“Permanent preservation for the benefit of the nation”: The Country House, Preservation, and Nostalgia in Vita Sackville-West’s The Edwardians and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando

Abstract

In the 1920s following the Great War, a whole range of societies concerned with the preservation of historic buildings and natural scenery constructed new relationships between Englishness and modernity. These debates remade class and gender identities, which in turn shaped the fate of the country house. Increasingly, the great house seemed a relic of a rural and aristocratic past, rather than an integral part of a modern suburbanized countryside which was accessible to all by the automobile (Mandler, Fall 172). The daughter of the great estate of Knole, Vita Sackville-West, explored issues of inheritance in a number of her works; in The Edwardians (1930), her popular novel, she raised this theme in relation to the recent past of the Edwardian period. Several years earlier, Virginia Woolf had published Orlando, which critics have called a “love letter” to her friend and former lover Sackville-West. In this novel, Orlando pursues her claim as a female heir to inheriting a lavish country estate that was not only a thinly disguised version of Knole, but also which Sackville-West could not inherit because of her gender. Furthermore, Virginia Woolf devoted a little-noticed section of her novel to the Edwardian period and the modernization of the home.¹