Portrait of a Marriage

The love story that scandalized and illuminated the Bloomsbury circle. Nigel Nicolson's extraordinary book combines his mother Vita Sackville-West's secret memoir with his own son's commentary, revealing one of the 20th century's most unconventional marriages. This 1973 paperback chronicles Vita's passionate affair with Violet Trefusis and her forty-nine-year marriage to diplomat Harold Nicolson - a union built on mutual infidelity, total frankness, and deepening love. Written by their son after discovering his mother's confessional manuscript, the book offers unprecedented intimacy into lives lived between convention and desire.

Vita and Harold, both bisexual, created a marriage that defied every rule while producing the legendary garden at Sissinghurst and some of the era's most distinguished writing. As Brendan Gill wrote in The New Yorker, this is "a cry from the heart as anybody writing in English in our time has come." A landmark in understanding how love might transcend traditional boundaries.