Synopses & Reviews
Review
"One might have thought that the story of V. Sackville-West as unfolded in Portrait of a Marriage, which her son, Nigel Nicolson, based on her 1920 autobiography and expanded to cover the whole story of her life and marriage, would have been sufficient.
Victoria Glendinning proves this wrong in her long, detailed, and interpretive biography of this remarkable woman— more remarkable as woman than as writer. 'The first great sorrow of her life,' writes Glendinning, 'was that, by an accident of gender, Knole could never be hers; the second, the realization that she was not a 'great' writer.... I would like her story to be read as an adventure story.' And so the story is told: an adventure in heredity, in personal relations, both conventional and unconventional, and also an adventure in the creation of gardens, first at Long Barn and afterward at Sissinghurst, this latter a creation which still survives, more vitally perhaps than any of her novels and poems." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)