Behind the Mask
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A dazzling new biography of Vita Sackville-West, the 20th century aristocrat, literary celebrity, devoted wife, famous lover of Virginia Woolf, recluse, and iconoclast who defied categorization. In this stunning new biography of Vita Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison's Behind the Mask traces the triumph and contradictions of Vita's extraordinary life. His narrative charts a fascinating course from Vita's lonely childhood at Knole, through her affectionate but ‘open' marriage to Harold Nicolson (during which both husband and wife energetically pursued homosexual affairs, Vita most famously with Virginia Woolf), and through Vita's literary successes and disappointments, to the famous gardens the couple created at Sissinghurst. The book tells how, from her privileged world of the aristocracy, Sackville-West brought her penchant for costume, play-acting and rebellion to the artistic vanguard of modern Britain. Dennison is the acclaimed author of many books including a biography of Queen Victoria. Here, in the first biography to be written of Vita for thirty years, he reveals the whole story and gets behind ‘the beautiful mask' of Vita's public achievements to reveal an often troubled persona which heroically resisted compromise on every level. Drawing on wideranging sources and the extensive letters that sustained her marriage, this is a compelling story of love, loss and jealousy, of high-life and low points, of binding affection and illicit passion – a portrait of an extraordinary, 20th-century life.
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This book was fine. I didn't dislike it, but I didn't really like it either. The book is broken up into long parts, each named after one of Vita's works or a work she inspired. Some of the part titles worked better than others for me. Mostly I think they were picked because they sounded good for that segment, not because that segment really had anything to do with that work.
The book starts with a court case involving Vita's mother, which happened when Vita was around 20. After that we go back to the beginning of Vita's life and from there it's mostly a linear biography. The beginning of the book felt weird to me, like the author was trying to write like one of the early 20th-c. authors he would mention later on. It was all a bit confusing for the first segment or so. After that the book got much more readable. At this point though, the author got too hung up in Vita's relationships. I understand that relationships make up a large part of someone's life, but it seemed like the relationships took up the majority of the focus of the book. Vita's works were mentioned really only when they were influenced by the relationships. Surely there was more to her life than all these affairs?
I got bogged down with reading this again towards the end (the middle was definitely the most readable to me), though I couldn't tell you why at this point. I'm just glad to have finished it. In the future I would like to read a more standard biography of Vita, as I feel like I still don't know much about her at all.
