Vita

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 ActonSuperb… 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.