Portrait of a Marriage [antikvár]

Foreword When my mother, V. Sackville-West, died in 1962, it was my duty as her executor to go through her personal papers. She was careful about such things, and had filed everything of importance, including all her letters to and iirom Harold Nicolson during the fifty years of their engagement and marriage, and all her owoi diaries and the diaries of her mother. Lady Sackville. In the forty pinewood drawers of a large Italian cupboard I found hundreds ofletters from the friends who had meant most to her since her childhood. At the time I read very little, making a mental note that while all the material existed for a full record of her life, it should be allowed to simmer. I took a final look round her sitting-room in the tower at Sissinghurst (a room which I had entered only half a dozen times in the previous thirty yeai-s), and came upon a locked Gladstone bag lying in the corner of the little turret-room which opens off it. The bag contained something - a tiara in its case, for all I knew. Having no key, I cut the leather from around its lock to open it. Inside was a large notebook in a flexible cover, page after page filled by her neat pencilled manuscript. I carried it to her writing-table and began to read. The first few pages were abortive drafts of a couple of short stories. The sixth page was headed '23 July 1920', followed by a narrative in the first person which continued for eighty more. I read it through to the end v^dtliout stirring from her table. It was an autobiography written when she was aged twenty-eight, a confession, an attempt to purge her mind and heart of a love which had possessed her,, a love for another woman, Violet Trefusis. The simplicity of it, its candour, the extraorcJinary sequence of events which it unfolded, her implicit plea for forgiveness and compassion, for the strength to resist further