Vita Sackville West: Selected Writings edited by Mary Ann CawsPalgrave Macmillan, 2003 (Palgrave, 2002)

A mix of the very interesting and the less interesting. Wonderful: all of the short stories, the novella Seducers in Ecuador, with its shifts in perspective and pleasingly strange conceit, some of the poetry (lines about winter light, autumn color). These lines, from “The Quarryman”: “New shapes, new planes, undreamed by architect; An accidental beauty, born of need.” Most of all, I loved the diaries and letters: Harold Nicolson’s charming and clever letters to Vita, full of lists and perfect witty tender phrases; all of Vita’s letters to Virginia Woolf—the descriptions of places and sights, the obvious care she took in writing them. Sentences in diary entries, here and there: March 26th: “L. falls in love with the Orient Express, and it’s all I can do to make her get out at Venice,” or April 27th: “Bicycle home & get drenched, but rather enjoy flying down the hill with the rain lashing my face.”