A House Full of Daughters
By Juliet NicolsonFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016 Juliet Nicolson is Vita Sackville-West’s grand-daughter, and her new book, A House Full of Daughters tells the story of seven generations of women in the same famous family. Nicolson starts with Vita’s grandmother, the Spanish dancer Pepita, and continues with Vita’s mother Victoria, to Vita, her sons and daughter-in-law, to her granddaughter, the author herself. The book ends with a tribute to the resilience of Nicolson’s daughters, Clemmie and Flora, who weathered the author’s divorce and descent into (and recovery from) alcohol and a love note to a baby granddaughter.If this all sounds a bit intimate, it is. This is a gossipy, light read, a Downton Abbey meets People magazine. The blurbs on the back signal the tone: with praise from Vanessa Redgrave and Julian Fellowes, you know this will be lighter than even the general run of Bloomsburiana.Still, the conceit of tracing one famous and famously self-documenting family’s daughters down through the generations is a promising one for a social historian such as Nicolson. In addition to the novel Abdication, Nicolson is the author of The Perfect Summer: England 1911, Just Before the Storm and The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age. The Great Silence in particular is a wonderfully evocative work in which Nicolson thoroughly delineates the atmosphere of grief in England in the immediate aftermath of World War I. It is a touchstone in my understanding of the period, hampered only by the author’s habit of rather loose documentation.That looseness is less of a problem in a family history where the story is personal and the archive private. Even the slight cheat of shifting from Vita’s sons to her daughter-in-law, the wonderfully named Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt, is earned. Nicolson’s reflections on her mother are among the most powerful passages in the book. In that section, she juxtaposes stories of a lonely young woman who learned in her debutante year that “The trick was not to find yourself alone at any point with someone who was NSIT (not safe in taxis) or who insisted that he MTF (must touch flesh…),” who, as a mother “I was put at once in ‘disgrace’, a word loaded with consequences including the threat that I would be carried away to the ‘Kiddymart’.”Underneath the patina of gossipy anecdotes, the book offers a disheartening case study of the condition of the wealthy woman—particularly the mother—under patriarchy. Considered this way, the humorous anecdotes of eccentricities of past generations take on a more somber hue. In a collection of short biographical sketches called “Lives of the Obscure,” Virginia Woolf drily remarked upon the habit of the Dictionary of National Biography (which her father edited) to sum up a life in a single word: naturalist, barrister, painter, eccentric. A man who spent his afternoons walking the fields of his estate, collecting samples might be a naturalist, an entomologist, an archaeologist; a woman engaged in the same activity is an eccentric. Conventional in their youths, several of the Nicolson’s forbears became “eccentric” as their lives and options narrowed, as motherhood consumed them, and husbands drifted away. Once a celebrated hostess, Victoria Sackville-West spent her late middle-age running a stationery shop and making elaborate collages from paper ephemera, telling anyone who would listen “I am very 1792,” thereby comparing herself to the French aristocrats who had survived the revolution.The most spectacularly interesting character in all of this is the author’s great-grandmother, the dancer Pepita, born Josefa Durán y Ortega in Málaga, Spain, 1830. By age 22, she was already married and famous across Europe. Lionel Sackville-West, an attaché in the British Legation in Germany, arranged to meet her when they both chanced to be in Paris, and they began a decades-long love affair. Their union resulted in five children who survived infancy and lasted until Pepita’s death. Because Pepita was already married (though estranged from her husband) and divorce was not available in Catholic-controlled Spain, the couple could never marry.Fascinating as Pepita was, Nicolson’s account suggests but does not quite satisfy the question of Lionel’s love for her. Although this story has been told many times elsewhere, Nicolson’s account left me hungry for more, particularly for more of Lionel. In spite of fame and wealth in her young adulthood, once she became a mother, Pepita herself was trapped: her career over, shunned by her neighbors, confined to the narrow social circle of those willing to be seen with a mistress. She lived in a small French town, only seeing Lionel during his vacations. Although their affair lasted longer than many marriages, when she died, he failed to see that his careful instructions on how to bury her could not stand up to custom:
Having given instructions to Pepita’s loyal friend…to make a coffin…Lionel left the town. But he had unwittingly abandoned her to the town’s unforgiving authorities….Pepita was buried on an unusually cold and snowy day, denied a headstone to mark her place in the vast, identity-smothering city cemetery.
