Vita Sackville-West, poet, author, and gardener, was born at Knole, about 25 miles from Sissinghurst, on 9 March 1892. The great Elizabethan mansion, home of her ancestors but denied to her through agnatic primogeniture, held enormous importance for her throughout her life. Sissinghurst was a substitute for Knole, and she greatly valued its familial connections. In 1913 Sackville-West married Harold Nicolson, a diplomat at the start of his career. Their relationship was unconventional, with both pursuing multiple, mainly same-sex, affairs. After breaking with her lover Violet Trefusis in 1921, Sackville-West became increasingly withdrawn. She wrote to her mother that she would like "to live alone in a tower with her books", an ambition she achieved in the tower at Sissinghurst where only her dogs were regularly admitted.