The Disinherited: A Story of Family, Love, and Betrayal
This is the second book by Robert Sackville-West (aka Lord Sackville) about his family and the sprawling house (far too small a word for Knole) they’ve inhabited since 1604. It focuses on the exotic family branch stemming from the liaison of Lionel Sackville-West, a fifth son (thus unlikely to inherit) with a married Spanish dancer nicknamed Pepita. A run-of-the-mill example of minor British nobility at play abroad eventually became the subject of a notorious lawsuit; Lionel ended up inheriting Knole after all, and his son Henry – who believed he was legitimate – contested the right to Knole of his cousin, also Lionel.
To add to the drama, the younger Lionel had married the older Lionel’s daughter, Victoria, also nicknamed Pepita, and Victoria found herself in the unenviable position of having to broadcast her own illegitimacy as a defense against her brother’s claim. As Victoria was the mother of the writer Vita Sackville-West, known best for her affair with Virginia Woolf, this lucidly written and entertaining history will be of great interest to many readers, particularly those who have read Orlando or visited Knole and experienced the magnetic pull of this enormous, ruinously expensive national treasure.
