This image is the cover for the book Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West

Aristocrat, novelist, essayist, traveler, and lover of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West lived a fascinating and daring life on the periphery of the Bloomsbury circle. She wrote in an astounding variety of genres, including travel narrative, historical and literary studies, poetry, fiction, and essays, and is probably best known or her novels, The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and incomparable writings about English country houses and gardens. Here, for the first time, is an anthology that represents the full expanse of her interests and styles. Over half of the works, including intimate diaries and a dream notebook, have never been published. Edited by a foremost expert on the Bloomsbury circle, Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings provides the best and most accessible introduction to this unique writer.

Vita Sackville-West, Mary Ann Caws

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (1892–1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer. A successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist, she published more than a dozen collections of poetry and thirteen novels. Sackville-West 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.

St. Martin’s Press