Vita Sackville-West

And I think this is important context.

It was inspired by Woolf's relationship with Lady Nicholson, better known as Vita Sackville-West, who was a writer and garden designer and a fellow member of the Bloomsbury Group.

Upper echelon, like sort of London society, but they were all authors and writers and would host these kind of literary salons and stuff like that.

Yeah, and the thing is with Virginia Woolf is she, especially with her observations of Vita Sackville-West, she's making a commentary about how English people view themselves and their history, especially within the context of these literary minds, right?

Mm-hmm.

And I think like, you know, I think also that Bloomsbury group, it's, I mean, she's probably the most enduring, the most sort of well-known writer of that group.

It's a portrait of one of Vita's ancestors.

So it's kind of very chewy and very interesting, I think.

And, um, it's an really interesting book, because, um, it's, does, like, a lot of things at once.

A, it's kind of like a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, who was Virginia Woolf's, uh, friend and lover-

Mm-hmm

... uh, for a good amount of time.

but, you know, it's...

It's sort of a thinly veiled novel about Vita Sackville-West.

And it doesn't strike me as the best use of my time and her genius.

And you didn't mind it? I used to have a lot of fun reading that book.

And we actually sat in Sissinghurst, which was a treat, in this very sort of tumbledown kitchen that had no frills and felt really old-fashioned and nice, with Adam Nicolson, who is a scion of that family, and-

Grandson of Vita Sackville-West.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so that's where we're coming from.

And so you're, you're also a garden designer and wonderfully a volunteer at Sissinghurst, which is Vita Sackville-West's garden, famous garden in Kent.

What is it like to have your hands in the soil of somewhere so famous, and what have you learned from your experiences there?

Oh, it's an, it's a, it's, uh, such a beautiful garden.

And the people behind it were extraordinary.

They were a couple, they were aristocrats.

Um, so Vita Sackville-West, uh, should have inherited the largest private house in the country that wasn't a palace in the form of Knole House in Sevenoaks, just up the road from Sissinghurst.

But because she was a woman, the laws, uh, prevented her from inheriting, inheriting back then.

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Preface.

Many friends have helped me in writing this book.

[laughs] That would've been good.

You know what? Vita Sackville-West should have had a Lesbos, actually, in her garden.

[laughs] A lesbian garden.

I don't know why they named it Delos.

design of the metronome and the auditory hallucinations.

There's a lot of the thing, like the book by Vita Sackville-West.

So there's little Easter eggs all over this movie, which is in its... which is in itself Nabokovian.

It's the game.

So what you have to do is you have to make it about a woman.

However, it's incredibly complex.

I think that's also why the book that she gets in the airplane when she tries to frantically dump it in the trash has to be Vita Sackville-West.

Absolutely.