The Letters of

Vita Sackville-West
to Virginia Woolf
Edited by
Louise DeSalvo and
Mitchell Leaska
Introduction by Mitchell Leask
 The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf © by Nigel Nicolson 1984.
Introduction © by Mitchell Leaska 1984.
Text and commentary © by Mitchell Leaska and Louise DeSalvo 1984

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, or television reviews, no
part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying or recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publisher.

Published by Cleis Press Inc., P.O. Box 14684, San Francisco, California 94114.

Printed in the United States.

Cover design: Scott Idleman
Text design: Ned Takahashi
Logo art: Juana Alicia

Excerpts from The Letters of Virginia Woolf, volumes 3, 4, 5, 6, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne
Trautmann are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and the Hogarth Press ©by Quentin
Bell and Angelica Garnett, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980.
Photographs reproduced courtesy of Nigel Nicolson.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sackville-West, V (Victoria), 1892-1962

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

Reprint. Originally published: New York: Morrow, ©1985.

Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
Sackville-West, V. (Victoria), 1892-1962— Correspondence.
Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941— Correspondence.
Authors, English—20th century—Correspondence.
I. Woolf, Virginia, 1882-1941. II. DeSalvo, Louise A.,1942- .
III. Leaska, Mitchell. IV. Title.
PR6037.A35Z497 2001 823’912 85-16903
ISBN 1-57344-136-8

First Cleis Press Edition

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents ...............................................................................................................................................5

Editorial Note .....................................................................................................................................................6
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................8
March 1923 - Early 1924 ..................................................................................................................................31
March - December 1924 ...................................................................................................................................42
January — November 1925 ..............................................................................................................................51
December 1925 - January 1926 ........................................................................................................................64
January - February 1926 ...................................................................................................................................74
March - May 1926 ..........................................................................................................................................120
May - September 1926 ...................................................................................................................................111
October 1926 -January 1927...........................................................................................................................125
January - February 1927 .................................................................................................................................144
February - May 1927 ......................................................................................................................................149
May - September 1927 ...................................................................................................................................165
October - December 1927 ..............................................................................................................................226
January - April 1928 .......................................................................................................................................234
April - September 1928 ..................................................................................................................................258
October - December 1928 ..............................................................................................................................268
January -July 1929..........................................................................................................................................302
July - December 1929 .....................................................................................................................................327
1930 - 1931 .....................................................................................................................................................319
1932 ................................................................................................................................................................304
1933 ................................................................................................................................................................308
1934 - 1936 .....................................................................................................................................................327
1937 ................................................................................................................................................................332
1938 ................................................................................................................................................................340
1939 ................................................................................................................................................................348
1940 - 1941 .....................................................................................................................................................357
Postscript ........................................................................................................................................................368
Editorial Note
All the letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, with the exception of eighteen, are preserved in the
Henry W. and Albert A. Collection in the New York Public Library. The remaining letters are at the University
of Sussex Library. With one or two exceptions, the letters are handwritten and, for the most part, legible, Vita
was an accurate speller and she followed the rules of traditional grammar, syntax, punctuation, and
paragraphing.
Establishing the chronological order of the letters was quite another matter. Vita was not especially
concerned with dates. Often only the day of the week is given. Sometimes she added the numerical date, and
sometimes the month. But rarely did she enter the day, the date, the month, and the year. In almost every
instance, however, after considerable research, we were able to deduce the letters exact place in the sequence
either from its internal evidence or from the date given in Virginia’s corresponding letter—or both. All other
dating information, added editorially, has been set within square brackets.
Most of Vita’s letters were written on stationery headed ‘Long Barn, Weald, Sevenoaks’ or, after 1932,
‘Sissinghurst Castle, Kent’. These addresses have been reproduced exactly as they appear in the original letters.
When she wrote on blank sheets, she occasionally wrote only part of the address: ‘Long Barn’, for example.
All information added for fuller place identification has also been set within brackets. Sometimes no part of
an address was included in a letter. In these instances we have added nothing.
Annotations have been provided to identify peripheral characters and to clarify otherwise obscure
allusions. A brief narrative has been entered at intervals to provide a context for the people and events about
to figure in exchanges and to supply the reader with a little background reference.
Virginia Woolf’s letters were all published in six volumes, between 1975 and 1980. As the editing of
Vita’s letters to Virginia proceeded, it became clear that their friendship was an extremely complex affair.
Vita’s letters contained numerous and often mysterious allusions and barely detectable innuendos that could
not be adequately explained in a footnote. It thus became clear that Virginia herself must be given a fair hearing
if we were to convey authentically something of the changing emotional tone of their relations during their
nineteen-year friendship. We have included, then, some 175 extracts from nearly 400 surviving letters Virginia
wrote to Vita.
Virginia’s letters, fortunately, have all been chronologically numbered by their editors. So when the
reader comes across, for instance, ‘See VW 1733’ in one of our annotations, the reader should turn to The
Letters of Virginia Woolf and refer to the letter numbered 1733.
One other small matter needs a word of explanation. There were several periods of two or three
months’ duration when Vita went to Teheran or to Berlin to stay with her husband, Harold Nicolson. During
these times the sequence of dates in Vita’s and Virginia’s letters may appear to be out of order. They are not
actually out of sequence. Because of the irregularity of the international postal service it was necessary to order
the letters not by the dates on which they were written but rather by the dates on which either Vita or Virginia
received a letter and subsequently replied to it.

