Even knowing little about Woolf and Sackville-West's publications, there was still a great enjoyment and delight for me teasing out moments of inspiration across their letters, finding an offhanded admission in one letter from Virginia to Vita that she had started writing something new, and the acknowledging wry smile of recognition in Vita's epistolary response. Love Letters collates the intimate moments of influence they asserted across each others lives. It was, and still is, a visionary work fluid in identity and sexuality, the titular character Orlando is an ever-shifting portrait of an aristocrat, eventually inheriting an estate that bears an uncanny resemblance to Knole, living in a body that flexes the theories and expectations of how we think about gender and sex, even today. It was no secret then, that Orlando - a romp across English literary history - was Virginia's representation of what she called Vita's "romantic", albeit frustrating, heritage.
Virginia's groundbreaking feminist work A Room of One's Own would later advocate for women's financial independence, perhaps also highlighted by Vita's grudge against the restrictions upon her gender. Vita was ten years Virginia's junior, and would come to serve as the muse behind Woolf's groundbreaking novel Orlando born into aristocracy, Vita frequently expressed her frustration that, as a woman, she would never inherit the sprawling family estate Knole. She, like Vita Sackville-West, would later marry Virginia's husband was a politically active writer, Leonard Woolf, and Vita's the diplomat Harold Nicholson.
Her sister was an artist, and together they formed the heart of the intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, in the early twentieth century. Newly published by Vintage, Love Letters: Vita and Virginia documents the pair's relationship chronologically through these letters, not only to each other, but to their husbands, friends, and in newly collated (and much more intimate) diary entries, widening the window into the world of the two formidable women.Īdeline Virginia Stephen, born in London in 1882, was of artistic heritage. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West's great love affair flourished across years, evidenced (for us to swoon over) across hundreds of pages of correspondence. “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia… It is incredible how essential to me you have become.”
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