During World War II, English people of all backgrounds and abilities found unique ways to aid the war effort. For writer Vita Sackville-West, that was with her during the war, she turned out a number of books analyzing and appreciating various aspects of English culture and the war effort that were explicitly designed to boost morale on the long-suffering homefront. One of the most interesting of those volumes, especially when examined decades later, is The Women’s Land Army . In it, Sackville-West traces the history of the Women’s Land Army from its inception in 1939 through 1944, when the book was published, under the auspices of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries. Copiously illustrated with photographs depicting English women engaged in all forms of farm labor, work they were encouraged to take up in the absence of able-bodied men, the book is a potent reminder that winning the war required effort from everyone. Sackville-West’s account of the land army and its work manages to be both richly informative—the book carries an appendix full of tables of facts and statistics—and powerfully human, offering a close-up picture of the daily lives, labor, and aspirations of these women, showing how their work, and the contribution it made to the war effort, became an important part of their identity, with consequences for women’s rights and work that would be felt throughout the postwar years.
Author
Novels of British writer Victoria Mary Sackville-West, known as Vita, include The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931). This prolific English author, poet, and memoirist in the early 20th century lived not so privately. While married to the diplomat Harold Nicolson, she conducted a series of scandalous amorous liaisons with many women, including the brilliant Virginia Woolf. They had an open marriage. Both Sackville-West and her husband had same-sex relationships. Her exuberant aristocratic life was one of inordinate privilege and way ahead of her time. She frequently traveled to Europe in the company of one or the other of her lovers and often dressed as a man to be able to gain access to places where only the couples could go. Gardening, like writing, was a passion Vita cherished with the certainty of a vocation: she wrote books on the topic and constructed the gardens of the castle of Sissinghurst, one of England's most beautiful gardens at her home. She published her first book Poems of East and West in 1917. She followed this with a novel, Heritage, in 1919. A second novel, The Heir (1922), dealt with her feelings about her family. Her next book, Knole and the Sackvilles (1922), covered her family history. The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931) are perhaps her best known novels today. In the latter, the elderly Lady Slane courageously embraces a long suppressed sense of freedom and whimsy after a lifetime of convention. In 1948 she was appointed a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. She continued to develop her garden at Sissinghurst Castle and for many years wrote a weekly gardening column for The Observer. In 1955 she was awarded the gold Veitch medal of the Royal Horticultural Society. In her last decade she published a further biography, Daughter of France (1959) and a final novel, No Signposts in the Sea (1961). She died of cancer on June 2, 1962.
