Exhibition of early 20th Century LGBTQ+ milestones

Poet and writer Vita Sackville-West bought Sissinghurst Castle Garden in 1930

An exhibition exploring the connections between a world-renowned garden in Kent and LGBTQ+ milestones of the 20th Century opens on Saturday.

Radical Relations looks at the unconventional lives of writer and poet Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, the creators of Sissinghurst Castle Garden.

Letters and texts on display for the first time reveal their personal connections to high-profile obscenity trials and banned novels.

A National Trust spokesperson said the exhibition puts the couple's "cultural network at the heart of the early LGBTQ+ movement".

On show for the first time is a copy of DH Lawrence’s 1930 defence of his banned novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Letters, books and objects, which are usually tucked away on Sissinghurst’s bookshelves, are to be on display.

They include Vita Sackville-West's Gladstone bag, which hid "an explosive autobiographical account of her passionate same-sex affair with Violet Trefusis," a Sissinghurst spokesperson said.

Also on display is Harold Nicolson’s annotation in Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, letters from The Well of Loneliness obscenity trial and a 1921 copy of Edward Carpenter’s The Intermediate Sex.

The exhibition is taking place in the Long Library at Sissinghurst

Visitors to Sissinghurst in the 1930s included core members of the Bloomsbury Group, such as Virigina Woolf.

Nicci Obholzer, senior house and collections officer, said: “The Bloomsbury Group produced remarkable works of art, literature and philosophy, while sharing complex personal lives, marriages and same sex relationships.

“Radical Relationships shines a spotlight on their interconnected lives, putting the world-renowned garden that Vita and Harold created at the heart of an early 20th century network of culturally influential people.”

The exhibition runs at Sissinghurst Castle Garden until March 2025.