Victoria Mary Sackville-West
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The Honourable Vita Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson CH |
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Vita Sackville-West in 1924
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| Born | Victoria Mary Sackville-West 9 March 1892 Knole House, Kent, England |
| Died | 2 June 1962 (aged 70) Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, England |
| Occupation | Novelist, poet, gardener |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 1917–1960 |
| Spouse | Harold Nicolson (m. 1913; her death 1962) |
| Children |
Benedict Nicolson Nigel Nicolson |
| Relatives |
Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville (father) Victoria Sackville-West (mother) |
Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer.
She was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime and 13 novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her famous friend and lover, Virginia Woolf.
She had a longstanding column in The Observer (1946-1961) and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.
Knole, the home of Vita's aristocratic ancestors in Kent, was given to Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. Vita was born there, the only child of cousins Victoria Sackville-West and Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville. Vita's mother, raised in a Parisian convent, was the illegitimate daughter of Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville and a Spanish dancer, Josefa de Oliva (née Durán y Ortega), known as Pepita. Pepita's mother was an acrobat who had married a barber.
Christened Victoria Mary Sackville-West, the girl was known as "Vita" throughout her life to distinguish her from her mother.The usual English aristocratic inheritance customs were followed by the Sackville-West family, which prevented Vita from inheriting Knole on the death of her father, which became a source of life-long bitterness. The house followed the title, and was bequeathed instead by her father to his nephew Charles, who became the 4th Baron.
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