

At her best, in prose as well as poetry, Vita wrote with insight, verve and colour. Her lingering descriptions of landscape and nature, described by a contemporary reviewer in the Daily Telegraph as a ‘generous glow of enthusiasm for beauty’,⁷³ retain an intensely visual, sensuous and moving quality; in her ‘Country Notes’ for the New Statesman, she categorised herself as someone in whom ‘the love of nature and the natural seasonal life [had attained] the proportions of a vice’.⁷⁴ ‘I looked out of my porthole and saw … the dawn scarlet behind a range of hills,’ Vita wrote of her first sighting of India. ‘Small craft were dotted about; kites swept over the placid surface; yellow lights ringed the water’s edge; rigging pencilled the flaming sky. Here was all the business of land again, albeit a land unawakened as yet.’⁷⁵ Vita’s description separates colours into the blocks of an artist’s palette; unravels the different threads; builds up its picture simply but lingeringly.

In her examination of character and motive she is sometimes intrepid and often unpredictable; necessarily discreet, given the climate of the time, her lesbian explorations contribute an element of tension, even subversion. Vita had a storyteller’s instinct and, as Leonard Woolf saw, enough honesty, romance and sentimentality to capture the popular imagination.⁷⁶ These qualities came to fruition in all three of her best-known novels, within narrative formats which in each case offered opportunities for the self-exploration that consistently shaped Vita’s fiction. What’s more, she wove her tales, with their often startling effects – sado-masochism in The Dark Island and life after death in Grand Canyon – with a minimum of writerly fuss and consistent ease; as Virginia described her: ‘Vita … writing another novel; but as careless about it all as ever.’⁷⁷ On the debit side is an inclination to purple prose and a taste for improbably heightened emotionalism. ‘How marvellously well she writes … She carries into her writings the quiet tranquillity of manner which is so characteristic of her,’ her mother wrote in 1927. Modern readers may reach the opposite conclusion. Vita’s style is invariably in keeping with that of popular fiction of its time: as she wrote in 1929, in her short biography of seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell, ‘so strong, so instinctive, is the habit of mind of one’s own age’.⁷⁸

It is not necessary to second Virginia Woolf’s dismissal of Vita’s ‘pen of brass’, a critique of her commercial instinct and ready facility, those ten, twelve or fifteen pages Vita wrote sometimes in a day, her assessment of The Edwardians as ‘not a very good book’,⁷⁹ or her generalised disdain for what she termed Vita’s ‘sleepwalking servantgirl novels’.⁸⁰ Vita herself made no claims for her early fiction, ‘the vile indiscretions of youth’, as she labelled them in 1927.⁸¹ Even Virginia agreed that ‘never was there a more modest writer’.⁸² It would not have occurred to Vita to suggest parity with Virginia’s writing. As we have seen, her acknowledgement of Virginia’s pre-eminent talent was a cornerstone of their relationship: Virginia enforced the gap by labelling Vita ‘Donkey West’. Vita enjoyed the act of writing: her novels were bread-and-butter undertakings, her purpose material gain. Reflecting Virginia’s influence, Vita told an interviewer in October 1930 that she wished she could ‘make a bonfire of all my novels … I particularly dislike my novels. The only one I can tolerate at all is Seducers in Ecuador.’⁸³ The following year she summed up her literary achievements in a flippant doggerel obituary as ‘a few cheap novels as bad as sin/ And some honest lines of verse’.⁸⁴ Her self-criticism was unnecessarily bleak. Virginia herself claimed that ‘all creation is the result of conflict’.⁸⁵ There was no shortage of conflict either in Vita’s writing or her life. The ultimate weakness of Vita’s writing is that its autobiographical dimension too often stopped short of self-revelation; her instincts for concealment and privacy were too great. ‘Those things which are felt, and those things which are seen … are not the business of words,’ she once wrote, a curious, if revealing, statement for any writer.⁸⁶

On 31 December 1932, Virginia recorded in her diary: ‘Vita is on the high seas, sailing to America.’⁸⁷ Two days previously, Vita and Harold had left Sissinghurst for a four-month lecture tour of the States. With Harold still without a job, their motives were financial.

Both had published well-received novels during the course of the year – Vita’s Family History and Harold’s Public Faces; in May, American publishers Doubleday, Doran & Co. had also issued a collection of Vita’s stories, Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour. The title story was her fictional recreation of Seery’s apartment in the rue Laffitte; ‘Elizabeth Higginbottom’ concerned ‘a severe and serious person’ who ‘attained the age of forty before romance entered her life’; ‘The Poet’ offered an up-to-date variation on the death of Chatterton, which had so absorbed the teenage Vita, and revisited the themes of plagiarism and artistic fraudulence that underpinned the earlier drama. All engaged with characteristic foibles and preoccupations. In the title story, Vita reimagined Seery’s apartment as belonging to her great-grandmother, a means retrospectively of asserting her possession of it and claiming it as an ‘ancestral mansion’. In ‘Elizabeth Higginbottom’, Vita’s unlikely heroine yearns for marriage in order to escape from her maiden name, the reverse of Vita’s own outlook. She blames her parents for her dissonant surname and is eventually made ridiculous in her one misguided attempt at passion, as if her unfortunate name had fixed her destiny, much as Vita’s own destiny was shaped by heredity. Nicholas Lambarde’s claims to greatness in ‘The Poet’ are exposed as a sham when the narrator recognises that his best poems are unwitting copies of other men’s work; only his picturesque death moves the reader. Several of the stories in the collection had previously appeared singly in magazines. The publishers described them as ‘eight stories, brilliant, fantastic, exquisite, by the author of “All Passion Spent”’ and paid Vita $500.

A well-oiled publicity machine, orchestrated on Vita and Harold’s behalf by a public-speaking agency called the Colston Leigh Bureau, ensured that, even at the height of the Great Depression, as many as possible of the book-buying American public were aware of the couple and their work. From the moment of their arrival in New York on 5 January, they found themselves objects of fascination. Reporters described Harold as ‘one of the cleverest men in England’; Vita’s connection with Knole and the long roll call of her Sackville ancestors inspired a degree of New World dizziness.⁸⁸ Testily Harold dismissed the ‘slushy adulation’ that pursued them.⁸⁹ Vita’s attitude, by contrast, was consistently one of wry amusement. ‘There were several descriptions of my personal appearance,’ she told Harold in February, referring to newspaper reports in Minneapolis. ‘My eyes, you will be pleased to hear, are (1) blue, (2) deep blue, (3) brown, (4) hazel. So you can take your choice. They got very puzzled as to what my name was, and there is a touching reference to my modesty in preferring to be called Miss S-W instead of Lady “which is her rightful title”. I think they thought I was being tactful in a democratic country.’⁹⁰

Vita had first been published in the States in August 1919, when George H. Doran brought out an American edition of Heritage. Doran’s publicity material had claimed then that ‘in its passion, its pervading sense of beauty and detached pity, [Heritage] is reminiscent of Conrad and – strange to say – of Wuthering Heights’, an assessment of suitably exaggerated hyperbole that nevertheless attributes to Vita’s first novel characteristics more fully realised in her life: emotionalism, a pervading sense of beauty and, in terms of the lovers she abandoned so easily, detached pity. In the intervening period, all Vita’s books except Poems of West and East, Orchard and Vineyard and Andrew Marvell had been published in the States. Vita’s American following was considerable; both she and Harold found that they were better known there than in Britain, despite their radio broadcasts for the BBC, large sales and Vita’s early notoriety as Kidlet.

