English Country Houses

🔖 V.Sackville-West, daughter of the third Baron Sackville, was born at Knole, Sevenoaks, which is one of the greatest and most famous houses in England. Many of the country houses which are described in this book she knows intimately and it is, as she herself says, necessarily written from a personal point of view. The author emphasises the fact that the English country house "is essen­tially part of the country, not only in the country, but part of it, a natural growth". The development of the English country house, from the defen­sive castle to the Elizabethan manor house and the eighteenth century "country seat" to the present day, is described here and room is found to give some vivid sketches of the life that went on within these houses. Miss Sackville-West collaborated with Virginia Woolf in some of the pro­ductions of the Hogarth Press and she is the author of "The Land", the poem which won the Hawthornden prize in 1927; she has also written a number of well-known novels.