Evening Standard, 6 May 2010

Byline: Lucy Worsley

INHERITANCE: THE STORY OF KNOLE & THE SACKVILLES by Robert Sackville-West (Bloomsbury, £20)

The 365 ancient rooms, 52 staircases and seven grey ragstone courtyards of Knole, near Sevenoaks, do not add up to Britain's most beautiful house.  It might well be "half as big as Cambridge", wrote Virginia Woolf, but she found it rather depressing.

Of all the great historic houses, though, Knole must have the best collection of Stuart furnishings, and the most peculiar family.

Virginia's lover, Vita Sackville-West, found her ancestors fascinating but repellent: "a rotten lot, and nearly all stark-staring mad".  This book suggests that Knole itself drove many of them to despair.  They seemed incapable of staying married to their spouses and producing legitimate sons.  As the author puts it, "woven into the story of the place is a sense of disappointment and disinheritance".

There has only been one direct father-son succession at Knole in the past 200 years.  It was Thomas Sackville, first Earl of Dorset, who acquired the medieval mansion once owned by Henry VIII.  (His father, "Fillsack Sackville", won the family's wealth by exploiting his public offices.) This first Earl's son married the intelligent but melancholy Lady Anne Clifford, who was capable of conversing on any topic "from Predestination to Slea Silk".  Her diaries describe Knole as the backdrop to a marriage gone hideously wrong because of her husband's attempts to disinherit her.

The 17th-century Sackvilles endured the indignity of having the Roundheads in their parlour because of the failures of the fourth Earl, a "poore, unsuccessful Cavalier".  The fifth Earl bribed his wife to leave him alone; the sixth Earl was celebrated for "lust and buggery".

Of his successors, the first Duke did well at court, but one of his sons became a failed opera impresario, and the other was sacked from the army for disobedience.  The third Duke had an affair with the voluptuous ballerina La Baccelli, who gives her (Anglicised) name to "Shelley's Tower" in the house.

In the 19th century, Knole rose to new prominence because it epitomised Victorian Britain's favourite period in history: a vaguely defined "Olden Time".  Then the nation became entranced by the relationship between Lionel, 2nd Lord Sackville, and the Spanish dancer Pepita.  Their illegitimate daughter Victoria married her own cousin to get her hands on Knole, then nearly lost it to her other siblings in a great court case.

Victoria's own daughter was the most famous Sackville-West of all, the writer Vita.  Both she and Virginia Woolf refashioned the complex Sackville story into powerful fiction: Vita in "The Edwardians", Virginia in "Orlando".

It's perhaps unfortunate that the book's female characters are so striking that their male appendages appear rather dim by comparison.  But then again, Inheritance is given extra spice by the fact that Robert Sackville-West knows what he's talking about: as 7th Lord Sackville, he now shares Knole with the National Trust.  He makes occasional welcome firstperson appearances in his narrative, describing his paranoia about lost keys, and justifiably worrying that his inheritance will drive him mad, too.

On the evidence of his charming, tolerant and humorous book, though, for a Sackville he seems surprisingly well-adjusted.