DA TIMESONLINE The grandson of Vita Sackville-West traces an English dream of perfectionJonathan Bate One of my favourite bites on YouTube shows a 78 rpm gramophone going round and round as Vita Sackville-West – with the clipped vowels of her class and age – reads extracts from The Land. Replete with trudging fieldsmen and sunlit grasses green as jade, her long pastoral poem transposes classical Arcadia to the clay soil of the Home Counties. Shortly after Vita’s poem won England’s most prestigious literary award, the Hawthornden Prize, Virginia Woolf had an idea for a new book: “And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita – only with a change about from one sex to the other”. Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson described Orlando...
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