What do you think?
Rate this book
Vita & Virginia: A Double Life
Virginia Woolf is one of the world’s most famous writers, and a leading light of literary modernism and feminism. During the 1920s she had a passionate affair with a fellow author, Vita Sackville-West, and they remained friends until Virginia’s death in 1941. The hero of Virginia’s novel Orlando was modeled on Vita and the book has been described as "one of the longest and most charming love letters in history." That’s on top of the more than 500 letters they wrote to each other. Vita was also a highly regarded and award-winning novelist before the War, but she is most famous today as the co-creator of the garden at Sissinghurst, one of the most influential and visited gardens in the world. This double biography of two extraordinary women examines their lives together and apart.
176 pages, Hardcover
Published September 1, 2018
About the author
Sarah Gristwood
27 books383 followersSarah Gristwood attended Oxford and then worked as a journalist specializing in the arts and women's issues. She has contributed to The Times, Guardian, Independent, and Evening Standard.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
August 31, 2019
This biography - I would almost describe it as a ‘picture book’ biography - would make a very good starting point for readers who would like to learn more about the romance/friendship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. It’s also a very attractive lure to the collector.
Divided into three parts - with titles taken from the women’s own writing (‘Moments of Being’, ‘Orlando’ and ‘All Passion Spent’) - the book fills in some of the most important moments on each woman’s time-line, whilst also grounding their individual lives and accomplishments (and of course their relationship) within the literary/social context of the time. Illustrated beautifully throughout, with family photos, pictures of houses and gardens, and other ephemera, the book has a broad appeal - and not just for the literary sort.
Divided into three parts - with titles taken from the women’s own writing (‘Moments of Being’, ‘Orlando’ and ‘All Passion Spent’) - the book fills in some of the most important moments on each woman’s time-line, whilst also grounding their individual lives and accomplishments (and of course their relationship) within the literary/social context of the time. Illustrated beautifully throughout, with family photos, pictures of houses and gardens, and other ephemera, the book has a broad appeal - and not just for the literary sort.
December 1, 2020
This is kind of everything I've ever looked for in my readings about Virginia and Vita—even when it's a part specifically about one or the other, you won't go a full page without the other being mentioned. Virginia's biography section situates Vita's participation at every point where she was even remotely present, and vice versa. I was especially amused by the richness of detail about Vita's (multiple) other lovers at every point, surprising even to me and I've read tons about her already. The long, detailed sections about the houses involved was confusing to me until I realized it's what Vita would've wanted—Knole and Sissinghurst deserve their chapters too. Overall a pretty cool read that I'll recommend to anyone interested in their relationship.
January 24, 2020
I have carried out a great deal of research on Virginia Woolf over the last few years, but had not read anything about her for quite a while. When I spotted the gorgeous National Trust published hardback of Sarah Gristwood's Vita & Virginia: A Double Life in my local library, then, I picked it up and borrowed it immediately.
The premise of the book is an examination of the brief love affair which Virginia Woolf and
fellow author Vita Sackville-West embarked upon in the 'heady days of the 1920s', and their friendship which endured until Woolf's tragic death in 1941. Gristwood presents quite extensive biographies of both women, particularly given that her biography is a relatively slim volume. Vita & Virginia has been split into three distinct sections - '1882-1922 Moments of Being', '1922-1930 Orlando', and 'All Passion Spent'. These sections are sandwiched between an introduction and a short piece entitled 'Afterlife', in which Gristwood examines the legacy left by both women.
In her introduction, Gristwood writes: '... Virginia told a friend, just months before her death, that apart from her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa, Vita was the only person she really loved.' She goes on to note: 'The bond that endured between those two women was predominantly, though not exclusively, one of the heart, and of the mind.' The two found solace in having similar professions, and also in how much admiration they held for one another.
Firstly, Gristwood details Vita's rather unconventional childhood, before moving onto Woolf's, which was shaken with many tragedies. She examines the writing careers of both women, and the personal struggles which they faced at various points. Also mentioned are Woolf and Sackville-West's other affairs and infatuations. The detail which has been included is rich, and there is certainly no lack of amusement. Gristwood writes, for example, that 'When Leonard was away, a playful contract required Virginia... that she would rest for a full half hour after lunch, be in bed by 10.25 every night, have her breakfast in bed and drink a whole glass of milk in the mornings.'
Of course, Gristwood devotes a whole chapter to how the two women met, and how their relationship went on to develop: 'Vita would encourage her to be a little more adventurous on even the most practical levels - to dress more smartly and spend money. Later in her friendship with Vita, Virginia would acknowledge how Vita opened new horizons for her.' The start of their relationship appears to have been a real period of growth for them both.
Throughout, Gristwood quotes extensively from Virginia's diary, and from the correspondence between the two women. Contextually, too, Vita & Virginia is very well placed; Gristwood writes about the political climate, the growing fear of war, and the preparations made for this by both families.
