Vita Sackville-West’s book-length blank verse poems The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946) are unique in English poetry as the twentieth century’s sole exemplars of Virgilian formal georgic. This chapter discusses both poems in their historical context, reading them as distinguished receptions of classical as well as English literary models. The chapter focuses on Sackville-West’s recalibrations of Virgil, and assesses the implications of her work on conceptions of the georgic genre with regard to didacticism, linguistic experiment, aesthetic achievement and ideas about empire and national identity.

This chapter studies the relationship between two of the foremost examples of georgic poetry in English – James Thomson’s The Seasons and Vita Sackville-West’s The Land, and the tradition’s primary ancient model, Virgil’s Georgics. It argues that georgic poetry is deeply implicated in the politics of empire in Roman no less than in British contexts, using themes of geography, travel and patriotism to showcase and celebrate imperial power. Simultaneously, georgic poetry can be read as a kind of archive, celebrating the artisanal practices of rural communities under threat from profit-driven economic models, marrying intense appreciation of the natural world with an equally intense awareness of that world’s fragility. As such, georgic poetry can be usefully read as dramatizing certain contradictions and challenges which remain relevant in global politics in the twenty-first century.

This chapter considers Virginia Woolf’s experiments in animal biography. It opens by presenting Woolf’s unpublished draft ‘Authorities’ note to Flush: A Biography (1933) as evidence of her knowing engagement with anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, before going on to read that text alongside her first experiment in the genre, Orlando: A Biography (1928). In doing so, the chapter draws on correspondence between Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, as well as the latter’s rarely discussed book Faces: Profiles of Dogs (1961), to illustrate how canine companions take centre stage in their amorous discourse. It then turns to another overlooked intertext, Thomas Browne’s 1646 Pseudodoxia Epidemica, also known as Vulgar Errors, to show Woolf’s queering of his early modern belief that hares can change sex from female to male. Finally, the chapter places Flush in dialogue with a lesser-known dog biography the Woolfs considered for publication at the Hogarth Press (and which Woolf cleverly alludes to in her canine biography): Inordinate (?) Affection: A Story for Dog Lovers (1936) by composer, memoirist and suffragette Ethel Smyth.