Harold would calculate that by the end of their tour the couple had travelled 33,527 miles; in seventy-two different journeys they had crossed the length and breadth of America and visited fifty-three different cities. As Vita wrote to Virginia in March: ‘I never realised the size of this darn country till I came here.’⁹¹ It was a frequently gruelling experience, with repeated nights on sleeper trains; at Des Moines in February, Vita was so tired she fell asleep at the station, ‘on a wooden bench among my luggage, looking like an immigrant’.⁹² Occasionally they shared the stage for joint lectures, more often they were apart. Vita’s repertoire was larger than Harold’s. She discussed ‘Changes in English Social Life’, with references to The Edwardians; ‘Novels and Novelists’ and ‘The Modern Spirit in Literature’, amply supplied with material for both from her broadcasts for Hilda and her friendship with Virginia; less often she spoke about her Persian travels. Press attention followed her wherever she went – ‘Mummy is lionised like nohow. She is given orchids and met by groups of people at stations,’ Harold wrote to Ben at the end of their first week;⁹³ she worked hard to ensure that her talks were well received. ‘Americans are easily and unexpectedly amused,’ Vita reported in her diary on 27 February. There were inadvertently entertaining incidents: ‘In the middle of my lecture a screen falls down on the heads of the audience but they do not appear to mind,’ she noted in Chicago.⁹⁴ There were also a great many parties, invariably hosted by the local branch of the Women’s Club of America. ‘I don’t think I can stand many more women,’ Vita wrote to Harold at the midway point, ‘America is rapidly curing me of any weakness I may ever have entertained for my own sex.’⁹⁵ At times Vita found both Americans in general and specific individuals trying. ‘It is awful how these people talk in trains,’ she noted;⁹⁶ the following week, having been prevented from going to bed by an over-attentive host, she added ‘with all their kindness, these people have very little imagination’.⁹⁷

Vita retained her ability to inspire powerful responses of physical attraction in those she encountered, despite recent weight gain and the increasingly ruddy complexion which caused one photographer to request that she remove her rouge. Typically the press referred to her as ‘Juno-esque’, ‘Portia-like’ and ‘Orlando’;⁹⁸ others reacted more idiosyncratically. At Cincinnati, Vita recorded in her diary: ‘A lady comes up afterwards and tells me she has had a vision during my lecture, and that I was Balkis, Queen of Sheba in a previous incarnation. Try to look suitably grateful.’⁹⁹ She too was not wholly immune to her new acquaintances. In Columbus, Ohio, on 20 February, she was particularly struck by a Mrs Edmunds, ‘who is really lovely without a hat – lovely wide brows and a serene look; dark hair; a Madonna-like type’.¹⁰⁰ At Northampton, Massachusetts, she found respite in the company of the wealthy Mina Curtiss. The latter’s farm in the Berkshire Hills reminded Vita for the first time on American soil of the way of life at Long Barn and Sissinghurst: pigeons colonised the roofs of the wooden buildings, in the meadows Jersey cows grazed.¹⁰¹ Vita felt a pang of homesickness and dedicated a poem to Mina, her thanks for a fleeting escape from ‘voices, cities, trains,/ … the clamour of a city street/ And vapid endless talk of books, books, books’.¹⁰²

Predictably Vita’s reaction to America itself was similarly varied. While dazzled by the South California desert, which reminded her of Persia, and the Grand Canyon, which would later form the centrepiece of her wartime novel of the same name (she described it to Virginia as ‘the most astonishing thing in the world’¹⁰³), she was less impressed by American cities. ‘A large, elderly, Edwardian-looking lady called Mrs Thompson then drives me off to “see Pittsburgh – such a beautiful city”,’ she reported on 27 February. ‘It reminds me of Sheffield.’¹⁰⁴ From the west coast she wrote simply: ‘Los Angeles is hell.’¹⁰⁵ Publicly she was circumspect in her pronouncements to the American press. Her fury on 28 January at ‘a newspaper article saying we had been rude about America’ was justified: she defended herself on the grounds that she would not be so ill-mannered or so unintelligent.¹⁰⁶ In return she inspired uniformly positive coverage in the American press. As Harold told her: ‘They adore your shy dignity, your regal modesty.’¹⁰⁷

On her return to Sissinghurst, Vita described herself as ‘enriched’ in more than the financial sense. Harold, whose attitude to their host country was less benign, told Raymond Mortimer that, despite appalling living expenses, ‘we shall bring back a pretty pile’, a profit in the region of £2,000.¹⁰⁸ Vita brought home, in addition, books, bogus native American trinkets of a sort she would later deride in Grand Canyon but which currently delighted her, and several large cowboy hats.

During their absence, areas of woodland at Sissinghurst had been thinned and tidied. Vita and Harold would continue improvements to the garden that year with the addition of a covered terrace attached to the Priest’s House, in what is now the White Garden but was then the Rose Garden; they used it for outdoor dining. The Erechtheum is a pergola constructed of salvaged fragments of columns supporting a wooden trellis. Vita and Harold planted a vine to cover it and, prompted by Harold’s philhellenism, named it after the temple of Athena on the Acropolis that had once been plundered by Lord Elgin. The idea was not theirs exclusively, but had been suggested by architect Albert Powys (known as A. R. P.), secretary of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, whose help at Sissinghurst Vita and Harold had enlisted.

Vita’s diary for her American tour is engaging and funny. She seldom employed her diary for self-scrutiny and the entries for this period are no exception, but the woman who emerges from its pages during the first quarter of 1933 appears at ease with herself. She was ‘lapped in happiness and security … so ordered, rational’, as she described herself elsewhere;¹⁰⁹ she was confident in her likes and dislikes, impatient perhaps but polite, hard working, mostly without cynicism, prepared to be amused, entertained and interested; at this point she was more open-minded than her ex-diplomat husband. The smooth surface of Vita’s American diary reveals no trace of the woman who, only months earlier, had written for the first and only time in her life: ‘Pass from my heart towards the heart of others;/ But in your passing, half-remember me.’¹¹⁰ In the spring of 1931, Vita had fallen in love again. The following summer, she learned that the object of her affections had fallen in love with another woman. It had never happened to her before and would never happen again. Vita would discover at first hand what it was to face rejection by a lover.