Vita & Virginia is essentially part biography, part guidebook to the National Trust protected properties which both Woolf and Sackville-West inhabited throughout their lifetimes. Of Knole in Kent, passed down through the male generations of the Sackville-West family, for instance, Gristwood understands that the property 'was a whole world, a small village in itself' to the young Vita. Vita & Virginia is filled to the brim with beautiful photographs and illustrations, many of their various dwellings and glorious gardens, which are lovely to linger over.
Vita & Virginia is fascinating. As something of a Woolf scholar, I did already know a lot of the information which Gristwood relays, but there were elements here that proved to be refreshingly new to me. I found the biography a delight to read. Vita & Virginia provides a wonderful introduction to the lives of both Woolf and Sackville-West, and the way in which their relationship evolved over time. Despite running to less than 200 pages, Gristwood's well written book feels thorough. Her omniscient, almost neutral tone suits the book so well, and she gives so much for the reader to consider.
The premise of the book is an examination of the brief love affair which Virginia Woolf and
fellow author Vita Sackville-West embarked upon in the 'heady days of the 1920s', and their friendship which endured until Woolf's tragic death in 1941. Gristwood presents quite extensive biographies of both women, particularly given that her biography is a relatively slim volume. Vita & Virginia has been split into three distinct sections - '1882-1922 Moments of Being', '1922-1930 Orlando', and 'All Passion Spent'. These sections are sandwiched between an introduction and a short piece entitled 'Afterlife', in which Gristwood examines the legacy left by both women.
In her introduction, Gristwood writes: '... Virginia told a friend, just months before her death, that apart from her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa, Vita was the only person she really loved.' She goes on to note: 'The bond that endured between those two women was predominantly, though not exclusively, one of the heart, and of the mind.' The two found solace in having similar professions, and also in how much admiration they held for one another.
Firstly, Gristwood details Vita's rather unconventional childhood, before moving onto Woolf's, which was shaken with many tragedies. She examines the writing careers of both women, and the personal struggles which they faced at various points. Also mentioned are Woolf and Sackville-West's other affairs and infatuations. The detail which has been included is rich, and there is certainly no lack of amusement. Gristwood writes, for example, that 'When Leonard was away, a playful contract required Virginia... that she would rest for a full half hour after lunch, be in bed by 10.25 every night, have her breakfast in bed and drink a whole glass of milk in the mornings.'
Of course, Gristwood devotes a whole chapter to how the two women met, and how their relationship went on to develop: 'Vita would encourage her to be a little more adventurous on even the most practical levels - to dress more smartly and spend money. Later in her friendship with Vita, Virginia would acknowledge how Vita opened new horizons for her.' The start of their relationship appears to have been a real period of growth for them both.
Throughout, Gristwood quotes extensively from Virginia's diary, and from the correspondence between the two women. Contextually, too, Vita & Virginia is very well placed; Gristwood writes about the political climate, the growing fear of war, and the preparations made for this by both families.
Vita & Virginia is essentially part biography, part guidebook to the National Trust protected properties which both Woolf and Sackville-West inhabited throughout their lifetimes. Of Knole in Kent, passed down through the male generations of the Sackville-West family, for instance, Gristwood understands that the property 'was a whole world, a small village in itself' to the young Vita. Vita & Virginia is filled to the brim with beautiful photographs and illustrations, many of their various dwellings and glorious gardens, which are lovely to linger over.
Vita & Virginia is fascinating. As something of a Woolf scholar, I did already know a lot of the information which Gristwood relays, but there were elements here that proved to be refreshingly new to me. I found the biography a delight to read. Vita & Virginia provides a wonderful introduction to the lives of both Woolf and Sackville-West, and the way in which their relationship evolved over time. Despite running to less than 200 pages, Gristwood's well written book feels thorough. Her omniscient, almost neutral tone suits the book so well, and she gives so much for the reader to consider.
November 29, 2019
A lavishly illustrated glimpse into the lives of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf as they traveled through their lives.
July 8, 2022
Great short biographies of these writers and especially the effect they had on each other's lives interspersed with beautiful photographs.
June 9, 2021
5 stars no questions asked! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I am completely besotted with the life and works of Virginia Woolf, including her social circles and romance with Vita Sackville-West. Finding this beautiful, cloth bound book produced by the National Trust in my local library was a jackpot and I immediately checked it out and started reading.
This is a biographical work containing the letters and love shared by Vita and Virginia, including a lot of intriguing detail about their various houses/castles/cottages, their group associations and their feelings towards one another and others in their lives. Context is provided throughout in terms of an accurate depiction of each subject’s social status, the event’s of the epoch and the rules which governed society, incredibly helpful to readers such as myself who are not experts in the field of late 19th/early 20th century England. The author offers a level of personal commentary insofar as to guide the reader but not so much that you cannot distinguish between what is history and what is commentary. It is packed full of photographs and illustrations which only enhance the reading experience and allowed me to learn so much more about the early 20th century women who I am so fond of!
I would recommend this book in a heartbeat.
I am completely besotted with the life and works of Virginia Woolf, including her social circles and romance with Vita Sackville-West. Finding this beautiful, cloth bound book produced by the National Trust in my local library was a jackpot and I immediately checked it out and started reading.
