Margaret Sackville

Lady Margaret Sackville (December 24, 1881 - April 18, 1963) was an English poet and children's author. Sackville was born on Grosvenor Street 60, in Mayfair, and was the youngest child of Reginald Windsor Sackville, 7th Earl de la Warra. She was a cousin of Vita Sackville West. She had a passionate fifteen-year romance with Ramsay MacDonald, recorded in letters that they wrote to each other from 1913 to 1929. MacDonald was a widower and repeatedly offered her, but she refused to become his wife. His biographer David Marquand suggested that although social factors were a factor in her rejection, the main reason was that they were of different religions. Sackville was a Catholic, and MacDonald grew up in a Presbyterian church, later joining the Free Church of Scotland. Sackville was never married. She spent most of her adult life in Midlothian and Edinburgh, where she became the first president of the Scottish PEN Club and was elected a member of the Royal Literary Society. She was a member of the Whitehouse Terrace Salon, Mark Andre Raffalovich, where she met guests, including Henry James, Compton Mackenzie and artist Hubert Wellington. In 1922, she published The Edinburgh Mask. It was performed at Music Hall, George Street, Edinburgh, and portrayed the story of Edinburgh in eleven scenes from the Romans to a meeting between the poet Robert Burns and writer Sir Walter Scott. She lived at 30 Regent Terrace, Edinburgh, from 1930 to 1932. In 1936, Sackville moved to Cheltenham, where she lived until the end of her life. She died of heart disease at the Rocky nursing home in Cheltenham in 1963.