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Queer Heritage · Sevenoaks, Kent

Knole (Vita's lost inheritance)

Vita's beloved birthplace, which she could not inherit as a woman — the emotional wound that Woolf transfigured into 'Orlando' and that fuelled their love affair.

StatusDocumented history

Date1892 (Vita's birth)–1930

The peopleVita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf

The siteKnole, Sevenoaks (National Trust)

Coordinates51.26900, 0.20500 (confidence 5/5)

The story

Vita Sackville-West was born at Knole in 1892 and loved it the way most people love a person — and could not inherit it, because she was a woman. The great house, held by the Sackvilles since 1566, passed at her father's death in 1928 to her uncle and then her cousin. It was the wound of her life. She turned it, characteristically, into a metaphor for desire, writing that her exile from Knole felt like a liaison with a beautiful woman who never wholly belonged to her.

Knole shaped everything she wrote. When Virginia Woolf, her lover from 1925, wrote Orlando (1928) — the novel whose hero lives for centuries and changes sex — she gave the fictional Vita the house the real Vita had been denied. The original manuscript now hangs at Knole, inscribed to her. Her son Nigel Nicolson called the book the longest and most charming love letter in literature. Knole, meanwhile, still keeps a Sackville family lease, and still shows the rooms where the child Vita once led visitors by the hand.

More stories at this spot

The two-seater to Amiens

In February 1920 Vita and Violet were in Amiens, poised to leave their husbands for good. Harold Nicolson and Denys Trefusis gave chase across the Channel in a small two-seater aeroplane — genuine derring-do in 1920 — and retrieved their wives amid furious scenes. Vita went home to Harold. Violet, married on the condition the marriage stay unconsummated, went back to a life she had never chosen.

The novel her mother banned

Vita and Violet wrote a novel together, Challenge, in which the hero is called Julian — Vita's own male alter ego — and the heroine, Eve, is Violet. Vita's mother, Lady Sackville, found the portrait so nakedly obvious that she had publication in Britain blocked. It came out in America in 1923 and was not published in the UK until 1974.

The garden as consolation

Sissinghurst's head gardener has said Vita, in despair at losing Knole, realised she could redeem the loss by making something beautiful — not in brick, but in planting. The outdoor "rooms" divided by yew and old wall have been read as an attempt to rebuild Knole's architecture in living green: hedges for walls, lawns for carpets, flowers for furnishings.

Sources

Nearby on the map

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Documented historyHot spot

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