Both those unfamiliar with the extraordinary life of British
aristocrat Victoria (Vita) Sackville - West and those who have read
Victoria Glendinning's compelling Vita (1983), Virginia Woolf's Orlando
(1928), or Sackville -West's own multiple published works of fiction,
poetry, or nature and travel writing will thoroughly enjoy Portrait Of A
Marriage (1973). Composed around a posthumously discovered confessional
manuscript Sackville - West wrote and hid away in 1920, the book's
chapters alternate between portions of Vita's nuanced, forthright
manuscript and son Nigel Nicholson's more objective recounting of the
facts in the lives of his parents, Sackville - West and her spouse,
author and diplomat Harold Nicholson.
Chiefly remembered today for
her garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent and for being the romantic
("Better to gloriously fail than dingily succeed"), daring, and bisexual
inspiration for Woolf's historical, gender-addressing novel Orlando,
Sackville - West was a temperamental, multifaceted, and deeply emotional
woman who followed the dictates of her heart and defied the conventions
of her era to what many would think an alarming degree. As her
manuscript clearly reveals, Sackville - West was a very human, self -
honest individual who was conscious of her moral and ethical weaknesses
and who continually struggled with her wayward nature and its
debilitating affects on her husband, children, and extended family.
Today a hero to some and a somewhat ridiculous figure to others, readers
of Portrait Of A Marriage are likely to come away with more than a
modicum of sympathy for the not - entirely enigmatic Vita; throughout
her life she managed to straddle a great number of seeming paradoxes and
today remains potent proof that many Western conventions concerning
love, marriage, parenthood, sexuality, and friendship are as not as
tightly mapped out as most would generally like to believe. Unlike
fellow writers and contemporaries Hilda Doolittle, Djuna Barnes, or Jean
Rhys, her excesses, dependencies, and emotional vacillations did not
ultimately undo Vita, either psychically, artistically, or socially.
Admittedly, Sackville - West was a child of privilege and remained
financially comfortable most of her life. However, her managerial skill,
expert monetary planning, and her own hard work as an author, radio
broadcaster, lecturer, and internationally acclaimed gardener went a
long way towards securing that position.
Portrait Of A Marriage
and the story of Sackville - West's life may be the ultimate romantic
tale of the twentieth century, though one in which the glamour of
wealth, palatial family estates (365 - room Knole), creative talent,
international fame, and steadfast love were offset by dark episodes of
betrayal, spousal abuse, transvestitism, emotional violence, and
apparent child abandonment. Remarkably, Vita's story was ultimately a
happy one, and the end of her life, relatively serene. Increasingly a
loner with age, Sackville - West sequestered herself in her private
tower at Sissinghurst, where she continued to write novels and other
literature. But men and women continued to fall in love with her and she
with them; as Victoria Glendinning wrote, "For Vita the great adventure
was never over."
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