Poets

English poet and novelist, born into an old aristocratic family, proprietors of Knole House in Kent. Vita Sackville-West wrote about the Kentish countryside and she was the chief model for Orlando in Virginia Woolf's novel of that same title from 1928. Sackville-West's best known poem, THE LAND, was awarded the Hawthorne Prize in 1927.

The country habit has me by the heart,

For he's bewitched for ever who has seen,

Not with his eyes but with his vision,

Spring

Flow down the woods and stipple leaves

with sun.

('Winter' from The Land)

Victoria Mary Sackville-West was the only child of Lionel Edward, third Baron of Sackville, and Victoria Josepha Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, his first cousin and the illegitimate daughter of the diplomat Sir Lionel Sackville-West. She was educated privately. As a child she started to write poetry, writing her first ballads at the age of 11. "I don't remember either my father or my mother very vividly at that time, except that Dada used to take me for terribly long walks and talk to me about science, principally Darwin, and I liked him a great deal better than mother, of whose quick temper I was frightened." (from Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson, 1973) Vita's mother considered her ugly - she was bony, she had long legs, straight hair, and she wanted to be as boyish as possible.

Between 1906 and 1910 Sackville-West produced eight novels and five plays. CHATTERTON, A DRAMA IN THREE ACTS, was privately..