The book was an immediate and runaway success. a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love which had possessed her, a love for another woman, Violet Tiefusis.' Afraid that the contents of that Gladstone bag might be destroyed by his father or 'it him,' Nicolson waited four years after the death of his father before risking publication. In Nicolson's mother's (now famous) canvas bag, found locked in the corner of her tower at Sissinghurst, was an autobiography written when Vita was twenty-eight. Violet Trefusis first became familiar to many of us when Nigel Nicolson published his fascinating account of his parents' marriage, Portrait of a Marriage, in 1973. As Robert Anderson so wisely wrote in I Never Sang For My Father, death may end a life but not a relationship. Her chosen epitaph is a poignant and telling one: 'She Withdrew.īut that was not the end of either woman.

Most of her ashes are buried close to her Vita's ashes are in a 'small pink marble sarcophagus that once held her two ink-wells, from Long Barn days,' Glendinning tells us, secure 'in the Sackville family crypt at Withyham with her ancestors.' jullian records that Violet's last wishes for a resting place shout louder. The perfect setting for the death agony of The last two months of her life were cruel, Philippe jullian, her biographer in The Other Woman: A Life of Violet Trefusis, summarizes it in his closing chapter, ironically entitled after one- of Vita's novels, All Passion Spent. Having survived Vita by ten years, her end too was tragic. though it 'can never be the same.'' Violet's death came from starvation as the culmination of illness on I March 1972. In 1967, Sissinghurst passed into the ownership of the National Trust, and as Victoria Glendinning points out in her excellent biography of Vita, 'its future was secure. Not even her most famous creation, her gardens, survived. Nigel Nicolson, her son, wrote after his father's death in 1968, 'He was never the same again. Vita tragically went to a painful death from which Harold Nicolson, her husband, never recovered. The lives of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West certainly demonstrate Eliot's observation elsewhere that our beginnings never know our endings. Of what was believed in as the most reliable -Īnd therefore the fittest for renunciation. While emotion takes to itself the emotionless

There is no end, but addition: the trailing Violet to Vita: The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville- Westedited by Mitchell A.

Violet to Vita by John Phillips