A number of books, already published, were extremely helpful in the editing of this collection. To the authors
and editors responsible for those volumes we acknowledge a debt of gratitude. They are, most particularly,
Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, editors of The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols.); Vita’s biographer
Victoria Glendinning for her Vita: The Life of V. Sackville-West; Anne Olivier Bell, editor of The Diaries of
Virginia Woolf (5 vols.); Quentin Bell for Virginia Woolf: A Biography; Nigel Nicolson for Portrait of a
Marriage; and James Lees-Milne for Harold Nicolson: A Biography (2 vols.). For permission to quote from
The Letters of Virginia Woolf and The Diaries of Virginia Woolf we thank the Hogarth Press. We also proffer
our gratitude to Lola L. Szladits, curator of the Collection, the New York Public Library, and A. N. Peasgood
of the University of Sussex Library. Dr Szladits and her staff offered generous assistance in making the
originals of Vita’s letters available to us. Mr Peasgood kindly located, photocopied, and sent us the eighteen
Vita letters presently housed in the Sussex Collection.
Our final and deepest thanks are offered to Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West’s son and literary
executor. The editing of this collection was at his invitation, and throughout its course he answered questions
and provided us with information he alone possessed. His generosity and judgement have been extraordinary.
We are grateful for being the privileged beneficiaries of his trust.
L.D. and M.L.
Introduction
by Mitchell Leaska

The letters which follow chronicle the story of two extraordinary women—Vita Sackville-West, who quested
for glory, and Virginia Woolf, who sought her love and affection. Rarely can a collection of correspondence
have cast into more dramatic relief two personalities more individual or more complex; and rarely can an
enterprise of the heart have been carried out so near the verge of archetypal feeling. Their adventure was filled
with love and with expectation, and these pages effervesce with excitement and hope and verbal caress. In
their fertility and abundance, these documents belong as much to literature as they do to fife. In letter after
letter, we come across little dramas of daily affairs; cameos of friends caught in folly; snatches of gossip,
sometimes serious, more often profane; polychrome snapshots of exotic travelogue; and little shared
confidences of literary craft. Sometimes there are muffled warnings of wounded affection or injured pride; and
as often the small benedictions of loving appeasement. But below the surface foam of words, we sense
occasionally the strange alchemy of love mixed with uncertainty and of compulsion mingled with constraint.
Such are the hieroglyphs of emotion imprinted across these pages.
The chronicle covers almost two decades. These were years filled for each of them with as many large
public successes as there were personal failures and private sorrows. But in their art as in their fives, however
great the differences which separated them, they were, alike, women of formidable resilience and
determination. In their writing Virginia, the innovator, tunneled her way into the future and Vita, the
traditionalist, sorted out the past. And during these years of alternating confidence and doubt in their private
lives, Virginia learned all the adverbs of manner and motive, and Vita mastered all the verbs of love and
passion.

Virginia’s early impressions of Vita are recorded in a letter to a friend. She was the high aristocrat called Vita
Sackville-West, daughter of Lord Sackville, daughter of Knole, wife of Harold Nicolson, and novelist, but her
real claim to consideration, is, if I may be so coarse, her legs. Oh they are exquisite—running like slender
pillars up into her trunk, which is that of a breastless cuirassier (yet she has 2 children) but all about her is
virginal, savage, patrician....

To Vita Sackville-West, Virginia was, simply, the ‘gentle genius’—lovely, idolized and remote.
Even through the calculated medium of letters, where verbal risks are minimized, it is evident that, in
the early months of their friendship, Vita’s attention settled on Virginia with obstinate concentration, and
Virginia responded with a blend of apprehensive mockery and guarded acquiescence. Each clearly had
something the other wanted. Vita was the superior woman in Virginias eyes, and Virginia was the superior
writer in Vita’s; and it would soon become apparent to both of them that just as one was questing for glory,
the other was in search of affection. And in those dual pursuits large loyalties and high proprietorial claims
would soon emerge, and with them four distinct personalities as well. Vita would become for Virginia the
voluptuous aristocrat some of the time, while at other times she would be the protective maternal figure,
crooning affectionate reassurance. Virginia would represent to Vita the mistress of English letters at one
moment, and at the next the helpless, affectionate child soliciting Vita’s custodial embraces. The rapport
between them was by no means a simple matter, and both women would eventually be reminded, more often
perhaps than they liked, that every human being needs something, and that neither of them would ever love
the other for herself alone. So that as there was passion and promise in the beginning, in the end there would
be compassion and compromise.

