Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, by Matthew Dennison
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Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, by Matthew Dennison
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A dazzling new biography of Vita Sackville-West, the 20th century aristocrat, literary celebrity, devoted wife, famous lover of Virginia Woolf, recluse, and iconoclast who defied categorization.In this stunning new biography of Vita Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison's Behind the Mask traces the triumph and contradictions of Vita's extraordinary life. His narrative charts a fascinating course from Vita's lonely childhood at Knole, through her affectionate but ‘open' marriage to Harold Nicolson (during which both husband and wife energetically pursued homosexual affairs, Vita most famously with Virginia Woolf), and through Vita's literary successes and disappointments, to the famous gardens the couple created at Sissinghurst. The book tells how, from her privileged world of the aristocracy, Sackville-West brought her penchant for costume, play-acting and rebellion to the artistic vanguard of modern Britain. Dennison is the acclaimed author of many books including a biography of Queen Victoria. Here, in the first biography to be written of Vita for thirty years, he reveals the whole story and gets behind ‘the beautiful mask' of Vita's public achievements to reveal an often troubled persona which heroically resisted compromise on every level. Drawing on wideranging sources and the extensive letters that sustained her marriage, this is a compelling story of love, loss and jealousy, of high-life and low points, of binding affection and illicit passion – a portrait of an extraordinary, 20th-century life.
Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, by Matthew Dennison - Amazon Sales Rank: #443399 in Books
- Brand: Dennison, Matthew
- Published on: 2015-06-09
- Released on: 2015-06-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.47" h x 1.33" w x 6.41" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 384 pages
Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, by Matthew Dennison Review
“Dennison captures both Vita's irresistible charm and her selfishness. Like his subject, he is a natural storyteller, and his impeccable scholarship never weighs down his lively narrative.” ―Independent
“Brave man to take on the biography of Vita, and he has brought it off superbly … It studies and reveals this extraordinary woman as well as could possibly be. A fine achievement.” ―Spectator, Susan Hill
“Astute and engaging, Dennison looks again at Vita's extraordinary life and makes a new sort of sense of it … fascinating … an insightful book. The connections between Vita's childhood, her dispossessions, her sexuality and her writing are compellingly explored. Vita emerges as a complex and interesting character, and far more than a gay icon.” ―Literary Review
“Dennison emphasises the desire for solitude that existed in tension with her joyous sensuality and need for love.” ―Guardian
“Detailed and fascinating … Dennison shows true admiration for his latest subject … freshly chronicled here for the first time in more than 30 years.” ―Daily Express
“Intimate … A splendid biography of a splendid character.” ―The Lady
“Comprehensively documents her literary … with evocative portraits of her husband [and lovers] … Dennison's Vita is convincingly ambivalent and inflammatory, a product of her age.” ―New Statesman
“This carefully researched book is intelligently and elegantly written … balanced, oratical and confident.” ―Spectator
“A judicious but lively biography of the highly un-Victorian Queen Victoria . . . an insightful, short look at the life of an immortal if only sometimes-admirable queen.” ―Kirkus Reviews on Queen Victoria
“Only a very talented biographer could get to the key of Queen Victoria's complicated and psychologically fascinating personality. . . . In Matthew Dennison she has found one.” ―Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War on Queen Victoria
“Fascinating.” ―Vogue on The Last Princess
“An erudite, nuanced, and engrossing portrait of a turbulent era and an empress demonized for refusing to be invisible.” ―Publishers Weekly on Livia, Empress of Rome
“Dennison has pulled off a tremendous coup in writing a short and concise book . . . [with] the confidence of considerable research, well digested and well delivered. . . . The Cast of characters is a rich one, and Dennison knows them well. . . . Perfect.” ―The Times (UK) on Queen Victoria
“Only a very talented biographer could get to the key of Queen Victoria's complicated and psychologically fascinating personality and character. Fortunately, in Matthew Dennison she has found one.” ―Andrew Roberts, author of The Storm of War on Queen Victoria
“Unputdownable . . . these histories from 2,000 years ago are riveting in their insight, black humor, and sheer readability. ” ―Daily Mail on Twelve Caesars
“Dennison has constructed a nattarive that his classical forbears would instantly recognize and appreciate.” ―Library Journal on Twelve Caesars
About the Author
MATTHEW DENNISON is the author of the critically acclaimed The Last Princess and Livia, Empress of Rome. As a journalist, he contributes to The Times, The Daily Telegraph, Country Life, and The Spectator. He is married and lives in North Wales and Shropshire.