This is a biographical work containing the letters and love shared by Vita and Virginia, including a lot of intriguing detail about their various houses/castles/cottages, their group associations and their feelings towards one another and others in their lives. Context is provided throughout in terms of an accurate depiction of each subject’s social status, the event’s of the epoch and the rules which governed society, incredibly helpful to readers such as myself who are not experts in the field of late 19th/early 20th century England. The author offers a level of personal commentary insofar as to guide the reader but not so much that you cannot distinguish between what is history and what is commentary. It is packed full of photographs and illustrations which only enhance the reading experience and allowed me to learn so much more about the early 20th century women who I am so fond of!
I would recommend this book in a heartbeat.
November 19, 2018
I felt like I was being led into a beautifully curated museum exhibit following the intersecting lives of Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf and sundry family, friends, lovers, and glorious homes. This was a pleasurable read, indeed.
April 25, 2022
read this for a school project. It's intentionally vague to cover both Vita & Virginia but that also makes it more of a starting-point source for research than one you can actually learn a lot from.
Read
October 4, 2018Sarah Gristwood has done a fine job here, economically placing the Bloomsbury set in their social and political context and challenging some long-standing myths about them. As one might expect from a National Trust publication, there are copious illustrations of Sissinghurst, Monks House (the Woolfs' country retreat) and Charleston, home of her sister Vanessa Bell. All three properties, as well as Knowle, Vita's beloved birthplace which she was unable to inherit, are in the Trust's care and well worth visiting. This book can be read in a couple of hours and makes an excellent introduction - I recommend reading it before you go there, if at all possible.
August 20, 2020
A beautiful take on two incredible women, and the importance of “place”, space, and buildings in their lives. Gristwood’s writing is a glorious gander through the ups and downs in Vita and Virginia’s journeys, never shying away from the truth, but never defining these women by their tragedies: instead by their loves, minds and creativity. I love how place becomes a person in Gristwood’s exploration of Woolf and Sackville-West, and this gorgeous book, with its photos, portraits and letters, goes to show what an extraordinary pair they were.
August 26, 2019
Such a well edited, presented book. I really liked the overall result and the way the content was delivered. This is the story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville's romance/friendship and their individual lives. Really good read.
February 22, 2024
sarà che sapevo già la gran parte della storia tra vita e virginia (sia singolarmente che come "coppia") ma l'ho trovato molto scialbo, solo una sequela di informazioni con poco sentimento.
nonostante tutto, leggere di v&v fa sempre bene al mio povero cuore.
nonostante tutto, leggere di v&v fa sempre bene al mio povero cuore.
February 27, 2026
Very interesting. I'm not much of a fan of Virginia Woolf's writing, but it was interesting to read about her life and her relationship with Vita. Also, the added advantage of photos - I love it when books have photos!
May 2, 2026
“In their June 1929 joint radio broadcast on ‘Marriage’, they agreed that marriage was a living organism, ‘a plant not a piece of furniture’”
“But Vita wrote every few days to Harold, and he to her. It was only to her diary that she admitted she was desperately unhappy, now sure she did not love him. Weeks later, however, she was telling her mother he was all her life”
“Rosamund felt able to tell Vita, ‘Men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever.’ Vita would write in her memoir that ‘men didn’t attract me, that I didn’t think of them in what is called “that way”. Women did.””
“Virginia was not ready to give up her freedom, she wanted to ‘go on as before’. But Vanessa wrote to Leonard assuring him that ‘You’re the only person who I know whom I can imagine as her husband.’”
“The very strength of his desire could sometimes make her angry … ‘is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments – when you kissed me the other day was one – when I feel no more than a rock.’”
“She had some feeling for him which was ‘permanent, and growing’, but she could still pass from hot to cold in a flash. She was half afraid of herself. ‘I feel I must give you everything; and that if I can’t, well, marriage would only be second-best for you as well as for me.’”
“Virginia wrote to a friend that she had lost her virginity and found ‘the climax immensely exaggerated’, but even that limited enthusiasm may have overstated the case. Leonard had always desired a marriage, he wrote, in which he could be ‘mind to mind and soul to soul’. But physical desire was part of the package.”
“she now began expressing anger towards Leonard. (Vanessa would later write that she had taken against all men.) As she left the nursing home in August to celebrate their wedding anniversary she became delusional, convinced everyone was laughing at her and refusing to eat.”
“Virginia complained that she rarely saw her mother alone. Later she would write, in A Room of One’s Own, of her own efforts to strangle the long-suffering, self-abnegating ‘Angel in the House’ that her mother’s life represented. Had she not killed the Angel, ‘she would have killed me.”
“It was a world of daily walks in Kensington Gardens where Virginia sailed her toy ship on the Round Pond, of shared stories the children made up, of instructive talks with her father, after their mother had taught her daughters their first lessons. Of, as Virginia later wrote, ‘plain duties’ and ‘appropriate pleasures’”
“she sought to separate herself and even, in the years ahead, use Orlando to challenge his idea of biography.”
