Red cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean original book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. 

A treasured copy of Jack’s mother, the power behind both her famous husband and Jack. She was a personal friend of Vita Sackville-West 

Vita Sackville-West was an extraordinary woman from a long line of extraordinary women – this book tells their stories. Her grandmother Pepita, daughter of an old-clothes peddler, made her fortune as a dancer and had a scandalous affair with an English diplomat. Their illegitimate daughter Victoria, Vita’s mother, spent her childhood hidden in a convent but went on to be the glamorous mistress of Knole, one of the grandest old houses in England. Vita brings her legendary wit, passion and eccentricity to this colourful family portrait.

• • The exciting story of [Vita’s] Spanish grandmother ― Guardian
• What appears to be a straightforward joint biography of her grandmother and mother becomes the means whereby Vita explores and makes sense for herself of those warring elements in her own past and temperament — Alison Hennegan

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JULIET NICOLSON  “Vita Sackville-West was an extraordinary woman from a long line of extraordinary women “ this book tells their stories.

Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) was born at Knole in Kent, the only child of aristocratic parents. In 1913 she married diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons and travelled extensively. They had an unconventional marriage, and throughout her life Sackville-West had a number of other relationships with both men and women. She wrote novels, non-fiction, and poetry, including The Land (1926), which won the Hawthorne Prize.

Review: Illegitimacy seems to cast a permanent stain that Vita Sackville-West’s romantic vision of her ‘exotic’ antecedents cannot erase. Sackville-West wears rose-tinted spectacles whilst retelling, from the work undertaken at extortionate cost to her uncle Henri, a younger brother of Vita’s mother Victoria, who attempted to claim the hereditary Sackville title. The fact remains, all of Pepita’s children were bastard children, born to her whilst she was still legally married to her dancer husband. Vita does nothing other than convince us that Pepita, and her mother Catalina before her, were nothing other than headstrong prima donna’s in the sense of their temperamental personalities, taking of adulation as a right and demanding of privileged treatment and behaving with utter petulance and outrage to any actual or imagined slight or inconvenience. After reading about this Pepita in the first half of the book, we are given a first hand account of some of Vita’s mother’s actions and behaviours. By all accounts, Victoria was no different to Pepita or Catalina yet was able to sail through the sea of high society without a care about the wake she was creating about her. It is not very edifying to discover how strongly she resembled the Spanish Beggar her wealthy benefactor, Sir John Murray Scott, accused her of being. Vita, whether consciously or not, provides enough evidence to substantiate Sir John’s complaint. Vita is blinded by her adoration of her high strung and wilful mother, rather like the owner of a badly raised puppy who merely has to pull a face of mock contrition over the ruins it has made to gain its owner’s forgiveness.