num_pages: 473
description: After they first met in 1922, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West began an intense and emotional friendship that lasted until Virginia's suicide in 1941. Like tinder and flint, they struck from one another the sparks of love, sexuality and literary inspiration.Throughout their friendship, during which both writers reached their peak of literary achievement, some 500 letters were exchanged. To Virginia, Vita was an exotic gypsy—the voluptuous and sensual aristocrat, the confidante through whom she could express her own Sapphism. To Vita, Virginia was an obsession.This collection of Vita Sackville-West's letters to Virginia Woolf, assembled with extracts from Virginia's replies and a linking narrative, is a unique memoir. It illuminates each woman's contemporaries, times, travels; their moments of levity, their periods of despair. And it reflects the private voices of two women, as their friendship deepened from formal admiration to become one of the most searingly intense affairs in modern literary history. The correspondence is not simply a moving personal exchange—it is as dramatically revealing of an extraordinary relationship as Portrait of a Marriage.
language: English
title: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
titlecomplete: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf
characters: Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West
genres: Biography, Queer, LGBT, Lesbian, Nonfiction, Womens, Romance, Classics, Feminism, History
ratings_count: 3159
publisher: PAPERMAC