Jane Ridley
Knole Me Tangere
Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West
By Matthew Dennison
William Collins 364pp £25 order from our bookshop
Vita Sackville-West is considered a lesbian icon. Nigel Nicolson caused a storm in 1973 when he published Portrait of a Marriage, an account of the affair between his mother, Vita, and Violet Trefusis. Victoria Glendinning revealed the full story of Vita’s love life in her biography, published in 1983. In this astute and engaging book, Matthew Dennison looks again at Vita’s extraordinary life and makes a new sort of sense of it.
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