维塔·萨克维尔-韦斯特

薇塔·萨克维尔-韦斯特（Vita Sackville-West，1892年3月9日—1962年6月2日）是一位英国作家、园艺家。她是一位成功的小说家、诗人和记者，也是一位多产的书信作家和日记作家。她一生出版了十几本诗集和13部小说。她曾两次获得豪森登奖，1927年因田园史诗《土地》，1933年因《诗集》。她也是同性恋人弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫的作品《奥兰多》主角的灵感来源。

1946年至1961年，她在《观察家报》上撰写专栏文章。她和丈夫哈罗德·尼科尔森爵士创建的西辛赫斯特城堡花园（Sissinghurst Castle Garden）颇为有名。

Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH (née Sackville-West; 9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.

Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.

She wrote a column in The Observer from 1946 to 1961 and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.

Biography

Antecedents

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. The house followed the title, and her father bequeathed it instead to his brother Charles, who became the 4th Baron.

Early life

Sackville-West was initially taught at home by governesses and later attended Helen Woolff's school for girls, an exclusive day school in Mayfair, where she met first loves Violet Keppel and Rosamund Grosvenor. She did not befriend local children and found it hard to make friends at school. Her biographers characterise her childhood as one filled by loneliness and isolation. She wrote prolifically at Knole, penning eight full-length (unpublished) novels between 1906 and 1910, ballads and many plays, some in French. Her lack of formal education led to later shyness with her peers, such as those in the Bloomsbury Group. She felt herself to be sluggish of mind and she was never at the intellectual heart of her social group.

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.

First loves

Sackville-West was a debutante in 1910. She was wooed by Orazio Pucci di Barsento, son of a distinguished Florentine family; by Lord Granby (later 9th Duke of Rutland); and by Lord Lascelles (later 6th Earl of Harewood), among others. In 1924 she had a passionate affair with historian Geoffrey Scott. Scott's marriage collapsed shortly thereafter, as was often the fallout with Sackville-West's affairs, all with women after this point (as most of them had been beforehand).