Pepita by Vita Sackville-West

It was recently announced that Virginia Woolf's scandalous love affair with Vita Sackville-West will soon be immortalised in celluloid. Despite having since fallen into obscurity, Sackville-West was once a celebrated novelist in her own right, and the re-release of her 1937 book Pepita is an attempt to remind the world of what made her such an entrancing figure.

Two literary biographies in one, the first part follows Vita's grandmother, Pepita, who rose from humble gypsy origins to become one of the most celebrated dancers in Europe. The second follows Vita's mother, Victoria (also called Pepita until English relatives deemed it 'too foreign'), who went from life in a French convent to mingling with American presidents and British monarchs.

What is most striking about Pepita, especially from the perspective of this current postmodern era, is its awareness of historicity. Though describing events happening many decades before, Sackville-West experiences them with the intensity of the present. They take place not in the simple past but with immediate vividness, and this historical sensitivity is expressed in the book's form: while the first narrative feels like a Georgette Heyer romance, the second takes on a quasi-modernist structure complete with streams of consciousness.

Yet though the book is engrossing and artfully written, it has dated, so while it does achieve Sackville-West's goal of making both Pepitas 'alive again', it may struggle to do the same for Vita.