“Virginia nonetheless attempted to throw herself out of a window, albeit one on the ground floor. She was suffering from hallucinations, hearing the birds singing in Greek and the King, Edward VII, ‘using the foulest possible language’ in the azaleas. (Perhaps the effects of the hypnotic drugs she would have been given must be taken into account.) Virginia herself attributed the voices to overeating, and sought to starve herself out of hearing them.”
“‘Put some affection into your letters’, she would beg Violet Dickinson. ‘My food is affection!’ Describing their relationship as a ‘romantic friendship’, Virginia would present Violet with ‘Friendship’s Gallery’, a fantastical personal tribute typed up in violet ink.”
“Virginia declared that ‘women are my line, not these inanimate creatures’. Duncan Grant remembered that for some years Virginia’s manner towards men would be ‘aloof and a little fierce’.”
“Virginia, however, was, Lytton said, ‘young, wild, inquisitive, discontented, and longing to be in love.”
“the Stephen sisters were photographed scantily dressed as characters from a Gauguin painting, ‘incredibly beautiful and very naked’, at the Post-Impressionist Ball, held to raise money for the suffrage cause.”
“Virginia herself was beginning to accept the general opinion that she should marry. She would soon be 30. ‘To be 29 and unmarried – to be a failure – childless – insane too, no writer.”
“He relished ‘a circle in which complete freedom of thought and speech was extended to both sexes.’ ‘I have always been greatly attracted by the undiluted female mind, as well as by the female body’, he wrote later in his autobiography”
“Magnificence, intelligence, wit, beauty, directness”
“exploring her conflicted feelings. ‘I say to myself. Anyhow, you’ll be quite happy with him: and he will give you companionship, children, and a busy life.’ But then she swore she was not prepared to look upon marriage as a profession.”
“‘We ask a great deal of life, don’t we?’, she asked rhetorically. But through the spring they saw each other almost every day: walks in Regent’s Park; concerts; attending the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic”
“Virginia ‘never had understood or sympathised with sexual passion in men”
“By the time the honeymoon couple reached Venice, Virginia was suffering from her tell-tale headaches and refusing to eat.”
“the possibility of a recurrence of the madness would forever be a third party in her marriage to Leonard.”
“Vita was able to convince herself that her life was complete.”
“their nicknames for each other were Mandril and Mongoose”
“through the course of their marriage, she would cast Leonard as the protective but also repressive parent”
“Virginia would tell Vanessa that she had married Leonard because he was ‘absolutely dependable & like a rock which was what she badly wanted.”
“violent emotional instability and oscillation … a refusal to admit or accept facts in the outside world’.”
“But she seems also in a sense to have valued the ‘madness’ itself. ‘As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at’ she wrote years later, ‘in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.”
“The ‘quicksand’ intimacy between these two women writers would comprise both admiration and jealousy”
“The Bloomsbury Group was no longer as tight-knit as it once had been. As Virginia told her diary: ‘the worst of it is how seldom we meet … months pass without a sight … But when we do meet there is nothing to complain of.”
“As ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like’ she no longer cared if reviews were mixed, if she was either ‘a great writer or a nincompoop”
“Violet had struck the secret of my duality; she attacked me about it, and I made no attempt to conceal it from her or from myself … I talked out the whole of myself with absolute sincerity and pain.’ Violet’s response, as Vita describes it, was that of the expert seducer, but Vita herself was just drunk with liberation – ‘the liberation of half my personality’. When she and Violet went away to Cornwall together, saying they wanted to see the spring flowers, Vita felt ‘like a person translated, or re-born’.”
“Harold wrote to Vita that he wished he were ‘more violent and less affectionate’; Vita wrote of her wanderlust – in which she comprised a running away from the ordinary life, the humdrum, stagnation, ‘bovine complacency”
“In the fantasy world where she and Violet now dwelt, they took on the Romany names of Mitya and Lushka.”
“Vita had always perceived two identities within herself – Violet called them Jekyll and Hyde. Vita said she was frightened of the Hyde side: ‘it’s so brutal and hard and savage, and Harold knows nothing of it; it would drive over his soul like an armoured chariot.’ But this was the side to which Violet called”
“She loved more deeply, less passionately’ than in the days when she had run away with Violet.”
“Harold could write about Vita’s future affairs as her ‘muddles’. (Virginia would describe her ‘floundering habits’.) Vita called his, his ‘fun’.”
“Vita is absolutely devoted to Harold, but there is nothing whatever sexual between them, which is strange in such a young and good-looking couple. She is not in the least jealous of him, and willingly allows him to relieve himself with anyone.”
“Vita: ‘we are sure of each other, in this odd, strange, detached, intimate, mystical relationship which we could never explain to any outside person.’ Her ‘creed’ for him began with: ‘To love me whatever I do.’ It ended with: ‘To give up everything and everybody for me in the last resort.’”
“But then the new friendship progressed with startling rapidity. Vita was ready to adore Virginia Woolf the writer. And Virginia – only beginning, at 40, to find her feet as a writer, only recently still convinced that Lytton or indeed Leonard had a better chance than she of being remembered – was ready to be adored.”