Virginia, the writer, was a woman of swift perception and incisive analytical power— an intellectual who
weighed and probed and tested for the exact motives of human action and utterance. She was by all standards
a brilliant ‘experimentalist in humanity’; but she appeared unattainable, unpredictable and sometimes even
unapproachable. With so much of her emotional side kept under cover, she was reserved and at the same time
mysterious. More than that, Virginia was a woman at once curious and independent; a curiosity frequently
misconstrued as affection and an independence often interpreted as absent-minded detachment. As a result she
sometimes gave the impression of being a part of everyone, yet belonging to no one. To the small Dionysian
figure hidden in Vita, this Apollonian frieze of intellect and intuition was an irresistible challenge.
There was another part of Virginia which Vita found easier to warm towards, and that was the childlike,
affectionate side of her; the self-absorbed, impatient and demonstrative girl who forever needed practical
reassurance and confidence-bolstering; the vulnerable creature who was prone to emotional bruising, who
hated criticism, demanded directness, craved affection—the brave ‘Potto’ who over and over again got
knocked down but refused to admit defeat. This was the Virginia that Vita loved and protected and mothered.
Vita, on her side, was a catalogue of contradictions. She was rebellious and she was reticent. She was
fearless and she was frightened; she was sociable and reclusive; bold as well as shy. She was a woman who
concealed an essentially timid nature under a carapace of managerial competence and extravagant courage.
Then she was a woman who saw only what she wanted to see, who was lavish with those of whose love and
obedience she was sure, but who neglected those whose wishes failed to coincide with her own; and she was
someone who had taught herself from a very early age to spot the weaknesses of others.
What Virginia saw in Vita, however, was a sensuous person who could be just noticeably elusive and
often puzzling. But this was ‘the real woman’, as Virginia often said, and a passionate one she was too. But as
with all contradictory personalities there was something slightly deceptive about her. Not far from the surface,
one could touch the stargazer, the lonely Vita who sought privacy and shunned messy emotional embroilments.
Yet it was this same woman who lived often enough on false promise and counterfeit hope, who seemed forever
fanning the embers of love and forever stepping back from its blaze.
There were other sides to Vita which Virginia seems to have detected almost from the beginning. One
of them was the indomitable woman who took charge of one’s life and charted one’s destiny, whose arrogance
flattened obstacles and whose vanity refused to acknowledge shabbiness, poverty or familiarity This was the
exalted woman who strode her own private acres and lived in castles and who spoke her mind with devastating
simplicity. Then there was the compassionate woman who understood life’s miseries and dispensed her bounty
on the world’s downtrodden—the gentle Vita whose strong hands cupped the fragile moth and nursed the
injured nightingale. And there was also the heroic Vita who worked like a slave and played like a prince and
saw the whole world as her personal challenge. All of these Vitas, wrapped into one, held Virginia magnetized
in a bright circle of high romance and adventure.

Vita’s emotional terrain, however, revealed a dark sadistic province which few people saw and still fewer
acknowledged. Virginia seems to have felt it from the very start, and there is enough in these letters to suggest
that in recognizing it she assumed a role sufficiently submissive to indicate to the woman she would soon love
that she was prepared to accept—indeed she would encourage—their relations to develop along the fines of
dominance and compliance. In Virginia’s mind this stratum of friendship was perhaps the closest she felt she
would ever get to playing the part of the submissive child to the dominant, affectionate and protective mother.
Little phrases scattered throughout the letters and cushioned in often deceptive contexts support the
notion that Virginia placed a sufficiently low value on herself in relation to Vita to permit her to feel both
helpless and needy and at the same time to feel a certain strange contentment with whatever small abuses Vita
might inadvertently cause her to suffer. Virginia was too sensitive an observer of human behaviour not to
recognize the role she was creating for herself. ‘Is it true you love giving pain?’ she asked Vita once in mock
seriousness. In one of the earliest pieces of the correspondence, Virginia wrote: ‘I enjoyed your intimate
letter.... It gave me a great deal of pain—which is I’ve no doubt the first stage of intimacy.... Never mind: I
enjoyed your abuse very much.’ Later she would beg Vita not to ‘snuff the stinking tallow out of your heart—
poor Virginia to wit....’ Later still: ‘Chuck me as often as you like, and don’t give it a moment’s thought.’ One
year before her death, Virginia would still write; ‘...you’ll never shake me off—.’And running parallel to this
line of submission or self-deprecation or whatever we choose to call it were two accompanying strands of
Virginia’s feeling for Vita. One was her ‘childlike dazzled affection’ and the other was the extraordinary
serenity and comfort Vita’s presence brought her during her frequent periods of illness. It is true that these
scattered citations are mere scraps of evidence, little more than fragments broken off at odd, unpremeditated
moments. Yet for all their scrappiness and seeming irrelevance, these odds and ends of feeling do indicate the
thrust of Virginia’s emotional alignment to Vita. For they illuminate the otherwise unexplained roles of
dominance and compliance which both women acted out in their lives in the guise of parent and child, healer
and patient, and, metaphorically, perhaps even victor and victim. Virginia could only have been more explicit
if she had said to Vita: your maternal protection strengthens the lost and wandering child in me; your healing
hand soothes me in illness; and your abuses assure me that I matter to you. There is no question that she sensed
in Vita the fearless competence and mastery she needed to demonstrate, together with the aggression she tried
to conceal. By the time she came to write the first sentence of Orlando, there wasn’t the slightest doubt in
Virginia’s mind that Orlando should make his entrance committing an act of violence—‘slicing at the head of
a Moor....’
Vita’s perception of herself is more difficult to ascertain, for, contradictory as she was, self-deception
came easily to her, and she saw only what she wanted to see. But she did say something in a letter to Virginia
which seems to sum up the way she approached life. She would rather ‘fad gloriously than dinghy succeed’,
she wrote. Those five words appear to hold the key to much of Vita’s inner domain of feeling; for they define
the nature of her quest for glory—a quest rooted in the assumption that the world was a potential battlefield,
that people were only safe when they were in captivity, that one’s resources should be mobilized not in the
interest of mere survival but indeed in the continuing struggle to triumph. No risk was too perilous and no
sacrifice too great for that necessary achievement. liven her intimacy with Virginia she saw as a ‘catch’, as a
conquest: Vita was ‘rather proud, really, of having caught such a big silver fish’, she said to her husband,
Harold Nicolson. Nor is it an accident of phrasing that she called the novel describing her turbulent love affair
with Violet Trefusis Challenge. Everyone in her life, it seems, began as a potential challenge, and everything
she came up against was, to her mind, susceptible to conquest. Virginia summed her up accurately when she
said that Orlando ‘liked to think that she was riding the back of the world’.

