He had recently become the youngest admitted officer in the diplomatic service, the start of a virtuosic foreign office career of global impact. Harold Nicolson proposed to Vita at the Hatfield Ball in January of 1912, having never kissed her (“He was very shy, and pulled all the buttons one by one off his gloves”). I was very fond of her, however she had a sweet nature. I mean that it was almost exclusively physical, as, to be frank, she always bored me as a companion. “Even my liaison with Rosamund was, in a sense, superficial.
She compared Rosamund’s company to that of the society men she met at balls, as if-radical thought-all companions were equal and comparable, gender immaterial, apples to apples. Vita had no concept of homosexuality as such-her instincts toward Rosamund seemed as ordinary as her penchant for tromping through bogs: an after-school hobby. Vita and Rosamund developed a quick intimacy, with ample time alone together granted by unsuspecting chaperones. More saliently, she was already smitten: with Rosamund Grosvenor, “the neat little girl who came to play with me when Dada went to South Africa.” Vita’s son Nigel (more on Nigel later-I have the utmost respect for Nigel) learned of this affair and many others when, after Vita’s death, he opened a locked gladstone bag in her sitting room and discovered her sensational written confessions. She grew up at Knole, the Sackville estate, built in 1455 on a thousand acres and said to contain fifty-two staircases.
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First among the failed wooers stood Lord Henry Lascelles, Sixth Earl of Harewood and first cousin of Tommy Lascelles, everybody’s favorite right-hand mustache in the Netflix series The Crown (when Vita rejected Lascelles, he married the Princess Mary, sister of King George VI).īut Vita wasn’t dazzled by men of great heritages or homes. Still, when she formally entered society at age eighteen (“four balls a week and luncheons every day”), she was seen as a refined beauty, and took after her mother in attracting various glossy admirers. She describes her childhood self in a diary as “rough, and secret,” frequently punished for “wrestling with the hall-boy,” fondest of her pocketknife, and inspired to start writing at age twelve by Cyrano de Bergerac. She returned to England and gave birth to their only child, Vita Sackville-West, on March 9, 1892.īy the age of eighteen, Vita had written eight full-length novels and five plays. Somehow, from among these suitors, she chose to marry her first cousin, another Lionel. Arthur, Pierpont Morgan, Rudyard Kipling, Auguste Rodin, and Henry Ford. Vita’s mother charmed Washington senseless with her bad English and so-called gypsy blood, receiving alleged marriage proposals from the widowed President of the United States Chester A. Upon transferring to the British Legation in Washington, DC, he summoned his nineteen-year-old eldest daughter to serve as his diplomatic hostess. When Lionel became the British minister in Buenos Aires, he sent those children to live in French convents. Her grandfather Lionel, the third Baron Sackville, fell in love with Pepita, the notorious Andalusian ballerina, and by her fathered five illegitimate children. Take as a representative starting point the comically deranged splendor of Vita’s ancestry. How preposterous is it that Vita Sackville-West, the best-selling bisexual baroness who wrote over thirty-five books that made an ingenious mockery of twenties societal norms, should be remembered today merely as a smoocher of Virginia Woolf? The reductive canonization of her affair with Woolf has elbowed out a more luxurious, strange story: Vita loved several women with exceptional ardor simultaneously adored her also-bisexual husband, Harold ultimately came to prefer the company of flora over fauna of any gender and committed herself to a life of prolific creation (written and planted) that redefined passion itself.
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