Pepita, Sackville-West, Vita. Published by Bernhard Tauchnitz, Leipzig, 1939. Signed, dated and inscribed by Vita Sackville-West to free endpaper. 12mo up to 7½” tall. 252pp. Bound in half purple leather over marbled boards, banded spine with gilt titles, top edge gilt. Printed by Oscar Brandstetter, Leipzig.Toning to endpapers and otherwise, contents are in fine condition. Binding is tight and square with rubbing to board edges, spine, tiny split head of spine. A rare copy, signed with a reference to Sissinghurst, Sackville-West’s famed gardens. In making Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West created one of the finest and most famous gardens in England and placed herself among the great gardeners of the twentieth century.
Pepita relates the love affair of the author’s grandfather Lord Sackville and her grandmother, Josefa de la Oliva, a Spanish dancer known as Pepita. The work is “a memorable evocation of her mother and grandmother in which she tried to come to terms with the most unsettling and uncomfortable aspects of her early life and her dual nationality” (ODNB).
Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), was a prolific fiction writer, prize-winning poet, biographer, journalist and garden designer. She was married to diplomat and noted diarist, Harold Nicolson. Vita and Virginia Woolf had a singular intense and deep relationship over many years. Woolf’s fantasy-biography Orlando is based on Vita’s life and work.