‘Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest?’ Vita asked, regarding the novel she was about to
write. ‘Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety.... Anyhow I don’t care about what is “better”, for however
many resolutions one makes, one’s pen... always finds its own level.’
To this Virginia replied: ‘Why need you be so timid and pride-blown, both at once.... Please write your
novel, and then you will enter into the unreal world, where Virginia lives—and poor woman, can’t now live
anywhere else.’
Virginia knew perfectly well what Vita’s question meant, but she knew too that living in the ‘unreal
world’ of fantasy was also living with a sense of freedom and power, something she had discovered on her
own during the pains and uncertainties of adolescence. For Virginia’s artistic roots stretch back to the unsettled
world of childhood dominated by an often absent mother. If one could move back in time to 25 January 1882,
the day of Virginia’s birth, one would catch a glimpse of Julia Stephen, the beautiful and mysterious mother
whose chief concern in life, for some equally mysterious reason, was nursing the sick and the dying; a woman
who was convinced that the ‘ordinary relations between the sick and the well are far easier and pleasanter than
between the well and the well’. This was the woman Virginia would one day capture in the person of Mrs
Ramsay in To the Lighthouse—the mother whose mysteries haunted the novelist for so much of her life.
Whatever her motives, however, Julia Stephen’s unceasing benevolence killed her at the age of forty-
nine, leaving Virginia, aged thirteen, motherless, numb with terror, and about to descend into her first black
period of insanity. When she recovered two years later—that is, in 1897—she learned that private feeling and
public fact were fearfully discrepant, and until she could correct that discrepancy, her world was in danger,
and herself at everyone’s mercy With a mother who had been away so much of the time, Virginia’s childhood
had lacked plan, continuity and coherence. With her mother now dead, there was no telling what might happen.
It didn’t take long for this precocious girl to discover, however, that although feeling and fact were out of
synchronism, feeling and fantasy were not; and with that discovery the world of the future novelist opened up
to her: if she could teach herself to fuse feeling with fantasy, she could create her own world—a spacious
republic populated only by those she chose to put there, a place where fact could not disturb, an invented realm
entirely under her control, where sorrow and doubt had no place. But however sovereign and almighty the
story- teller might be, there still remained the stark fact of having no mother. Until that emptiness could be
filled (which was impossible) or some reasonably satisfying substitute presented itself (which was highly
improbable), the safest place to live was in the ‘unreal world’ of imagination. Virginia, therefore, knew the
power of fantasy perhaps better than did Vita, though her way of dealing with it would always be different
from Vita’s.
Thus, when the women met for the first time on 14 December 1922, two highly organized personalities
faced each other. They had much in common, but even more differentiated them. What mattered, however,
and would continue to matter in the years ahead, was that each was in possession of something the other felt
she had been denied. Vita envied Virginia the writer and Virginia stood in awe of Vita the woman. In the
woman Virginia would find the mother, and in the writer Vita would discover the child. It was an auspicious
beginning.

