Eddy: The Life of Edward Sackville-West

Heir to Knole and a peerage, novelist, critic and pianist, the intimate of Bloomsbury writers and painters, Edward Sackville-West appeared to have had bestowed on him every gift and opportunity. Yet all his life he was dogged by chronic ill-health and cursed with a masochistic psychological make-up that meant he could never attain the satisfaction in personal relationships he craved. Although the butt of ridicule from his cousin Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf and the model for Nancy Mitford's comic fictional character "Uncle Davey" in "The Pursuit of Love", Eddy Sackville-West is seen by the author as, in reality, a man of physical courage and moral stature. He was the translator of Rilke and one of the first to recognize the genius of Kafka, he also befriended, long before they were famous, Graham Sutherland, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten, with whom he fell in love. For this biography, Michael De-la-Noy has gathered information from his diaries and many unpublished letters - from Evelyn Waugh, Alix Strachey, Duncan Grant and Raymond Mortimer - to relate the story of Edward's life, which is set against the literary, musical and social history of Britain between the 1920s and 1960s. The author has also written biographies of Edward Elgar and Denton Welch.