Vita

The Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West.

Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst.

Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband Harold Nicolson, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs.

Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.

“"What each of us would look for in an ideal future biographer is what each of us looks for in an ideal doctor: sympathy, trustfulness and acute powers of diagnosis. All these three qualities are here present. Vita would undoubtedly have shared our approval and gratitude" -- Sunday Telegraph "A biography that conceals nothing... gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction" -- Observer "Superb... much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience" -- The Times "It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life... superb" -- Irish Times "Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be" -- Country Life "Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning's Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West" -- Guardian”

What each of us would look for in an ideal future biographer is what each of us looks for in an ideal doctor: sympathy, trustfulness and acute powers of diagnosis. All these three qualities are here present. Vita would undoubtedly have shared our approval and gratitude Sunday Telegraph
A biography that conceals nothing... gives her life in fact the strangeness, subtlety, complexity and ambivalence missing from her fiction Observer
Surely the definitive biography. -- Harold Acton
Superb... much more than just a record of events but an opening up of understanding and experience -- Fiona McCarthy The Times
It required both literary skill of the highest order and a rare imaginative compassion to fashion a work of art out of life... superb -- Dervla Murphy Irish Times
Her modest, masterly, well-written treatment of a subject so absorbing in both intimate detail and public ramification is as good as it could be Country Life
Again and again, I found myself turning to my battered paperback of Victoria Glendinning's Whitbread prize-winning biography of Sackville-West Guardian

Victoria Glendinning is a biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. Her biographies include A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, Edith Sitwell: A Unicorn Among Lions (winner of the Duff Cooper Prize and the James Tait Black Prize), Rebecca West, Anthony Trollope (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Biography), Jonathan Swift, Leonard Woolf and a biography of Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. Her novels include The Grown-Ups, Electricity, Flight and The Butcher's Daughter. She is an Honorary Vice-President of English PEN and Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded a CBE in 1998.

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