Vita’s earliest history also tells much about the woman who speaks in the pages ahead, and although countless
little details complicate her portrait, it is safe to say that when Vita was born at Knole in the small hours of 9
March 1892, she already had two disadvantages. The first was having been born female. According to the
family entail, as a woman she would never inherit Knole, the great ancestral house which had been granted to
Thomas Sackville by Queen Elizabeth in 1566. The second was being the daughter of Victoria Sackville-West,
an essentially destructive woman. She was rapacious; she was ruthless; she was self-centred; she was beautiful.
She was also overwhelmed with self-doubt. Without much thought to the consequences, she bribed her little
daughter by showering her with every kind of material reward if she could make her mother feel adored and
indispensable. No matter how much the child tried, however, the effort unfortunately was never enough. Vita
was simply inadequate to the task. Lady Sackville moreover believed it her privilege, indeed her right, to
indulge, whenever it took her fancy, in great pendulum swings of mood and temper, with Vita almost always
the innocent and confused recipient of her mother’s flamboyant emotionalism. Day after day, as a child, Vita
was treated as though she were a plaything—smothered with love one moment, hated the next; called beautiful
and cherished in the morning, condemned as ugly and unwanted in the afternoon. Throughout much of her
adult life, and even after her marriage, Vita lived in the shade of this egotistical and power- hungry woman
who ‘wounded and dazzled and fascinated’ her. More important, however, Vita grew up with a sense of
personal impotence. Never was she allowed to feel herself a separate person with rights of her own.
Before and even during marriage, Lady Sackville s beauty had attracted countless suitors, and she
continued, after her separation from Lord Sackville, to attract a good many more—-John Murray Scott,
Pierpont Morgan, William Waldorf Astor—all men of fabulous wealth and influence. It is not hard to see how
Vita, when she was old enough to acknowledge her sex, became fearful that it might put her in deadly combat
with her mother for male favour. And so she subconsciously did what must somehow have seemed to her the
most logical thing to do: she suppressed her feminine side and, when it was safe enough to do so, granted
ascendancy to masculine behaviour, male pursuits and boyish mannerisms. What better way was there of
avoiding confrontation with her mother in the arena of male contestants? And what more effective way was
there than this not only to imagine herself male, but to imagine herself as successor to Knole as well?
Somewhere in the confusion of these early years, Vita assimilated her mother’s conviction that ‘the
world was a hard place where one must fight one’s own battle for one’s own best advantage’. In addition to
the fighting spirit, Vita appears also to have learned some conjuring tricks from Lady Sackville, who ‘possessed
more than anybody I have ever known the faculty of delusion.... She entered the only world she knew, the
world of unreality which she made real to herself, and into which she persuaded other people by the sheer
strength of her own personality and conviction to enter.’ As long as one was in her presence, one was almost
‘tempted to believe in all the fables she told one’.
Thus raised in the shadow of a mother whose fife was disordered, whose habits were erratic and whose
affections were unreliable, it was perfectly natural for Vita to realize at some early period of her life that, if
she genuinely needed stability, order and permanence, she would have to invent them for herself. And this she
did. How easy it is to imagine her as a child roaming the hundreds of rooms of Knole, rooms which had
survived for hundreds of years, acknowledging their durability, imagining their history, inventing little fables
of beauty, valour and bloodshed. Those ancient paintings and tapestries—each of them must contain some
magnificent tale hidden somewhere. Each of them must hoard some mystery of forsaken honour and defeated
love. One sees her in the guarded secrecy of an impressionable youth stepping timidly down the silent corridors
of the past, searching the farthest corners of antiquity, where all had once been solid and unchanging.
Vita’s retreat into the past was her defence against the present. Knole was the only place she knew,
and it grew to symbolize for her all the permanence and security her present life was denied. Knole also carried
with it all the ceremony of history and the poetry of romance, and in these Vita sought refuge. In history and
in romance, she could put aside her confusion and fear, and imagine herself to be anyone she chose.
This step backward into antiquity was only one short move from freedom. If Vita could shed her
bondage to the present altogether, she might be free to invent a new persona to bear the weight of heroism and
reflect the burnish of glory. But there was one obstacle: she was female. The legislators of the Sackville family
had long ago decreed that Vita Sackville-West would never govern Knole. Of that she was certain. But there
was no rule on earth, past or present, which could prevent her from stretching her fantasy to the extent of
changing her sex. Of that too she was certain. And so, step by step, with trial and caution, Vita moved towards
the ground which men customarily trod; and as she did so, a substantial part of the female persona receded,
made room for the new male figure she was constructing, a figure of power and courage and a certain lusty
recklessness.
This might all have remained a child’s game, a fantasy of adolescence to ward off the unhappiness of
growing up under Lady Sackville s dictatorship. But for Vita the feeling of dominance was magnificent, and
the male self she had created would become the personal myth which would govern the way she lived for the
remainder of her life. As a male, moreover, there was nothing to discourage her from courting her mother with
the same ceremonious rituals as did her other suitors. This was something she could have done as Vita the
daughter. And there was a certain high drama in Vita’s adoration for her beautiful, wicked mother, something
lusty and primitive. Lady Sackville might abuse or humiliate her in any way she chose, and still ‘I would have
died for her’, wrote Vita, ‘I would have murdered anyone that breathed a word against her. I would have
suffered any injustice at her hands.’
But as with all attempts to establish harmony, however artificial, out of the chaos of one’s life, this
attempt too would produce a conflict with unhappy results. Vita had learned from childhood that she needed
autonomy as well as affection, privacy as well as intimacy, but she had also learned under her mother’s
disobliging hand just how unlovable she was. She must have realized, too, that being loved and being free
somehow didn’t go together. Independence required emotional distance from others, just as affection called
for submission and acquiescence. This was the awful tug-of-war which Vita had no way of resolving, but she
learned with the passage of time that negotiation and compromise might go a long way towards bridging the
rift. In her future love affairs with women, the compromise she settled on to reconcile these opposing urges
took the form of deep maternal compassion accompanied by extravagant gestures of passion—a combination
which these women interpreted as love. But passion and pity, neither singly nor in sum, equal love. It was in
fact this very combination which caused her so much heartache. Yet however much turmoil her amorous
embroilments caused her, Vita could not live without love—or, more accurately, without the idea of love—in
her life, another conviction she seems to have inherited from her mother. "Mais enfin, ma chérie,’ Lady
Sackville insisted in her characteristic mix of languages, ‘...you know love is the most beautiful thing on Earth?
Et c’est ce qui le plus to most people.’ One of the little ironies in this story was that Lady Sackville herself
became the principal beneficiary of Vita’s love.
It was thus through many conflicting shades and tangled paths of childhood that Vita grew up to
become the woman who would one day write these letters. She carried with her, in fantasy at least, the banner
of conquest, the emblem of history and the shield of manhood. These were her defences for fighting ‘one’s
own battles for one’s best advantage’, as Lady Sackville had taught her, and ‘one’s best advantage’ to Vita
meant personal franchise and self-jurisdiction. These she must have if she was eventually to gain fame and
prestige, the only really enduring safeguards in what she felt to be a potentially hostile world. The sadistic
streak in her, of which so few people knew, was rooted not in the desire to inflict pain, but rather in the urgency
to feel in possession of sufficient power to direct the course of her fife as a separate and autonomous woman
with her own locus of rights. Only in her fiction do we find scenes of physical violence. The women in her
factual life dramatize a different story.

