This biography of Virginia Woolf is unusual in two respects. It is written by someone who knew her well when he was a child; and it closely investigates her attitudes to feminism and war.
Nigel Nicolson was the son of Vita Sackville-West, who was Virginia Woolf’s most intimate friend, and for a short time her lover. He spent many days in her company, particularly at the period when she was writing Orlando, her spoof biography of his mother, and he has threaded his recollections of her through his narrative of her life.
Virginia Woolf was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, and her writings, specially her novels Mrs Dalloway and The Waves, were works of astonishing originality. She is equally well-known for her two polemical books, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, which have become classics of the feminist movement., although in Nicolson’s view they are ‘wildly overstated’. On matters political, on the first world war, he also thinks ‘she got it wrong’. Nigel Nicolson’s life of Virginia Woolf is an affectionate, but not uncritical biography of one of the most remarkable women of her age.

Virginia Woolf (Lives)

NIGEL NICOLSON

Weidenfeld&Nicolson

Rightfully called "the garden of England," the county of Kent can boast of an impressive seacoast bordered by cliffs, small towns of infinite charm, and naturally rich and fertile soil in which greenery flourishes. Combining the best a guidebook has to offer with a history of how the region developed, a born-and-bred Kentishman relates a fascinating tale of a place filled with character and spirit. Breathtaking photographs show majestic landscapes, churches, manors, and farms, and nature at its wildest. 160 pages, 65 color illus., 51 b/w illus., 7 9/16 x 10 3/8.

Kent

History

Europe

Weidenfeld Nicolson Illustrated

This is a tour through 18th-century England in the footsteps of Jane Austen. The houses, gardens and landscapes she wove into her novels are identified and depicted in photographs.

The World of Jane Austen: Her Houses in Fact and Fiction

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

National Trust Atlas

Travel

UNKNO

National Trust Atlas: The National Trust and the National Trust for Scotland

Science & Math

The National Trust Book of Great Houses of Britain

Arts & Photography

Architecture

GRAFTON

Nicolson, Nigel. Portrait of a Marriage [Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson]. New York, Athenaeum, 1973. 14 cm x 24 cm. CI, 250 pages. Original hardcover. Excellent condition with only very minor signs of external wear. Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson is the 1973 biography of writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West compiled by her son Nigel Nicolson from her journals and letters. This is a book of strong emotions relating to Sackville-West's complicated marriage to writer and politician Harold Nicolson. The two chapters written by Vita sometimes seem to be a diary and sometimes a self-confession. They are centred in herself and her violent passion for the wild Violet Trefusis, who loves her, gives her intense pleasure, both physical and intellectual, and drives her to hurt intensely and briefly abandon Harold Nicolson, Vita's bisexual husband, and her two children, Nigel and Ben. The three chapters written by Nigel Nicolson are also very strong but in a different sense. Reading about the sexual and emotional life secrets of a mother by the hand of her son is strange, uncomfortable and in certain occasions it even seems cruel: "I did not know Violet. I met her only twice, and by then she had become a galleon, no longer the pinnace of her youth, and I did not recognize in her sails the high wind which had swept my mother away [...]. I did not know that Vita could love like this, had loved like this, because she would not speak of it to her son. Now that I know everything I love her more, as my father did, because she was tempted, because she was weak. She was a rebel, she was Julian [Vita's alter ego], and though she did not know it, she fought for more than Violet. She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up every..

Portrait of a Marriage: V. Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Atheneum

A Reflection of the Other Person (Collected Letters) (Vol 4)

The Hogarth Press Ltd.

Mary Curzon

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Mystery

Futura

In 1870 Mary Leiter was born in the suburbs of Chicago, the daughter of a self-made man. Although she died aged only thirty-six, she became the most famous American woman of her times. As the wife of Lord Curzon, and Vicereine of India when British power was greatest, she occupied with incomparable grace, courage and distinction the most splendid position which any American, man or woman, has ever held in the British Empire.

Phoenix Giant

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Books by NIGEL NICOLSON