Behind the Mask: 
The Life of Vita Sackville-Westby Matthew DennisonSt. Martin's Press, 2015When biographer Matthew Dennison opens his new book Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West with a quasi-disclaimer, “Vita never fully succeeded in explaining herself to herself … I hope that the present account, which does not attempt a blow-by-blow chronology of her life, helps to bring reflections of Vita closer within reach,” he's engaging in a bit of professional politesse. As his book's own subtitle indicates, this is indeed intended to be more or less complete “blow-by-blow chronology” of his subject's life and times, not some artistic assemblage of various impressions. But the soft-pedaling is understandable, since looming over the shoulder of Behind the Mask is Victoria Glendinning's critically praised award-winning 1983 book Vita: A Biography of Vita Sackville-West, a blow-by-blow chronology that is, for the handful of 20th century readers at all interested in Vita Sackville-West, virtually synonymous with the writer.It's an awkward but necessary duty to point out right at the start of any discussion of Matthew Dennison's book that it is in virtually every way inferior to its predecessor. In its wit, insight, narrative breadth, rhetorical elegance, and depth of research, Glendinning's book is a monumental achievement. Dennison's book – chatty, strainingly topical, accessible, and referencing Glendinning's book in every chapter – can only really be a kind of companion to the earlier work.It's a friendly enough companion. Dennison is a smooth hand at these fast-paced quote-heavy popular biographies (I was slow warming to his biography of Queen Victoria, mainly for the same reason here: it was only a fraction of the big Victoria biographies by Stanley Weintraub and Elizabeth Longford), and here he hits all the major marks of Sackville-West's life: born in 1892 at her family's sprawling Knole House (about which she wrote a terrific book in 1922), forbidden from inheriting Knole because of her gender, succeeding at the writer's life – occasional prose, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry – marrying diplomat Harold Nicolson while having a series of female lovers, including Violte Trefusis and of course Virginia Woolf, eventually creating the magnificent gardens at Sissinghurst Castle, and dying at age 70 in 1962. He does a workmanlike job of overlaying the author's various works, especially her dreadful novels, onto the various periods and fixations of her life in often shrewd ways, although he flatly states that “her identity as daughter of Knole, the great Sackville house in Kent, overruled all other personae.”In her rapture of enchantment, at one point Violet Trefusis writes to Vita:
“I love you because you have never yielded in anything; I love you because you never capitulate. I love you for your wonderful intelligence, for your literary aspirations, for your unconscious coquetry. I love you because you have the air of doubting nothing!”
Nowhere in Dennison's book do we meet a version of Sackville-West who could inspire such enthusiasm, even though Dennison is assiduous in making sure we meet all the various people, men and women, who were thus inspired. And part of this remove might stem from how hard Sackville-West worked to create it throughout her life; Glendinning felt it too - “This is Vita Sackville-West's story,” she writes at the beginning of her biography, “One of the 'lies' of all biography is in that fact. (Another is that any story can ever be the whole story).”About Sackville-West's protean lesbianism, Glendinning writes:
Her instincts were sophisticated, but her knowledge was limited. She knew that there were 'effeminate' men (and Harold was not effeminate) but she did not know the physical realities of male homosexuality. Neither did she know that there was a name for the love she and Rosamund [Grosvenor] felt for one another …
And she quotes her subject writing to Harold about it years later:
You were older than I, and far better informed. I was very young, and very innocent. I knew nothing about homosexuality. I didn't even know that such a thing existed – either between men or between women. You should have told me. You should have warned me. You should have told me about yourself, and have warned me that the same sort of thing was likely to happen to myself.
“A century ago, Vita's rejection of conventional gender roles in sex was more controversial than it is today,” Dennison writes, and then he's back to digging through the novels: “Like much in her life, she attempted to resolve the issue through writing.”Dennison is an able, energetic biographer, and he does himself no discredit in Behind the Mask. And rumor has it that Victoria Glendinning's biography can be had on Amazon for a mere penny.
