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(3.5) | None | Heritage (1919) is a novel by Vita Sackville-West. While she is most widely recognized as the lover of English novelist Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West was a popular and gifted poet, playwright, and novelist in her own right. A prominent lesbian and bohemian figure, Sackville-West was also the daughter of an English Baron, granting her a unique and often divided perspective on life in the twentieth century. Heritage, her debut novel, is a semi-autobiographical tale of desire, secrecy, and family. "[H]er name was Ruth, and she was gleaning. She moved by stages across the field, throwing out her long wooden rake to its farthest extent and drawing it back to her until she had gathered sufficient strands into a heap, when, laying down the rake, she bound the corn against her thigh, rapidly and skilfully into a sheaf." While staying on a farm in rural Kent, Malory finds himself enthralled with Ruth Pennistan, the daughter of his host. Intrigued by her dark hair and olive complexion, he attempts to discover the secret of her birth. Known for her tumultuous, heated affairs with men and women alike, Sackville-West is an artist whose works so often mirror her life. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Vita Sackville-West's Heritage is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.… (more) |
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Information from the German Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to your language. | |
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To My Mother  | |
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Two years of my life were spent in a rough gray village of the Apennines; a shaggy village, tilted perilously up the side of the hill; a rambling village, too incoherent to form a single perspectived street, but which revolved around, or, rather, above and below, a little piazza warm with present sun, though grim with unknown, conjectured violence in the past. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Heritage (1919) is a novel by Vita Sackville-West. While she is most widely recognized as the lover of English novelist Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West was a popular and gifted poet, playwright, and novelist in her own right. A prominent lesbian and bohemian figure, Sackville-West was also the daughter of an English Baron, granting her a unique and often divided perspective on life in the twentieth century. Heritage, her debut novel, is a semi-autobiographical tale of desire, secrecy, and family. "[H]er name was Ruth, and she was gleaning. She moved by stages across the field, throwing out her long wooden rake to its farthest extent and drawing it back to her until she had gathered sufficient strands into a heap, when, laying down the rake, she bound the corn against her thigh, rapidly and skilfully into a sheaf." While staying on a farm in rural Kent, Malory finds himself enthralled with Ruth Pennistan, the daughter of his host. Intrigued by her dark hair and olive complexion, he attempts to discover the secret of her birth. Known for her tumultuous, heated affairs with men and women alike, Sackville-West is an artist whose works so often mirror her life. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Vita Sackville-West's Heritage is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers. ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description
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Publisher's description:
Vita Sackville-West's brilliant first novel, published in 1919, at the height of her stormy affair with Violet Trefusis, is acclaimed as a masterpiece.
The story of Ruth Pennistan, on the one hand a conventional farmer's daughter, born and brought up in Kent, on the other a mysterious gypsy figure, trapped against her will in a drama of love and tragedy. A heroine who mirrored the passions and contradictions of Vita's own life and character. | |
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The last of that lovely crop from Bello Books, and very bad I feel indeed about having taken so long to read them all! But they’re all read and reviewed now, and I’m very glad of the fine print-on-demand reprint issues Bello is doing.
Now, I have the idea that this is one of the preferred of Vita’s books and I have to say that I personally felt more engaged with “Family History”. Not to say that this is a bad or lesser book, I suppose it’s just a very different one. It’s the convoluted and slightly farm-Gothic (is that a genre? You know what I mean, right – Mary Webb, Cold Comfort Farm … doings and goings on in a rural setting, lots of emotion and repression and large farm-hands and quivering daughters …) tale, framed by the narratives of one young man who’s the main narrator and another who he meets on a retreat in London and who narrates his own story in one section of direct speech and then a number of long letters. By all sorts of machinations of fate and free will, they both end up involved with a Kentish family with Spanish incursions, and then over the course of a decade or two that takes in the First World War, they separately engage with the family, correspond at length about it and, frankly, meddle in the affairs of the simple farming folk with predictably disastrous consequences.
While this is in part a portrait of Violet Trefusis (I think I read somewhere – but where?) and while the countryside of the Weald is a beautifully drawn character, to me the book never quite comes alive as fully as the other books of Vita’s that I’ve read, and doesn’t leap off the page at you. Maybe one issue is that the narrators admire their fellow characters too much – I’m not sure. But even though it’s flawed, still a good read and I’m glad that it’s been republished.
Deaccessioning via Virago Group (