Love Letters by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

Love Letters by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West came upon my radar because of two things. One, Ariel mentioned it on the Books Unbound podcast. Two, I was looking for something for the "memoir that explores queerness" prompt for the Pop Sugar Reading Challenge. All the memoirs I was finding were TOO SAD or TOO DENSE and I just wanted to read a love story. Don't be mad at me, friends - it's been A YEAR. So I read this because I thought it would be my memoir replacement and it's my reading challenge and I make the rules.

THIS BOOK IS THE BEST. Sackville-West was about a decade younger and much more famous than Virginia Woolf. They met at a dinner party and Woolf wrote in her diary that Sackville-West "is a grenadier; hard; handsome; manly; inclined to double chin" (page 1) and Sackville-West wrote in a letter to her husband that she'd "rarely taken such a fancy to anyone" (page 2). They were both married and their husbands play occasional roles in the love affair.

Sackville-West is always SO EFFUSIVE in her praise of Woolf, who is frequently bedridden and much more needy about her writing than Sackville-West is. Consider these lines:

Altogether after reading your first letter I felt like a stroked cat. (page 14)

Lord, you ARE a good writer, aren't you? And a good critic. I take off my hat; I sweep it off, so that its plume raises the dust. (page 207)

I am half in love with Sackville-West myself.

And Woolf was not to be underestimated in her praise of Sackville-West. There were lines that if I would have rolled my eyes at in a fictional novel, but made me squee in delight when I read them in these letters.

[from Woolf's diary] ...she shines in the grocer's shop in Sevenoaks with a candle-lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. (page 35-36)

How on earth have you mastered the art of being subtle, profound, humorous, arch, coy, satirical, affectionate, intimate, profane, colloquial, solemn, sensible, poetical, and a dear old shabby sheepdog - on the wireless? (page 196)

YOU GUYS! I wrote down so many notes and highlighted so many passages. I don't say this often, but I want a physical copy of this book of my own. I want it on my bookshelves. I want to reread it every ten years and fall in love with Vita all over again. 

The editors did such a good job of highlighting letters and diary entries that told the arc of their relationship. Even the final paragraph of editor's notes "Vita died from cancer on 2 June 1962. Her writing desk at Sissinghurst remains as she left it, decorated with two photos: one is of her husband, and the other is of Virginia." (page 270) Virginia died more than twenty years before Vita. WHAT A LOVE STORY. *sob* (Note: I didn't actually cry reading this book. But I did feel my heart grow ten sizes larger.)

Highly recommend if  you're into this sort of thing. I didn't know I was into this sort of thing, BUT I AM. 100/5 stars. No notes. This is my favorite book I've read all year. 

Lines of note:

Do keep it up - your belief that I achieve things. I assure you, I have need of all your illusions after 6 weeks of lying in bed, drinking milk, now and then turning over and answering a letter. We go back on Friday; what have I achieved? Nothing. Hardly a word written, masses complete trash read, you not seen...(page 27)

LOL. I feel for Woolf. When I had COVID, I just slept and read. I don't think I read trash, but I'm not above it. 

She is doomed to go to Persia; and I mind the thought so much (thinking to lose sight of her for five years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her. (page 32)

Woolf made me laugh with this. It was hard for to admit in her own diary that she loved Sackville-West. 

The rest of the time I read Proust. As no one on board has ever heard of Proust, but has enough French to translate the title, I am looked at rather askance for the numerous volumes of Sodome et Gomorrhe which litter the decks.

But why did he take ten pages to say what could be said in ten words? (page 50)

Vita is HILARIOUS. I love a good Proust insult. 

How nice would it be, wouldn't it, to get out of the rut of one's own thoughts for a bit; to alter the whole shape of the mind; to walk suddenly into a mental landscape as different as the landscape of Central Asia is from that of Kent. (page 102)

This is how she wrote in CASUAL LETTERS. What a writer. 

It is a very queer thing, being ill, when you are not used to it. I suppose in the course of time, if one became really bed ridden, one would evolve ingenious methods of dealing with the difficulties of bed-life [...] for at present everything seems to fall on the floor or else become submerged under blankets and sheets. Also litter - what does one do about litter? My room is like Hampstead Heath after a Bank Holiday. (page 188-189)

I am not sure this would have resonated with me so much, but my recent bout of COVID and the state of our bedroom when I finally felt human again made this passage shine for me. 

Life is too complicated - I sometimes feel that I can't manage it at all. (page 204)

Now this could be the header to my blog. 

Words I looked up:

gentian (page 9) - family of flowers notable for their mostly large trumpet-shaped flowers, which are often of an intense blue hue

androsace (page 9) - flowering plant commonly known as rock jasmine

arras (page 40) -  a wall hanging or screen of tapestry often Flemish in origin

theorbo (page 53) - a plucked string instrument of the lute family, with an extended neck that houses the second pegbox most commonly used during the Baroque musical period

bingle (page 96) - a collision, especially an automobile accident

Hawthornden Prize (page 116) - One of Britain’s oldest literary awards; it was established in 1919 by Alice Warrender. This £25,000 prize is awarded annually to a British, Irish or British-based author for a work of “imaginative literature” – including poetry, novels, history, biography and creative non-fiction – published in the previous calendar year. The prize is for a book in English, not for a translation. Sackville-West was an early winner in 1926.  

somnifiene (page 174) - no idea? a sleeping pill maybe?

white feather campaign (page 243) - The white feather is a widely recognized propaganda symbol. It has, among other things, represented cowardice or conscientious pacifism; as in A. E. W. Mason's 1902 book The Four Feathers. In Britain during the First World War it was often given to males out of uniform by women to shame them publicly into signing up.

Hat mentions (why hats?):
She was dressed in ringed yellow jersey, and large hat...(page 12)
My heart goes out to you over the hat...(page 57)
It was very odd indeed, orange and black, with a hat to match - a sort of top-hat made of straw with two orange feathers like Mercury's wings...(page 65)
This is the last day of June and finds me in a black pit of despair because Clive laughed at my new hat...(page 68)
Oh dear I was wearing the hat without thinking it was good or bad...there was Nessa tripping along in the dark, in her quiet black hat...Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you're wearing! (page 69)
...utterly impossible to do anything with a hat like that. (page 69)
[Michael Arlen] Best known for his 1924 novel The Green Hat. (footnote on page 123)
I had no hat. (page 148)
...I'm glad you have no hat on. (page 178)
I can hardly find 8 inches x 8 inches of space on my table to put this paper on. And there isn't a chair to sit on, - all loaded up with books and papers and cowboy hats. (page 216) 

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Have you ever read anything by Virginia Woolf or Vita Sackville-West? Do you like to read collections of letters?