Download Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West AudioBook Free
Aristocrat, literary movie star, 'Rose Queen', committed wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast - Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward. Her life is retold here in a amazing new biography. In such a stunning portrait of Vita Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison traces the triumph and contradictions of Vita's astonishing life. His narrative charts a remarkable course from Vita's lonely years as a child at Knole, through her affectionate but 'open up' marriage to Harold Nicolson (where both couple energetically pursued homosexual affairs, Vita most famously with Virginia Woolf), and through Vita's literary successes and disappointments, to the famous landscapes the few created at Sissinghurst. The reserve explains to how, from her privileged world of the aristocracy, Sackville-West helped bring her penchant for halloween costume, play-acting and rebellion to the creative vanguard of modern Britain. Dennison is the acclaimed writer of many books including a biography of Queen Victoria. Here, in the first biography to be written of Vita for 30 years, he shows the whole report and gets behind 'the beautiful face mask' of Vita's public achievements to disclose an often stressed persona which heroically resisted compromise on every level. Sketching on wide-ranging sources and the extensive letters that suffered her marriage, this is a powerful report of love, loss, and jealousy, of high-life and low details, of binding devotion and illicit passion - a portrait of a fantastic, 20th-century life.
