Book description
Vita Sackville-West wrote
Saint Joan of Arc
in 1936 at the age of forty-four, and had, at that point, already been
writing for thirty years. At fourteen, Sackville-West published her
first book and, at fourteen, Joan of Arc first heard the voices. Joan
was seventeen when she took command of the armies of France--a peasant
girl in the early fifteenth century in charge of a nation's forces. At
nineteen she was captured by the British and tried as a witch by a
church court. Before her twentieth birthday she was burned at the stake.
In 1920 she was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church as a saint. In a
clever, brisk voice, Vita Sackville-West tells the triumphant story of a
French peasant girl, raised in a country torn apart by the Hundred
Years' War, who rose from poverty to military greatness. With dazzling
insight and clarity, Sackville-West breathes new life into Joan of Arc's
beautiful and tragic 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.
