Knole and the Sackvilles was published by William Heinemann in 1922. Knole, in Kent, is one of the largest private houses in England — 365 rooms, 52 staircases, 7 courtyards — given to Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, by his cousin Elizabeth I in 1566. It had remained in the Sackville family for over three centuries when Vita wrote this book, and it was the landscape of her childhood, the place she loved more than any other.
The book is simultaneously a history of the house (its architecture, its art collection, its furniture), a history of the family (the Sackvilles through the centuries — poets, courtiers, diplomats, eccentrics), and an elegy. Because of the laws of primogeniture, Vita — as a woman — could not inherit Knole. It passed to her uncle and then to her cousin. This disinheritance was the defining grief of her life, and the book is charged with the intensity of that loss: she writes about the house with the passionate specificity of someone describing a beloved who has been taken from her.
The book also served as one of the sources for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) — the novel dedicated to Vita, whose protagonist lives for centuries in a house that is unmistakably Knole, and who changes sex, thereby able to inherit what Vita could not.
Collecting Knole and the Sackvilles
First edition (William Heinemann, London, 1922): Cloth with dust jacket, illustrated with photographs.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good: $75–$200
- Sackville-West’s first significant publication