Introducing the forthcoming addition to the Slightly Foxed Editions list, No. 70:
Nigel Nicolson | PORTRAIT OF A MARRIAGE
‘Of course I have no right whatsoever to write down the truth about my life, involving as it naturally does the lives of so many other people,’ wrote Vita Sackville-West in July 1920. But write it down she did, and when in 1973 her son Nigel took the decision to publish Vita’s account of her passionate love affair with Violet Trefusis he feared he might be prosecuted for obscenity. Times have changed, but Vita’s account of a forbidden relationship which nearly destroyed her marriage is still both fascinating and disturbing.
Based on a cache of letters and diaries Nigel discovered after his mother’s death, Portrait of a Marriage is told in alternating chapters. In two Vita describes her own exotic and aristocratic upbringing at Knole, the great house in Kent that she adored but was never destined to inherit, her marriage to the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, and her long relationship with Violet, a fatal and often painful attraction that she found impossible to resist.
The remaining three give Nigel’s perspective on the affair and what came after. While her son was convinced that she had always intended her account to be read by those to whom, as she put it, ‘the psychology of people like myself will be a matter of interest’, he felt it should be known that this episode was only part of his parents’ long struggle to achieve ‘one of the strangest and most successful unions that two gifted people have ever enjoyed’.
Portrait of a Marriage is published on 1 March, but we’re pleased to report that it’s available to order now, with copies ready for dispatch later this month. And we look forward to bringing news of the forthcoming spring issue of Slightly Foxed magazine in due course.
With best wishes, as ever, from the SF staff
Izzy, Isabel, Rebecca, Edie & Jennie
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