The Heir (1922) is a novel by Vita Sackville-West. While she is most widely recognized as the lover of English novelist Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West was a popular and gifted poet, playwright, and novelist in her own right. A prominent lesbian and bohemian figure, Sackville-West was also the daughter of an English Baron, granting her a unique and often divided perspective on life in the twentieth century. The Heir, her third novel, is a semi-autobiographical tale of family, tradition, and romance. “They had gone, they and their talk of mortgages, rents, acreage, tenants, possible buyers, building lots, and sales by auction or private treaty! Chase stood on the bridge above the moat, watching their departure.” Mr. Chase is an insurance salesman by trade, a successful modern man who just so happens to stand in line to inherit Blackboys, his family’s massive estate. Despite the beauty of the castle and its surrounding acres of fields and forests, Mr. Chase simply wishes to sell the place and get on with his life, severing himself from the past entirely. As the day of sale approaches, however, he finds himself strangely nostalgic. Having experienced the bitter loss of Sissinghurst, her ancestral home, to a male cousin, Sackville-West is an artist whose works so often mirror her life. This edition of Vita Sackville-West’s The Heir is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.
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About the author
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1952) was an English novelist, poet, journalist, and gardener. Born at Knole, the Sackville’s hereditary home in west Kent, Vita was the daughter of English peer Lionel Sackville-West and his cousin Victoria, herself the illegitimate daughter of the 2nd Baron Sackville and a Spanish dancer named Pepita. Educated by governesses as a young girl, Vita later attended school in Mayfair, where she met her future lover Violet Keppel. An only child, she entertained herself by writing novels, plays, and poems in her youth, both in English and French. At the age of eighteen, she made her debut in English society and was courted by powerful and well-connected men. She had affairs with men and women throughout her life, leading an open marriage with diplomat Harold Nicholson. Following their wedding in 1913, the couple moved to Constantinople for one year before returning to settle in England, where they raised two sons. Vita’s most productive period of literary output, in which she published such works as The Land (1926) and All Passion Spent (1931), coincided with her affair with English novelist Virginia Woolf, which lasted from 1925 to 1935. The success of Vita’s writing—published through Woolf’s Hogarth Press—allowed her lover to publish some of her masterpieces, including The Waves (1931) and Orlando (1928), the latter being inspired by Sackville-West’s family history, androgynous features, and unique personality. Vita died at the age of seventy at Sissinghurst Castle, where she worked with her husband to design one of England’s most famous gardens.
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