HYLAND
nole Castle, in Sevenoaks, Kent, is famous, not
only for its spectacular architecture, art and decoration,
but perhaps, even more so, as the birthplace of the
novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf's
lover and inspiration for Woolf's novel, Orlando: A
Biography, an adventurous tale of metamorphosis, which
includes the eponymous hero awakening one day to
discover he has become a woman: "I'm sick to death of
this particular self. I want another."
Vita Sackville-West was herself rather androgynous in
appearance, handsome rather than beautiful, dark (her
mother Victoria was half-Spanish) even solemn, as she
appears in portraits and photographs. Her marriage to the
writer and politician Harold Nicolson was notably an open
one, both spouses having same-sex relationships which
The cartoons in the Cartoon Gallery: the Raphael cartoons,
seventeenth-century copies of 'cartoons' or designs for
tapestries originally painted by Raphael in the sixteenth century.
John
Miller
K