She fell in love at a moment of unhappiness. Vita could not explain the cause of what Virginia called her ‘vague mood of depression’, and yet it hung, heavy, refusing to budge, darkening her final weeks’ work on All Passion Spent. ‘If I, who am the most fortunate of women, can ask What is life for?, how can other people live at all?’ she asked Virginia on 22 January.¹¹¹ Neither woman could pinpoint an answer. Although Vita did not identify her as such, Virginia herself was part of the problem: their relationship had stalled through Vita’s fault, that cooling of ardour that sought distraction first with Mary, afterwards with Margaret Voigt then Hilda. Virginia revenged herself by making Vita jealous of her own new friendship with septuagenarian composer-turned-writer, Dame Ethyl Smyth.

As long ago as 1909, Vita had identified ‘the gnawing doubt of self’ as ‘worse than any outward suffering’:¹¹² Virginia retained enough of a hold over Vita to challenge the careful balance of her self-confidence. At the same time, Harold and Ben were also unhappy. Harold jibbed against what he saw as his mistaken change of career – ‘I simply loathe writing for a newspaper, and have got an anti-vulgarisation complex’;¹¹³ as late as 1935 he was still dreaming he had been asked to return to the Foreign Office and waking to disappointment on discovering that his hopes were only dreams. As with Vita’s relationship with Violet, he refused to allow himself to blame her for his unsettlement. Ben was miserable at Eton. In the autumn of 1931 he suffered a nervous breakdown. Harold was too busy to visit him and Vita bore the brunt alone. On the plus side, Victoria underlined her ongoing (if temporary) truce with Vita by dispatching to Sissinghurst weekly grocery hampers from Selfridges and a drip feed of treasures from Knole. Among highlights of the latter was a copy of one of the two portraits by Kneller of Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset, poetaster and hero of Vita’s early historical novel The King’s Secret.

A consignment of ‘moth-eaten but superb’ carpets from Victoria’s house in Streatham inspired Harold to reflect on the inconsistencies in their lives. ‘It is typical of our existence that with no settled income and no certain prospects, we should live in a muddle of museum carpets, ruined castles, and penury.’¹¹⁴ Most lasting among Victoria’s gifts would be two lead vases with covers and eight bronze urns from the gardens of Bagatelle, two of which were sold after the war; Victoria also sent the statue of a bacchante that stands today at the head of Sissinghurst’s Lime Walk. Less pleasing to reflect on was Roy Campbell’s overtly hostile and dangerously transparent verse satire, The Georgiad. Its publication in 1931 added to Vita and Harold’s dissatisfaction. Wisely, the Nicolsons responded to its very public drubbing with silence.

The woman who startled Vita out of her ‘ordered, rational’ state was a journalist eight years her junior. Simply dressed, eschewing make-up, with her short hair and strong face, she was boyish in appearance; she possessed none of Mary’s gypsy wildness or Hilda’s earnest diffidence. Her name was Evelyn Irons. They met in a drawing room in Belgrave Square. Vita had accepted a request to read to an invited audience from The Land. Briefly, afterwards, Evelyn, who was the editor of the Women’s Page of the Daily Mail, attempted to interview Vita: she found herself reduced to a daze by what she regarded as ‘headily emotional stuff’ and the questions she wanted to ask Vita eluded her. When she set off to return to the office, Vita followed her. Vita suggested lunch at Harold’s flat in King’s Bench Walk. Evelyn’s response was contained within a letter full of the questions she had failed to ask in Belgrave Square. Vita replied: ‘I really do hate newspaper stunts and try to keep away from them as much as possible,’ ignored Evelyn’s questions and again suggested lunch – ‘to show me you forgive me’. Evelyn accepted.

Two days later, on 6 March, Evelyn went to Sissinghurst and stayed the night. By evening it was cold, the moon glinted on frozen turf, made reflections in the lake, silvering the willows, the outlines of wild ducks; Evelyn admitted to herself that she had fallen in love. She invited Vita to a party in the flat in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, which she shared with her lover, Olive Rinder. Vita took olives. Evelyn offered drinks, issued a challenge: ‘I suppose you know that I’m desperately in love with you.’

Not since Lord Lascelles and Ivan Hay had Vita resisted the aphrodisiac of being loved. Evelyn’s visits to Long Barn and Sissinghurst became a routine, a weekly occurrence, usually on Fridays. She left on Saturday mornings, ahead of Harold’s return. Vita insisted on secrecy: like Violet before her, Evelyn balked at its constraints. For her part, Olive Rinder encouraged Evelyn’s romantic truancy; she too was halfway to falling in love with Vita. Once, Vita cooked the first Sissinghurst asparagus for Evelyn: she steamed it in a syrup tin over a primus stove. The two women worked together in the garden: Evelyn’s photographs show Vita in a spotted shirt, belted at the waist, over breeches, or a shapeless dress of indeterminate colour like an overall, with gardening gauntlets and a spaniel in attendance. In her new novel, Vita called her heroine Evelyn. It was a lover’s joke. For all her desirability and attractiveness as a character, Evelyn Jarrold in Family History is decorative, feminine, trivial: her dressmaker, Mr Rivers, is ‘in the habit of saying that few of his clients could afford to look both picturesque and chic, but that Mrs Tommy Jarrold was one of the exceptions’.¹¹⁵ Evelyn Irons was bored by clothes and would shortly leave the paper’s Women’s Page; her interests were serious, hard-hitting. Neither picturesqueness nor chicness interested her any more than they interested Vita. She would never, like the fictional Evelyn, make herself foolish in love.

Reversing the roles she had shared with Pat Dansey, Vita bought Evelyn extravagant presents – a monogrammed leather writing case for her own daily letters; a suitcase filled with silk pyjamas; a diamond watch. She loved Evelyn extravagantly too and deluged her with poems. But her instinct erred. In a poem written in May called ‘Warning’, Vita suggested that the springtime of love contained within it seeds of its autumn decay: ‘love’s revenges their fruits for us shall bear/ The darkened fruits of passion so fresh in spring begun’.¹¹⁶ Possibly she anticipated the cooling of her own passion and was preparing the way for her disentanglement.

When it happened, it would be Evelyn who disentangled herself from Vita, not vice versa, Evelyn’s the passion that cooled. In Family History, which she had finished by the beginning of July, Vita attributes to the fictional Evelyn characteristics she must have recognised as her own. Of Ruth, who is secretly in love with Evelyn, we read: ‘She had no illusions as to the depths of woman’s cruelty where love or vanity were concerned. Evelyn, she knew, had a cruel and ugly side to her nature. She stated it in those terms, crudely, going no further, and not realising that in Evelyn she had to deal with an exceedingly complex and passionate temperament.’¹¹⁷ In the novel, those Vita-like characteristics contribute to Evelyn’s superiority over Ruth; in Vita’s relationship with the real Evelyn, cruelty on the latter’s part was inadvertent and Vita lost the upper hand. She was defeated by a greater love.

