Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Publication
Atheneum (1991), Edition: Reprint, 249 pages
Description
Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet, and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into an androgynous time-traveler in Orlando. The story of Sackville-West's marriage to Harold Nicolson is one of intrigue and bewilderment. Their son, this book's author, combines his mother's memoir with his own explanations and what he learned from their many letters. Even during her various love affairs with women, Vita maintained a loving marriage with Harold. This book presents an often misunderstood but always fascinating couple.
User reviews
LibraryThing member jwhenderson
This is a fascinating biography of a marriage between two individuals who should not have been able to live together. That they did and succeeded in raising a family is the story of this book. It is told in a unique way with two sections based on Vita's autobiography amplified by sections written
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by her son Nigel. The focus is tilted toward the courtship and early years of marriage with little detail of the later years of the marriage. The book raises interesting questions about the differences in the couple and the dynamics of their personal lives apart from the marriage and the effect on both their marriage and sons. Show Less
LibraryThing member shojo_a
Continuing my reading about Vita and Violet, I felt it important to read 'Portrait of a Marriage'.To use the official lingo, is both a primary and a secondary source of sorts. The book is split into roughly for chapters, plus an introduction. Two of the chapters are by Vita, and each is followed by
After his mothers death n 1962, Nigel found a locked bag among her things. Inside the bag was a notebook of her writing. After a few pages of abortive poems, he found pages and pages of writing. The first page, dated 1920 began 'Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life...but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living so who knows the complete truth...' The 80 pages that followed were her attempt to write down her love affair with Violet Trefusis, and, in working her way through everything she'd been through and felt, to come to terms with the fact that it was ending.
The rest of the book then, is Nigel's attempt to place that affair in the context of his parent's marriage, to show how they weathered it, to add his own insights and explain Vita and Harold's unconventional and amazing marriage, supplimented with letters and diary entries from Harold, Vita and Violet.
The result is so dense that it's almost hard to think of it all at once, except to say that the combined effect of is it all is extraordinary.
It's such a feeling book. Everyone feels so much. Violet and Vita's love, Harold and Vita's love, even Nigel's love for his parents not just as parents, but as people. That's really what came through it for me. All the different kinds of love people have for each other, the ways they can make each other miserable and the ways they can comfort each other, the ways they can set each other aflame, and the ways they can be a safe harbor, just how strong, how destructive and how healing love can be. How it can destroy lives or enrich them.
Vita knew that one day a love like what she had with Violet, and her own nature which was drawn to 'love' Harold, and be 'in love' with women, would be accepted and seen as normal, and I'm glad she was (for the most part) right.
I was also so struck by Vita and Harold's marriage, how they remained each other's anchor, each other's 'true north', as Harold said, regardless of any love affairs Vita had with women or Harold had with men. They loved each other and accepted who each other was, and it's really incredible to me.
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a chapter by Nigel Nicolson, her son and literary executor. After his mothers death n 1962, Nigel found a locked bag among her things. Inside the bag was a notebook of her writing. After a few pages of abortive poems, he found pages and pages of writing. The first page, dated 1920 began 'Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life...but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living so who knows the complete truth...' The 80 pages that followed were her attempt to write down her love affair with Violet Trefusis, and, in working her way through everything she'd been through and felt, to come to terms with the fact that it was ending.
The rest of the book then, is Nigel's attempt to place that affair in the context of his parent's marriage, to show how they weathered it, to add his own insights and explain Vita and Harold's unconventional and amazing marriage, supplimented with letters and diary entries from Harold, Vita and Violet.
The result is so dense that it's almost hard to think of it all at once, except to say that the combined effect of is it all is extraordinary.
It's such a feeling book. Everyone feels so much. Violet and Vita's love, Harold and Vita's love, even Nigel's love for his parents not just as parents, but as people. That's really what came through it for me. All the different kinds of love people have for each other, the ways they can make each other miserable and the ways they can comfort each other, the ways they can set each other aflame, and the ways they can be a safe harbor, just how strong, how destructive and how healing love can be. How it can destroy lives or enrich them.