In this distant light, Vita’s preferring to ‘fail gloriously than dingily succeed’ assumes a larger significance. It
speaks of her attitude towards life, and it lays bare the range of her striving for domination, authority and
control. It was an attitude of aggressiveness reflected even in her letters to Virginia. How often we come across
phrasing like ‘I don’t want to drag you down here’; ‘I shall pin you down’; ‘Let me come and carry you off’;
‘The wish to steal Virginia overcomes me’; ‘I shall have to make you come by main force’, and so much more.
These citations are indeed so slight that they might pass unnoticed, and some of us might even insist upon
seeing them as negligible. They are nevertheless from the lexicon of abduction and they belong to the language
of aggression.
With the same pen she used to write her letters to Virginia, Vita would in a few years write a novel in
which her sadistic hero would say to his lover: ‘I would like to chain you up... naked and beat you and beat
you till you screamed. ‘This is of course very strong fantasy, but we need no psychoanalytical assistance to
interpret the underlying message, which, stated simply, runs something like this: ‘Only when I’ve relieved my
inferior sense of myself by putting you in bondage can I feel comfortable with you emotionally—and sexually.
‘This was a language Vita understood perfectly.
The same tough strand of muscle runs through these letters, though certainly no violence was ever
directed toward Virginia. It is important only to notice the spontaneous word choices, for they bespeak Vita’s
buried conviction that life, in all its diversity, was something which needed to be fought and conquered;
something which required competence and force. This was clearly the emotional atmosphere in which she
lived. Her smallest acts of affection were coloured and often twisted with the romance of power and
ravishment. Such was the cast of her mind. Vita’s dream world was a world fraught with danger—and the
prospect of conquest. We need to remind ourselves, however, that the Vita who fantasized about muscular
force and sadistic torture ‘was the woman who, first of all, had all her life been overwhelmed and diminished
by a grasping mother; and secondly, who, in losing Knole, was daily reminded of the inferior place of her sex
in a world assigned to male governance. It is little wonder that she should learn to see the vulnerable spots in
others; less wonder still that she should emotionally brutalize anyone who threatened her precarious sense of
sovereignty. ‘Social relations’, said Vita, ‘are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together
for the purposes of defence.’ In her interior world only the ‘fittest’ survived. Weakness was devoured by
strength.
In a letter to Virginia—Vita was tending the Woolfs’ spaniel, Pinker, at the time— she wrote:

Pinker and I try to console one another. She sleeps on my bed, and clings to me as the one
comparatively familiar thing in a strange and probably hostile world.... I had to explain that
Mrs Woolf lived in London, a separate life, a fact which was as unpleasant to me as it could
be to any spaniel puppy.... I explained that everybody always betrayed one sooner or later,
and usually gave one away to somebody else, and that the only thing to do was to make the
best of it.

