Behind the Mask
The Life of Vita Sackville-West
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling new biography of Vita Sackville-West, the 20th century aristocrat, literary celebrity, devoted wife, famous lover of Virginia Woolf, recluse, and iconoclast who defied categorization.
In this stunning new biography of Vita Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison's Behind the Mask traces the triumph and contradictions of Vita's extraordinary life. His narrative charts a fascinating course from Vita's lonely childhood at Knole, through her affectionate but ‘open' marriage to Harold Nicolson (during which both husband and wife energetically pursued homosexual affairs, Vita most famously with Virginia Woolf), and through Vita's literary successes and disappointments, to the famous gardens the couple created at Sissinghurst. The book tells how, from her privileged world of the aristocracy, Sackville-West brought her penchant for costume, play-acting and rebellion to the artistic vanguard of modern Britain. Dennison is the acclaimed author of many books including a biography of Queen Victoria. Here, in the first biography to be written of Vita for thirty years, he reveals the whole story and gets behind ‘the beautiful mask' of Vita's public achievements to reveal an often troubled persona which heroically resisted compromise on every level. Drawing on wideranging sources and the extensive letters that sustained her marriage, this is a compelling story of love, loss and jealousy, of high-life and low points, of binding affection and illicit passion – a portrait of an extraordinary, 20th-century life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Biographer Dennison (The Last Princess) offers a dense and tedious portrait of British writer Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) that begins in 1910 with the legal troubles of Victoria, the author's mother, who acquired a scandalous reputation for her out-of-wedlock birth and (possibly platonic) relationship with an older man who bequeathed his estate to her husband. These events thrust the aristocratic Sackville-Wests into the spotlight for the first time. Dennison then backtracks to Sackville-West's birth and privileged upbringing that laid the groundwork for Sackville-West's complicated nature, including her need for role play, her tendency toward drama and cruelty, and the contradictions between her actions and work. Her long engagement to diplomat Harold Nicolson and their eventual marriage are explored, as are her affairs with her childhood friend Rosamund, novelist Violet Keppel, and Virginia Woolf. The book then moves onto the final decades of Vita's life, when creating the famous Sissinghurst Castle Gardens became her priority, and when, perhaps for the first time, she was rejected by a potential lover. Dennison has plenty of information to offer but unfortunately little focus. Fans of Sackville-West's, or of Woolf's novel Orlando (inspired by Sackville-West), will be interested nonetheless, but they'll have to wade through a great deal of undigested information to get to the story.