Vita knew that one day a love like what she had with Violet, and her own nature which was drawn to 'love' Harold, and be 'in love' with women, would be accepted and seen as normal, and I'm glad she was (for the most part) right.
I was also so struck by Vita and Harold's marriage, how they remained each other's anchor, each other's 'true north', as Harold said, regardless of any love affairs Vita had with women or Harold had with men. They loved each other and accepted who each other was, and it's really incredible to me.
Show Less
LibraryThing member kristykay22
Nicolson wrote a really fascinating book about his mother, his father, and their devoted and unique marriage -- it is a nicely structured balance between extracts from Vita's diary recounting her early life and her tumultuous affair with a woman and context, other sources, and history provided by
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Nicolson. There is also a bunch of Virginia Woolf stuff in there and the reaction of the Sackville family to the publication of Orlando. Show Less
LibraryThing member sdr19899
This book is a compassionate yet honest look at a very unorthodox marriage which should NOT have worked, but did.
LibraryThing member shojo_a
Continuing my reading about Vita and Violet, I felt it important to read 'Portrait of a Marriage'.To use the official lingo, is both a primary and a secondary source of sorts. The book is split into roughly for chapters, plus an introduction. Two of the chapters are by Vita, and each is followed by
After his mothers death n 1962, Nigel found a locked bag among her things. Inside the bag was a notebook of her writing. After a few pages of abortive poems, he found pages and pages of writing. The first page, dated 1920 began 'Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life...but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living so who knows the complete truth...' The 80 pages that followed were her attempt to write down her love affair with Violet Trefusis, and, in working her way through everything she'd been through and felt, to come to terms with the fact that it was ending.
The rest of the book then, is Nigel's attempt to place that affair in the context of his parent's marriage, to show how they weathered it, to add his own insights and explain Vita and Harold's unconventional and amazing marriage, supplimented with letters and diary entries from Harold, Vita and Violet.
The result is so dense that it's almost hard to think of it all at once, except to say that the combined effect of is it all is extraordinary.
It's such a feeling book. Everyone feels so much. Violet and Vita's love, Harold and Vita's love, even Nigel's love for his parents not just as parents, but as people. That's really what came through it for me. All the different kinds of love people have for each other, the ways they can make each other miserable and the ways they can comfort each other, the ways they can set each other aflame, and the ways they can be a safe harbor, just how strong, how destructive and how healing love can be. How it can destroy lives or enrich them.
Vita knew that one day a love like what she had with Violet, and her own nature which was drawn to 'love' Harold, and be 'in love' with women, would be accepted and seen as normal, and I'm glad she was (for the most part) right.
I was also so struck by Vita and Harold's marriage, how they remained each other's anchor, each other's 'true north', as Harold said, regardless of any love affairs Vita had with women or Harold had with men. They loved each other and accepted who each other was, and it's really incredible to me.
Show More
a chapter by Nigel Nicolson, her son and literary executor. After his mothers death n 1962, Nigel found a locked bag among her things. Inside the bag was a notebook of her writing. After a few pages of abortive poems, he found pages and pages of writing. The first page, dated 1920 began 'Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life...but I do so urged by a necessity of truth-telling, because there is no living so who knows the complete truth...' The 80 pages that followed were her attempt to write down her love affair with Violet Trefusis, and, in working her way through everything she'd been through and felt, to come to terms with the fact that it was ending.
The rest of the book then, is Nigel's attempt to place that affair in the context of his parent's marriage, to show how they weathered it, to add his own insights and explain Vita and Harold's unconventional and amazing marriage, supplimented with letters and diary entries from Harold, Vita and Violet.
The result is so dense that it's almost hard to think of it all at once, except to say that the combined effect of is it all is extraordinary.