Before that, at the end of September, Vita and Evelyn went to Provence. They visited Tarascon, Arles, Nîmes, Les Baux. In Nîmes, both were revolted by the spectacle of a bullfight: the Spanish instincts of Pepita’s granddaughter were tempered by that English side of her duality which revelled in rabbits, budgerigars, her dogs and their puppies. In the ruined hilltop village of Les Baux, the combination of Evelyn, love, autumn sun and the beauty of the setting inspired Vita to further poetry. Vita concealed from Harold that she was not alone – ‘Their absolute seclusion … invested their secret love with idyllic colours,’ she wrote in Family History.¹¹⁸ When he found out, Harold dubbed it ‘Lez Boss’. After the Violet debacle, he could be excused his displeasure at the idea of Vita and a girlfriend in France.

The holiday was a success: Vita wrote, Evelyn took photographs; they made bonfires from dried lavender and the aromatic cones of cypress trees. Vita was expansive, unguarded. ‘Oh northern mists of doubt and fear,/ You are not here, you are not here,’ she wrote.¹¹⁹ She made jokes about her adventure with Violet, and Harold and Denys’s dash by plane to Amiens; she talked about Mary, also about Hilda and Dottie who had found common ground in their shared loss of Vita and forged a surprisingly warm friendship from that unpromising beginning. Vita referred to them jointly as ‘The Sicilian Expedition’ after a holiday the two had shared on the island. Later, they returned the favour. Given the difficulties certain to arise from Evelyn already having a partner, Hilda and Dottie referred to her as Vita’s scrape. The label stuck and Vita adopted ‘Scrape’ as her name for Evelyn. Once Vita also became Olive Rinder’s lover, early in 1932, she rapidly found herself in a triangle of conflicting jealousies, a scrape indeed. That this was entirely of her own making, she was honest enough to admit, both to herself and to Evelyn, apologetically, when the latter found out; less apologetically she told Evelyn that she was ‘more than ever convinced that it is possible to love two people’.¹²⁰ Again she did not tell Harold (the third person she loved). Instead she wrote cryptically to Virginia (a fourth love object): ‘Life is too complicated, – I sometimes feel that I can’t manage it at all.’¹²¹ Virginia replied with concern, but Vita declined to explain herself. Nor did she hasten to resolve the increasingly acrimonious tangle in which she had embroiled Evelyn and Olive. That would be left to Evelyn’s defection.

In the meantime, Vita used her poems to impose conditions on Evelyn: ‘Love thou but me …/ … with my own cipher [I] would imprint thee,/ That thou should’st answer to my single voice.’¹²² It was her habitual refrain, insisting on unswerving devotion, regardless of the mobile and omnivorous character of her own emotions. In a poem written at Les Baux, she promised to love Evelyn until death: in practice she interpreted to suit herself Gibran’s injunction about making bonds of love. She acknowledged to Evelyn that her poetic promises sounded like ‘threadbare vows’ and denied that they were such. They were, and the intensity of her feelings proved typically evanescent. So too did Evelyn’s. In Evelyn’s case, her feelings for Vita were knocked sideways by a coup de foudre at a party on 14 July 1932.

Evelyn fell in love with an older woman with ‘features cut like a Greek intaglio’, Joy McSweeney: Joy would remain Evelyn’s partner until her death in 1979. With a degree of trepidation, Evelyn told Vita of her change of heart in the first week of August. Coming on top of a disastrous Cornish holiday in Lamorna, where Vita, Evelyn and Olive had argued bitterly, Evelyn’s revelations cannot have surprised Vita. Vita was regretful nevertheless. On 11 August, she sent Evelyn a poem, which she published in her Collected Poems the following year. ‘Do not forget, my dear, that once we loved,’ she wrote in ‘Valediction’. ‘Remember only, free of stain or smutch,/ That passion once went naked and ungloved,/ And that your skin was startled by my touch.’¹²³ Those memories, with their unapologetic emphasis on the physicality of their love, were alive and real for Vita.

Vita did not comment on Evelyn’s transferral of her affections. Although she described herself as ‘very revengeful when I love’,¹²⁴ a tendency she had proved before in hotel rooms in Paris and Amiens, she was sensible enough to accept defeat and write out her unhappiness in verse. She clung to the memory of Les Baux and would invoke it in her occasional letters to Evelyn, which continued for the rest of her life. Her American lecture tour provided welcome distraction. On her return Vita took a deliberate step away from the dangerous, talkative, disloyal world of newspapers and bohemian London parties into the safety of her tower at Sissinghurst; she planted water lilies in the lake and Iris kaempferi by the moat.¹²⁵ In the future, other helpers than Evelyn would work alongside her in the garden.

But Vita remained stung, unexpectedly on the defensive. Although her retreat appeared to be endorsed by advice Harold received from Lord Eustace Percy on the couple’s return from America that ‘serious people ought to withdraw from life nowadays’, she wondered if in fact she had any choice.¹²⁶ In an unpublished diary poem written in May 1933, she described herself as ‘a broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection’ and asked ‘What have I to give my friends in the last resort?/ An awkwardness, a shyness and a scrap,/ No thing that’s truly me.’¹²⁷ Eventually she took cover in her writing, explaining her feelings in what would become her next novel: ‘In her immature philosophy, the first tenet was to shut yourself away in a stony fortress and then to consider what system of bluff would best defend you against the importunities of the world.’¹²⁸ It was St Barbara’s philosophy, passive, discreet: far removed from the cavalier swagger that remained a part of Vita’s self-identity.

Vita compartmentalised her life. It was a form of pragmatism, her means of juggling conflicting loyalties. It also, at times, represented a genuine failure of imagination. ‘It is almost as hard, in Persia, to believe in the existence of England, as it is, in England, to believe in the existence of Persia,’ she wrote in Tehran in 1926.¹²⁹ At times that ‘blindness’ extended beyond England and Persia to Vita’s dealings with people. Her emotional life was seldom simple. In 1931, she had fallen in love with Evelyn, encouraged Olive Rinder to fall in love with her, remained hurt at what she saw as Virginia’s abandonment, worked alongside Hilda and written and gardened at a furious rate. Her support for Harold and her sons was boundless in theory but circumscribed in practice by these multiple claims on her time and energy.

