Sackville-West, Vita

Vita Sackville-West was an English author and poet who is best known for her novels The Edwardians and All Passions Spent, and is notable as the only author to twice win the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for imaginative literature (in 1926 for The Land and in 1933 for Collected Poems.) Sackville-West and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, also a writer, had an open marriage, and her passionate relationship with author Virginia Woolf served as the inspiration for Woolf's Orlando. A member of the British peerage, Sackville-West led a life that could have inspired Julian Fellowes's Downton Abbey,