Did you know that a student researcher found a 1932 love letter from Virginia Woolf to Vita Sackville-West decades after Sackville-West’s deathin 1962?
That letter was for sale recently at the 44th California International Antiquarian Book Fair in San Francisco. The letter asks, “When am I going to see you? because you know you love now several people, women I mean, physically I mean, better, oftener, more carnally than me.”
It was Woolf’s only known writing about their physical relationship, said Peter Harrington, a London bookseller who offered the manuscript for $51,000.
Woolf and Sackville-West became romantically involved in the 1920s. Woolf’s pseudo-biography Orlando (1928) was based on Sackville-West and is set in her family home in Kent, Knole. Her son, Nigel Nic0lson, has described the novel as “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature.”
Nicolson writes about his recollections of his mother’s relationship with Woolf in Portrait of a Marriage (1973).
You must be logged in to post a comment.