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Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita9 Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf.
Vita Sackville-West was born at Knole House in Sevenoaks Kent, the only child of Lionel Edward Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville and his wife Victoria Sackville-West, who were cousins. Her mother was the natural daughter of Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville. Christened Victoria Mary Sackville-West , she was known as Vita throughout her life, to distinguish her from her mother.
The then laws of primogeniture[citation needed] prevented Vita from inheriting Knole House on the death of her father. The house passed, with the title, to her uncle Charles Sackville-West, 4th Baron Sackville. The loss of Knole House would affect her for the rest of her life; of the signing in 1947 of documents relinquishing any claim on the property, part of its transition to the National Trust, she wrote that the signing... nearly broke my heart, putting my signature to what I regarded as a betrayal of all the tradition of my ancestors and the house I loved.
In 1913, at age 21, Vita married the 27 year-old writer and politician Harold George Nicolson (21 November 1886 – 1 May 1968), nicknamed Hadji, the third son of British diplomat Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock (1849–1928). The couple had an open marriage. Both Sackville-West and her husband had consecutive same-sex relations, as did some of the people gravitating around the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, with whom they had some association.
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