A lesbian life
From Clarke Hayes
Sir: At the risk of sounding pedantic, Vita Sackville-West did not go through a syracusan nor a lesbian 'phase' (Harry Mount, Books, 19 June). Vita Sackville-West was a practising lesbian all her life.
Following her torrid affair with Violet Trefusis — described in her own words and reproduced by Nigel Nicolson in Portrait of a Maniage — Sackville-West embarked on a failed affair with the architect Geoffrey Scott, then settled down to a mainly celibate marriage with Harold Nicolson. What followed through the Twenties and Thirties was a return to her true nature — a series of affairs and relationships with just about any woman she could get her hands on. These were often, it seems, young journalists from the BBC eager to go down to Kent to interview her, and thrilled, one imagines, by the ease with which they were seduced by her! An attempted night of passion with Virginia Woolf in the mid-Twenties left the latter emotionally bruised, as was her wont, but she recovered sufficiently to write what Nigel Nicolson described as 'the longest love letter in literature'. Orlando.
In 1940, when Violet Trefusis was in exile in England and wished to meet, Vita resisted. She wrote to Violet, 'You are the unexploded bomb to me, I don't want you to explode,' By the end of the war Vita was over 50, and age, gardening, alcohol and a strange mystical passion for her sister-in-law, Lady Gwendolyn St Levan, all tempered her passion for amorous affairs with women.
One has only to read Victoria Glendinning's excellent Vita to discover the truth. 'Phase'? Oh no!
Clarke Hayes
Hastings, East Sussex
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