In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her grandparents were Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, and her father was Nigel Nicolson, that they all wrote copiously about themselves, that Knole and Sissinghurst are stuffed with family records, and that she is herself a publisher turned writer, it proved impossible to resist adding her voice to the already substantial record of her family’s powerful social and literary connections.
For a long time she was impressed by something her grandmother’s lover, Virginia Woolf, once said to her father: ‘Nothing has really happened until it is written down.’ She rejects this idea; but by writing her perceptive, self-aware book she herself makes something significant happen. She has not so much joined a family tradition as interrogated it, and in doing so liberated both her female forebears and herself from another family habit: emotional suppression and alcoholic self-destruction.
Some of the stories she relates are familiar, but she tells them with a fresh energy, a delight in vivid detail and the flourish of a romantic novelist. She begins with her great-great-grandmother Pepita, a flamenco dancer with gypsy blood from the ‘throbbing, poverty-riddled’ backstreets of Malaga, who married and left her dancing teacher before becoming the mistress of the 25-year-old diplomat Lionel Sackville-West, heir to Knole, the vast family house in Kent. Spanish women could not then divorce, but the couple travelled and lived together in France and produced five children before Pepita’s death in childbirth in 1871.
One of these illegitimate children became Nicolson’s great-grandmother, Victoria, perhaps the most astonishing of all the women in this saga. In 1881, at the age of 19, she became her father’s companion and hostess at the British Legation in Washington, where her beauty and originality beguiled Henry James and led to a proposal of marriage (one of a dozen or so, she liked to recall) from the new President, Chester Arthur.
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