Vast, islanded in a great park of antique provenance, grazed by speckled deer who roam or doze under the heavy ancient trees, Knole is the many-gabled manor house in which Vita Sackville-West was born in 1892. She was devoted to it, thrilled by it, enriched by it, educated by it. As a child she wandered through its galleries after nightfall with a candle: "But I was never frightened at Knole. I loved it; and took it for granted that Knole loved me."
But Vita was a girl: she could never inherit the house which had her imagination and her soul in thrall. Built in grey Kentish rag-stone around a series of courtyards spreading out from a gatehouse to cover four acres, Knole's first records date from the 13th century; its fame both as a building and a demesne grew from the building there by Archbishop Bouchier of Canterbury and his successor Cardinal Morton, before Thomas Cranmer reluctantly handed it over to Henry VIII. It was passed on to the Sackvilles by his daughter Queen Elizabeth.
"Who is there next? Well, only a high aristocrat called Vita Sackville-West . . . daughter of Knole, wife of Harold Nicolson, and novelist, but her real claim to consideration is, if I may be so coarse, her legs. Oh they are exquisite - running like slender pillars up into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier (yet she has two children) . . . and why she writes, which she does with complete competency, and a pen of brass, is a puzzle to me. If I were she, I should merely stride, with eleven Elk hounds behind me, through my ancestral woods . . ."
Writing this to the painter, Jacques Raverat, in 1924 of her first meeting with Vita, Virginia Woolf (in Congenial Spirits: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, 1989) introduces what was to develop into a lifelong mutual fascination. It yielded, from Woolf in 1928, Orlando, the novel which makes a man of Vita and provides her at last with cuirass and elkhounds. It is also the novel which restores Vita to Knole; who else but Woolf, that meticulous fantasist, could provide such an unrealisable gift?
"There it lay in the early sunshine of spring . . . Courts and buildings, grey, red, plum colour, lay orderly and symmetrical . . . in this was a fountain; in that a statue . . . here was a chapel, there a belfry . . . This vast, yet ordered, building which could house a thousand men and perhaps two thousand horses, was built, Orlando thought, by workmen whose names are unknown . . . Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths has left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their childbearing, have left this."
Orlando/Vita was, as Virginia Woolf wrote early in their acquaintance, "violently Sapphic". Revisiting Victoria Glendinning's sympathetic biography of Vita Sackville-West (Vita, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1985) I can't help wondering if this sexual preference, which despite several scandalous affairs Vita managed to accommodate in her successful marriage to Harold Nicolson wasn't in itself an indication of the forcefulness of Knole as a psychic wound.
Vita - who is now most often remembered as the creator, with her husband, of the garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent - earned a satisfying living by her pen which, despite Woolf's dismissal, was not "of brass". She wrote long poems (those were still the days when people curled up with a good ode) as well as several novels, including the self-examining The Edwardians and the valedictory All Passion Spent. She was high born, handsome, despite being hirsute - the biography makes several references to her moustache and in one case to moustaches - and highly sexed: "The flowers have come, and are adorable, dusky, tortured, passionate like you . . ." wrote Virginia Woolf during their love affair.
When Knole was handed over to the National Trust Vita wrote that her heart was broken. The word of recognition for those who had created, lived and died in houses of this kind might be a small thing, a single feather from the too-gorgeous plumage of a discarded past, yet that word must be uttered so that something of the grace of another age might seep into the consciousness of the million visitors wandering freely among the ancient courts.
Today I am one of the million; others prefer Sissinghurst and find Vita resplendent there, where she died in 1962. But here at Knole in Sevenoaks, Kent, there is a pulse of connection, the pulse felt by the returning Orlando, visiting one of the galleries where rows of chairs with their velvets faded hold their arms out for Elizabeth, for James, for Shakespeare, it might be, for Cecil, who never came. "Gently opening a door, she stood on the threshold so that (as she fancied) the room could not see her and watched the tapestry rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to move it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew. The heart still beat, she thought, however faintly, however far withdrawn; the frail indomitable heart of the immense building."