“Virginia was querying the very nature of her relations with Vita, left so ardent in January – ‘& now what?’ Virginia asked herself whether she was indeed in love with Vita – ‘But what is love?’ Vita’s being ‘in love’ with Virginia was itself an appeal – it ‘excites & flatters, & interests.’”
“Love for Virginia was a very different thing to love for Violet – ‘a mental thing, a spiritual thing if you like, an intellectual thing, and she inspires a feeling of tenderness which I suppose is because of her funny mixture of hardness and softness – the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad again.’ Vita felt protective – besides being flattered, as she frankly said, by Virginia’s love. She was, moreover, ‘scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don’t know what effect it would have, you see: and that is a fire with which I have no wish to play.’”
“I don’t think I have ever loved anybody so much, in the way of friendship’.”
“they had something in common ‘which I shall never find in anyone else. A sharpness, a sense of reality …”
“She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may … have an eye on me”
“He was, as Nigel Nicolson puts it, to be ‘replaced by someone to whom he could not hold a candle, a woman, a genius’, and one whose romance with Vita could work in tandem with Vita’s love for Harold.”
“described Vita at this point as being literally in the prime of life, ‘an animal at the height of its powers, a beautiful flower in full bloom. She was very handsome, dashing, aristocratic, lordly, almost arrogant.”
“If one could be friendly with women’, Virginia wrote, ‘what a pleasure – the relationship so secret & private compared with relations with men.”
“Virginia was, Vita wrote two days later, ‘one of the most mentally exciting people I know’. Their friendship had come on by leaps and bounds in those two days, but though Vita loved her she could not be ‘in love’ with her”
“Virginia would continue to be much taken with Vita’s legs – ‘pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung.”
“Virginia was drawn to Vita’s ‘maturity and full breastedness’ – the sense that Vita was ‘in full sail on high tides’, while Virginia herself was confined (by her own constraints, and by Leonard’s watchful care) to a quiet life in the backwaters.”
“her very motherhood – ‘her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman.’”
“Vita herself was aware of this, Virginia noted, ‘& so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone.”
“she wrote that she was ‘reduced to a thing that wants Virginia’ – it was incredible how essential to her Virginia had become. In the power balance of their relationship, that revelation might not help her cause – ‘But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and standoffish with you: I love you too much for that”
“Virginia, left behind, had noted in her diary how ‘I feel a lack of stimulus, of marked days, now Vita is gone’. She would later tell Vita that she had been startled and terrified by her own unhappiness”
“I wish I didn’t love you so much. No I don’t though; that’s not true.”
“Virginia had written to Vita: ‘In all London, you and I alone like being married.”
“The rules of the game they made for themselves suggested that this was one that two could play”
“suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and it’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind … Shall you mind? Say yes, or No.’ There could be only one answer: Vita was, she said, thrilled and terrified, but what fun! Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson would call Virginia’s Orlando ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
“Orlando would survive through more than three centuries, so that the story ends only on the very day on the book’s publication: 11 October 1928. Orlando at that time is still only 36 – Vita’s age – and loving the same things as she does: writing poetry; trees; salukis, spaniels and elkhounds; the heraldic leopards of the Sackville family crest, pearls and red Spanish wine.”
“I’ve lived in you all these months – coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?’ Vita, ‘terrified’, wrote back that she had always foreseen this danger. ‘I won’t be fictitious. I won’t be loved solely in an astral body, or in Virginia’s world”
“As Virginia put it: in every human being ‘a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place’, as, of course, it had in Orlando. She believed that it was ‘fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. There had to be some collaboration in the mind, some marriage of opposites between the woman and the man, for the art of creation to succeed.”
“a letter Virginia wrote to Vita shortly acknowledged – or was it more a complaint? – that ‘you know you love now several people, women I mean, better, oftener, more carnally than me.’ She described Vita once as falling in love with every pretty woman ‘just like a man’.”
“Virginia was ‘on the rim of everyone’s life … that the human contact others can achieve is not for such as her … And so I wanted you to turn on the human tap somehow”
“I’m getting old myself … and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia’.”
“Her friendship with Vita was over, she wrote in her diary. ‘Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as a ripe fruit falls.’ Vita’s voice calling her name still had the power to thrill, but then disillusionment set in. ‘And she has grown very fat, very much the indolent country lady, run to seed, incurious now about books; has written no poetry; only kindles about dogs, flowers, & new buildings.”
“Someone who met Virginia in these years described her as having the marks of all her dreams imprinted on her face”
“I could not write about this to anyone I did not love as I love you.”
“But Vita wrote every few days to Harold, and he to her. It was only to her diary that she admitted she was desperately unhappy, now sure she did not love him. Weeks later, however, she was telling her mother he was all her life”
“Rosamund felt able to tell Vita, ‘Men may come and men may go, but I go on for ever.’ Vita would write in her memoir that ‘men didn’t attract me, that I didn’t think of them in what is called “that way”. Women did.””
