Sackville, Margaret

About the author

Lady Margaret Sackville (1881–1963) was a poet, playwright and children’s author. At the age of sixteen, she was discovered by Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who helped her towards publication. After her first book, Floral Symphony, was published in 1900, she published over twenty volumes of poetry. Under the influence of Ramsay Macdonald, with whom she had a lengthy affair, she became a socialist and pacifist, and during the First World War was a member of the anti-war Union of Democratic Control.

Lady Margaret Sackville was garlanded by literary society. When the Poetry Society was formed in 1912, she was its first president. She later became the first president of Scottish PEN, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her children’s books were a minor part of her oeuvre. She wrote one nonsense horse book, Mr Horse’s New Shoes (1936), for Country Life. It is unusual in that it contains eleven tipped-in colour plates as well as a colour frontis, but as the plates are only tipped in, many of the extant copies are missing some.

Finding the book
Reasonably easy to find, but can be difficult to find undamaged, and with its dustjacket.

Links and sources
Biographical information on Lady Margaret Sackville
Further biographical information