page_title: Vita Sackville-West
section_title: Antecedents
hierarchical_section_title: Vita Sackville-West / Biography / Antecedents
caption_attribution_description: English: Victoria Josepha Sackville-West, mother of Vita Sackville-West
context_page_description: Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH, usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer.
  She was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime and 13 novels. She 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 and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.
context_section_description: Knole, the home of Vita's aristocratic ancestors in Kent, was given to Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. Vita was born there, the only child of cousins Victoria Sackville-West and Lionel Sackville-West, 3rd Baron Sackville. Vita's mother, raised in a Parisian convent, was the illegitimate daughter of Lionel Sackville-West, 2nd Baron Sackville and a Spanish dancer, Josefa de Oliva (née Durán y Ortega), known as Pepita. Pepita's mother was an acrobat who had married a barber.
  Although the marriage of Vita's parents was initially happy, shortly after her birth, the couple drifted and Lionel took an opera singer for a mistress who came to live with them at Knole.
  Christened Victoria Mary Sackville-West, the girl was known as "Vita" throughout her life to distinguish her from her mother, also called Victoria. The usual English aristocratic inheritance customs were followed by the Sackville-West family, preventing Vita from inheriting Knole on the death of her father, a source of life-long bitterness to Vita. The house followed the title, and was bequeathed instead by her father to his nephew Charles, who became the 4th Baron.
caption: Victoria Josefa Dolores Catalina Sackville-West, Baroness Sackville. Vita's mother, circa 1885
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