‘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’.
The Nicolsons’ marriage, which lasted until Vita’s death in 1962, was indeed an unusual one. Throughout their 49 years together, both partners were perpetually in love with someone else, usually of the same sex, but their own relationship only grew stronger with time, and their primary loyalty was always to one another. Nigel’s loving and thoughtful account of his parents’ marriage provides an intriguing counterpoint to Vita’s journals, written in the white heat of her affair.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
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...
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Nigel’s insightful Portrait of a Marriage shines a light on a fascinating couple
An intimate and controversial account of his bisexual parents’ open relationship
One of the most absorbing stories, built around two very remarkable people, ever to stray from Gothic fiction into real life
A brilliantly structured account of the dramas, infidelities and deep emotional attachment that went to construct the partnership of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West
The charm of this book lies in the elegance of its narration, the taste with which their son has managed to convey the real, enduring quality of his parents’ love for each other
Portrait of a Marriage is as close to a cry from the heart as anybody writing English in our time has come, and it is a cry that, once heard, is not likely ever to be forgotten … Unexpected and astonishing
The publisher, editor, biographer and sometime politician Nigel Nicolson, who has died aged 87, laboured in the shadow of his famous and turbulent parents, the diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson and the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West. Although, like his elder brother, the art historian Ben Nicolson, he managed to carve a distinguished career for himself, this background was something of an ordeal, both professionally and emotionally, and, for a man of such obvious talents, Nigel Nicolson remained all his life considerably underrated . . .