“Virginia was not ready to give up her freedom, she wanted to ‘go on as before’. But Vanessa wrote to Leonard assuring him that ‘You’re the only person who I know whom I can imagine as her husband.’”
“The very strength of his desire could sometimes make her angry … ‘is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments – when you kissed me the other day was one – when I feel no more than a rock.’”
“She had some feeling for him which was ‘permanent, and growing’, but she could still pass from hot to cold in a flash. She was half afraid of herself. ‘I feel I must give you everything; and that if I can’t, well, marriage would only be second-best for you as well as for me.’”
“Virginia wrote to a friend that she had lost her virginity and found ‘the climax immensely exaggerated’, but even that limited enthusiasm may have overstated the case. Leonard had always desired a marriage, he wrote, in which he could be ‘mind to mind and soul to soul’. But physical desire was part of the package.”
“she now began expressing anger towards Leonard. (Vanessa would later write that she had taken against all men.) As she left the nursing home in August to celebrate their wedding anniversary she became delusional, convinced everyone was laughing at her and refusing to eat.”
“Virginia complained that she rarely saw her mother alone. Later she would write, in A Room of One’s Own, of her own efforts to strangle the long-suffering, self-abnegating ‘Angel in the House’ that her mother’s life represented. Had she not killed the Angel, ‘she would have killed me.”
“It was a world of daily walks in Kensington Gardens where Virginia sailed her toy ship on the Round Pond, of shared stories the children made up, of instructive talks with her father, after their mother had taught her daughters their first lessons. Of, as Virginia later wrote, ‘plain duties’ and ‘appropriate pleasures’”
“she sought to separate herself and even, in the years ahead, use Orlando to challenge his idea of biography.”
“Virginia nonetheless attempted to throw herself out of a window, albeit one on the ground floor. She was suffering from hallucinations, hearing the birds singing in Greek and the King, Edward VII, ‘using the foulest possible language’ in the azaleas. (Perhaps the effects of the hypnotic drugs she would have been given must be taken into account.) Virginia herself attributed the voices to overeating, and sought to starve herself out of hearing them.”
“‘Put some affection into your letters’, she would beg Violet Dickinson. ‘My food is affection!’ Describing their relationship as a ‘romantic friendship’, Virginia would present Violet with ‘Friendship’s Gallery’, a fantastical personal tribute typed up in violet ink.”
“Virginia declared that ‘women are my line, not these inanimate creatures’. Duncan Grant remembered that for some years Virginia’s manner towards men would be ‘aloof and a little fierce’.”
“Virginia, however, was, Lytton said, ‘young, wild, inquisitive, discontented, and longing to be in love.”
“the Stephen sisters were photographed scantily dressed as characters from a Gauguin painting, ‘incredibly beautiful and very naked’, at the Post-Impressionist Ball, held to raise money for the suffrage cause.”
“Virginia herself was beginning to accept the general opinion that she should marry. She would soon be 30. ‘To be 29 and unmarried – to be a failure – childless – insane too, no writer.”
“He relished ‘a circle in which complete freedom of thought and speech was extended to both sexes.’ ‘I have always been greatly attracted by the undiluted female mind, as well as by the female body’, he wrote later in his autobiography”
“Magnificence, intelligence, wit, beauty, directness”
“exploring her conflicted feelings. ‘I say to myself. Anyhow, you’ll be quite happy with him: and he will give you companionship, children, and a busy life.’ But then she swore she was not prepared to look upon marriage as a profession.”
“‘We ask a great deal of life, don’t we?’, she asked rhetorically. But through the spring they saw each other almost every day: walks in Regent’s Park; concerts; attending the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic”
“Virginia ‘never had understood or sympathised with sexual passion in men”
“By the time the honeymoon couple reached Venice, Virginia was suffering from her tell-tale headaches and refusing to eat.”
“the possibility of a recurrence of the madness would forever be a third party in her marriage to Leonard.”
“Vita was able to convince herself that her life was complete.”
“their nicknames for each other were Mandril and Mongoose”
“through the course of their marriage, she would cast Leonard as the protective but also repressive parent”
“Virginia would tell Vanessa that she had married Leonard because he was ‘absolutely dependable & like a rock which was what she badly wanted.”
“violent emotional instability and oscillation … a refusal to admit or accept facts in the outside world’.”
“But she seems also in a sense to have valued the ‘madness’ itself. ‘As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at’ she wrote years later, ‘in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does.”
“The ‘quicksand’ intimacy between these two women writers would comprise both admiration and jealousy”
“The Bloomsbury Group was no longer as tight-knit as it once had been. As Virginia told her diary: ‘the worst of it is how seldom we meet … months pass without a sight … But when we do meet there is nothing to complain of.”
“As ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like’ she no longer cared if reviews were mixed, if she was either ‘a great writer or a nincompoop”
“Violet had struck the secret of my duality; she attacked me about it, and I made no attempt to conceal it from her or from myself … I talked out the whole of myself with absolute sincerity and pain.’ Violet’s response, as Vita describes it, was that of the expert seducer, but Vita herself was just drunk with liberation – ‘the liberation of half my personality’. When she and Violet went away to Cornwall together, saying they wanted to see the spring flowers, Vita felt ‘like a person translated, or re-born’.”
