Book description
'One never gets enough love.'
A novel by the acclaimed author, poet and gardener which recounts the
ill-fated relationship of Evelyn Jarrold, a 39-year-old fashionable
upper middle class widow and 25-year-old Miles Vane-Merrick, a socially
aware aristocrat. While they are passionately in love they both have
powerful and contrasting domineering personalities. They make each other
happy and unhappy, she beadily aware of the unconventional age gap and
lacking confidence in Miles's world. Miles has many interests including
his love for Evelyn, his estate, his politics, his interesting friends.
He is set to become a successful, popular politician. A wonderful
evocation of the complexity of 1930s high-society mores and values,
Family History
is a universal love story. The Hon. Lady Nicolson, Vita
Sackville-West, was an English poet, novelist and gardener. She was
famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage to
Harold Nicolson, her passionate relationships with women and her gardens
at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent.
Sackville-West's long narrative poem, The Land, won the Hawthornden
Prize in 1927, and her Collected Poems won the prize again in 1933. Her
best-known novels are The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent
(1931). Both titles were reissued alongside her earlier novel, Challenge
(1923), by Virago in Spring 2011.
In 1946 Sackville-West was made a Companion of Honour for her services
to literature. The following year she began a weekly column in the
Observer called In your Garden. In 1948 she became a founder member of
the National Trust's garden committee.
Sissinghurst Castle is now owned by the National Trust and the garden
Vita Sackville-West created there is open to the public. It is one of
the most visited gardens in England.
