A year after the publication of Orchard and Vineyard, VSW and Virginia Woolf met for the first time (an experience which flustered the novelist, who wrote of her future lover: “Not much to my severe taste – florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist,” but who, nevertheless made “me feel virgin, shy, schoolgirlish”, prompting the “muzzy-headed” Woolf to ask the poet for a copy of Orchard and Vineyard (Glendinning, 1983). While the “common reader” in 1921 would not have had “the key” to the collection, “[k]nowing the background, [as Woolf likely did from the literary London gossip] a reader can trace the emotional confusions of the preceding years in Orchard and Vineyard” (ibid). In this gallimaufry, alongside the poems of Kent (some of which would be incorporated into The Land) and the Mediterranean, others railed against society during “the worst times of the Violet affair” (ibid). VSW’s affair with Violet Trefusis, and The Land, would subsequently make their way into Woolf’s Orlando. A fruity and fruitful collection, then.
Victoria Glendinning (1983) Vita: The life of V. Sackville-West (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). [ref: 3480]