Queer Heritage · Cranbrook, Kent
Sissinghurst Castle (Vita Sackville-West)
Home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson's famously open marriage; Vita's affair with Virginia Woolf inspired 'Orlando', 'the longest love letter in literature'. Pair with Knole (her lost birthplace).
The story
Vita and her husband Harold Nicolson bought Sissinghurst in 1930: a ruined Elizabethan castle in the Kent Weald, a tower and a moat and a great deal of weed. It had belonged, generations back, to Vita's own ancestors, and she treated buying it as a kind of homecoming — a replacement for Knole, the house she had lost for the crime of being female.
They built the garden together over thirty years. Harold laid out the structure, the vistas and walls; Vita did the planting, room by hedged room, including the famous White Garden. On just five acres it is the most visited garden in England, with the National Trust reporting over 150,000 visitors a year. She wrote up in the tower, in a sanctum few were allowed to enter, having quietly locked away, in a Gladstone bag, the 1920 manuscript in which she confessed her elopements with Violet Trefusis and her nights out as "Julian," a young man in a khaki bandage. Her son found it after her death and published it as Portrait of a Marriage (1973).
More stories at this spot
- Vita & Violet Trefusis elopement (1917)
- Vita & Virginia Woolf
Sources
- National Portrait Gallery
- TIME
- National Trust
- The New York Review of Books (John Richardson, 1973)
- Encyclopedia.com (Women in World History)
- Country Life
- The Paris Review
Nearby on the map
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.
Documented historyRoyal LiaisonHever Castle (Henry VIII courts Anne Boleyn)Hever, Edenbridge, Kent · EnglandAnne Boleyn's girlhood home, where Henry VIII rode out to press a courtship that would break England from Rome. The castle keeps his love letters' story alive — 'I would you were in mine arms, or I in yours' — the correspondence of a king undone by a woman who knew the value of waiting.
Documented historyFolk Rite & FertilityThe Long Man of WilmingtonWilmington, East Sussex · EnglandA 235ft chalk giant clasping two staves, a focus for neo-pagan and May-Day fertility ritual where the Long Man Morris Men dance at dawn. A 2003 excavation led by Professor Martin Bell of the University of Reading (with the Open University's Landscape Mysteries) strongly suggested the figure dates from the Early Modern period — the 16th or 17th century AD.
Documented + folkloreSpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.