Harold had joined the staff of the Evening Standard on 1 January 1930. Before the month was out, he knew that he had made a mistake, disliked journalism, slithered into depression. That depression lingered. His aversion to Grub Street dented his self-esteem. His early dreams with Vita taunted him. In January 1913, apprehensive about her dislike of diplomacy as a profession and a way of life, Vita had begged Harold to reassure her that ‘the truth is a rose-coloured story culminating in you and me making a State entry into Delhi on an elephant with a golden howdah, and you receiving deputations of Indian princes’; in May 1926, the Nicolsons’ butler George Horne, known as Moody, confided to Vita that he shared the same dream for Harold.¹³⁰ Harold soon discovered that Lord Beaverbrook’s gossip columns were a far cry from following in the footsteps of his Uncle Dufferin as Viceroy. Distaste for journalism lay behind his decision to join Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party in January 1931 and stand as a parliamentary candidate in October; Virginia described his political opportunism to Vita as ‘rash, foolish, perverse, incalculable’, as indeed it proved.¹³¹ Predictably the collapse of New Party hopes in the 1931 elections had also dealt a body blow to the party’s paper, Action, and Harold was forced to use his own money to settle some of the journal’s outstanding debts. With a degree of accuracy, he noted in his diary at the end of the year, ‘Everything has gone wrong. I have lost not only my fortune but much of my reputation.’¹³² In the short term, he would remain equally preoccupied with both.

With his financial prospects ‘so black that I groan to gaze into the abyss’, Vita visited Harold’s bank on 23 December 1931 and successfully ‘extract[ed] an unwilling loan from them’.¹³³ Harold acknowledged Vita’s role in his life as one of calmness, comfort and consideration; he omitted to mention the lack of interest in either politics or journalism which had caused her to fall asleep the night they sat beside the fire discussing his future: ‘When I reach the point where I picture myself riding on an elephant at Delhi, I find that for the last half-hour she has been asleep.’¹³⁴

Airily Vita reassured her husband that he could make £2,000 by writing a novel; it was still less than the income she had forsworn from Victoria. Vita’s admiration for Harold’s writing was sincere and wholehearted. In her diary in January 1924 she had described herself as ‘so impressed with [the] vividness’ of his Byron: The Last Journey, which she read as proofs. ‘I like his lucid mind, and his ease of expression. He is like a person who knows how to use a scythe,’ she wrote to Virginia.¹³⁵ Her dislike of the bulk of the careers open to Harold was equally sincere. In addition, Vita struggled to take seriously any mention of the precariousness of their finances. In March 1932, Harold described her reaction to just such a conversation: ‘Our discussion is interrupted by a sudden desire on her part to take the Blue Train to Biarritz, or why not Syracuse, or why, if one has got as far as that, not to Greece or the Lebanon? I point out that we CANNOT AFFORD IT – THAT WE ARE POOR PEOPLE THESE DAYS.’¹³⁶

But Vita was not listening. She parried Harold’s misgivings with her proposed new plantings for the front of Sissinghurst, ‘a wall of limes, framing the two gables and the arch, and following on to a poplar avenue across the fields’.¹³⁷ For the considerable sum of £5, she bought four large yew trees for the courtyard. ‘We found them in a nurseryman’s garden, to which they had just been transplanted from Penshurst churchyard. The parishioners of Penshurst apparently thought them too gloomy and threw them out. They were old trees but they were just what the courtyard at Sissinghurst demanded and we chanced it.’¹³⁸ At further expense the trees’ roots were thoroughly doused with bull’s blood during planting. From the same nurseryman Vita acquired a neglected climbing hybrid perpetual rose that was afterwards identified as Souvenir du Docteur Jamain. It remained one of her favourites. In August 1957 she described it with customary lushness as ‘nostalgically scented, meaning everything that burying one’s nose into the heart of a rose meant in one’s childhood, or in one’s adolescence when one first discovered poetry, or the first time one fell in love’.¹³⁹ Harold’s warnings affected Vita glancingly: she was never constrained by the ordinary or the small scale. ‘It is always possible to paint any picture in dark colours, but that means that one has left out the essential part,’ she wrote later. ‘Life depends largely on how you take it.’¹⁴⁰ Her boldness was a tonic to Harold. When Vita was away, his confidence faltered.

During Vita’s absence in Provence with Evelyn, Harold identified in his diary ‘what it is that makes us so indispensable to each other’. He focused on four points: their respect for one another; their ability to relax completely in one another’s company; their stimulation of one another and the harmony of their togetherness.¹⁴¹ He highlighted Vita’s understanding; he did not refer to love, either given or received. And he never forgot Vita’s underlying dislike of marriage as an institution, of which she had given him ample proof. ‘I know you loathe marriage and that it is not a natural state for you,’ he wrote on their twenty-first wedding anniversary in 1934.¹⁴²

Vita’s financial phlegmatism appeared to be rewarded by the success of the couple’s American lecture tour at the beginning of 1933. This benison was followed by another in the autumn, when Vita received a letter from her French bank announcing a balance of £2,600. It was not enough to assuage Harold’s fears completely. ‘Unless we begin to make more money by books, we are in for a very difficult time. This is for me a constant anxiety,’ he wrote on 31 December. Both Harold and Vita knew that they were playing a waiting game: Vita would become a wealthy woman on Victoria’s death.

Naturally less anxious about such things than Harold, Vita was wrestling with different anxieties. Once Evelyn had set up home with Joy McSweeney, Olive Rinder was homeless: suffering from tuberculosis, she was too weak to support herself by working. Vita’s financial support exceeded her emotional benefactions. She recognised that Olive, like Violet before her, had seen through her: the picture Olive painted of Vita was less heroic than Violet’s. ‘You do like to have your cake and eat it, – and so many cakes, so many, a surfeit of sweet things,’ Olive had written to Vita on 11 January 1932.¹⁴³ It was a repetition of Pat Dansey’s criticism about Vita’s deluded play-acting as ‘a romantic young man who treats women badly’. Again the accusation of selfishness, however deserved, was unwelcome. Vita asked Evelyn to go on visiting Olive, but Evelyn had broken free. In the years to come, neither Olive nor Vita would see her often. Vita found a bungalow for Olive. Olive’s letters to her were pathetic entreaties. For Vita the spell was broken. The depression that had assailed her early in 1931 returned.

‘It goes without saying that a book by the author of “The Edwardians” is ably written, that every part of it, taken singly, is good, and that it holds the interest,’ wrote Basil Davenport in his review of The Dark Island in the Saturday Review on 24 November 1934. ‘But it holds the interest only to disappoint it; the new “Wuthering Heights” is still unwritten, and the self-tormenting sadist still awaits his genius.’

