Mouldering hats and wedding veils

In deciding to write a book about her forebears and herself, Juliet Nicolson follows in their footsteps. Given that her grandparents were Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, and her father was Nigel Nicolson, that they all wrote copiously about themselves, that Knole and Sissinghurst are stuffed with family records, and that she is herself a publisher turned writer, it proved impossible to resist adding her voice to the already substantial record of her family’s powerful social and literary connections.

For a long time she was impressed by something her grandmother’s lover, Virginia Woolf, once said to her father: ‘Nothing has really happened until it is written down.’ She rejects this idea; but by writing her perceptive, self-aware book she herself makes something significant happen. She has not so much joined a family tradition as interrogated it, and in doing so liberated both her female forebears and herself from another family habit: emotional suppression and alcoholic self-destruction.