Love Letters
Back of the Book
"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way."
In 1922, the relatively unknown writer Virginia Woolf met the popular author, aristocrat—and notorious Sapphist—Vita Sackville-West. Virginia didn’t think much of Vita’s conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. In her diary she wrote: "But could I ever know her?" It was to be the start of nearly 20 years of correspondence, flirtation, literary inspiration, and deep friendship. Virginia would write her most playful novel, Orlando, for and about Vita, and their close bond would end only with Virginia’s tragic death in 1941. Here is the true love story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, told through selected letters and diary entries, allowing us to hear these women’s complex and constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Passionate, witty, and lyrical, their writing gives us a vivid sense of their extraordinary lives: from Vita’s travels across the globe with her foreign diplomat husband, to Virginia’s gossip about parties with the Bloomsbury set; from their shared love of dogs and gardens, to their grief and fear as war breaks out across Europe.
These letters bring to life a relationship that—even a hundred years later—feels radical, relatable, and vital.
We Love It Because
Much publicized, the love affair of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West has always been fodder for conceptions of queer love. This is of course, because the traces it has left behind are just that stunning. A premier example of a literary love affair that centers womanhood and the physiological reality of inhabiting a female body as well as a feminine consciousness and directing love towards another that is also reflected towards itself—a synecdochal depiction of a love that truly gives both ways.
Memorable Passage
And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head.
About the Authors
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) were two literary luminaries whose lives and work intersected in a rich tapestry of friendship, influence, and creative collaboration. Woolf, a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, was a groundbreaking modernist writer known for her novels like Mrs Dalloway and Orlando. Sackville-West, a prolific poet and novelist, brought her own formidable talents to the literary scene. Their friendship and the passionate, romantic undertones of their relationship are beautifully documented in the letters they exchanged. This connection inspired Woolf's novel Orlando, a fantastical exploration of gender and time that was a love letter to Sackville-West. Both women are worth knowing not only for their individual contributions to literature but also for the fascinating interplay of their lives, which has left an indelible mark on the literary and cultural history of the early 20th century. Their work continues to captivate readers, inviting them into the worlds of Bloomsbury and the Sackville family estate at Knole, showcasing the enduring power of artistic collaboration and the complexities of human connection.
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