Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West - Softcover

Glendinning, Victoria

4.15

510 ratings by Goodreads

9781788312431: Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1788312430 ISBN 13: 9781788312431

Publisher: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2018

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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. In her Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband, 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.

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Review:

'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

About the Author:

Victoria Glendinning is a biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. Her biographies include A Suppressed Cry: Life and Death of a Quaker Daughter; Elizabeth Bowen: Portait 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 life 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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