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Portrait Of A Marriage - Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (Paperback, New Ed)
Loot Price: R256
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Portrait Of A Marriage - Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson (Paperback, New Ed)
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List price R313
Loot Price R256
Discovery Miles 2 560
You Save R57 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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One cannot underestimate or overlook the tasteful, sometimes
elegant, romantic and wayward elements which are variously and
signally a part of this memoir of Nigel Nicolson's parents - the
gifted and prominent V. (Vita) Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson.
And even where one might attempt to avert one's eyes from
Shakespeare's "greatest scandal waits on greatest state," one
cannot dismiss it out of hand particularly since Vita's imperious
mother was involved in the most notorious trial of Edwardian
society. But the primary story here - one third of which was
written in Vita's hand and left locked in a Gladstone bag, two
thirds of which consists of her son's amplification thereof - deals
with her love for another woman, Violet. This was prefaced by a
girlhood affair with the duller Rosamund and followed by a more
discreet friendship with Virginia Woolf who modeled Orlando on Vita
- that "most charming love letter in literature." The liaison with
Violet (which included a period when Vita appeared as "Julian" both
in fact and in the novels she wrote) lasted some three years and is
filled with a turbulent urgency on both sides, ending with a scene
- closer to French comedy than tragedy - when both husbands came to
reclaim their wives. None of this will or did diminish the fact
that the Nicolsons achieved a marriage of great mutuality and
serene permanence for 49 years in spite of "her muddles" and "his
fun" - they were both homosexual from the start. Indeed before she
married him, Vita spoke of Harold as "unalterable, perennial and
best" just as he proved to be. Nicolson's book is then much more
than this episode - in recording it Vita said "I swore I would
shirk nothing" and her mother called it "quite like a sensational
novel" - as he retraces, revises and illumines the family history
throughout. Vita also said that this story "assumed an audience" -
surely it will now be affirmed. (Kirkus Reviews)
The classic story of the relationship between Vita Sackville-West
and Harold Nicolson, and a unique portrait of the Bloomsbury Group.
'A brilliantly structured account of the dramas, infidelities and
deep emotional attachments' GUARDIAN 'An intimate and controversial
account of his bisexual parents' open relationship' NEW YORK TIMES
'One of the most absorbing stories, built around two very
remarkable people, ever to stray from Gothic fiction into real
life' TLS The marriage was that between the two writers, Vita
Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson and the portrait is drawn partly
by Vita herself in an autobiography which she left behind at her
death in 1962 and partly by her son, Nigel. It was one of the
happiest and strangest marriages there has ever been. Both Vita and
Harold were always in love with other people and each gave the
other full liberty 'without enquiry or reproach', knowing that
their love for each other would be unaffected and even strengthened
by the crises which it survived. This account of their love story
is now a modern classic.
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