On 10 October 1934, the Hogarth Press printed a first edition of 10,590 copies of what would prove to be Vita’s last novel for almost a decade. By the end of the year only half had sold, 4,000 of them ahead of publication and a raft of mostly ambivalent reviews.¹⁴⁴

The Dark Island is the most disturbing of Vita’s novels. It tells the story of a marriage between Shirin, a woman who, like Vita, prefers ‘harshness to sentimentality’, and Davenport’s ‘self-tormenting sadist’, her husband Venn. Venn too resembles Vita: he has been shaped by his childhood, ‘too well trained by his own temperament, and by Storn [his ancestral home], always to choose the more cruel, more dangerous path’.¹⁴⁵ At some length Vita examines the angry and self-destructive emotional make-up of her handsome protagonists. She summarised her melodramatic plot as ‘the trouble which ended in two persons losing their lives and in one criminal receiving an expression of sympathy from the coroner instead of a sentence of death from the judge’. It is brooding, intense stuff played out against a backdrop of equal intensity.

The dark island of the title is Storn, crowned by a Norman castle, the home of the le Breton family. Both husband and wife are more in love with Storn than one another; like Vita’s feelings for Knole, their passion for the island exceeds simple love and overrides other loyalties. Like Vita’s Sissinghurst, Storn is a retreat from the world: Shirin relishes ‘the bliss, the release of living for ever on Storn away from people’.¹⁴⁶ For husband and wife, Storn is their journey’s end: physically and metaphorically it lies ‘at the end of that path of sunlight, symbol of all romance and of all escape from the humdrum weariness of life, from its meannesses, its falsity, and its pain’.¹⁴⁷ Their tragedy is to take into that path of sunlight their own meannesses and falsity. Despite its vigorous emotions, The Dark Island is a novel by an older, wearier, less sanguine Vita.

On delivery of Vita’s manuscript, Leonard Woolf described the novel to Virginia as ‘perilous fantastic stuff, a woman flagellated in a cave’.¹⁴⁸ Astutely he questioned how much of Vita’s lurid Grand Guignol the public would stand. Harold, Nigel and Ben, who designed the dust jacket, combined in disliking The Dark Island; Harold protested that it was ‘morbid and distressing’. Sexual violence and calculated cruelty were curious subjects for a popular writer of bestsellers in 1934. Where recently Vita had wooed a large, middle-class readership with a story of Edwardian aristocratic amorality, in The Dark Island she exposed to their bewildered gaze unlovely subtexts drawn from her own atypical experience of upper-class life, conflicts centred on inheritance, territorialism and the inequalities of men and women. The tragic story of Shirin le Breton offered Vita’s readers no picturesque distractions from an uncertain decade. The violence that in The Dragon in Shallow Waters had appeared simply stirring here acquires a darker, more lingering impact, which made for uncomfortable reading. The Times Literary Supplement acclaimed the novel as a work of ‘fervid’ imagination: it was that very fervour which alienated other readers. Virginia suggested Vita was too close to her material. Afterwards she acknowledged that the emotional revelations contained within the novel made her jealous and lessened her enjoyment.

The key, as always, lay within Vita herself. Soon after her return from America, she had fallen in love with her sister-in-law. Gwen St Aubyn was one of two grown-up bridesmaids at Vita and Harold’s wedding. The Dark Island is dedicated to Gwen and Gwen is the inspiration for its heroine, Shirin; Storn is St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall, which Gwen’s husband Sam would inherit on his father’s death. Even Shirin’s name, Persian for ‘sweet’, was Vita’s pet name for Gwen; it was more appropriate in Gwen’s case than that of the fictional Shirin. As Vita’s son Ben recognised, the novel is a double portrait of Gwen and, in the guise of old Lady le Breton, Victoria. It also, of course, encompasses images of Vita herself, a fragmented reflection divided between several characters. The Venn who whips the chained and naked Shirin in Andromeda’s Cave is an adult version of the nettle-thrashing Vita of those Boer War games with the Battiscombes; like Vita, Venn is torn between his hatred of democracy and mistrust of privilege. Shirin shares Vita’s obsessive belief in the redemptive power of place; like Vita, she is casual in her approach to romantic conquest, studiedly without regrets and secretive. Vita’s description of Shirin’s friend Cristina suggests self-portraiture, ‘with her tawny appearance and her big limbs; her large gestures, her large generosity, her love of bright colours, her coltish way of striding about, her impatient way of pushing her hair back, her strong square hands, her direct speech – all rather Wagnerian’.¹⁴⁹ Cristina’s affection for Shirin clearly transcends the ordinary bounds of friendship. She admits that she wants ‘the whole of Shirin greedily’,¹⁵⁰ a statement in itself to account for Harold’s dislike of the novel. In her ponderous ratiocination, Cristina repeatedly resorts to horticultural imagery. In The Dark Island, Vita wears many masks.

On 18 August 1933, Vita had written to Virginia, ‘I’ve got my sister-in-law staying here, and she’s been ill, and I am supposed to provide the cure. Country rustication and all that.’¹⁵¹ Gwen was Harold’s only sister, ten years his junior, four years younger than Vita. Despite a strong sibling bond, she had played little part in the Nicolsons’ lives since 1913, although she and her husband rented Vita and Harold’s Ebury Street house early in their marriage. It was a motor accident involving serious head injuries that brought her to Sissinghurst to convalesce. Her arrival provoked a mixed response in Vita. The women were not close. Gwen and her husband led safe, predictable lives in county society, accepting its values and shibboleths; Gwen mostly appeared preoccupied with bringing up her large family of five children. At the time of her accident, she was working on a book, The Family Book, subtitled: ‘A comprehensive guide to family life from before marriage to the adolescence of children: primarily for parents’. Both title and subject seemed to confirm Gwen’s conventionalism.

Vita’s letter to Virginia suggests the way the wind was blowing. She described her pleasure in looking after Gwen as increased by Gwen’s work on The Family Book: ‘We sit on the steps of the tower discussing why some women get their physical satisfaction interiorally or exteriorally, and what connection there may or may not be between the inner part of the nerve and the outer – and what connection there may be between perversion and normality – and so on. A very interesting question.’¹⁵²

Gwen had reached a crossroads in her life. More important to her than The Family Book was her long, thoughtful spiritual journey towards Catholicism. That change represented a move away from the solid certainties of St Aubyn county life; in the aftermath of her accident Gwen embraced a larger-scale questioning of the building blocks of her existence. Vita, who had warned Harold during their engagement that she was incapable of submission, interpreted this development as a rejection of Gwen’s former docility in marriage and encouraged her rebellion. The women’s friendship grew. Gwen’s doctor insisted she needed at least a year’s full convalescence: with her husband’s acquiescence, and in the absence of guest rooms, she moved in to a room at the top of Vita’s tower at Sissinghurst that was specially prepared for her. With intervals she would continue to live with Vita and Harold until 1942.

