Victoriana

By James Atlas

LADY SACKVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY by Susan Mary Alsop Doubleday; 273 pages; $10

Portrait of a Marriage, Nigel Nicolson's bestselling immorality tale about his mother's lesbian affairs and his father's homosexual proclivities, schooled American readers in the eccentric love lives of the English aristocracy. Nicolson's mother, Vita Sackville-West, belonged to one of England's most venerable families; Knole, their fabled ancestral home, sheltered the sort of elaborate sexual and emotional transactions fashionable among the Bloomsbury set. But the Victorian era boasted its own dramas of unlikely passion: Vita's mother, Lady Victoria Sackville, was herself the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish dancer and a Sackville heir. Courted by President Chester A. Arthur and J.P. Morgan--to name two of the more prominent suitors--she married her first cousin and embarked on a chaotic life that involved her in lawsuits, love affairs and implausible schemes for the preservation of Knole.

Yet Victoria was never quite at home in that world, despite her intense reverence for its grandeur and tradition. Brought up in the isolation of a rented villa, a decorous distance from her father's diplomatic post, she was put in a convent after her mother died in childbirth. Not until she was 19, when her father was appointed British Minister to Washington, did Victoria obtain a glimpse of high society. She was notably unworldly for an heiress of one of England's great families and vacillated between those polarities of temperament that her daughter described as "the gypsy and the Sackville."

Pepita, ostensibly a biography of Victoria's mother, offered a devastating portrait of Vita Sackville-West's own mother, a "pure undiluted peasant," whose tantrums made austere Knole echo like some Andalusian marketplace. Victoria, wrote her daughter, was "a powerful dynamo generating nothing," an imperious, high-strung woman given to firing her servants on a whim and more turbulent than Lady Macbeth. "I think perhaps you do not realise," Victoria complained to Lord Kitchener in the midst of World War I, "that we employ five carpenters and four painters and two blacksmiths and two footmen, and you are taking them all from us!" Victoria was so beset with lawsuits in her ill-tempered old age that she referred to her last residence, a Brighton villa, as the Writs Hotel.

Susan Mary Alsop provides a vivid if rather breathless account of Victoria's remarkable life, dwelling at considerable length on her subject's wardrobe and taste in furniture. The widow of an American diplomat in Paris, now the ex-wife of Columnist Joseph Alsop, the author displays a knowing familiarity with social protocol. "There is always in Washington a certain tension between the French and British embassies, disguised but real," she remarks a`a propos of nothing. Mrs. Alsop applauds her subject's casual attitude toward bathroom linen; after all, she remarks, "an efficient maid would have been on duty." She also appears to have been overly influenced by Victoria's exclamation, "Quel roman est ma vie!" (My life is just like a novel!). In the absence of evidence, the biographer has a disconcerting habit of inventing scenes. "One can imagine," she often conjectures; yes, but did it happen?

Still, she writes with style and verve, and her narrative of the trials that dominated Lady Sackville's life is masterly. Victoria's brother Henry sued to inherit Knole, upon which the scandal of the Sackvilie children's illegitimacy emerged in court; then the family of Sir John Murray Scott, a platonic lover of Victoria's who bequeathed her a considerable for tune, challenged his will, and her private life again became a public issue. Portrait of a Marriage touched upon these causes celebres; the Alsop biography recounts them with an effervescence reminiscent of Lady Sackvilie herself in those innocent days before she became the tyrant of Knole.

James Atlas

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