Vita and Harold

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``For each of us the magnetic north is each other,'' Harold wrote Vita; ``If you were to die, I would kill myself,'' she told him. Married, they lived apart during much of the time spanned by these loving letters (1910-1962), while he pursued a political and writing career and she wrote poetry and novels and circulated in the Bloomsbury literary world. While he lunched with Germany's president, she was blasting T. S. Eliot; he had a dismal visit with James Joyce while she went to H. G. Wells's ``awful'' dinner party. He was present at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and a member of Parliament as Hitler came to power. She ``eloped'' with Violet Trefusis and was obsessed with Virginia Woolf; he had homosexual affairs. Their mutual adoration survived it all. They knew Everybody and, gifted writers both, they described them to each other with grace and feeling. Their son, who has artfully edited their correspondence (most of it previously unpublished), told of their relationship in Portrait of a Marriage (1973), but the sound of their own voices in these enchanting letters gives fresh and privileged insight into exceptional lives and times. (July)

Library Journal

Their son selected from 10,000 existing letters (hitherto available only to researchers) to create this epistolary chronicle of the relationship between Sackville-West and Nicolson from 1910 to 1962. Their beautifully written, tender, and intimate correspondence reveals an extraordinarily talented, witty, articulate, sophisticated, upper-class English literary couple, both successful authors, who did not believe in marriage yet achieved a very happy one despite infidelities and long separations. Publication will coincide with the July PBS dramatization of Nicolson's earlier book about his famous parents, Portrait of a Marriage , which devoted more space to Vita's extramarital affairs; the two books complement each other nicely. Extensive and useful editorial notes, plus an index, add to this collection's value. Libraries may anticipate requests for both books and other biographies of the Nicolsons as a result of the PBS telecast. Recommended.--Lesley Jorbin, Cleveland State Univ. Lib.