“I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don't really resent it.”

—Vita Sackville West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf dated 21 January 1926.

“I wish you could live in my brain for a week. It is washed with the most violent waves of emotion… And you think it all fixed and settled. Do we then know nobody?—only our own version of them, which, as likely as not, are emanations from ourselves.”

—Letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville West, 1926.

“I am a misery without you. So dont, I beg, be foolish walking over mountains. If you break a leg, I break my heart, remember.”

—Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West (Feb 28th 1927)

“She is at once distant and human, she remains silent as long as she does not want to speak, but then she expresses herself magnificently well.”

—Vita SackVille West (on Virginia Woolf)

“One's love for Virginia is a very different thing: 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 the terror of going mad again. She makes me feel protective. Also she loves me, which flatters and pleases me. Also...I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of her being absolutely untouchable in my eyes. So all that remains is an unknown quantity. I somehow resent to leave her and each time I do, I question each bit of truthfulness towards my emotions. But darling, Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way; there is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea...I have gone to bed with her (twice) but that's all; and I told you that before, I think. Now you know all about it; and I hope I haven't shocked you.”

—Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to her husband Harold Nicholson dated 25 April 1926.

“I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. Oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly.You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.”

—Vita Sackville West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf dated 21 January 1926.

“Was your telegram intended to convey a command or merely a message? I mean, should it be written "Love Virginia!" - an imperative, - or "Love. Virginia."? Whichever way you read it, it was very nice and unexpected, and if a command it has been obeyed.”

—Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, January 1928

“In their letters Woolf and Sackville-West imagined each other. As they took photographs of each other — but almost never appeared in one together — so, too, did they pose and frame each other. How they imagined each other affected how they saw themselves. Sackville-West wanted Woolf to respect her as a writer. Woolf struggled to see herself as a sexual being. Both asked the impossible. Imagining their lives spilled over onto their thinking about the construction and representation of gender, sexuality, and subjectivity.”

—Karyn Z. Sproles, Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

“If you'll make me up, I'll make you.”

—Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 23 September 1925.

“It is not going too far to suggest that her very name seemed made for her: Virginia Woolf. She could not have been better called, and was fortunate both as a baby at the font and in marriage. Tenuousness and purity were in her baptismal name, and a hint of the fang in the other.”

—Vita Sackville-West in a letter to a friend (1941).

“Like a child, I think if you were here, I should be happy. You are like a clean hare's bone that one finds on a moor with emeralds stuck about it.”

—Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 23 March 1927.

Vita Sackville-West / Talk on Virginia Woolf and Orlando

The Bloomsbury Group

Vita Sackille-West discusses the inspiration behind Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.

Suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita..

“I am light headed at the moment; why, heaven knows. I have been walking alone down a valley to Rat Farm, if that means anything to you: and that quiet and the cold and the loveliness - one hare, the downs blue green; the stacks, like cakes cut in half - I say all this so excited me; and my own life suddenly became so impressive to me, not as usual shooting meteor like through the sky, but solitary and still that, as I say - well how is the sentence to end? Figure to yourself that sentence, like the shooting star, extinct in an abyss, a dome; of blue; the color of night: which, if dearest Vita you can follow, is now my condition: as I sit waiting for dinner, over the logs. [...] Do you really love me? Much? Passionately not reasonably? ”

—Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West dated 3 January 1929.

“You can go on cutting my heart in two for as long as you wish.”

—Virginia Woolf in a letter to Vita Sackville-West
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