<p>For many years, the ‘Vita & Virginia Bot’ on Twitter (now X) posted epistolary fragments of the love letters exchanged by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West every few hours every day. The Bot used a very old and expensive edition of their published correspondence for this public service, and many of us were in its sway, enjoying delicious sentences such as "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia." When, in 2021, a major publishing house finally published a selection of these love letters, our bookstore wasted no time in getting hold of many copies. </p>.<p>Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West is a chronological collection of letters and diary entries of the unfurling intimacy and connection between Vita and Virginia from 1922 to 1941. The letters are lush, and the women are full of desire and admiration for one another as they gossip and exchange feelings and ideas. This edition offers snippets from Virginia Woolf's diary and Vita Sackville-West's letters to her husband, Harold Nicolson, giving us a deeper and more complete context of their relationship over a long period. This queer affair of love and connection (and even disconnection) between literary greats a hundred years ago is a treat you should dip into at leisure.</p>.<p>Vita Sackville-West was quite a well-established writer at the time she met Virginia Woolf, more famous and well-known at the time that they became friends. She had an unconventional marriage with diplomat Harold Nicolson, very polyamorous and very close. Born into aristocracy, she travelled the world. She was known to cross-dress and make the best of her freedoms. Virginia's was a quieter intellectual life, given her struggle with what we would now call mental illness. But it was a prolific life, rich in ideas, subversion and thought, surrounded as she was by the iconoclastic Bloomsbury group while running Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard Woolf. </p>.<p>Their connection to one another was intellectual, spiritual and erotic all at once, and sometimes more of one than the other. The letters are full of longing, and their love for one another takes many forms over time. Both often ask themselves, "Am I in love?" and wonder what love itself is, in delicious detail. They talk about their writing and one another's work: Mrs Dalloway, The Seducers of Ecuador, and Pepito. In what is perhaps the most romantic literary act possible, Virginia modelled Orlando — a genre-defying, shapeshifting and gender-bending novel — on Vita. The novel also brought Virginia into fame and the canon. </p>.<p>What is missing in this collection of letters is a portrait of what the two women's time together might have been like, in cadence and conversation, in person. There are movies which have tried to imagine parts: Sally Potter's Orlando, Stephen Daldry's The Hours, and Chanya Button's Vita and Virginia. The women's correspondence ended with Virginia Woolf's death by suicide in the River Ouse (about which Olivia Laing writes in To The River) and Vita's letter to Harold about this tragic news. Vita is said to have spent many years wishing she could have saved Virginia. She is today remembered less for her literary achievements than for her friendship and affair with Virginia.</p>.<p>I discovered much later that Virginia Woolf had a great queer love, as English literature courses and the canon had put her back in the closet. Reading the love letters and their words to one another is still a revelation, and their intrepid and fierce love for one another in a time when this form of love had no visible place in the world is an inspiration. To leave you with a fantastic letter: “4 February 1929. A woman writes that she has to stop and kiss the page when she reads Orlando... The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you. Virginia”.</p>.<p>Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.</p>.<p><em>The author is a writer and editor based in Mysuru. She enjoys non-fiction about politics and society and the punny brilliance of Anthea Bell.</em></p>
<p>For many years, the ‘Vita & Virginia Bot’ on Twitter (now X) posted epistolary fragments of the love letters exchanged by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West every few hours every day. The Bot used a very old and expensive edition of their published correspondence for this public service, and many of us were in its sway, enjoying delicious sentences such as "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia." When, in 2021, a major publishing house finally published a selection of these love letters, our bookstore wasted no time in getting hold of many copies. </p>.<p>Love Letters: Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West is a chronological collection of letters and diary entries of the unfurling intimacy and connection between Vita and Virginia from 1922 to 1941. The letters are lush, and the women are full of desire and admiration for one another as they gossip and exchange feelings and ideas. This edition offers snippets from Virginia Woolf's diary and Vita Sackville-West's letters to her husband, Harold Nicolson, giving us a deeper and more complete context of their relationship over a long period. This queer affair of love and connection (and even disconnection) between literary greats a hundred years ago is a treat you should dip into at leisure.</p>.<p>Vita Sackville-West was quite a well-established writer at the time she met Virginia Woolf, more famous and well-known at the time that they became friends. She had an unconventional marriage with diplomat Harold Nicolson, very polyamorous and very close. Born into aristocracy, she travelled the world. She was known to cross-dress and make the best of her freedoms. Virginia's was a quieter intellectual life, given her struggle with what we would now call mental illness. But it was a prolific life, rich in ideas, subversion and thought, surrounded as she was by the iconoclastic Bloomsbury group while running Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard Woolf. </p>.<p>Their connection to one another was intellectual, spiritual and erotic all at once, and sometimes more of one than the other. The letters are full of longing, and their love for one another takes many forms over time. Both often ask themselves, "Am I in love?" and wonder what love itself is, in delicious detail. They talk about their writing and one another's work: Mrs Dalloway, The Seducers of Ecuador, and Pepito. In what is perhaps the most romantic literary act possible, Virginia modelled Orlando — a genre-defying, shapeshifting and gender-bending novel — on Vita. The novel also brought Virginia into fame and the canon. </p>.<p>What is missing in this collection of letters is a portrait of what the two women's time together might have been like, in cadence and conversation, in person. There are movies which have tried to imagine parts: Sally Potter's Orlando, Stephen Daldry's The Hours, and Chanya Button's Vita and Virginia. The women's correspondence ended with Virginia Woolf's death by suicide in the River Ouse (about which Olivia Laing writes in To The River) and Vita's letter to Harold about this tragic news. Vita is said to have spent many years wishing she could have saved Virginia. She is today remembered less for her literary achievements than for her friendship and affair with Virginia.</p>.<p>I discovered much later that Virginia Woolf had a great queer love, as English literature courses and the canon had put her back in the closet. Reading the love letters and their words to one another is still a revelation, and their intrepid and fierce love for one another in a time when this form of love had no visible place in the world is an inspiration. To leave you with a fantastic letter: “4 February 1929. A woman writes that she has to stop and kiss the page when she reads Orlando... The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you. Virginia”.</p>.<p>Piqued is a monthly column in which the staff of Champaca Bookstore bring us unheard voices and stories from their shelves.</p>.<p><em>The author is a writer and editor based in Mysuru. She enjoys non-fiction about politics and society and the punny brilliance of Anthea Bell.</em></p>