Orchard and Vineyard.
Inscribed to Evelyn Irons
Sackville-West, V. Orchard and Vineyard. London and New York: John Lane The Bodley Head Ltd. and John Lane Company, 1921.
8vo.; title page unopened; light foxing throughout; occasional smudges; cloth spine, paper-covered boards; printed label to spine and upper panel; wear to extremities. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of this collection of poems composed primarily during the summer of 1917, offering Sackville-West’s impressions of life in Kent and in the Mediterannean. Cross A6. She divides the poems into the groupings of Humanities, Insurrection, Home, Ad Astra, From “A Masque of Youth,” Songs of Fancy, and Sailing. Glendinning writes that in this collection that in addition to the pastoral, in this collection there are also “poems of rebellion, hate and bitterness against society written at the worst times during the [Violet] Trefusis affair; Long Barn poems; garden poems, and a home-coming poem, ‘Night,’ dedicated to Harold [Nicolson].… knowing the background, a reader can trace the emotional confusion of the preceding years, but the common reader, in 1921, did not have the key.”
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to Evelyn Irons, a female British journalist who expatriated to the United States after World War II: Evelyn from Vita. Evelyn and Vita began their tempestuous romance in 1931. While still living with Olive Rinder, Evelyn made weekend visits to stay with Vita at Sissinghurst, then newly purchased. They gardened, wrote poetry to each other and made love. The two women also went on a secret holiday to France where they explored the caves and ruins of Les Baux. That same year Vita arranged for Evelyn to meet Virginia Woolf and to give her a tour of the Daily Mail, an encounter Evelyn eventually wrote about for the New Yorker.
The eccentric Olive encouraged the affair between Evelyn and Vita, in an odd way deluded that it would benefit her as well. A year later further complications arose when Evelyn met and fell in love with another woman, Joy McSweeney. She broke off her romantic relationships with both Vita and Olive. (Meanwhile, Vita had begun an affair with Olive. Feeling sorry for Olive’s eviction from Evelyn’s flat and life, Vita bought Olive a dog and found her a cottage near Sissinghurst.)
By leaving Vita, Evelyn earned the distinction of becoming the only woman to do so. In response to the break-up Vita wrote Evelyn her well-known poem “Valediction,” which is published in this volume, along with four other poems to or about Irons: “The Last Train Down,” “No Obligation,” “Love Too Painful,” and “Warning.”
(#8591)
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