The book also includes Vita’s own account of her obsessive love affair with Violet Keppel in the early days of her marriage to Harold. I learned that both Vita and her husband, the diplomat Harold Nicolson, had numerous affairs, mostly with people of their own sex, while remaining otherwise devoted to one another, their children and their famous garden. I found her in Portrait of a Marriage, her son Nigel Nicolson’s 1973 book about his parents’ enduring and open relationship. Vita Sackville-West was not the first companion I encountered there, but she was certainly the most indelible one. W hen I was an undergraduate and just coming out as a lesbian, I slunk to a dimly lit, out-of-the-way place where I knew I would find other people like me – the stacks of the library.
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