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Corsets Lingerie Biography
Tall, dark and magnetically attractive, Vita Sackville-West had the dubious knack of inflaming passions wherever she went.
Marriages crumbled in her wake. Grown men and women threatened suicide. One lover even produced a pistol and threatened to blow her own brains out.
Yet, on the face of it, Vita led a life of serene Edwardian upper-class respectability. Feted as a poet and novelist — her most successful book was The Edwardians — she was a baron’s daughter who had married a diplomat and borne two sons.
In later years, she became well-known as a horticulturalist, creating beautiful gardens at Sissinghurst, her final home in Kent, which are visited to this day by a respectful and admiring public.
As an enthralling new biography reveals, however, her extraordinary secret sex life was just as important to her as all the plaudits.
Despite the huge risks she knew she was taking with her reputation, she was a romantic rebel whose escapades make even the most implausible plots for Downton Abbey seem tame.
Unusually — in a time when the word ‘lesbian’ didn’t even exist — most of her lovers were women.
But such was the potency of Vita’s sex appeal that she also attracted numerous ardent male admirers.
As one of the most privileged young women of the Edwardian era, Vita had grown up at Knole in Kent — a great Tudor palace that had six acres of roof, seven courtyards and more than 50 staircases.
Crawling through its hundreds of rooms (there was reputedly one for every day of the year) was a pet tortoise with a monogram picked out on its shell with diamonds.
By the time she turned 18, she had developed into a tall, dark and peach-skinned beauty. Naturally, her parents expected to make the most splendid of marriages.
There was just one problem: although one eligible aristocrat after another fell in love with her, she wasn’t attracted to any of them.
Disparagingly, she dismissed them as ‘little dancing things in ballrooms’.
However, Vita never seriously considered the possibility of not marrying at all. Nor was she interested in setting up home with one of her girlfriends - two of whom had already fallen madly in love with her.
Rosamund Grosvenor, a relative of the Duke of Westminster, often stayed in the room next to Vita’s at Knole, where — in Vita’s words — they lived ‘on terms of the greatest possible intimacy’.
Although she later denied they made love, she admitted that she was so overwhelmingly in love with Rosamund that ‘passion . . . used to make my head swim sometimes’.
Far more dangerous, however, was Vita’s schoolfriend Violet. Already touched by scandal — she was the daughter of Alice Keppel, the mistress of Edward VII — she nursed such a burning passion for Vita that she begged her never to marry.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2797963/stately-home-seductress-makes-downton-s-wildest-plots-look-tame-vita-sackville-west-known-affairs-men-women-reveals-voracious-thought.html#ixzz3KJeQPJyz
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on FacebookThey’d met when Violet was 11 and Vita was 13. Three years later, the precocious Violet told her friend that she loved her and gave her a Venetian doge’s ring carved from red lava.
Vita, for her part, was slow to respond to Violet’s sexual overtures. But by the time she was thrilling the debutante circuit, it’s likely that one or both of her female relationships had become physical.
Then in the summer of 1910, at a dinner party in London, Vita met a young diplomat called Harold Nicolson.
She immediately liked ‘his irrepressible brown curls, his laughing eyes, his charming smile’, but she only realised she loved Harold when he kissed her — two years into their courtship.
‘It never struck me as wrong that I should be more or less engaged to Harold, and at the same time very much in love with Rosamund,’ she confessed later.
To her mind, the ever-present and curvaceous Rosamund merely provided affection, distraction and physical excitement when Harold was absent.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2797963/stately-home-seductress-makes-downton-s-wildest-plots-look-tame-vita-sackville-west-known-affairs-men-women-reveals-voracious-thought.html#ixzz3KJeVbxQc
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on FacebookMeanwhile, Harold almost certainly did fall in love with Vita. But he was far less naive than she was: six years her senior, he already knew that his sexual inclinations were predominantly homosexual.
With few exceptions, however, his dalliances never overwhelmed him emotionally in the way that Vita would later be consumed repeatedly by her own love affairs.
After much prevarication, she finally married him in 1913 in the chapel at Knole at a ceremony attended not only by four duchesses but also her father’s secret mistress, aptly attired in skunk fur.
At that point, neither Vita nor Harold had admitted to each other their homosexual proclivities.
The night before the wedding, Rosamund had cried all night. As for Violet, who hadn’t even been told about the wedding, she raged that she’d been ‘stunned by what I took to be a piece of perfidy I did not deserve’. She was soon to exact a devastating revenge.
Meanwhile, Vita surprised herself by thoroughly enjoying her wedding night. Later, in purple prose, she described how ‘an irresistible cosmic force of nature, no longer to be denied, had flung two lives together and shattered them into one’.
The honeymoon period lasted for four-and-a-half years and produced two sons, Benedict and Nigel.
During this period, Vita published a volume of poetry and, to all intents and purposes, the couple appeared to settle down at Long Barn, an ancient house they’d bought in Kent.
Replete with happiness, Vita concluded that ‘it was hardly possible for two people to be more completely and unquestioningly happy’.
Violet, for her part, had broken off a ‘suitable’ engagement to the future Duke of Wellington, and was still pining for her lost love. At her own ‘sarcastic’ request, she’d also become godmother to the Nicolsons’ first son.
Her chance finally came after Harold was forced to confess to Vita that a fleeting encounter with a man had resulted in venereal disease. Furthermore, he said, he’d been told by his doctor not to have sex for six months.
Terrified that he’d lose his wife, he struggled to convince Vita that his homosexuality was unimportant to their marriage. And, for a while, all seemed to be well.
Then, two days before the date earmarked by Harold’s doctor for the all-clear, Violet happened to be a houseguest at Long Barn.
Vita had just taken delivery of some breeches and gaiters — as worn by members of the Women’s Land Army, formed the previous year.
Pulling them on, she went wild with delight: ‘I ran, I shouted, I jumped, I climbed, I vaulted over gates, I felt like a schoolboy let out on a holiday; and Violet followed me across woods and fields,’ she wrote later.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2797963/stately-home-seductress-makes-downton-s-wildest-plots-look-tame-vita-sackville-west-known-affairs-men-women-reveals-voracious-thought.html#ixzz3KJeZqWUr
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