On this day in 1962 Vita Sackville-West died, at the age of seventy. Easy to lose in the glare of one so filmed, written and gossiped about is the fact that Sackville-West was a prolific, prize-winning and commercially successful author. She won the 1927 Hawthornden Prize for poetry with "The Land," rose to best-seller status in the 1930s for novels such as The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and wrote some fifty books in all -- not just novels and poetry but travel books, biography (fittingly, on Aphra Benn and Joan of Arc), and eight books on gardening ... FULL STORY »
