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English houses and their inheritance
Public and private histories all have their part to play in the life of the English home
e grand passion of Vita Sackville-West’s life was Knole, the house – or “conglomeration of buildings half as big as Cambridge”, in Virginia Woolf’s words – where she grew up but which she could not inherit because she was not a boy. Thomas Sackville took possession of Knole in 1604 and turned it into a “calendar” house designed to awe: 365 rooms and fifty-two staircases, some with little purpose, and seven courtyards spread over four acres. Sackville’s will, directing that Knole be passed from “heir male to heir male”, meant that it was never split among family or sold off in parts. But with only one instance of a father-son succession in the past 200 years, the story of Knole is about disappointment and disinheritance as much as inheritance. The voices of aggrieved women ring down the ages. Lady Anne Clifford, who married Richard Sackville in 1609, felt doubly disinherited: she was also fighting for her father’s estates in Cumberland. She kept a diary detailing her unhappiness and listing dates and conversations in the inheritance contest. Within days of arriving at Knole in 1889, Vita’s mother Victoria sat down and read Lady Anne’s diary with its record of “perpetual domestic quarrels”, and Vita herself later published an edition. Vita celebrated Anne Clifford in Knole and the Sackvilles (1922) and she imagined herself as Anne’s ghost, prowling about the gardens at night. Banished upon her father’s death, Vita went on writing about Knole in novels such as The Edwardians; while in Orlando, Virginia Woolf worked the magic that ensured Vita’s name would be linked to Knole beyond all the brothers, nephews and uncles in the melancholy story of inheritance.
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