Half a century after it was first published in 1973, Portrait of a Marriage still delivers a powerful depth charge, still intrigues and amazes in equal measure. The story it tells, of a marriage made all the stronger by the centrifugal forces of bisexual love affairs forcing it apart, is profoundly moving, and in Nigel Nicolson’s graceful telling, as relevant now as ever. We live in an age of soundbites, where complex lives are often reduced to simplistic labels – Vita Sackville-West? Ah, yes, the gardener, the lover of Virginia Woolf, the inspiration for Orlando – and need to be reminded of the fire and passion, the agony and ecstasy, that combined in the making of two such singular lives and one such singular marriage.
After his mother Vita Sackville-West died in 1962, Nicolson went through her papers and came upon a locked Gladstone bag. This contained her account – her confession – of the tumultuous affair with Violet Keppel that had pushed her marriage to the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson to the very brink. Written in 1920 when she was 28, it was her attempt to be truthful, and it was locked away, because:
I shall be able to trust no one to read it; there is only one person in whom I have such utter confidence that I would give every line of this confession into his hands, knowing that after wading through this morass – for it is a morass, my life, a bog, a swamp, a deceitful country, with one bright patch in the middle, the patch that is unalterably his – I know that after wading through it all he would emerge holding his estimate of me steadfast.
Ten years passed before Nicolson decided to publish Vita’s account, verbatim, but interspersed with his own more nuanced commentary. Her voice is raw, urgent, occasionally confused and confusing; his steady and sympathetic, putting the story Vita tells into the context of contemporary letters between the dramatis personae and his own experience of his parents’ marriage.
And what a drama it was, unfolding through Vita’s extraordinary upbringing as the only child of Lord Sackville, incumbent of Knole (famously, a house with fifty-two staircases, set within a thousand acres), and illegitimate granddaughter of an Andalucian dancer – an inheritance which might account for her fiery and rebellious temperament. The seductive Violet Keppel (daughter of Alice Keppel, mistress of Edward VII), whom she met at the age of 13 and who kissed her on the spot, would not be the first object of Vita’s affections. That was neat, dull Rosamund Grosvenor, with whom she became obsessed while being simultaneously courted by numerous men at débutante balls and notably by Harold Nicolson, who proposed marriage before they had even exchanged a kiss. Intense as it was, she would shrug off her liaison with Rosamund as ‘superficial. I mean that it was almost exclusively physical as, to be frank, she always bored me as a companion. I was very fond of her, however; she had a sweet nature. But she was quite stupid. Harold wasn’t.’
Rosamund, and indeed Harold, would be no match for Violet when she burst upon the scene again in April 1918. Vita had by now enjoyed nearly four years of unadulterated married happiness with Harold, giving birth to two sons, Ben and Nigel. When Violet asked if she might visit her at Long Barn, the Nicolsons’ house near Sevenoaks, Vita reluctantly agreed. At first, ‘We were both bored. My serenity got on her nerves, her restlessness got on mine . . .’ until one day Vita acquired some breeches and gaiters ‘like the women-on-the-land were wearing’ and was intoxicated by the freedom they gave her. Violet was transfixed. ‘I remember that wild irresponsible day,’ recalled Vita. ‘It was one of the most vibrant days of my life . . . the old undercurrent had come back stronger than ever.’
It was Violet, not Vita, who acted as seductress, drawing Vita into her sphere: ‘She was more skilful than I . . . she was infinitely clever.’ Violet had little to lose, for her engagement to the absent but gallant Denys Trefusis was a farce: she had forced him to accept that their union would be platonic and had no intention of making him happy. Vita meanwhile absconded with Violet to Cornwall, to London, to Paris, to Monte Carlo, wherever the two could be together – ‘a mad and irresponsible summer of moonlight nights, and infinite escapades, and passionate letters, and music, and poetry’.
So bewitched was she by Violet and the exhilaration of self-discovery that Harold and her children faded into the background, and she barely gave them a thought. In London and Paris that autumn Vita dressed as a boy, revelling in her newfound freedom as ‘Julian’: ‘It was marvellous fun, all the more so as there was always the risk of being found out.’ But she never was: cross-dressing suited her, an expression of her alter ego, and the fugitive couple stayed abroad all winter, prolonging their ‘wild and radiant months’ before the inevitable and dreadful reckoning, played out with operatic levels of drama over the following two years.