“Harold wrote to Vita that he wished he were ‘more violent and less affectionate’; Vita wrote of her wanderlust – in which she comprised a running away from the ordinary life, the humdrum, stagnation, ‘bovine complacency”
“In the fantasy world where she and Violet now dwelt, they took on the Romany names of Mitya and Lushka.”
“Vita had always perceived two identities within herself – Violet called them Jekyll and Hyde. Vita said she was frightened of the Hyde side: ‘it’s so brutal and hard and savage, and Harold knows nothing of it; it would drive over his soul like an armoured chariot.’ But this was the side to which Violet called”
“She loved more deeply, less passionately’ than in the days when she had run away with Violet.”
“Harold could write about Vita’s future affairs as her ‘muddles’. (Virginia would describe her ‘floundering habits’.) Vita called his, his ‘fun’.”
“Vita is absolutely devoted to Harold, but there is nothing whatever sexual between them, which is strange in such a young and good-looking couple. She is not in the least jealous of him, and willingly allows him to relieve himself with anyone.”
“Vita: ‘we are sure of each other, in this odd, strange, detached, intimate, mystical relationship which we could never explain to any outside person.’ Her ‘creed’ for him began with: ‘To love me whatever I do.’ It ended with: ‘To give up everything and everybody for me in the last resort.’”
“But then the new friendship progressed with startling rapidity. Vita was ready to adore Virginia Woolf the writer. And Virginia – only beginning, at 40, to find her feet as a writer, only recently still convinced that Lytton or indeed Leonard had a better chance than she of being remembered – was ready to be adored.”
“Virginia was querying the very nature of her relations with Vita, left so ardent in January – ‘& now what?’ Virginia asked herself whether she was indeed in love with Vita – ‘But what is love?’ Vita’s being ‘in love’ with Virginia was itself an appeal – it ‘excites & flatters, & interests.’”
“Love for Virginia was a very different thing to love for Violet – ‘a mental thing, a spiritual thing if you like, an intellectual thing, and she inspires a feeling of tenderness which I suppose is because of her funny mixture of hardness and softness – the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad again.’ Vita felt protective – besides being flattered, as she frankly said, by Virginia’s love. She was, moreover, ‘scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don’t know what effect it would have, you see: and that is a fire with which I have no wish to play.’”
“I don’t think I have ever loved anybody so much, in the way of friendship’.”
“they had something in common ‘which I shall never find in anyone else. A sharpness, a sense of reality …”
“She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may … have an eye on me”
“He was, as Nigel Nicolson puts it, to be ‘replaced by someone to whom he could not hold a candle, a woman, a genius’, and one whose romance with Vita could work in tandem with Vita’s love for Harold.”
“described Vita at this point as being literally in the prime of life, ‘an animal at the height of its powers, a beautiful flower in full bloom. She was very handsome, dashing, aristocratic, lordly, almost arrogant.”
“If one could be friendly with women’, Virginia wrote, ‘what a pleasure – the relationship so secret & private compared with relations with men.”
“Virginia was, Vita wrote two days later, ‘one of the most mentally exciting people I know’. Their friendship had come on by leaps and bounds in those two days, but though Vita loved her she could not be ‘in love’ with her”
“Virginia would continue to be much taken with Vita’s legs – ‘pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung.”
“Virginia was drawn to Vita’s ‘maturity and full breastedness’ – the sense that Vita was ‘in full sail on high tides’, while Virginia herself was confined (by her own constraints, and by Leonard’s watchful care) to a quiet life in the backwaters.”
“her very motherhood – ‘her being in short (what I have never been) a real woman.’”
“Vita herself was aware of this, Virginia noted, ‘& so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always most wished from everyone.”
“she wrote that she was ‘reduced to a thing that wants Virginia’ – it was incredible how essential to her Virginia had become. In the power balance of their relationship, that revelation might not help her cause – ‘But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and standoffish with you: I love you too much for that”
“Virginia, left behind, had noted in her diary how ‘I feel a lack of stimulus, of marked days, now Vita is gone’. She would later tell Vita that she had been startled and terrified by her own unhappiness”
“I wish I didn’t love you so much. No I don’t though; that’s not true.”
“Virginia had written to Vita: ‘In all London, you and I alone like being married.”
“The rules of the game they made for themselves suggested that this was one that two could play”
“suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and it’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind … Shall you mind? Say yes, or No.’ There could be only one answer: Vita was, she said, thrilled and terrified, but what fun! Vita’s son Nigel Nicolson would call Virginia’s Orlando ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
“Orlando would survive through more than three centuries, so that the story ends only on the very day on the book’s publication: 11 October 1928. Orlando at that time is still only 36 – Vita’s age – and loving the same things as she does: writing poetry; trees; salukis, spaniels and elkhounds; the heraldic leopards of the Sackville family crest, pearls and red Spanish wine.”