Following an operation in January 1934, Gwen was taken by Vita to Portofino to recover. Harold expressed concern at his ‘poor cracked sister’ travelling so soon, but no other uneasiness.¹⁵³ The women stayed in Castello Brown, the small sixteenth-century hilltop castle perched above the harbour, which had inspired Elizabeth von Arnim’s novel of the previous decade, The Enchanted April. In ironic vein, Harold wrote to Vita: ‘Well, I am all for that sort of thing, as you know. I liked being turned out of my dear little suburban home [Long Barn] and made to sleep in a ruined tower on a camp-bed [Sissinghurst]. And I see no reason why, in the present state of our finances, you did not buy the Castello outright … It all comes from Gwen reading … the works of Elizabeth Russell [von Arnim].’¹⁵⁴

Von Arnim had described the Castello as ideal for ‘those who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine’, a prescription calculated to appeal to Vita.¹⁵⁵ She had also drawn a picture of women frustrated in marriage, temporarily abandoning their husbands. ‘A picture had flashed across her brain, and there were two figures in it sitting together under a great trailing wisteria that stretched across the branches of a tree she didn’t know, and it was herself and Mrs Arbuthnot – she saw them – she saw them.’¹⁵⁶ Like Vita in 1918, von Arnim’s women reject the constraints of unrelenting domesticity. ‘There ought to be a break, there ought to be intervals,’ one exclaims, referring to the married woman’s monotony of ‘see[ing] about the dinner and the fish’. As in von Arnim’s novel, in which, within a fairytale scheme, wives are fondly reunited with their husbands against a backdrop of glittering Mediterranean, Harold joined Vita and Gwen in their harbourside eyrie. In this case, there had been no crisis. Vita had made her protest long ago and Gwen had no need to shirk domestic responsibilities, having already, as she said, entrusted all responsibilities to Vita.

In 1940, Gwen published an account of her conversion to Catholicism, Towards a Pattern. It consists of letters written to an unnamed recipient, who is almost certainly Vita. In describing a mystical vision that appears to her while she is writing, Gwen tells her correspondent, ‘I heard your pen scratching as you wrote … The room, and you, were there, and so was I, but I was conscious of an enormous change in me.’¹⁵⁷ That change in Gwen had begun before 1940. It began when Vita reimagined her as a flawed and tragic romantic heroine in The Dark Island and, in the way of Vita’s fiction, merged their two personalities in her picture of Shirin. In turn Gwen would influence Vita. At first those changes happened in small ways: Virginia noted with disapproval that Vita had begun to wear nail polish and lipstick, inexpertly applied. Afterwards Gwen’s preoccupations shaped both the subject matter of Vita’s writing and her handling of those subjects.

The mysticism that characterises the biography of St Joan of Arc which Vita wrote during the period of her intimacy with Gwen St Aubyn arose out of the latter’s religious odyssey: it is already discernible in The Dark Island. Shirin succumbs to the ‘beauty and magic of Storn’: ‘like a faith, like an ecstasy, it transformed her, filling her with strength and purity and ardour, with a passion that transcended all material love’.¹⁵⁸ Gwen’s journey towards spiritual renewal inspired similar questioning on Vita’s part: Vita described her as ‘you, who opened first my shuttered eyes/ To the first difficult and deep surmise’.¹⁵⁹ The Hogarth Press promoted Vita’s long poem Solitude, written under Gwen’s influence and published in 1938, as ‘the poet’s intimate reflections induced by the solitude of night, reflections upon love, God and the universe, beauty and truth, life and death’, territory Vita would visit again, in different guise, in The Garden. In fact she was no newcomer to such questions. On and off throughout the last decade she had struggled to unravel a workable philosophy of living, most notably in ‘Reddín’, the long poem she finished in 1928, having previously attempted to write it as a novel, including during the trip to Italy with Dottie and Gerry in 1921.

The poem is named after an architect who builds a temple that ‘compelled each man to find his way anew/ Round corners and by paths that no guide knew’.¹⁶⁰ Reddín’s philosophy is explicitly non-Christian – ‘No vision of the martyr or the saint/ Shone down from domed mosaic’. It is a creed which, rather vaguely, embraces everyone: ‘all were welcome there,/ Since the great doors stood open’.¹⁶¹ In its vagueness lies both its strength and its weakness: after a decade the Vita who had once described herself as ‘disgracefully happy-go-lucky’ was still searching for answers.¹⁶² Solitude included her attempt at a fuller, more personal answer; she also offered images of transformation in Saint Joan of Arc and The Eagle and the Dove. After the cool critical reception of The Dark Island, Gwen’s example provided Vita with fresh inspiration and, in her biography of Joan of Arc, published by Cobden-Sanderson in June 1936, a popular commercial success. Vita’s mother, who read the book in manuscript form, lamented the absence of any love interest in her heroine’s life; her friends were caustic, and baffled by a development they regarded as out of character. No one who had read ‘Reddín’ or Vita’s assessment of Joan of Arc’s first dilemma – ‘the practical inconvenience of belonging to the wrong sex must be faced and overcome’¹⁶³ – could fail to find the connection.

Vita celebrated completing her new book by planting quantities of old-fashioned roses. In the same year, a large greenhouse and an orchid house were erected at Sissinghurst and Vita bought thirty new budgerigars for her aviary. The Lime Walk was planted and paved. It would become Harold’s particular suzerainty, referred to as ‘My Life’s Work’ or ‘MLW’; he employed his own gardener, Sidney Neve, for its upkeep and kept detailed notebooks on its progress.¹⁶⁴ Gwen continued to help Vita in the garden. Together they rowed on the lake, gathered apples in the orchard, filled cushions with the ‘delicious silky floss’ contained in bulrush stems. Whenever they were at home, Ben and Nigel also helped their parents in the garden, part of Sissinghurst’s ‘monastic’ routine in which gardening formed the only alternative to writing. But it was not Saint Joan of Arc which so richly endowed Vita and Harold’s garden. On 30 January 1936, following a minor stroke or heart attack, Victoria died peacefully in her sleep at her house, White Lodge, near Brighton. She was seventy-three. In his diary Harold described Vita as ‘much harassed and shattered, but inwardly, I think, relieved’. Vita, who had rushed to her mother’s bedside, described herself as ‘stunned’. She felt fragile; the onset of the menopause exacerbated the uncontrollability of her responses. Eight days later, Harold returned to Brighton to bury Victoria, as she had requested in ‘a pathetic typewritten note’, by scattering her ashes out at sea, in sight of White Lodge. Vita did not accompany him.