People were not kind and nature was indifferent to human wishes. This was an atavistic world ruled by laws
which inevitably destroyed what one loved. ‘Something always does, when one wants a thing too passionately,’
she had written just a little earlier.
Just how savage or indifferent people could be, to Vita’s way of thinking, emerges in a letter written
during her first voyage to Persia. En route, she fell ill and ‘all last night I had a fever and a sore throat, and was
quite certain through my nightmares that I should be put ashore at Karachi with diphtheria and left there
alone.... I am all alone, and there is no one on this ship who cares whether I live or die.’ Of course a great many
people cared very much whether she lived or died, but the subjective world she experienced was under the
primeval powers of the jungle, and it was from its dense and perilous growth that her emotional life drew its
characteristic mood. If she didn’t master fife, she would forever be its slave, at its mercy. What looked like
overpowering aggressiveness on Vita’s part was fundamentally a determination to survive through the exercise
of personal might. She had to deal competently with the techniques of fife in order to master it—or to be
mastered by it. It is unlikely that Vita herself would have articulated her feelings in quite this way, but it is
clear from hundreds of accumulated details scattered throughout these letters that the atmosphere of combat
was the one in which, much of the time, she genuinely felt herself to be.
Her superior sense of efficiency often led her into misunderstanding and difficulty. In a letter to
Virginia in the earliest months of their friendship, for example, Vita suggested an expedition to the Basque
provinces. Thinking that Virginia might need some powerful incentive for going, Vita suggested that she look
on the trip ‘as copy,—as I believe you look upon everything, human relationships included. Oh yes, you like
people, through the brain better than through the heart,—forgive me if I am wrong.’
Virginia was justifiably hurt by that remark and said so. What is so astonishing, however, is that Vita didn’t
have the slightest notion of what she had said to hurt Virginia. This was the truth. What someone else might
consider a heartless remark— not understanding her hidden motives—Vita regarded simply as a suggestion of
efficiency. Four years later, when Vita’s father lay dying at Knole, she said again, and with the same
disconcerting directness, ‘What good copy it would all be for Virginia’s book [Orlando]. The whole thing’,
she added with her characteristic penchant for high romance, was a ‘mixture of the tragic, the grotesque, and
the magnificent.’
By the time she met Vita Sackville-West in 1922, Virginia Woolf had survived three major periods of insanity
and had published three novels. She was forty, and already a writer of acknowledged importance, but she had
not yet had a commercial success. Vita had already published several volumes of poetry and fiction by this
date, and was also an established author. She was thirty years old, ten years Virginia’s junior.
The day after that first encounter on 14 December, Virginia recorded in her diary meeting ‘the lovely
aristocratic Sackville-West last night at Clive’s. Not much to my severer taste... with all the supple ease of the
aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist. She writes 15 pages a day—has finished another book—publishes with
Heinemanns— knows everyone—But could I ever know her?’
Up to this time, Virginia had had only two infatuations in her fife, one in her teens with Madge
Vaughan (after whom Clarissa Dalloway was modelled), and one in her early twenties with Violet Dickinson,
a woman many years older than Virginia. Her willing surrender to Vita Sackville-West’s magnetism would
therefore be the first in Virginia’s adult life, and Vita would be the first woman to appear on the domestic
scene of Virginia’s married life with Leonard Woolf. But Vita was something special, and Virginia appears to
have been willing to search out the possibilities. ‘Mrs Nicolson thinks me the best woman writer’—Virginia
wrote in her journal,‘& I have almost got used to Mrs Nicolson’s having heard of me. But it gives me some
pleasure.’ If Mrs Nicolson liked Mrs Woolf’s writing, well...at least she had that much in her favour. More
important than that, however, Vita had aroused something childlike in Virginia: ‘The aristocratic manner is
something like the actresses—no false shyness or modesty: a bead dropped into her plate at dinner—given to
Clive—asks for liqueur—has her hand on all the ropes—makes me feel virgin, shy, & schoolgirlish.... She is
a grenadier; hard; handsome, manly.... ’
Following their first meeting, there was a quick exchange of dinners and books. Virginia read Vita’s
novel and poems with approval, and confided again to her diary: ‘She is a pronounced Sapphist, & may...have
an eye on me, old though I am. Nature might have sharpened her faculties. Snob as I am, I trace her passions
500 years back, & they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.’ It is clear that Virginia would not have
minded at all if Vita had ‘an eye’ on her, for she was fascinated by this ‘pronounced Sapphist’.
The fascination was reciprocal. Vita’s letter to her husband, Harold Nicolson, dated 19 December
1922, just after their meeting, fills in her page of the story.

