Reinventing and shifting lines in Vita Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1926)

When, in 1926, the renowned Edwardian poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) travelled to Iran to visit her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was then serving as a diplomat in Teheran, she could not have imagined how disconnected her image of Persia was from reality. Despite her surprise and disappointment regarding some aspects of the country, Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran conveys a fantasized image of Persia. This paper aims to show that her text is influenced by inherited prejudices that are responsible for her picturing Persia as a land of exotic and romantic adventures. Instead of relying on historical facts, she deliberately invites fiction into her travelogue. Hence, despite the linear structure of the travelogue, the writer’s Edwardian representation of Persia is constantly shifted and pushed aside by the reality of life there. Building on Edward Said’s theories, this paper argues that Sackville-West’s subjective approach to her travelogue and her use of fictional elements contribute to the persistence of a mythical image of Persia despite the emergence of shifting lines and reliable information about the country.