Antecedents . Vita's mother, circa 1885 Victoria Mary Sackville-West — called Vita, to distinguish her from her mother — was born on 9 March 1892 at
Knole, the Kent home of Sackville-West's aristocratic ancestors. She was the only child
of cousins Victoria Sackville-West and
Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville. Vita's mother, the illegitimate daughter of
Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville and the Spanish dancer
Pepita (Josefa de Oliva, née Durán y Ortega), had been raised in a Parisian convent. Although the marriage of Sackville-West's parents was initially happy, the couple drifted apart shortly after her birth. Lionel took a mistress, an opera singer who came to live with them at Knole. Knole had been given to
Thomas Sackville by Elizabeth I, in the sixteenth century. The Sackville-West family followed the English aristocracy's inheritance customs, preventing Vita from inheriting Knole upon the death of her father, which was a source of life-long bitterness for her. Sackville-West's apparently
Roma lineage introduced a passion for "gypsy" ways, a culture she perceived to be hot-blooded, heart-led, dark, and romantic. It informed the stormy nature of many of her later love affairs and was a strong theme in her writing. Sackville-West visited Roma camps and felt herself to be at one with them. Vita's mother had a wide array of famous lovers, including financier
J. P. Morgan and
Sir John Murray Scott (from 1897 until his death in 1912). Scott, secretary to the couple who inherited and developed the
Wallace Collection, was a devoted companion and Lady Sackville and he were rarely apart during their years together. During her childhood, Vita spent a great deal of time in Scott's apartments in Paris, perfecting her already fluent French. Sackville-West fell in love with Rosamund Grosvenor (1888–1944), who was four years her senior. In her journal, Vita wrote "Oh, I dare say I realized vaguely that I had no business to sleep with Rosamund, and I should certainly never have allowed anyone to find it out," but she saw no real conflict. Lady Sackville, Vita's mother, invited Rosamund to visit the family at their villa in
Monte Carlo (1910). Rosamund also stayed with Vita at
Knole, at Murray Scott's
pied-à-terre on the
Rue Laffitte in Paris, and at Sluie, Scott's shooting lodge in the Scottish Highlands, near
Banchory. Their secret relationship ended in 1913 when Vita married.
Marriage to Harold Nicolson Sackville-West was courted for 18 months by young diplomat
Harold Nicolson, whom she found to be a secretive character. She writes that the wooing was entirely chaste and throughout they did not so much as kiss. In 1913, at age 21, Vita married him in the private chapel at Knole. Vita's parents were opposed to the marriage on the grounds that "penniless" Nicolson had an annual income of only £250. He was the third secretary at the British Embassy in
Constantinople at the time. Another of Sackville-West's suitors,
Lord Granby, had an annual income of £100,000, owned vast acres of land and was heir to an old title,
Duke of Rutland. Sackville-West saw herself as psychologically divided into two: one side of her personality was more feminine, soft, submissive, and attracted to men while the other side was more masculine, hard, aggressive, and attracted to women. and bought
Long Barn in Kent as a country house (1915–1930). They employed the architect
Edwin Lutyens to make improvements to the house. The British declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, following Ottoman naval attacks on Russia, precluded any return to Constantinople. Sackville-West called the marriage her own greatest failure. She writes: "I went into wild spirits; I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday... that wild irresponsible day". The couple were involved in planning the coronation of
Rezā Khan and got to know the six-year old Crown Prince
Mohammad Reza well.
Relationship with Virginia Woolf , 1927 Sackville-West's relationship with the prominent writer
Virginia Woolf began in 1925 and ended in 1935, reaching its height between 1925 and 1928. Though Sackville-West came from an aristocratic family that was far richer than Woolf's own, the women bonded over their confined childhoods and emotionally absent parents. Sackville-West greatly admired Woolf's writings, considering her to be the better author. She told Woolf in one letter: "I contrast my illiterate writing with your scholarly one, and I am ashamed". In 1927, Sackville-West had an affair with
Mary Garman, a member of the Bloomsbury Group; between 1929 and 1931, she maintained a relationship with
Hilda Matheson, head of the
BBC Talks Department. In 1931, Sackville-West was in a
ménage à trois with journalist
Evelyn Irons and Irons's lover, Olive Rinder. Irons had interviewed Sackville-West after her novel
The Edwardians had become a best-seller. ==Sissinghurst==