Лучшие книги Виты Сэквилл-Уэст

"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way."

In 1922, the relatively unknown writer Virginia Woolf met the popular author, aristocrat—and notorious Sapphist—Vita Sackville-West. Virginia didn’t think much of Vita’s conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. In her diary she wrote: "But could I ever know her?" It was to be the start of nearly 20 years of correspondence, flirtation, literary inspiration, and deep friendship. Virginia would write her most playful novel, Orlando, for and about Vita, and their close bond would end only with Virginia’s tragic death in 1941.

Here is the true love story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, told through selected letters and diary entries, allowing us to hear these women’s complex and constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Passionate, witty, and lyrical, their writing gives us a vivid sense of their extraordinary lives: from Vita’s travels across the globe with her foreign diplomat husband, to Virginia’s gossip about parties with the Bloomsbury set; from their shared love of dogs and gardens, to their grief and fear as war breaks out across Europe.

These letters bring to life a relationship that—even a hundred years later—feels radical, relatable, and vital.

After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf began a passionate relationship that lasted until Woolf's death in 1941. Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons.

Edwardian era love, society and politics explored in this perfect read for Downton Abbey fans.
Sebastian is young, handsome and romantic, the heir to a vast and beautiful English country estate. He is a fixed feature in the eternal round of lavish parties, intrigues and traditions at the cold, decadent heart of Edwardian high society. Everyone knows the role he must play, but Sebastian isn't sure he wants the part. Position, privilege and wealth are his, if he can resist the lure of a brave new world.

Ruth Pennistan is a farmer’s daughter, born and brought up in Kent. But her dark hair and eyes belie a forgotten ancestry – a Spanish gypsy grandmother and a passionate inheritance. Malory, the rather strait-laced guest of the family, falls head over heels in love, even whilst Ruth becomes trapped against her will in a drama of love and tragedy with another man. Vita Sackville-West’s first heroine echoes the passions and contradictions of the author's own life.

Vita Sackville-West is known as much for her creation of the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle as for her numerous novels, poems and gardening articles. Written in 1926, The Land is a nostalgic celebration of the Kentish countryside through the seasons. It won the Hawthornden Prize and sold over 100,000 copies.

A portrait of fashionable society at the height of an era, The Edwardians reveals, through the lives of its characters, all that was glamorous about the period—and all that was to lead to its downfall. Sebastian and Viola are children of the English aristocracy. Handsome and moody, 19-year-old Sebastian is heir to Chevron, a vast country estate. Tying him to his inheritance is a deep sense of tradition and love of the English countryside, but he loathes the cold, extravagant society of which he is a part. At 16, his sister Viola is more independent: an unfashionable beauty who scorns every part of her inheritance—most particularly that of…

Edmund Carr is at sea in more ways than one. An eminent journalist and self-made man, he has recently discovered that he has only a short time to live. Leaving his job on a Fleet Street paper, he takes a passage on a cruise ship where he knows that Laura, a beautiful and intelligent widow whom he secretly admires, will be a fellow passenger. Exhilarated by the distant vista of exotic islands and his conversations with Laura, Edmund finds himself rethinking all his values. A voyage on many levels, those long purposeless days at sea find Edumnd relinquishing the past as he discovers the joys and the pain of a love he is simultaneously determined to conceal.

When Lady Slane was young, she nurtured a secret, burning ambition: to become an artist. She became, instead, the dutiful wife of a great statesman, and mother to six children. In her widowhood she finally defies her family. Her children, all over sixty, have planned for her to spend her remaining days quietly, as a paying guest of each of them in turn. Much to their dismay, Lady Slane rents a small house in Hampstead and chooses to live independently, free from her past. She revels in her new-found freedom, living the life she forfeited seventy years earlier to the conventions of a Victorian marriage, and attracts an odd assortment of…

Vita Sackville-West's brilliant first novel, published in 1919, at the height of her stormy affair with Violet Trefusis, is acclaimed as a masterpiece.
The story of Ruth Pennistan, on the one hand a conventional farmer's daughter, born and brought up in Kent, on the other a mysterious gypsy figure, trapped against her will in a drama of love and tragedy. A heroine who mirrored the passions and contradictions of Vita's own life and character.
'Alive with smouldering passion and passages of real beauty . . . unquestionably a novel of unusual power' — Daily Telegraph