Uploaded April 2018 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
If "open" marriage remains a conundrum in the 21st Century, imagine its impact a hundred years ago.
Two of its then leading practitioners, Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, were a couple devoted not merely to each other, but to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, whose celebrated gardens are still the most visited in England, almost a century later. In a remarkably elastic domestic arrangement, nonetheless fraught with its ups and downs, Vita's infamous affairs with - inter alia - Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefusis and Sonia Keppel remain the stuff of legend; but so, too, does her life as best-selling novelist, poet, BBC broadcaster - and gardener.
In this impeccable biography - the first such in over three decades - Matthew Dennison has illuminated an uncommonly complex life with both taste and sensitivity. Sissinghurst is a subject in itself, as several earlier volumes will attest, but it will never eclipse that of its restorers. A rewarding book, indeed: well written, revealing and elegantly packaged.
More video book reviews at thisoldHoarehouse.com
If "open" marriage remains a conundrum in the 21st Century, imagine its impact a hundred years ago.
Two of its then leading practitioners, Sir Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, were a couple devoted not merely to each other, but to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, whose celebrated gardens are still the most visited in England, almost a century later. In a remarkably elastic domestic arrangement, nonetheless fraught with its ups and downs, Vita's infamous affairs with - inter alia - Virginia Woolf, Violet Trefusis and Sonia Keppel remain the stuff of legend; but so, too, does her life as best-selling novelist, poet, BBC broadcaster - and gardener.
In this impeccable biography - the first such in over three decades - Matthew Dennison has illuminated an uncommonly complex life with both taste and sensitivity. Sissinghurst is a subject in itself, as several earlier volumes will attest, but it will never eclipse that of its restorers. A rewarding book, indeed: well written, revealing and elegantly packaged.
More video book reviews at thisoldHoarehouse.com