It's such a feeling book. Everyone feels so much. Violet and Vita's love, Harold and Vita's love, even Nigel's love for his parents not just as parents, but as people. That's really what came through it for me. All the different kinds of love people have for each other, the ways they can make each other miserable and the ways they can comfort each other, the ways they can set each other aflame, and the ways they can be a safe harbor, just how strong, how destructive and how healing love can be. How it can destroy lives or enrich them.
Vita knew that one day a love like what she had with Violet, and her own nature which was drawn to 'love' Harold, and be 'in love' with women, would be accepted and seen as normal, and I'm glad she was (for the most part) right.
I was also so struck by Vita and Harold's marriage, how they remained each other's anchor, each other's 'true north', as Harold said, regardless of any love affairs Vita had with women or Harold had with men. They loved each other and accepted who each other was, and it's really incredible to me.
Show Less
LibraryThing member write-review
A Passionate Affair within an Unconventional Marriage
Interestingly, in her tribute and spoof of her dear friend Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf framed the questions that Nigel Nicolson attempted answering by surrounding his mother's confession of her affair with Violet Trefusis with his own
Of course, Woolf was writing fiction and a humorous tribute, a well as a send up of Victorian biography, so she probably didn't believe her answer, and certainly Vita, Harold, and Nigel didn't. Doubtless, Nigel's parents had a decidedly unconventional marriage. It was a marriage, though, and something of a perfect one for them, one conducted much times at a distance, in obsessive letter writing, often from necessity as Harold Nicolson served as a diplomat until 1929 and then as a politician and writer, and laced on both sides with homosexual affairs. Vita and Harold wrote constantly, both producing numerous highly regarded works of fiction, criticism, she poetry, as well as diaries, and Vita's gardening books (the National Trust now owns and maintains their second home Sissinghurst Castle and its gardens, a passion they shared). And writing, by its nature, is a solitary profession.
In A Portrait of a Marriage, Vita works out her own feelings about her just concluding affair with Violet Trefusis, an impassioned three-year romp through England and over Europe that came within a hare's breath of ruining her marriage; that would have sunk any ordinary marriage if not for upper class social convention (ironically, what she and Violet professed to be rebelling against), strong-willed mothers, and an almost unbelievably tolerant and loving husband. She came to understand fully Harold's love for her and her for him, and suffered and wrote of her guilt for tormenting him.
That is the crux of A Portrait of a Marriage: in their own ways, Vita and Harold loved each other. It may not have been a conventional love or marriage; nonetheless, the foundation of their relationship was love and respect for each other. Nigel brings out their love in what must have been a difficult assignment for a son.
Highly recommended to be read with an open mind. For more on Vita, an ever-fascinating woman, read the standard biography by Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West. For more on her affair with Violet Trefusis, who became a fine writer herself, see Professor Mitchell A. Leaska's introduction to Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921. And do read Vita's works, still worthy of your attention.
Finally, a picture is worth a thousands words. This edition contains perhaps my favorite photo of Vita and Harold. They are on their way to the Scott hearing (Vita's mother's contested inheritance of a fortune from Sir John Murray "Seery" Scott) on July 4, 1913, where Vita is to present testimony. A paparazzi of the era snapped it a few months preceding her marriage to Harold on October 1, 1913. From left to right, are Harold, a very great space, Vita tightly next to Rosamund Grosvenor, then Lord Sackville slightly ahead. Nothing special you might say, except that Rosamund and Vita were lovers, though few viewing the photo at the time would have known.
