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Books

Vita in her ivory tower: a portrait of a lonely, lovelorn aristocrat who yearned to be mistress of her own ancestral home

A review of Behind the Mask by Matthew Dennison reveals that in Vita Sackville-West’s copious writings, she generally cast herself as a man

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West Matthew Dennison

Collins, pp.364, £25, ISBN: 9780007486960

Visitors to the National Trust’s Sissinghurst — the decayed Elizabethan castle transformed by Vita Sackville-West in the early 1930s — are regaled by picturesque extracts from Vita’s landscape poems, and moving professions of love to and from her husband Harold Nicolson. Matthew Dennison’s title, Behind the Mask, indicates his ambition to get beyond such projections to something more real.

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