A Note of Explanation

Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH (1892–1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer. A successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist, she published more than a dozen collections of poetry and thirteen novels. Sackville-West was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the androgynous protagonist of Orlando: A Biography by her famous friend and lover, Virginia Woolf. She had a longstanding column in the Observer (1946–1961) and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.