Interestingly, in her tribute and spoof of her dear friend Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf framed the questions that Nigel Nicolson attempted answering by surrounding his mother's confession of her affair with Violet Trefusis with his own
Show More
apologia for her various affairs. Toward the end of Orlando, Woolf placed these thoughts in the mind of Vita's personification, Lady Orlando: "She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage?" She answered, "She had her doubts."Of course, Woolf was writing fiction and a humorous tribute, a well as a send up of Victorian biography, so she probably didn't believe her answer, and certainly Vita, Harold, and Nigel didn't. Doubtless, Nigel's parents had a decidedly unconventional marriage. It was a marriage, though, and something of a perfect one for them, one conducted much times at a distance, in obsessive letter writing, often from necessity as Harold Nicolson served as a diplomat until 1929 and then as a politician and writer, and laced on both sides with homosexual affairs. Vita and Harold wrote constantly, both producing numerous highly regarded works of fiction, criticism, she poetry, as well as diaries, and Vita's gardening books (the National Trust now owns and maintains their second home Sissinghurst Castle and its gardens, a passion they shared). And writing, by its nature, is a solitary profession.
In A Portrait of a Marriage, Vita works out her own feelings about her just concluding affair with Violet Trefusis, an impassioned three-year romp through England and over Europe that came within a hare's breath of ruining her marriage; that would have sunk any ordinary marriage if not for upper class social convention (ironically, what she and Violet professed to be rebelling against), strong-willed mothers, and an almost unbelievably tolerant and loving husband. She came to understand fully Harold's love for her and her for him, and suffered and wrote of her guilt for tormenting him.
That is the crux of A Portrait of a Marriage: in their own ways, Vita and Harold loved each other. It may not have been a conventional love or marriage; nonetheless, the foundation of their relationship was love and respect for each other. Nigel brings out their love in what must have been a difficult assignment for a son.
Highly recommended to be read with an open mind. For more on Vita, an ever-fascinating woman, read the standard biography by Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West. For more on her affair with Violet Trefusis, who became a fine writer herself, see Professor Mitchell A. Leaska's introduction to Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921. And do read Vita's works, still worthy of your attention.
Finally, a picture is worth a thousands words. This edition contains perhaps my favorite photo of Vita and Harold. They are on their way to the Scott hearing (Vita's mother's contested inheritance of a fortune from Sir John Murray "Seery" Scott) on July 4, 1913, where Vita is to present testimony. A paparazzi of the era snapped it a few months preceding her marriage to Harold on October 1, 1913. From left to right, are Harold, a very great space, Vita tightly next to Rosamund Grosvenor, then Lord Sackville slightly ahead. Nothing special you might say, except that Rosamund and Vita were lovers, though few viewing the photo at the time would have known.
Show Less
LibraryThing member write-review
A Passionate Affair within an Unconventional Marriage
Interestingly, in her tribute and spoof of her dear friend Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf framed the questions that Nigel Nicolson attempted answering by surrounding his mother's confession of her affair with Violet Trefusis with his own
Of course, Woolf was writing fiction and a humorous tribute, a well as a send up of Victorian biography, so she probably didn't believe her answer, and certainly Vita, Harold, and Nigel didn't. Doubtless, Nigel's parents had a decidedly unconventional marriage. It was a marriage, though, and something of a perfect one for them, one conducted much times at a distance, in obsessive letter writing, often from necessity as Harold Nicolson served as a diplomat until 1929 and then as a politician and writer, and laced on both sides with homosexual affairs. Vita and Harold wrote constantly, both producing numerous highly regarded works of fiction, criticism, she poetry, as well as diaries, and Vita's gardening books (the National Trust now owns and maintains their second home Sissinghurst Castle and its gardens, a passion they shared). And writing, by its nature, is a solitary profession.
In A Portrait of a Marriage, Vita works out her own feelings about her just concluding affair with Violet Trefusis, an impassioned three-year romp through England and over Europe that came within a hare's breath of ruining her marriage; that would have sunk any ordinary marriage if not for upper class social convention (ironically, what she and Violet professed to be rebelling against), strong-willed mothers, and an almost unbelievably tolerant and loving husband. She came to understand fully Harold's love for her and her for him, and suffered and wrote of her guilt for tormenting him.
That is the crux of A Portrait of a Marriage: in their own ways, Vita and Harold loved each other. It may not have been a conventional love or marriage; nonetheless, the foundation of their relationship was love and respect for each other. Nigel brings out their love in what must have been a difficult assignment for a son.
