Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH, was an English poet, novelist, and garden designer.
She was a successful novelist, poet, and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime and 13 novels. She was twice awarded the Hawthonden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems.
She is also remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst Castle created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.
Vita was deeply involved with Violet Keppel. Their sexual relationship began when they were both in their teens and strongly influenced them for years. Both later married and became writers.
Sackville-West was courted for 18 months by young diplomat Harold Nicolson. In 1913, at age 21, Vita married him in the private chapel at Knole and together they had two children.
The couple had an open marriage. Both Sackville-West and her husband had same-sex relationships before and during their marriage.
Her romance with fellow writer Virginia Woolf began in 1925 and eventually developed into a deep friendship. She was the inspiration Virginia Woolf's the androgynous protagonist of Orlando: A Biography.