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.

[1][2] 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.

[7][8][9] 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.

[10] 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.

[b] 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.

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.

[17] Following the pattern of his father's career, Harold Nicolson was at various times a diplomat, journalist, broadcaster, Member of Parliament, and author of biographies and novels.

It was only during this time that she attempted to don, with good grace, the part of a "correct and adoring wife of the brilliant young diplomat", as she sarcastically wrote.

[20] Sackville-West heard allegations that Keppel and her husband Trefusis had been involved sexually, and she broke off the relationship as the lesbian oath of fidelity had been broken.

[23]: 197  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.

[23]: 202  Though Woolf envied Sackville-West's ability to write quickly, she was inclined to believe that the volumes were written too much in haste: "Vita's prose is too fluent".

[i] It was largely due to Sackville-West's support that Woolf began to heal from the trauma, allowing her for the first time to have a satisfying erotic relationship.

[23]: 209–210  In the 1930s they clashed over Nicolson's "unfortunate" involvement with Oswald Mosley and the New Party (later renamed the British Union of Fascists),[m] and they were at odds over the imminent war.

In fact it is one of the major things in my lifeOne of Sackville-West's male suitors, Henry Lascelles, would later marry the Princess Royal and become the 6th Earl of Harewood.

[27] 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.

[1] Sissinghurst was an Elizabethan ruin and the creation of the gardens would be a joint labour of love that would last many decades, first entailing years of clearing debris from the land.

Her first garden at Long Barn (Kent, 1915–1930) was experimental, a place of learning by trial and error and she carried over her ideas and projects to Sissinghurst, using her hard won experience.

[17] In this regard, Sackville-West wrote of her deep desire and love for Keppel while at same time declaring her "shame" about this "duality with which I was too weak and too self-indulgent to struggle".

[17] At various times, Sackville-West called herself a "pariah" with a "perverted nature" and "unnatural" feelings for Keppel, who was portrayed as a tempting, if degrading, object of her desire.

[17] Much influenced by the theories promoted by sexologists like Magnus Hirschfeld, Edward Carpenter, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud, Sackville-West sometimes wrote of her sexuality as abnormal and wrong and due to some psychological flaw she was born with, portraying heterosexuality as the norm that she wanted, but failed to live up to.

[17] In 1973, when her son Nigel Nicolson published Portrait of a Marriage, he was uncertain if he was going to be charged with obscenity, going to considerable lengths to stress the legitimacy of a love for a person of the same sex in his introduction.

"[17]: 131 The memoir was dramatised by the BBC (and PBS in North America) in 1990, starring Janet McTeer as Vita, and Cathryn Harrison as Violet.

Challenge (first entitled Rebellion, then Enchantment, then Vanity and at some point Foam), is a roman à clef with the character of Julian being a male version of Sackville-West and Eve, the woman he desires so passionately is Keppel.

Throughout their relationship, Keppel was given to threatening suicide if Sackville-West left her, a character trait shared by Eve, who finally drowns herself by walking in the sea when Julian is aboard a boat and too far off to hear her calling for him.

[14]: 144  Sackville-West was English, but she invented Romani ancestry for herself on the Spanish side of her family, explaining her bohemian behaviour as due to her alleged "Gypsy" descent.

[38] Her epic poem Solitude, published by the Hogarth Press in October 1938 contains references to the Bible, Paracelsus, Ixion, Catullus, Andromeda, the Iliad and a Sabine bride, all of which were quite acceptable in the early 20th century, but were seen as anachronistic by 1938.

She thinks of herself as superior to the farmers who merely work the land without the time or the interest for poetry, all of which make it possible for her to have a deeper appreciation of nature.

Despite being a shy woman, Sackville-West often forced herself to participate in literary readings before book clubs and on the BBC in order to feel a sense of belonging.

With his wife, the horticulturalist Sarah Raven, they committed to restore the mixed working farm and growing food on the property for residents and visitors, a function that had withered under the aegis of the Trust.