Sackville-West, Vita (Victoria Mary) (1892-1962)

English writer. Her novels include The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931); she also wrote the long pastoral poem The Land (1926). The fine gardens around her home at Sissinghurst, Kent, were created by her and her husband Harold Nicolson.

Virginia Woolf was a close friend and based the novel Orlando (1928) on her.

Sackville-West was born at Knole, Kent, the daughter of the 3rd Baron Sackville. She was educated privately and began writing as a child. Knole and the Sackvilles 1922 describes her ancestral home and family. With her husband, she travelled to the Middle East, writing an account in Passenger to Teheran in 1926. Her fiction includes the novels Heritage (1919) and The Dark Island (1934); and a collection of short stories, The Heir (1922). She also wrote biographies of, among others, Aphra Behn (1927), Andrew Marvell (1929), Saint Joan (1936), and her grandmother, the Spanish dancer Pepita (1937); and also The Eagle and the Dove: St Theresa of Avila, St Thérèse of Lisieux (1943). Volumes of verse are The King's Daughter (1930), Collected Poems (1933), Solitude (1938), and The Garden (1946). Portrait of a Marriage (1973) by her son Nigel Nicolson (1917- ) describes the unorthodox married life of his parents.