“I think that Virginia Woolf recognized that she was quite a bit of a better writer than Vita ever could be,” Smith says. In 1917, Sackville-West caused scandal in high society when she eloped with her lover Violet Trefusis to Europe the pair spent two years on-and-off running away together and being brought back to England by disgruntled family members. (This was a point that Woolf highlighted in perhaps her most openly political and feminist work, the 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, in which she advocated for women to be financially independent.) Sackville-West married diplomat Harold Nicholson in 1913, who would, like his wife, also come to have same-sex affairs outside of their marriage. The Sackvilles’ ancestral home was Knole, a sprawling estate in southern England, and Sackville-West was always frustrated that she would never be able to inherit Knole due to her gender, as English aristocratic custom forbid it. The glamorous writer Vita Sackville-West was 10 years younger than Woolf and came from an aristocratic family. 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.
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