Sissinghurst Castle in the county of Kent, England is renowned for both its beautiful landscaped gardens and for the speed with which tickets for its annual garden tours are sold out. Both of these factors are due to the landscaping design and brilliance of one Lady Victoria Mary Nicolson, otherwise known as Vita Sackville-West. As famous for her much-publicized bisexuality and membership of the Bloomsbury Set as for her work as a novelist, diarist, journalist and poet, it is probably as a garden designer that Sackville-West is both best known and least controversial. Whilst her novels and diaries dealt with subjects such as her shame and ambivalence about her sexuality, her poems often dealt with and showcased her love of the earth and of nature around her. She was both a lover of and friend to the earth, and tended to be its biggest cheering section as well even when the fashion of the day was to malign what was seen as outdated and anachronistic countryside and garden scenes.
For an author little-known as a poet, Sackville-West was surprisingly prolific, publishing thirteen volumes of poetry during her lifetime; the first, Chatterton, was published in 1909. She was also the recipient of many awards for her poetry, including the prestigious Hawthorneden Award for Imaginative Literature twice, once for her pastoral poem The Land and once for her 1933 volume Collected Works. In 1927, when she penned The Land, Sackville-West intimated that she had written it in response to T.S. Eliot's Modernist epic The Wasteland, which seems to position the land as a vengeful and death-seeking entity, whereas Sackville-West's poem was rooted far more deeply in a love of the land and of an appreciation for family tradition. This appreciation was juxtaposed with the poem's dedication which was to her lover Dorothy Wellesley, a poet, socialite and member of the British aristocracy.
Sackville-West was often seen as something of an outdated poet and although much of her work was appreciated and acclaimed at the time of its publication it fell quickly out of favor within a decade or so. The most notable example of this is another epic poem, Solitude, which contained many Biblical and ancient Greek references, which at the time of its publication, 1936, were still more or less in vogue, but two years later, in a more pre-war Britain, were seen as intellectually indulgent, snobbish and anachronistic. The poem is narrated by an un-named speaker who is never revealed as male or female, although he or she does seem to have a great deal in common with the poet, speaking of a great love for a woman, angrily condemning an ancient Greek character said to have been a rapist, and extolling the similar intellectual pursuits of books and gardening.
Sackville-West was better known in later life as someone who inspired the great works of others, rather than for producing great literary works of her own; perhaps the most important of these was her friend, lover and mentor Virginia Woolf's story Orlando, as Sackville-West was said to have inspired the androgynous hero who changes sex over the course of the novel, and who is deeply fascinated with the history and culture of the Romanies in Eastern Europe. Throughout their careers, both Sackville-West and Woolf traded inspiration and often created plot lines and characters based on their mutual love and of things that they saw and admired in each other's character. Towards the end of her life, Sackville-West was saddened to realize that she was seen as almost culturally irrelevant in a literary sense and that her work was considered extremely old fashioned; her cutting-edge and beautiful garden design, on the other hand, never fell out of favor.
