far off to hear her calling for him. The book's ending reflected Sackville-West's guilt about breaking her relationship with Keppel. Her mother, Lady Sackville, found the portrayal obvious enough to refuse to allow publication of the novel in England; but Vita's son Nigel Nicolson praises his mother: "She fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was prepared to give up everything ... How could she regret that the knowledge of it should now reach the ears of a new generation, one so infinitely more compassionate than her own?" Sackville-West was fascinated with and often wrote about the Roma people. As the British scholar Kirstie Blair noted, for her: "Gypsies represent liberation, excitement, danger and the free expression of sexuality". In particular, the Roma women, especially Spanish Romani women, served as a symbol for female homosexuality in her writings. As with many other female writers in this period, for Sackville-West, the Romani represented a social element both familiar and strange; a people perceived and admired as flamboyant romantics while at the same time viewed and hated as shifty, dishonest types; a rootless people who belonged nowhere yet could be found everywhere in Europe, serving as a symbol for a sort of unconventional femininity. The picture Sackville-West held of the Romani was much influenced by "Orientalism", as the Romani were believed to have originated from India. The idea of a people who belonged nowhere, existing outside of the values of "civilization", held genuine appeal to her as it offered up the possibility of gender roles different from those held in the West. Sackville-West was English, but she invented Romani ancestry for herself on the Spanish side of her family, explaining her bohemian behavior as due to her alleged "Gypsy" descent. Orlando Woolf was inspired by Sackville-West to write her novel Orlando (1928), featuring a protagonist who changes sex over the centuries. Reflecting Sackville-West's interest in the Romani, when Orlando goes to bed as a man and mysteriously wakes up as a woman in Constantinople (which is implied might have been the result of a spell cast by a Romani witch whom he married), it is at a Romani camp in the Balkans that Orlando is first welcomed and accepted as a woman, as the Romani in the novel