Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West. Matthew Dennison

of a forgotten character from the desultory evidence at his disposal.’¹³ She indicated the danger of posthumous judgements based on ‘a patchwork of letters, preserved by chance, independent of their context’. That argument is a truism of all biography. In revisiting Vita’s own life story, I have supported the evidence of letters and her diary with the textual evidence of so much of her writing: poetry, novels, plays, short stories, travel books, books of literary criticism, biography and journalism. The sections of this book are named after Vita’s own novels and poems (or, in the case of Part Four, a book written about Vita during her lifetime by Virginia Woolf, who knew her well and loved her). Such recourse, I recognise, is a commonplace of literary biography; it is particularly apt in Vita’s case. ‘Few things are more distasteful than veiled hints,’ Vita wrote once, addressing head on rumours of lesbianism on the part of the Spanish saint, Teresa of Avila.¹⁴ I believe that her writing is full of hints – sometimes veiled, sometimes otherwise – indicative of her state of mind, her emotional dilemmas, the nature of her engagement with herself and the world around her. I have used these ‘hints’ to support more conventional evidence in order to reach the fullest possible picture of this remarkable woman. As Vita herself concluded about St Teresa, ‘every point concerning so complex a character and so truly extraordinary a make-up is of interest as possibly throwing a little extra light on subsequent behaviour’.¹⁵

      Vita never fully succeeded in explaining herself to herself. In one of her poems she imagined staring at her reflection in a mountain pool: ‘seen there my own image/ As an upturned mask that floated/ Just under the surface, within reach, beyond reach’.¹⁶ I hope that the present account, which does not attempt a blow-by-blow chronology of her life, helps to bring reflections of Vita closer within reach.

       PROLOGUE

       Heritage

      ‘Those brief ten years we call Edwardian … were a gay and yet an earnest time … Money nobly flowed. Ideals changed … “Respectability”, that good old word, … sank into discredit … Among most of the wealthy, most of the titled, most of the gay and extravagant classes, a wider liberty grew.’

      Rose Macaulay, Told by an Idiot, 1923

      THE SUM OF money at stake was impressively large. At his death on 17 January 1912, Sir John Murray Scott, sixty-five-year-old great-grandson of Nelson’s captain of the fleet Sir George Murray, left estate valued at £1.18 million (the equivalent, at today’s values, of around £80 million).¹ The challenge to Sir John’s will brought by his family the following year was heard in a packed courtroom. An eight-day trial conducted by England’s foremost barristers, it made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. It transformed its plaintiffs – a family notable for reserve and taciturnity – into reluctant celebrities. In the process, it exposed the deceits and compromises of Edwardian morality, stripping away the veneer of well-mannered discretion to reveal a cynical culture of avarice and lust, a preference for appearances over truth.

      Like many rich men, Sir John had enjoyed playing a cat-and-mouse game with family and friends over the contents of his will, which extended to numerous bequests. Principal legatees were his brothers and sisters – middle-aged, unmarried, overweight: the sober-minded offspring of a Scottish doctor. Collectively they inherited £410,000 and the family’s London home in Connaught Place plus contents. Further legacies, to the tune of £223,000, benefited a series of recipients. A single large legacy provided the bone of contention. In addition to furniture and works of art valued at the enormous total of £350,000, childless bachelor Sir John left £150,000 in cash to the woman he described as ‘ma chère petite amie’.

      Victoria Sackville-West was fifty years old. Of mixed English and Spanish parentage, she had the wide-eyed gaze of a languorous fawn, a complexion which, with care, had retained its lustre into middle age and an ample bosom ideally suited to the role of Edwardian grande dame. In her youth, she claimed she had received twenty-five proposals of marriage before accepting her husband, who was also her first cousin and heir to one of the greatest houses in England; she was a vain and fanciful woman. At twelve stone, her height five feet seven inches, she may no longer have been as ‘petite’ as formerly: undimmed were her powers of persuasion and her theatricality. She was also prone to an unpredictable Latin exactingness. This trait appears to have had an invigorating rather than an alienating effect on admirers including the American millionaire banker John Pierpont Morgan, hero of the Sudan, Lord Kitchener, and Observer editor J. L. Garvin. Rudyard Kipling described Victoria as ‘on mature reflection the most wonderful person I have ever met’; throughout her life she attracted rich and powerful men.² Even less sympathetic onlookers acknowledged her distinctive allure. ‘In her too fleshy face, classical features sought to escape from the encroaching fat. An admirable mouth, of a pure and cruel design, held good. It was obvious that she had been beautiful.’³ Counsel for the prosecution described her damningly as possessing all ‘the fascinations of an accomplished woman’.⁴ Unspoken accusations of immorality added a tang to the courtroom proceedings.

      In fact the ‘affair’ of Sir John Murray Scott and Victoria Sackville-West was a sentimental friendship of rare intensity, a compromise at which the latter excelled. Their relationship was almost certainly unconsummated. In her diary Victoria claimed to be ‘much too fond of [her] husband to flirt with anybody’;⁵ the frisky baby talk of her letters to Scott suggests otherwise. Bachelor Sir John may have been over-fastidious in the matter of sex.

      Victoria’s past was romantic and picaresque. She was illegitimate, Catholic, the daughter of a small-town Spanish dancer Josefa Durán, known as Pepita, ‘the Star of Andalusia’. Pepita had become the mistress of an English nobleman. She bore him seven children, including Victoria. In a bid for respectability, she reinvented herself as Countess West and enlisted kings and princes as godparents to her illegitimate children. At her lover’s request, she set up home on the French coast southwest of Bordeaux, away from the eyes of the world.

      Like Sir John, Victoria had lived part of her life in Paris. Until her absent father reappeared to rescue her, she had been educated for a governess at the Convent of St Joseph on rue Monceau. In 1890 she became chatelaine of Knole in Kent. She described it with simple pride – and truthfully – as ‘bigger than Hampton Court’. The vast house was the ancestral home of her husband, Lionel Sackville-West. Victoria learned swiftly that the income which supported it was less splendid. That Victoria’s husband was also her first cousin was a curious twist worthy of Victorian popular fiction: the English nobleman, Pepita’s lover, was the 2nd Baron Sackville, not only Victoria’s father but her husband’s uncle. Pepita died in 1871, her lover, Lord Sackville, in 1908. In the absence of legitimate offspring the latter’s title passed to his nephew.

      After ‘ten perfect years of the most complete happiness and passionate love’, Lionel and Victoria’s marriage had turned sour.⁶ In the summer of 1913, the couple had a single child, their daughter Vita, who had lately celebrated her twenty-first birthday. Given her sex, the Sackville title would again descend collaterally. Meanwhile, out of love with his wife, Lionel took a series of mistresses: Lady Camden, Lady Constance Hatch, called Connie, an opera singer called Olive Rubens. Like miscreants on a saucy seaside postcard, Lionel and Lady Connie played a lot of golf.

      Sir John Murray Scott had been a giant of a man. Measuring more than five feet around the waist and tall too, he weighed in excess of twenty-five stone. He died of a heart attack. The fortune he left behind him derived neither from his family nor his own entrepreneurialism. Instead, in 1897, he had inherited £1 million from his employer, a former shop girl who had caught the eye of Sir Richard Wallace, first as his mistress and afterwards his wife. Wallace was the illegitimate son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford. Lord Hertford left him estates in Ireland, a Parisian apartment