Rarely can a marriage have been put to such a test, privately and publicly. The triumph of Portrait of a Marriage is to show how it survived, indeed evolved into a stronger union than ever, tempering the anguish, cruelty and humiliation suffered by all concerned into an enviably close, almost spiritual partnership. Harold would prevail, for Vita loved her husband; Violet might be intoxicating, ravishing, perfect, but Harold was ‘unalterable, perennial and best’.
His letters to Vita, movingly quoted by Nigel as a counterpoint to Vita’s extravagant abandon, are heartrending, generous to a fault, suffused with love and empathy. Rarely does Harold allude to the great matters of state with which he was grappling as a diplomat while his marriage hung so precariously in the balance: his vital work at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, for which he would earn the CMG. Vita never gave a fig for Harold’s career, and in 1929, after postings to Teheran and Berlin where she visited but never accompanied him outright, he would retire from the Foreign Office to return home to Kent.
The months, even years they spent apart in that period gave them both the freedom to follow their hearts’ desires, for both were bisexual and, as Nigel observes, ‘Vita was always in love’. Harold enjoyed liaisons with a series of clever young men, but none would ever threaten his commitment to Vita, who referred to them as ‘his fun’, while he called her affairs ‘her muddles’. She, meanwhile, emerged from her passionate liaison with Violet – the one serious crisis of her marriage – only to fall precipitously in love with a man, the writer and aesthete Geoffrey Scott.
He was followed in Vita’s affections by Virginia Woolf, who was likewise smitten, and whose fascination with Vita and her abiding love of Knole inspired her strangest flight of fancy, her novel Orlando. Woolf described Vita’s splendour: ‘she shines in the grocer’s shop at Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung . . .’ But the intensity of their affair was tempered by Vita’s knowledge of Virginia’s mental instability, Harold warning her, ‘Oh my dear, I hope Virginia is not going to be a muddle! It is like smoking over a petrol tank.’
This remark sums up Harold’s attitude to Vita’s erotic adventures: indulgent, amused, generous, concerned for the welfare of all. By this stage, they had nothing to hide from one another, and had achieved a happy formula for their marriage. ‘We are sure of each other,’ she wrote, ‘in this odd, strange, detached, intimate, mystical relationship which we could never explain to any outside person.’ When apart they wrote thousands of letters, the warp and weft of their lives, and kept nothing from one another. She wrote to Harold of ‘the great triumph of being loved by you’ and both, Nigel Nicolson says, ‘were perpetually amazed at their good fortune’.
In 1930 Vita discovered the run-down but romantic Sissinghurst Castle, still in her beloved Kentish Weald, and resolved to move there and create a garden from scratch: gardening had always been a passion, and she was by now less interested in adventuring and her former social whirl. And so they continued, Harold pursuing his career as a politician, journalist and man of letters, spending his weeks at his rooms in Albany in the heart of London, then returning to Sissinghurst where Vita would have spent the week gardening all day, writing all night in her tower room, producing in all some thirty-five books and countless columns for the Observer. ‘What cannot be preserved except in memory,’ writes Nigel Nicolson, ‘is the gentleness of their reunions. They did not “leap together like two flames” as when Violet returned from Holland, but berthed like two sister ships.’
Portrait of a Marriage is a brave and honest tribute to two remarkable people who succeeded in creating their own unique version of marriage against all the expectations of the day. Fifty years on, it reads as vividly as if it was written yesterday; and marriage, loosed from its straitjacket, can take more forms than were ever imagined in the last century. No wonder Portrait – which provoked a furore on first publication, on several counts – has become a classic: it has so much to teach us about human nature, about desire, about the nature of true love, and filial love: what more could we ask of a book, then and now?
Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Ariane Bankes 2025
About the contributor
Ariane Bankes is author of The Quality of Love (2024) and niece of Arthur Koestler, who lived at Long Barn after the Nicolsons, in the 1950s. She is currently curating an exhibition on Dora Carrington for Pallant House Gallery, Chichester.
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