Vita Sackville West

Vita Sackville-West was an English novelist and poet. Her published poetry collections include Chatterton (1909), Poems of West and East (1917), and Orchard and Vineyard (1921); additionally she wrote more than thirteen novels, including The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931). Though married, Sackville-West maintained numerous love affairs with women, including Virginia Woolf, who based the protagonist of the novel Orlando (1928) on her. An avid gardener, she wrote a popular gardening column in The Observer in 1946, which exposed her writing to a new audience and generation.