Knole and the Sackvilles.
Sackville-West, Vita. Knole and the Sackvilles: Manuscript and Diagram. 1922.
8vo.; ca. 35 unbound typescript leaves and 5 leaves of ink manuscript on rectos; some with spindle holes; occasional paperclip rust stains.
Together with:
Ink diagram of the Sackville Vault, Withyham, setting out the arrangement of the family tombs from the early seventeenth century through 1888, with a marginal note, “All this side is wrong. I ought to put them the other way round.”
Four paper slips of manuscript notes for and a 19-page typescript, with revisions, of this guidebook text about Vita’s ancestral home and its inhabitants, preceded by a two-page manuscript introduction and accompanied by approximately fifteen pages of related typescript notes.
This text does not correspond to the Heinemann/Doran publication of the same name; it was perhaps published by Country Life for the National Trust. (See Cross A8.)
This detailed history of Sackville homestead and lineage was the first published of many works inspired by Knole. As she was completing it, she wrote to her cousin Eddy Sackville-West: “They were a rotten lot, and nearly all stark staring mad. You and I have got a jolly sort of heredity to fight against.” Written no doubt at least in part in jest, this betrayed the darker side of Vita’s affinity for Knole and those who had inhabited it for centuries. The death of her father in January 1928 would set off an avalanche of pain as her ties to Knole were legally severed. Primogeniture laws preordained this loss, which she would feel bitterly and write about for the rest of her life. Knole passed first to her Uncle Charlie, and then to his son Eddy. This plight would inspire Virginia Woolf to compose Orlando, with Vita posing for photographs published in her fictional biography.
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