Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson

Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet and biographer, is best known as the friend of Virginia Woolf, who transformed her into the androgynous time-traveller of Orlando. Her love affair with Violet Keppel Trefusis in 1920 was a story of intrigue and bewilderment. Nigel Nicolson combines his mother's vivid memoir of the affair with what he learned from family letters, explains the context of this romantic crisis, and describes how Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson went on to live the rest of their lives in a harmonious marriage.