The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf by Vita Sackville-West

Smith, a professor of English at Texas State University. “They came from pretty different places,” says Victoria L. “You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality.” “I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you,” Sackville-West wrote to her husband after their first meetings. The two women met in December 1922 and grew closer through attending a series of dinner parties together in London. Vita & Virginia depicts the two women meeting at a costume party, at which Sackville-West is immediately entranced by Woolf’s intellect and eloquence. How did Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West meet? Gemma Arterton as “Vita Sackville-West” and Elizabeth Debicki as “Virginia Woolf” in Chanya Button’s Vita & Virginia. While Virginia Woolf’s earlier novels, which included Night and Day (1919), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), were not hugely commercially or critically successful during her time, she is today respected as one of the most important writers of the 20th century and a pioneer of “stream of consciousness” writing. In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a politically active left-wing writer and university friend of her brother’s. Her sister Vanessa was an artist, and when they reached adulthood, the two sisters became the heart of an influential intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of radical artists, writers and thinkers during the early 20th century. Who were Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West?īorn in London in 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen, or “Ginia” as she was affectionately known, had a love for arts and literature running through her family. Here’s the true story behind Vita & Virginia, Woolf and Sackville-West’s passionate relationship and the great literary work it inspired. Starring Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf and Gemma Arterton as Sackville-West, the film from director Chanya Button is set against the backdrop of bohemian high society in 1920s London with a host of characters based on real-life people. That relationship is the subject of a new film, Vita & Virginia, which includes lines lifted straight from the literary duo’s love letters. Although both were married to men, the two women penned hundreds of poetic letters to each other, and their relationship would inspire one of Woolf’s most celebrated works, the 1928 novel Orlando. A popular writer herself, Sackville-West was proclaiming her love for Woolf during the most intense years of their romantic relationship in the 1920s. “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia…It is incredible how essential to me you have become,” wrote Vita Sackville-West to the novelist Virginia Woolf in 1926.

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf by Vita Sackville-West