Love Letters: Vita and Virginia

The radical, relatable, and playful love story between two extraordinary twentieth-century writers, revealed in selected letters and diary entries.

‘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…’

At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat, and sapphist Vita Sackville-West. Virginia wrote in her diary that she didn’t think much of Vita’s conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs… It was to be the start of almost twenty years of flirtation, friendship, and literary collaboration. Their correspondence ended only with Virginia’s suicide in 1941.

Intimate and playful, these selected letters and diary entries allow us to hear the women’s constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Eavesdrop on the affair that inspired Virginia to write Orlando, and discover an extraordinary relationship which - even a hundred years later - feels radical and relatable.

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM ALISON BECHDEL, AUTHOR OF FUN HOME AND CREATOR OF THE BECHDEL TEST.