Highly recommended to be read with an open mind. For more on Vita, an ever-fascinating woman, read the standard biography by Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West. For more on her affair with Violet Trefusis, who became a fine writer herself, see Professor Mitchell A. Leaska's introduction to Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921. And do read Vita's works, still worthy of your attention.
Finally, a picture is worth a thousands words. This edition contains perhaps my favorite photo of Vita and Harold. They are on their way to the Scott hearing (Vita's mother's contested inheritance of a fortune from Sir John Murray "Seery" Scott) on July 4, 1913, where Vita is to present testimony. A paparazzi of the era snapped it a few months preceding her marriage to Harold on October 1, 1913. From left to right, are Harold, a very great space, Vita tightly next to Rosamund Grosvenor, then Lord Sackville slightly ahead. Nothing special you might say, except that Rosamund and Vita were lovers, though few viewing the photo at the time would have known.
Interestingly, in her tribute and spoof of her dear friend Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf framed the questions that Nigel Nicolson attempted answering by surrounding his mother's confession of her affair with Violet Trefusis with his own
Show More
apologia for her various affairs. Toward the end of Orlando, Woolf placed these thoughts in the mind of Vita's personification, Lady Orlando: "She was married, true; but if one's husband was always sailing round Cape Horn, was it marriage? If one liked him, was it marriage? And finally, if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry, was it marriage?" She answered, "She had her doubts."Of course, Woolf was writing fiction and a humorous tribute, a well as a send up of Victorian biography, so she probably didn't believe her answer, and certainly Vita, Harold, and Nigel didn't. Doubtless, Nigel's parents had a decidedly unconventional marriage. It was a marriage, though, and something of a perfect one for them, one conducted much times at a distance, in obsessive letter writing, often from necessity as Harold Nicolson served as a diplomat until 1929 and then as a politician and writer, and laced on both sides with homosexual affairs. Vita and Harold wrote constantly, both producing numerous highly regarded works of fiction, criticism, she poetry, as well as diaries, and Vita's gardening books (the National Trust now owns and maintains their second home Sissinghurst Castle and its gardens, a passion they shared). And writing, by its nature, is a solitary profession.
In A Portrait of a Marriage, Vita works out her own feelings about her just concluding affair with Violet Trefusis, an impassioned three-year romp through England and over Europe that came within a hare's breath of ruining her marriage; that would have sunk any ordinary marriage if not for upper class social convention (ironically, what she and Violet professed to be rebelling against), strong-willed mothers, and an almost unbelievably tolerant and loving husband. She came to understand fully Harold's love for her and her for him, and suffered and wrote of her guilt for tormenting him.
That is the crux of A Portrait of a Marriage: in their own ways, Vita and Harold loved each other. It may not have been a conventional love or marriage; nonetheless, the foundation of their relationship was love and respect for each other. Nigel brings out their love in what must have been a difficult assignment for a son.
Highly recommended to be read with an open mind. For more on Vita, an ever-fascinating woman, read the standard biography by Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West. For more on her affair with Violet Trefusis, who became a fine writer herself, see Professor Mitchell A. Leaska's introduction to Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West, 1910-1921. And do read Vita's works, still worthy of your attention.
Finally, a picture is worth a thousands words. This edition contains perhaps my favorite photo of Vita and Harold. They are on their way to the Scott hearing (Vita's mother's contested inheritance of a fortune from Sir John Murray "Seery" Scott) on July 4, 1913, where Vita is to present testimony. A paparazzi of the era snapped it a few months preceding her marriage to Harold on October 1, 1913. From left to right, are Harold, a very great space, Vita tightly next to Rosamund Grosvenor, then Lord Sackville slightly ahead. Nothing special you might say, except that Rosamund and Vita were lovers, though few viewing the photo at the time would have known.
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Subjects
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1973
ISBN
0689705972 / 9780689705977