vii

vii

The new novel, _Grey Wethers_, taking its name from those ancient sacrificial stones of the Druids which are the symbols of the story, traces back in substance to Miss Sackville-West’s _Heritage_, but is free from the faults of construction which made her first novel so unsatisfactory. The fineness of her hand upon this more familiar material is the delicate reward for her incessant painstaking. She is not a person to rest satisfied, but an artist. An artist....

“What was the promise of that mediocre ease beside the certainty of these exquisite privations?” So Chase questioned himself, in Miss Sackville-West’s story of _The Heir_. “What was that drudgery beside this beauty, this pride, this Quixotism?” There is only one answer. If you would be an artist you do not even bother with the answer. But your heart leaps.

Books by V. Sackville-West

_Poems of West and East_ [in England] 1921 _Orchard and Vineyard_ [in England] 1918 _Heritage_ 1920 _The Dragon in Shallow Waters_ 1923 _Knole and the Sackvilles_ 1923 _Challenge_ [withdrawn in England prior to publication, 1920] 1923 _Grey Wethers_ 1924 _The Heir and Other Stories_

Sources on V. Sackville-West

_Knole and the Sackvilles_, generally, and also pages 11, 17, 68, 82, 83, 219 and 220

_Who’s Who_ [in England]

Private Information

7. _Harold Bell Wright_