Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

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Matthew Dennison. Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Copyright

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Preface

PROLOGUE

Heritage

PART I

The Edwardians

PART II

Challenge

PART III

Invitation to Cast Out Care

PART IV

Orlando

PART V

The Land and the Garden

PART VI

All Passion Spent?

PICTURE SECTION

NOTES

PREFACE

PROLOGUE: HERITAGE

I THE EDWARDIANS

II CHALLENGE

III INVITATION TO CAST OUT CARE

IV ORLANDO

V THE LAND AND THE GARDEN

VI ALL PASSION SPENT?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SECONDARY SOURCES

WORKS BY V. SACKVILLE-WEST

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

About the Publisher

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For Gráinne, with all love

‘… he told her that he could find no words to praise her; yet instantly bethought him how she was like the spring and green grass and rushing waters.’

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Vita’s response to her dilemma was creative: she mythologised an existence she only partly understood. It was her own version of her mother’s ‘Quel roman est ma vie!’, but lacked the unqualified exuberance of Victoria’s joyful exclamation. For Vita, she and Knole and its whole population of relatives and servants became characters in a fable. She described her grandfather as ‘rather like an old goblin’. Contemptuously she listened to her mother ‘making up legends about the place, quite unwarrantable and unnecessary’, but acknowledged that ‘no ordinary mother could introduce such fairy tales into life’.82 Stalwartly and in silence, she worshipped her long-suffering father whom she imagined not as an individual but a type, ‘a pleasing man’83 – as Virginia Woolf described him, ‘the figure of an English nobleman, decayed, dignified, smoothed, effete’.84 Even the buildings themselves had an unreal quality, like a theatrical backcloth: ‘my little court [is] so lovely in the moonlight. With its gabled windows it looks like a court on a stage, till I half expect to see a light spring up in one window and the play begin.’85 When at length Vita devised a role for herself, she existed in a mythical tower, part heroine, part observer. At Sissinghurst thirty years on, she made good that pretence. Her sense of life as a performance – theatrical and containing elements of make-believe – began much earlier.

Victoria rejoiced in a reality that surpassed any romantic novel: Vita transformed the reality of her unsatisfactory childhood into a personal fiction. It was one way of placing herself centre stage and making sense of her fellow actors; the process also implied distance. These impulses of mythomania and detachment would remain part of Vita’s psyche until death. Early on, albeit subconsciously, she resorted to fiction to clarify the business of living: later she recycled her own reality as the principal element of her fiction, and all her novels contain fragments of autobiography. Despite this, Vita was an honest child and naturally affectionate. For the most part, those traits too would endure.

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