“I’ve lived in you all these months – coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?’ Vita, ‘terrified’, wrote back that she had always foreseen this danger. ‘I won’t be fictitious. I won’t be loved solely in an astral body, or in Virginia’s world”
“As Virginia put it: in every human being ‘a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place’, as, of course, it had in Orlando. She believed that it was ‘fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. There had to be some collaboration in the mind, some marriage of opposites between the woman and the man, for the art of creation to succeed.”
“a letter Virginia wrote to Vita shortly acknowledged – or was it more a complaint? – that ‘you know you love now several people, women I mean, better, oftener, more carnally than me.’ She described Vita once as falling in love with every pretty woman ‘just like a man’.”
“Virginia was ‘on the rim of everyone’s life … that the human contact others can achieve is not for such as her … And so I wanted you to turn on the human tap somehow”
“I’m getting old myself … and I come to feel more and more how difficult it is to collect oneself into one Virginia’.”
“Her friendship with Vita was over, she wrote in her diary. ‘Not with a quarrel, not with a bang, but as a ripe fruit falls.’ Vita’s voice calling her name still had the power to thrill, but then disillusionment set in. ‘And she has grown very fat, very much the indolent country lady, run to seed, incurious now about books; has written no poetry; only kindles about dogs, flowers, & new buildings.”
“Someone who met Virginia in these years described her as having the marks of all her dreams imprinted on her face”
“I could not write about this to anyone I did not love as I love you.”
October 3, 2022
A good book that offers a look into the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. I enjoyed the physicality of the book as it has a fabric cover and is the size of a catalogue, and there are many pictures of the two women, people in their lives, their houses, gardens and the interior design of their living spaces. Yet, after having previously read the love letters between the two, this book did feel very surface-level and rushed. I would recommend reading the letters exchanged between the two if you really want to understand their characters and their dynamic. It is much better to understand things with their words rather than rely on a narrator as you are ultimately subjected to their censorship because they decided on what was significant enough to include in this book.
September 21, 2024
Wonderful book, written with a clear love and deep respect for both women. The story of Virginia and Vita, together and as individuals, is wonderful, tragic, touching and beautiful. The bond they had as loyal friends above all is inspiring, and the end of their lives and the people connected to them is so sad and emotional. Wonderful book, this is the second one I've read from this writer, and I'm never disappointed.
I can only think how lucky they both were to meet each other in life, and how lucky they were with the men who were their husbands, all of them so aware of what loyalty and love means beyond conventions.
I can only think how lucky they both were to meet each other in life, and how lucky they were with the men who were their husbands, all of them so aware of what loyalty and love means beyond conventions.
August 4, 2020
This is such a gorgeous book filled with beautiful photos and interesting, well-written text to go alongside it. Going into this I knew very little about either Vita or Virginia, but I now feel like I have a least a bit of a grasp on who they were as women and writers, as well as their relationship with one another and the people around them.
September 7, 2020
This double biography of Vita and Virginia is (or it felt to me) very brief, however it did offer a lot of information I did not yet know, making for a very quick and delightful read on these two fantastic women.
July 31, 2019
Love love love love love love love love
Want to Read
April 16, 2020I learned of this book here: https://theliterarysisters.wordpress....
April 22, 2020
literally one of my most prized possessions
December 31, 2020
Absolutamente precioso, tanto de forma como de contenido.
February 24, 2023
I enjoyed reading this book🖤💚
June 14, 2025
actually quite interesting
July 7, 2025
More V&V…
November 23, 2020
A straightforward, brief and understanding approach to Vita and Virginia lives, great for begginers who don't know a lot about the bloomsbury world. The book doesn't focus that much on Virginia and Vita relationship (it is not the main subject), it also addresses topics like mental health, relationships (family, marriage, love, frienship), trauma, creative creation... in a very respectful and amusing way. It is also a very lightweight reading thanks to the several photos and letter extracts that accompany the main text.
May 13, 2019
While not the most detailed of biographies (although, for that, it makes more sense to read V&V’s individual biographies), Sarah Gristwood created something very beautiful here – with some more updated takes on their relationship, thank God! My favourite part about it, though, was probably just how gorgeous this book is. It feels like a very special possession to have, and I adored the collection of photographs she chose to include. A beautiful little summary of their life and relationship!
April 7, 2020
This book is very rewarding, I recommend you to read this book if you are a literary fan of either of the writers or want to explore an unusual encounter of a historic episode.
I think this is a book that will stay with me for a long time as it made me admire the writers and their writing more dearly, for I grew fonder of their existence.
To read the summary - Please check this book review - https://wordsbake.blogspot.com/2020/0...
I think this is a book that will stay with me for a long time as it made me admire the writers and their writing more dearly, for I grew fonder of their existence.
To read the summary - Please check this book review - https://wordsbake.blogspot.com/2020/0...
May 16, 2019
I did not want this book to end - but of course it had to with the deaths of these two remarkable women. The author brings these women to life and the complicated lives they led as respectable married women who also both had numerous lesbian lovers through out their marriages. And the setting in time - first half of the twentieth century - made this book a favorite biography.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews