Vita Sackville-West – My Own RE:public

The Beebs at 100

Since 1922 (it just had to be 1922!) the BBC has informed and entertained at home and abroad; during times of empire – its waning and its demise; in war and peace; through political turmoil and social upheaval. In these days of instantaneous communication and the new media that has evolved out of it, she navigates gingerly through troubled waters but, hopefully and with good will and chance, is in no real danger of sinking anytime soon – with or without the license fee, meddling politicians, the next app, or the next big thing.

With a timeline to be explored either by year or thematically, and thoughtful collections of 100 objects, 100 faces and 100 voices that have been accumulating over the year, the BBC proudly displays the first century of their being.

Whether the Coronation Map of 1953, David Attenborough’s rejected job application (an ‘oversight’ that was thankfully quickly reversed!) or the Monty Python animations of Terry Gilliam, especially the objects category offers surprises and something familiar for almost everyone.

And from the beginning, women were there; in many roles, mostly unheralded, underpaid and pawns to the patriarchal structures of … Auntie Beeb! For me the name Hilda Matheson jumps out; she who shared with Virginia Woolf (who wrote of her disparagingly – that, enough to make one curious) the affections of Vita Sackville-West. Specific to her work with the BBC, this blog entry is very interesting, and illustrative of what the ‘girls’ were up against.

During my exploration of the celebratory website, links to the Radio Times were prevalent and it turns out that the Programme Index includes amongst its (searchable) historical listings also digitized copies of the Radio Times. One way (should the time allow) of appraising the societal history of the United Kingdom over the last century – thinking about how far it has come and imagining how far it could go.

Virginia & Vita

A pre-publication extract in The Guardian drawn from Alison Bechdel’s introduction, alerts me to Love Letters: Vita and Virginia by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, published by Vintage (Penguin) on 4 February.

“Love Letters: Vita and Virginia”,
Vintage Classics, 2021

As things will have it, I am deep in Volume Three of Woolf’s diary, and therefore in the period when Virginia’s first tentative interest in Vita is beginning to evolve into something more. And though I have read some of these letters in the past in other collections, brought together and standing alone, this very affordable little tome is a must have!

Sussex blooming…

not as royal, but better cultivated!

Diving in and out of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and biography anew, I have been attentive to her intense relationship with place. The homes of her childhood and younger years are never far away; returning as fragmented memories, misplaced, reimagined and memorialised in her writing – think about the Stephen family’s “Talland House” and childhood summers in St.Ives and the Ramsay’s summer house on the Isle of Skye in To the Lighthouse. Or the walks she took and places she went as related in many a diary entry, then reimagined and true to the time in the city as seen through the eyes of Mrs. Dalloway or any Pargiter.

Charleston, West Firle, in East Sussex. Antiquary -CC BY-SA 4.0

And for Woolf, Sussex is a very special place. Here, at the time of her marriage in 1912, she found in “Asheham House” near Beddingham sanctuary from the distractions of London, but still near to “Charleston Farmhouse”, the Firle home of Vanessa and her complicated family and their seemingly endlessly brilliant string of guests. Distractions it seem had a way of following her, and were perhaps never quite as unwelcome as often would have it!

The modest Monk’s House – Oliver Mallinson Lewis, Oxford, United Kingdom CC BY-SA 2.0

Later, in 1919, she and Leonard purchased “Monk’s House” in the village of Rodmell which would remain until her death her (their) constant retreat. The walks, the garden, the weather, the famous “writing shed” – that room of her own, all the visiting and being visited upon; as much as the profound inner life and intellectual musings – and the gossip! – it is the every day, often the mundane, as lived in her rural sanctuary that bring her diaries to vivid life, just as flowers come to bloom.

By the way, Asheham is no more, but an afterlife was granted it by grateful Woolfs – the romantic Leonard getting the better of the cerebral self in an autobiographical aside and a spirited Virginia imagining a ghostly couple bound for eternity in a short story entitled A Haunted House, first published by Hogarth in Monday or Tuesday in 1922, and later in a collection published by Leonard in 1944. Who was this ghostly pair? Perhaps the shades of their very selves, the Woolfs, viewed from a distant future; forever young, forever in this place.