Lionel and Pepita’s daughter, Victoria Sackville-West, rivals her mother and daughter for interest. After Pepita’s death, she accompanied her father to Washington, D.C., where he served as British Minister to the Legation. Victoria joined her father, working as his chatelaine, performing all the duties that a wife might ordinarily perform, fulfilling a role that was denied her mother. Beautiful, intelligent, wealthy, curious and charismatic, Victoria became an incredibly popular and famous young hostess. President Chester Arthur proposed to her during a White House dinner, a proposal which was met with laughter from Victoria but which nevertheless made headlines: “THE PRESIDENT NOT TO GET MARRIED: SPECIAL REPORT TO THE WORLD.”Victoria’s social achievement in the diplomatic world marks narrow kind of progress. In America, her wealth and titled father counted for more than her illegitimacy and afforded her the chance at a public life. But when Victoria’s daughter Vita herself went to Tehran, it was not as a diplomat or a traveler, but as a diplomat’s wife. Then, two generations later, Juliet almost ends up there as a girlfriend: her boyfriend had a job as a deejay in the Tehran Hilton. Nicolson went to college instead, surprising her parents into supporting her. For all the scandals, headlines, and fame in this family, real change comes very slowly.Because her parents could not marry, and because her mother died in childbirth, Victoria had a double mark over her life: illegitimate herself and terrified of pregnancy, she stopped trying to get pregnant (and thus having sex at all) after the birth of her first child, a girl. The lack of a male heir set in motion the inheritance trial that, in 1910, insured that Vita Sackville-West could never inherit the Sackville-West home, Knole House. The trial brought Pepita’s story back into the public eye and made young Vita as famous as her grandmother, so much so, that “an envelope bearing an American stamp and sparingly addressed to ‘Kidlet, England’, the name [a family friend] and subsequently the press had affectionately given her, was delivered to Knole unerringly.”We see Nicolson’s gift for social history, particularly of the early twentieth century, in a detail from her uncle’s boyhood at Eton. There, he “watched Mr. Butler, the keeper of the playing fields at Eton, tuck his empty left coat sleeve into his jacket pocket while keeping his spare arm on a shelf above the boys’ washbasins in the cricket pavilion. His false arm …was worn during matches.” That detail of one man’s re-integration to civilian life after losing a limb in World War One—and the way in which, to the boys, his prosthesis, but not the war, was normal, characterizes Nicolson at her best: a specific, novelistic evocation of time and place. She is less successful at broad strokes, as when she asserts that her mother, born in 1928, “was unlucky. She arrived in the world at a bad time to be a daughter.” While boys may have mattered more than girls in the Tennyson d’Eyncourt family, a girl born wealthy in England between the wars might see herself as very lucky indeed with the right to vote, to work, to get an education, to have access to birth control.Unfortunately for Philippa Tennyson d’Eyncourt, neither she nor her family saw anything special about being a daughter. As a young woman, trapped in the countryside with no occupation and socially ambitious parents, she met Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, while he was campaigning for a Conservative seat in Parliament. They courted. When Nigel’s father Harold fretted, “’Can she open a bazaar well?’” Nigel simply answered, “She’ll have to learn.” The marriage was not a success.The detail of the bazaar is worth pausing over. In 1925, Virginia Woolf satirized the aristocratic attachment to bazaars in Mrs. Dalloway, having Clarissa admire Lady Bexborough for being able to open a bazaar while still holding the telegram announcing the death of her son on the Western Front. Before Philippa’s birth, bazaars were already a relic, an object of satire on the life of aristocratic women. A few years later, Woolf and Vita Sackville-West became friends and, briefly, lovers. But Woolf’s feminism and Vita’s lesbianism did not translate into liberation in Vita’s son: a quarter century after Woolf mocked the custom of opening bazaars, bazaars still mattered. In Nicolson’s mother’s unhappy, aimless life we see how deeply entrenched and intentional was the system insuring that aristocratic women were under-educated and idle. From centuries ago, to Philippa with her drinking, her older lovers, and her succession of bizarre hobbies, up through Princess Diana and beyond, the price of being aristocratic and female and English seems steep.Nicolson does not flinch from details of her family’s snobbery. Particularly candid is her account of how the adolescent Philippa was encouraged to mock the working-class London children whom her family housed during the Second World War. Such shameful confessions signal honesty, marking the distance both Philippa and Nicolson herself had to travel from the casual cruelty of the aristocracy. However, Nicolson somewhat undoes her credibility later on, when she shudders at how the birth of her first daughter was marred by having to share a room with a woman “married to a man who owned a pizza parlour” and the consequent “odour of margherita and pepperoni that suffused our little ward.” Nicolson self-congratulation at being able to endure an ordinary inconvenience of the semi-private room sounded to this reader like an eruption of unconscious privilege. Most of the time, Nicolson writes with generosity, honesty, and intelligence; these occasional glimpses of blindness to privilege are jarring.As a narrative of how the aristocracy becomes modern, this particular story of a houseful of daughters moves toward freedom at a snail’s pace and with a snail’s peculiarly meandering course. Nevertheless, the details are amusing. For example: Pepita’s mother, Catalina, glorying in her elevation from washerwoman to local celebrity, saw that “Each Sunday before Mass, a pair of large, matching velvet armchairs would be carried with some ceremony by Catalina’s servants into Albolote’s church and placed at the head of the congregation at the high altar.” Eventually, the priest put a stop to this ostentatious practice and Catalina ceased churchgoing altogether. The wonderful thing about gossip is that it moves between the purely frivolous—such as the detail that the author’s childhood hospitalization coincided with that of Prince Charles, recovering from an appendectomy in the same ward—and the enticingly literary, yet still frivolous:
After Vita died, Adam and I climbed the tower steps up there for the first time. We would sit at her desk and rifle through the drawers, marveling at a passport that would never be used again…The words on a page of blue writing paper, hidden at the back the desk drawer puzzled me, so I kept the page. ‘Darling, I left a pearl earring on your side of the bed yesterday. Keep it safely for me? your Mary.’
Even the accounts of cruelty have a novelistic flair, as when Vita’s son was born and Victoria reportedly fumed “If Vita prefers the name Benedict to her mother’s love, she is welcome to it.” Juliet’s father, Nigel, had his own style, as a parent, taking Juliet and her brother on long hiking trips, asking occasionally “‘I hope you aren’t consti?’ he would mutter…feeling he should somehow enquire whether our digestion systems were still functioning on a diet of reindeer meat and Polo mints.” Most delicious of all, perhaps, is the detail of Juliet, sitting for her debutante photograph with Cecil Beaton, still performing the rituals of aristocracy into the 1960s. Instead of “cheese,” Beaton instructed, for a more natural smile, please, on the count of three, say “lesbian.”____Anne Fernald teaches modernist literature at Fordham University and is the editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
