PAW-TRAITS

FROM THE TEACUP- DEMOLISHING GREAT DANE TO THE HEARTY FOX TERRIER, RENOWNED WRITER VITA SACKVILLE- WEST MUSES OVER SIX CLASSIC BREEDS

English aristocrat Vita Sackville-West is famed for her bestselling novels, her award-winning poems, and the incredible garden that she created at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, as well as her love affairs– notably her decade-long relationship with Virginia Woolf. Adding to that impressive list is the fact that she was also a dog lover. She surrounded herself with dogs: unsurprisingly, her letters are full of them. In one, written to Woolf in December 1926, Pippin – her cocker spaniel, and mother of Woolf’s Pinka – is described trying to burrow under her quilt as she reads Mrs Dalloway in bed; in another to her husband, diplomat Harold Nicholson, she notes: “Now I have had my dinner, or rather Pippin has had most of my dinner.” Pippin features in Orlando, too – along with the elkhound, Canute – Woolf’s novel inspired by Vita. A lifetime of admiration and curiosity about dogs went into her book Faces, published in 1961, the year before her death, aged 70.

Faces features descriptions of 44 different breeds, written to accompany photographs taken by Laelia Goehr. Each entry is typically idiosyncratic, drawing from sources ranging from 16th-century letters to dogs she had met.

“I have not hesitated to say whether I disliked or admired the dog I was writing about,” she writes in the foreword – and some breeds are definitely painted in a more appealing light than others. “As the readers of these notes will readily discover, my taste is for the large, noble, romantic, and aesthetically decorative animal.”

“A JOLLY COMPANION, WHO BARKED AT STRANGERS AND BIT THE POSTMAN”