Vita Sackville-West lived several lives at once. She was a novelist and poet, gardener and aristocrat, wife and mother, compulsive lover of women, heir to a house she could never inherit. 

Drawing on diaries, correspondence, family papers and previously unpublished material, Glendinning moves chronologically from Sackville-West’s childhood at Knole through her marriage to Harold Nicolson, her affairs with Violet Trefusis and others, her writing career, travels and eventual creation of Sissinghurst. The interest lies as much in the architecture surrounding the life as in its famous episodes: inheritance, class, gender, reputation and the elaborate arrangements by which unconventional lives were made possible inside conventional institutions.

Published in 1983, the biography won the Whitbread Prize for Biography and remains one of the substantial accounts of Sackville-West’s life. It is also heavily illustrated, with photographs of Sackville-West, her family, lovers and the places around which her life was organised.

Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1983. First edition, third impression (reprinted November 1983 and January 1984). Hardcover with dust jacket. Illustrated with black-and-white photographic plates. Light shelf wear and minor age toning to jacket; internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition.