Victoria Mary Sackville-West, The Hon Lady Nicolson, CH (9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and poet. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage, and her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf.

In 1913, at age 21, Vita married the 27 year-old writer and politician Harold George Nicolson (21 November 1886 – 1 May 1968), nicknamed Hadji, the third son of British diplomat Arthur Nicolson, 1st Baron Carnock (1849–1928). The couple had an open marriage. Both Sackville-West and her husband had consecutive same-sex relations, as did some of the people
gravitating around the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, with whom they had some association.

Violet and Vita had met in childhood in 1904. Violet, who was two years younger, gave Vita a ring in 1908 when they both were teen-agers - it was her first gesture of affection and tenderness. "She is mine," Sackville-West wrote later in her diary, but they did not meet much before the late 1910s. Vita fell also in love with another girl, Rosamund Grosvenor, who was four years older than Vita. Violet's and Vita's relationship continued until after their respective marriages. At one point they 'eloped' to France but in 1921 Violet returned to her husband Denys Trefusis. This long relationship was the subject of Sackville-West's secret diary and gave material for her third novel, CHALLENGE. It depicted a Greek vineyard owner who was torn between his love for a woman and for his island home.


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