Virginia Woolf’s Affair with Vita Sackville-West

After Virginia Woolf met fellow writer Vita Sackville-West in the early 1920s, the two women had a romantic affair that lasted for a number of years.

Virginia and Vita first met at a dinner party in 1922. After learning that Vita was a writer, Virginia invited her to publish a novel with her small press, Hogarth Press. Eventually, their work relationship blossomed into a friendship. Vita and her husband Harold Nicholson visited the Woolf’s in February of 1923, after which Virginia wrote in her diary:

“We had a surprise visit from the Nicholson’s. She [Vita Sackville-West] is a pronounced sapphist, & may, thinks Ethel Sands, have an eye on me, old though I am. Nature may have sharpened her faculties. Snob as I am, I trace her passions – 500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine. I fancy the tang is gone.”

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Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West at Monk’s House in 1933

Vita was from an aristocratic family, the Sackville-West’s of Sevenoaks in Kent where they lived in their ancestral home called Knole house. Vita and her husband, who were both bisexual and both writers, had an open marriage.

Although Virginia was unimpressed by Vita when they first met, she quickly found herself smitten by Vita’s aristocratic upbringing, her intelligence, her beauty and her family. They remained friends for a few years before they began their sexual affair in December of 1925, after which Virginia wrote in her diary:

“Vita shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks…pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung…There is her maturity and full-breastedness: her being so much in full sail on the high tides, where I am coasting down backwaters; her capacity I mean to take the floor in any company, to represent her country, to visit Chatsworth, to control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood…her in short (what I have never been) a real woman.”

Surprisingly, Virginia’s husband Leonard knew about the affair and didn’t object, understanding how important it was for Virginia to be happy. In her diary on November 23, 1926, Virginia described a visit from Vita and Leonard’s reaction to the affair:

“She was sitting on the floor in her red velvet jacket & red striped silk shirt, I knotting her pearls into heaps of great clustered eggs. She had come up to see me – so we go on – a spirited, creditable affair, I think, innocent (spiritually) & all gain, I think, rather a bore for Leonard, but not enough to worry him. The truth is one has room for a good many relationships.”

This affair continued for a few years. When Vita traveled, which she did often, the two would write love letters to each other. In 1926, Virginia wrote the following letter to Vita, who was on a trip to Persia:

Vita Sackville-West in 1913

“Look here Vita — throw over your man, and we’ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I’ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads — They won’t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.”

Virginia was so enamored by Vita that she wrote a novel about her in 1927 titled “Orlando,” in which the main character is a gender-crossing aristocrat who lives over for over 400 years and has many relationships with both women and men. Vita’s son, Nigel Nicholson, once referred to “Orlando” as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

Virginia, though, was not Vita’s first lesbian lover and definitely not her last. Virginia often found herself fuming with jealousy over Vita’s other lovers in her life and felt, as the older woman in the relationship, unwanted and dowdy. The affair eventually ended sometime in 1927 or 1928 but the friendship survived and the two remained close friends until Virginia’s death in 1941.