Famous as much for the people she knew (one extended affair was with Virginia Woolf), and the places she lived (the grand house of Knole near Sevenoaks, where she was born, and the smaller but equally impressive Sissinghurst, in the Weald) as for her literary works, Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) spent most of her life based in Kent. Her work celebrated aspects of its physical reality, but also the social meaning of this place. `The Heir’ (1922) is the most prominent example, set in the world of the large, inherited Blackboys Estate, modelled at least in its exterior circumstances on Groombridge Place near Tunbridge Wells (a place of inspiration for Arthur Conan-Doyle – see his entry) but perhaps partly on the grand Elizabethan pile of Knole with its long gallery and endless suite of rooms.
Sackville-West figures as part of the Bloomsbury set myth, though she makes sense best as a rural arm of this. Her childhood in the Knole estate involved a great deal of solitariness, and self-teaching – the latter of which she shared with Woolf, who, like her, was unable to go to university because of social and family restrictions. She wrote prolifically from a very young age, suffering the ignominy of not inheriting Knole but seeing it go to her male cousin. Her marriage to the young diplomat Harold Nicholson was also viewed dimly by her family – he came from a lineage which was only recently ennobled, she from an ancient family that had been embedded in the English establishment for centuries. Despite this, through her mother at least she claimed Roma ancestry.
Sackville-West’s attempts to be a diplomat’s wife was short lived. While Nicholson was abroad on posts, she tended to stay in the UK. There she enjoyed a long series of affairs with both men and women. Her long poem `The Land’ (1926) celebrated in part the delights of the Kentish rural landscape, and was seen by some as a response to T S Eliot’s `Wasteland’ of a few years earlier. This is a puzzling parallel, if only because her work has none of the daring modernity that his did. At best, it shared a similar anxiety about the vexed state of the world, but offered retreat to the sureness of the stable, unchanging rural life and society as an antidote.
From 1915 to 1930, she and her husband lived at the 14th century `Long Barn’, in the small settlement of Sevenoaks Weald. There, they invited the architect Edward Lutyens to make renovations, before moving to Sissinghurst in 1930. This remained her home till her death over thirty years later, and exists today much as she left it, in the hands of the National Trust, preserving both the living space she created there, but also the garden surrounding it.
`The Heir’ is from the `Long Barn’ years, and tells the story of a Mr Chase, an unmarried middle aged man who works in insurance in Wolverhampton, who is bequeathed a grand manor house in Kent on the death of his aunt. Taxes and expenses mean that he needs to sell the property and its extensive side buildings and grounds. The agent for this, Mr Nutley, a somewhat officious solicitor helping to execute the aunt’s will, is supportive of this move. `The house,’ he says,
`isn’t so very large, and it’s inconvenient, no bathrooms, no electric light, no garage, no central heating. The buyer would have all that on his hands, and the moat ought to be cleaned out too.’ (Sackwille-West, `The Heir’, Must Have Books facsimile reprint of original edition, 2014, 16)
When reminded of its historical nature, Nutley remains unmoved. `I wouldn’t care for it myself,’ he says, `low rooms, dark passages, a stinking moat, and a slippery staircase. If that’s Tudor, you’re welcome to it’ (Ibid).
Chase though clearly sees something different. `The Heir’ is subtitled `a Love Story’ – but it is clearly one not involving humans but between Chase and this building and the place it is in:
`Its façade of old, plum-coloured bricks, the inverted V of the two gables, the rectangle of the windows, and the creamy stucco of the little colonnade that joined the two projecting wings, all reflected unbroken in the green stillness of the moat’ (Ibid, 24).
It was the epitome of tranquillity: `The house seemed to lie at the very heart of peace.’ This same attribute dominates the land around:
`The house was the soul: did contain and guard the soul as in a casket; the lands were England, Saxon as they could be, and if the house were at the heart of the land, then the soul of the house must indeed be at the heart and root of England, and once arrived at the soul of the house, you might fairly claim to have pierced to the soul of England. Grave, gentle, encrusted with tradition, embossed with legend, simple and proud, ample and maternal’ (Ibid, 58-59)
The sale of the house, to Chase, becomes like seeing it `prostituted; yes, it was like seeing one’s mistress in a slave-market’ (Ibid, 101). This prompts his final intervention, to ensure that the house is saved. The novel ends with the integrity of this great, symbolic place being defended, though there is little detail in the novel about precisely how Chase plans to ensure it does not fall to rack and ruin once he has acquired it properly himself.
`The Heir’ was written in the aftermath of the First World War. The impact of this conflict on the British landed classes and their great estates had been devastating. The historian David Cannadine has documented this in `The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy’ (Vintage, New York, 1999). Tellingly, both Knole and Sissinghurst are today in the hands of the National Trust, their running costs largely derived from visits by tourists and members. Sackville-West presents Blackboys as not just a physical structure but intimately connected to a whole social and cultural setup which was settled, stable, reassuring – something alluded to ironically in the work of the great critic of the Bloomsbury ethos F R Leavis in his own notions of the Organic Society shattered by the crudities of the Industrial Revolution. Alas, as historians have subsequently shown, this sort of society never existed. And perhaps Sackville-West knew this on some level. She was, after all, writing fiction, even if it was inspired by a real place, and perhaps by fragments of real people.