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Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful. One-dimensional and poorly written By Jehoshephat Awful. Sackville-West, whatever else she was, was a writer of some accomplishment (although not to my personal taste) and founded and developed an extraordinary garden at Sissinghurst which is still a major tourist attraction almost 100 years later. But this biographer sees her as totally self-absorbed, totally ruled by her own emotions, dictatorial toward all others, and defined most importantly by her sexual affairs and her self-conscious awareness of her "dual personalities". (Lots of people have more than one side to their character. This is not a individually defining trait.) Whether she had any intelligence to go along with all this (and she did) is left by the wayside in this completely one-dimensional treatment. The writing is extremely repetitive, and increases the monotony of the author's fixations on one or two of Sackville-West's qualities as a human being. She deserves better in every way.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful. A competent biography of Sackville-West's emotional/sexual life By S. McGee If you're looking for a well-rounded biography of Vita Sackville-West, this, disappointingly enough, really isn't it. Her literary life -- so central to her own sense of self -- takes a definite back seat to her romantic and sexual adventures and to her emotional attachments to her two homes, Knole -- the family home of the Sackvilles -- and Sissinghurst, which she and her husband, Harold Nicolson, transformed from a near-ruin into a distinctive and charming Tudor-era manor, whose gardens remain a tribute to their efforts and a "must-visit" for afficionados. To the extent that biographer Matthew Dennison deals with her writings, it is to quote from them to illustrate her bisexuality, her "duality", her cross-dressing adventures, and other aspects of her life, rather than to view them as works in their own right. That may be reasonable enough: when he does, in the final third of the book, finally get around to addressing her literary work directly (however briefly and perfunctorily, Dennison notes Vita's own awareness of her limitations. "I might write dozens of quite good books," she writes to Nicolson,"but I shall never write a great one." Thus far, at least, despite the fact that she won the Hawthornden Prize for one of her poems and that books like The Edwardians and All Passion Spent were bestsellers in their day and remain widely read among those who flock to the books re-published by Virago.So perhaps Dennison's approach to tackling Vita's life makes sense, but reading about a woman lurching from one affair to the next still doesn't make for an especially compelling biography. Had she not been Vita Sackville-West, who also wrote books, who was the model for Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, who wrote about Knole and transformed Sissinghurst, would this book be of any interest at all? Much of it is a chronicle of emotional turmoil, and of the complicated web of relationships that surrounded Vita throughout her life. Perhaps (or so Dennison hypothesizes) this was triggered by the knowledge early in life that Vita would lose Knole to a cousin, thanks to the inheritance laws favoring the male line within the Sackvilles; this, he says may have "stimulated a strong possessive streak" that caused her to encourage obsessive love and admiration from both men and women -- only to back away once the focus of her "love" had submitted entirely to her.That may make an interesting psychological study, but it's less than compelling as a biography, especially when Vita's path crossed with so many notable figures of her era. Dennison touches on her friendship with the Woolfs, and her work with Hogarth Press, but gives us few details of what the process of working with them was like. Dennison has his primary interest: the loss of Knole and Vita's early identity as a Sackville heir (which implied a blurring of genders). And he pursues that, to the exclusion of much else in Sackville-West's life, even her writing and her gardening. Both are mentioned; her passion for both is described, but Dennison never really delves into what it was that made her significant, even in her era, in either. If Vita today is relatively unknown, in the 1920s and 1930s, she outsold Virginia Woolf. Why? What resonated with readers? Dennison deals with that in a perfunctory manner and only a sentence or two -- to me, inexplicable in a biography devoted to someone whose primary identity was as a writer.This is still an interesting and engaging biography that will give a reader who already knows something about Vita Sackville-West some insight beyond her novels. That said, if you're going to read only one biography of her, I wouldn't make it this one. Try Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West. Sure, it's dated, but it's more comprehensive and even better written, and every bit as well researched. (There also are fewer leaps to judgment on the part of the biographer, and fewer sweeping assertions about what Vita "must have" or "undoubtedly" thought or concluded.) For me, this was a 3.5 star book, which was a bit of a stretch to round up to 4 stars. I did so primarily because of the caliber of the writing; basically, it's good enough NOT to be a 3 star book, if not good enough to normally earn 4 stars from me.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. A Life Of Intensity By John D. Cofield Vita Sackville-West was famous for her intellect, her sensuality, and her intensity. Matthew Dennison's new biography well captures that intensity, both in her public life as an author, commentator, and creator of a famous garden as well as in her stormy personal life.Victoria Sackville-West was born at Knole, the quintessential Stately Home. Vita, as she was always known, lived a fairy tale existence with more than a few thorns and ogres. Her parents were absorbed in their own affairs and Vita was raised largely by the servants. She loved Knole, but as a daughter she was unable to inherit it or the Sackville lordship that went with it. Because of this Vita was always very proud of her name and ancestry but also extremely defensive. As an intelligent young woman she found few attractions in the role prescribed for her by tradition: to make her Society debut, find a suitable husband, and produce children. Early in her life she began to write romances and stories based on her family history, and in early adulthood she began to publish stories, novels, poems, and biographies. She married Harold Nicolson, a young diplomat from a good family, and gave birth to two sons.Although Vita and her husband were devoted to each other, they had the most open of marriages, both pursuing long love affairs with various members of their own sex. Vita's first lesbian affair with Violet Keppel Trefusis scandalized Society. Later she was to fall in love with many other women, most famously Virginia Woolf. Her literary career blossomed and she became a well known commentator on the BBC. In middle age she and Harold purchased Sissinghurst Castle in Kent and busied themselves creating beautiful gardens, a focus which lasted until their deaths in the 1960s.Matthew Dennison does a good job of depicting Vita and Harold's lives and personalities, as well as those of the many women and men with whom they became romantically involved. Sometimes these relationships were quasi-incestuous, with Vita having affairs with women whose husbands were lovers of Harold. He also well depicts Vita's (and to a lesser extent Harold's) celebrated literary accomplishments. The book is beautifully illustrated and is well researched and annotated. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson were a fascinating couple, and though their private lives were often messy and even sordid, their books and their beautiful Sissinghurst gardens remain as their memorials.
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Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, by Matthew Dennison
