Pepita was published by the Hogarth Press in 1937. It is the biography of Vita’s paternal grandmother — Josefa de la Oliva, known as Pepita, a celebrated Spanish dancer who became the long-term mistress of Lionel Sackville-West, a British diplomat. Their relationship produced a large family, none of them legitimate under English law, which led to one of the most sensational court cases of the Edwardian era when the inheritance of Knole was contested.
Sackville-West tells the story with the narrative skill of a novelist: Pepita’s career dancing across Europe, her retirement to a villa in Arcachon, her relationship with Lionel (who was posted to embassies throughout the world while maintaining his Spanish family in secret), and the aftermath of her death — when her children, raised as aristocrats, discovered that they were legally illegitimate and that their father’s title and house might be taken from them.
The book is simultaneously a family memoir, a social history of diplomatic life in the nineteenth century, and a meditation on legitimacy — legal, social, and psychological. Vita writes about her grandmother with fascination and pride: Pepita was exotic, passionate, outside respectable society in every way, and yet she conquered a Sackville and produced the line that led to Vita herself.
Collecting Pepita
First edition (Hogarth Press, London, 1937): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $100–$250
- Very good: $40–$100
- Hogarth Press imprint adds value