In Behind the Mask: A Life of Vita Sackville-West, British journalist and biographer Mark Dennison (The Last Princess) focuses on the complex individual behind the early-20th-century icon. This balanced life history reveals a famous writer, horticulturalist and gardener, baron's daughter, respectable Edwardian wife and mother, and passionate lover of men and women--most famously Virginia Woolf.
Vita Sackville-West was born in 1892, into aristocratic privilege. At age 21, Vita married the diplomat Harold Nicolson. Though they both vigorously pursued other--mostly same-sex--lovers, they remained a devoted couple until Vita's death in 1962. Dennison recounts the details of Vita's affairs with her childhood friend Rosamund Grosvenor, the novelist Violet Trefusis (née Keppel) and Virginia Woolf with objective restraint and a multitude of details. Vita's affair with Woolf seems to have been less emotionally intense but was important as a friendship with another writer, a point crucial to Dennison's argument that Sackville-West's literary legacy transcends her taboo-breaking sexual behavior. She twice won the Hawthornden Prize for poetry, published many widely praised novels and biographies, and later wrote an influential weekly garden column in the Observer, which, along with her care of her famous gardens at Sissinghurst, helped secure her place in history as a garden designer.
Dennison is a meticulous and respectful chronicler of Vita's life. Thoroughly researched, with liberal quoting from her diary, letters and books, his narrative retains an urgency colored by details worthy of the best British costume dramas, and reveals a complex, gifted, charismatic but conflicted woman whose many and wide-ranging accomplishments, long obscured by her sensational life, deserve recognition. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer