Word: knoles
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...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...
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...
...because it gives her headaches." Vita remembers herself as a cruel, lonely tomboy roaming around Knple, one of the last great private estates in England. Her only affectionate companionship came from her grandfather, Lord Sackville, a shy, wood-whittling man who "loved children and believed in faeries." Knole was financed through what Nigel calls the "corner on millionaires and elderly artists" held by Vita's formidable mother. Vita retreated from family lawsuits into daydreams of feudal ceremony and tempestuousness...
...Bigelow, who never revealed her age (about 70), a Broadway chorine of the '20s who married the fourth Baron Sackville, became mistress of an 8,000-acre estate and a cavernous Tudor mansion with 365 rooms, 52 staircases, seven courtyards; of a heart attack; at the family seat, Knole, Kent...
...British Ambassador Sackville-West was sacked for putting his nose into a U. S. election campaign. A month later he became Lord Sackville, finished out a long, lazy life "reading right through Gibbon every other year and whittling paper-knives from the lids of cigar-boxes." As mistress of Knole Castle and pet of Edward VII, Victoria took London into camp as she had Washington, married the heir to Knole, first cousin Lionel Sackville-West, shy, quiet. the perfect English country gentleman, five years her junior...