Love notes and letters are almost invariably near the top of ‘Best Romantic Gestures’ lists (source: I looked at, like, three on google). Maybe in the 21st century full-on letters have given way to faster methods, i.e. texting or sliding into their DMs, but years ago they were an easy way of telling someone how much you loved them.

And very few couples did them better than Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Woolf and Sackville-West met in 1922, and four days later, Virginia invited Vita to a dinner party. Sackville-West was immediately infatuated with Woolf, and reported as much to her husband, diplomat Harold Nicolson: “I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least, she asked me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.“

A flurry of letters passed between them before a sudden silence; a possible cause for this was Woolf’s hesitancy to accept both her feelings to Sackville-West, and Vita’s towards her. However, they reconnected, and their romance began in earnest, its peak lasting from 1925-28. Even after they ceased to be lovers, they maintained a strong friendship, which lasted until Woolf’s suicide in 1941.

The years of their relationship were also the most professionally productive years of their lives. The two women were each other’s critics and support; they brought out the best in one another.

There was a definitive axiom that both believed to be true—Vita was the better woman (“her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman,” – Woolf, in her diary) and Virginia the better writer (“I contrast my illiterate writing with your scholarly one, and am ashamed.” – Sackville-West, in a letter to Virginia).

That being said, Sackville-West was the more profitable writer, as sometimes people were put off by Woolf’s scholarly prose.

Nevertheless, in this frame of one aspiring to be a better woman, and the other a better writer, so too did they help each other. Woolf was Sackville-West’s unflinching critic, telling her exactly what she thought of her writing. And for Virginia, Vita was a support when other people often shook their heads. Woolf suffered from mental illness and depression her whole life, and she had a tendency to work herself to exhaustion before giving time for herself. More than that, she would exhaust herself working for other people before she took time for her own work.

In her letters to Woolf, Sackville-West focused on Virginia’s good health, her accomplishments, her generosity—all her good qualities. At the same time, she encouraged Woolf to focus more on herself, writing to her once, “Between Ottoline, Gertrude Stein, and bridal parties which make you faint, what time is left for Virginia?”

It seemed, for a time, the message was received. 

It is important to note that both women were happily married to their respective husbands. Sackville-West’s marriage to Nicolson was an open one—both were queer and both had extra-marital affairs, and Vita was almost shockingly candid with Harold about her relationships with women.

“Darling, there is no muddle anywhere!” she wrote to Harold, a week after telling Virginia that she loved her, “I have gone to bed with her (twice), but that’s all.”

For Woolf’s part, her husband, Leonard Woolf, was not queer, but he saw how good Vita was for his wife and he did not stand in the way of their relationship. The two couples were close friends, and as Vita’s son, Nigel Nicolson, writes in his book, Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson:

“Their marriages were alike in the freedom they allowed each other, in the invincibility of their love, in its intellectual, spiritual and non-physical base, in the eagerness of all four of them to savour life, challenge convention, work hard, play dangerously with the emotions — and in their solicitude for each other. How well do I recall Leonard’s look as he watched Virginia across a sitting-room to see that she did not grow tired or overexcited, caring for her much as Joseph must have cared for Mary, for their relationship was Biblical. There was no jealousy between the Woolfs and the Nicolsons, because they had arrived independently at the same definition of ‘trust.’”

In 1928, Woolf published Orlando, which was labelled by Nigel Nicolson as ‘The longest and most charming love letter in literature’. At this point, Vita was starting to look at other women, and the novel was Virginia’s response.

Orlando is the story of Vita, fictionalised through the titular character. While initially identified as male, Orlando’s gender is a fluid thing throughout the novel, and the text is actually interspersed with pictures of Vita, dressed in both ‘male’ and ‘female’ clothing. In it, Virginia returns to Vita her ancestral home of Knole, the inheritance of which had always frustrated Sackville-West—that is to say, she would never be able to inherit it because of her gender.

But at the same time, she creates a version of Vita that cannot be taken away from her. She was aware that Vita’s head was being turned in other directions, she probably saw the writing on the wall, and so she created Orlando.

Upon finishing the novel, Woolf wrote to Sackville-West: “I’ve lived in you all these months—coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?”

The response she received was simply: “I won’t be fictitious. I won’t be loved solely in an astral body, or in Virginia’s world.”

The response to Orlando was hugely positive. Vita wrote that she had been ‘enchanted’ by it, and even Harold Nicolson praised it: “It really is Vita — her puzzled concentration, her absent-minded tenderness … She strides magnificent and clumsy through 350 years.”

Only Vita’s mother seemed to dislike it, calling it ‘cruel’.

Despite this, their relationship began to falter, and they likely ended their romantic relationship not long after the publication. However, the families remained friends, even with both physical and emotional distance separating them. During World War II, when rationing allowed, Virginia would drive to Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, where Vita and Harold had taken up residence, and Vita sent butter and eggs to the Woolfs.

Tragically, in those first years of the war, Woolf fell into a deep depression, and in 1941, she filled her pockets with rocks and walked into River Ouse. Sackville-West was one of the first people Leonard Woolf broke the news to, and it left her in a state of shock. 

“The loveliest mind and spirit I ever knew, immortal both to the world and us who loved her… This is not a hard letter to write as you will know something of what I feel and words are unnecessary. For you I feel a really overwhelming sorrow, and for myself a loss which can never diminish,” she wrote to Leonard.

Even years after, Vita was still haunted by the event. “I still think that I might have saved her if only I had been there and had known the state of mind she was getting into,” she wrote to her husband. 

Whether or not this is true, we can’t know. But what is certain is that Vita Sackville-West was a bright spot for Virginia Woolf, and their relationship as both lovers and friends was hugely important for both of them.

Sources:

• DeSalvo, Louise A, ‘Lighting the Cave: The Relationship Between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 8.2 (1982), 195–214
• Meese, E, ‘When Virginia Looked at Vita, What Did She See; Or, Lesbian: Feminist: Woman-What’s the Differ(e/a)nce?’, Feminist Studies, 18.1 (1992), 99–117
• https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2021/february/virginia-woolf-vita-sackville-west-letters-love-affair.html
• https://www.literaryladiesguide.com/literary-musings/beyond-the-legend-virginia-woolf-and-vita-sackville-wests-love-affair-friendship/
• https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/07/28/virginia-woolf-vita-sackville-west/
• https://time.com/5655270/virginia-woolf-vita-sackville-west-relationship/