It was a vignette, like others in this story, which balanced sobriety with slapstick. More than twenty years after Victoria’s triumph in the Scott lawsuit, the Sackvilles remained noteworthy. Members of the press seized upon news of Victoria’s death. Vita and Harold took precautions. Victoria’s ashes were removed from the undertakers’ premises after cremation and entrusted to a local oyster seller, Mr English. English turned out to be a drunkard: only with difficulty was he dissuaded from keeping Harold company in his hired fishing boat. Assisted by the two sailors who owned the boat, Harold travelled two miles out to sea; also with him was Victoria’s last secretary, Cecil Rhind. Kneeling at the gunwale, the sailors and Rhind standing behind him, their hats in their hands, Harold tipped into ‘an angry brown sea’ the handful of Victoria’s last remains. In place of prayers was a simple valediction, hurled by Harold into the wind: ‘B.M. – all who love you are happy that you should now be at peace. We shall remember always your beauty, your courage and your charm.’¹⁶⁵ Inevitably the wind changed direction. It threw the ashes back into Harold’s face. They settled in the seams and creases of his greatcoat.¹⁶⁶

Harold reported proceedings selectively to Vita. After death duties, the estate she inherited from Victoria provided her with an annual income of £5,000. There was also £1,000 a year each for Ben, now twenty-two and embarked on the first steps of his career as an art historian, and nineteen-year-old Nigel, at Balliol College, Oxford, where he had followed in Ben and Harold’s footsteps. Among Victoria’s possessions were garden benches designed by Lutyens which made their way to Sissinghurst. In the short term, Vita and Harold’s financial worries were over. Seery’s gift to his ‘chère petite amie’ extended its lifeline to a third generation.

For Vita, Victoria’s death demanded resolution. She achieved it, as always, through her writing. The following October she offered the public a careful, affectionate and misleading account of her relationship with her mother: what Victoria meant to her, she asserted, was ‘a mixture of tragedy and – no, not comedy, but sheer fun’.¹⁶⁷ In a double biography of Victoria and Pepita, entitled simply Pepita, Vita imposed order on disorder and replaced questions with answers. She did so by presenting the lives of her mother and her grandmother as case studies in the Latin temperament. Pepita became Vita’s fullest exposition of her personal theory of her own duality. She rooted the ‘Spanish’ side of her nature in an inescapable maternal continuum and exploited national stereotypes to explain away troubling behaviour. Of Pepita’s mother (her own great-grandmother), Vita wrote: ‘Catalina lavished on her own daughter the fierce and possessive love which Latin women do often display towards their children, injudicious to a degree and mischievous in its consequences, but certainly not malevolent in its intention.’¹⁶⁸ At a stroke, Vita appeared to solve the riddle of Victoria’s own approach to motherhood; the pattern she outlined came close to describing her own behaviour in her sexual relationships with other women. This pat quality to Pepita reassured Vita; it also trivialised more extreme aspects of Victoria’s bad behaviour. Its writing proved an act of exorcism. In none of her fiction written after Pepita did Vita explore with the same urgency and intensity the emotional and sexual ebullience of earlier fictions. She had settled the record.

Separately Leonard and Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita about the manuscript to express their delight: Virginia claimed she ‘read it like a shark swallowing a mackerel’.¹⁶⁹ In private they accused Vita of consciously downplaying Victoria’s devilment: Virginia remembered too vividly the horror she had felt in 1929 when Victoria took it upon herself to enlighten Ben and Nigel about their parents’ sexual proclivities. In this case, Vita’s instinct for myth-making was stronger than the careful objectivity she had demonstrated in her biography of Joan of Arc. Again she plundered fairy tales for easy explanations: ‘The bad fairy who attended the christening of Sleeping Beauty must have attended my mother’s also. Gifts had been showered on her: beauty and charm and energy, abounding vitality, courage, determination … But the bad fairy ordained that she should fritter everything away.’¹⁷⁰ Like much of Vita’s writing, it was an exercise in wish fulfilment. Her American publishers aligned it with her fiction. ‘Witty, frank, completely devoid of reticences,’ claimed Doubleday Doran, ‘this unconventional memoir of the extraordinary Sackville-West family could only have been written by the brilliant author of The Edwardians and All Passion Spent.’ The Hogarth Press published four editions in six months and, at the end of March 1938, paid Vita royalties on sales of 12,198 copies.

Meanwhile, Vita had embarked on her first gardening book: Some Flowers was published by Cobden-Sanderson in November 1937. Despite her growing reclusiveness, she had made a new friend of Maidstone-based rose expert, Edward Ashton Bunyard, author of Old Garden Roses; she included four roses in Some Flowers, alongside crown imperials and the pomegranate, Punica granatum, which she had first seen a decade before growing untended in Persian myrtle groves. From the outset Vita’s horticultural writing betrayed an idiosyncratic quality. She offered commonsense advice and observations while celebrating favourite plants with the sensuousness typical of her writing. ‘It is improbable that we shall ever lie on a bed of roses, unless we are very decadent and also very rich,’ she wrote of Rosa gallica, ‘but we can imagine ourselves doing so when we hold a single rose close to our eyes and absorb it in an intimate way into our private heart.’¹⁷¹

On 8 June 1937, Harold wrote to Vita: ‘Never has Sissinghurst looked more lovely … we have got what we wanted to get – a perfect proportion between the classical and the romantic, between the element of expectation and the element of surprise.’¹⁷² Up to a point those neat polarities represented Harold and Vita themselves; Vita’s romanticism took the form of the lavishness which she claimed was ‘an inherent part of my philosophy’, her principle of ‘cram, cram, cram’ that, as much as anything, hallmarked a distinctive Sissinghurst style.¹⁷³ By the late 1930s, Vita and Harold’s complementary outlooks had sculpted Sissinghurst’s six acres into a richly satisfying aesthetic and horticultural mélange: in their garden they proved to one another that in their divergences lay much of their strength and each was touchingly eager to accord credit to the other. That Vita shared Harold’s assessment of Sissinghurst’s loveliness is indicated by her agreement the following summer to open the garden twice to paying visitors. The Nicolsons charged them a shilling a head. Over the course of two days they raised £25 14s 6d. The same year Vita made her first plantings in the Herb Garden and between them they completed the carpet of polyanthus in the Nuttery. Harold celebrated the success of their open days by giving Vita a plant token. In the unpublished poem she wrote to him in response, she linked plants’ growth with the growth of love and, reflecting on their marriage, resorted to her planting philosophy: ‘let us cram with flowers each threatened rift’.¹⁷⁴

The Sackville flag was hoisted at Sissinghurst for the first time in the second week of March 1939. It was Harold’s present to Vita. ‘The flag streamed out five minutes after I had passed under the porch and made me feel awfully grand,’ Vita wrote in her diary on 24 March.¹⁷⁵ Later she told an American friend that it was Harold who valued the symbolism of the flag: ‘as Harold says of the flag I fly in the tower: “It grands the place up.”’¹⁷⁶ It hardly matters. Bold above her tower, it was the pennant of her possession. In the fullest sense, Sissinghurst was Vita’s. The last of the ‘fragments of an age gone by’ that she had described in her poem ‘Sissinghurst’ had been ‘assembled’. From now on possession would be reversed: Vita would belong to Sissinghurst.