I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm
and personality.... Mrs Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big.
She is utterly unaffected.... At first you think she is plain, then a sort of spiritual beauty
imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her.... She is both detached and
human, silent till she wants to say something, and then says it supremely well. She is quite
old. I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me. At least she’s asked
me to Richmond where she lives. Darling, I have quite lost my heart.

Virginia was indeed ‘both detached and human’, as Vita had observed, and in the next nineteen years
she would learn in full measure exactly how detached Virginia Woolf could be—as well as how human. The
detachment, however, held a certain magical pull for Vita, and she saw it as a challenge. Didn’t winning the
friendship of this genius of letters mean a kind of triumph? After all, Virginia was a ‘big silver fish’, and to
land her would be indeed a conquest to be proud of. Vita would say as much to Harold in the months ahead.
But here a long pause interrupted the proceedings of love. Whether their first steps had been taken too
quickly, or whether Virginia became apprehensive, or whether Vita simply grew impatient, is not clear; but
for many months an almost complete silence separated them. In March 1924, however, when the Woolfs
moved from Richmond to Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, it was Virginia who broke the silence: would Vita
come and have lunch in the new flat—‘but prepare for a complete picnic, among the ruins of books and legs
of tables, dirt and dust and only fragments of food’. This was the first time they had ever been alone together,
and Vita went away with her ‘head swimming with Virginia’.
 Something of greater importance was in the offing, however—an opportunity that would serve Vita’s
ambitions as a novelist. Would she write a book for the Hogarth Press to publish, Virginia asked her in May.
‘If so, what and when? Could it be this autumn? ‘This was rather a challenge, being asked to produce a book
at three months’ notice. But Vita thrived on challenges—the bigger, the better. Of course she would give them
a book. Better still, she would write it during her holiday on the peaks of the Italian Alps! But that was really
no challenge. How could Virginia so underestimate her? Writing a book was a mere ‘commercial proposition’.
The real challenge was Virginia’s charging her with writing ‘letters of impersonal frigidity’. Well, now, that
was quite a different proposition. First, however, the book must get written, as indeed it was; and it turned out
to be perhaps Vita’s most imaginatively conceived novel. Its title was Seducers in Ecuador. She dedicated it
to Virginia, and with that dedication the first real step was taken towards a deeper intimacy.
When the manuscript arrived, Virginia wrote again for her own eyes:

Vita was here for Sunday, gliding down the village in her large new blue Austin car, which
she manages consummately. She was dressed in ringed yellow Jersey, & a large hat, & had
a dressing case all full of silver & night gowns wrapped in tissue. Nelly said ‘If only she
weren’t an honourable!’.... But I like her being honourable, & she is it, a perfect lady, with
all the dash & courage of the aristocracy.... She left with us a story which really interests me
rather. I see my own face in it, it’s true. But she has shed the old verbiage, & come to terms
with some sort glimmer of art; so I think; & indeed, I rather marvel at her skill, & sensibility;
for is she not mother, wife, great lady, hostess, as well as scribbling? How little I do of all
that: my brain would never let me milk it to the tune of 20,000 words in a fortnight....

But, she went on, Vita

is like an over ripe grape in features, moustached, pouting, will be a little heavy; meanwhile,
she strides on fine legs, in a well cut skirt.. .has a manly good sense & simplicity; Oh yes, I
like her; could tack her on to my equipage for all time; & suppose if life allowed, this might
be a friendship of a sort.

The Hogarth Press published Seducers in Ecuador in November of that year. Virginia offered small
criticisms, but it was, she said to Vita, ‘much more interesting (to me at least) than you’ve yet done.... I am
very glad we are going to publish it, and extremely proud and indeed touched, with my childlike dazzled
affection for you, that you should dedicate it to me. ’Thus, little by little, visit by visit, and letter by letter, the
friendship grew—Aphrodite was beginning to exert her influence.
In 1925, both Virginia’s The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway made their debut. Vita was in awe
of their brilliance. One thing that Mrs Dalloway had done for her, she said to its author, was to make it
unnecessary ever to go to London again, for the ‘whole of London in June is in your first score of pages.
(Couldn’t you do a winter London now...)’ (She could not of course foresee that in three years’ time she would
be reading about herself, garbed as Orlando, skating on the Thames during the Great Frost.) By late summer,
while Vita was writing The Land, which would become her most enduring work, Virginia was forced to retire
to bed suffering from headaches and exhaustion. Once more their letters alone carried the weight of their
developing intimacy.
Harold Nicolson had been informed by the Foreign Office in September that he was being posted to
the British Legation in Teheran, and it was arranged that Vita would join him there in January and remain until
May. This news made Virginia see for the first time, and to her surprise, exactly how much Vita had come to
mean to her. Vita was ‘doomed to go to Persia; & I minded the thought so much (thinking to lose sight of her
for 5 years) that I conclude I am genuinely fond of her. There is the glamour of unfamiliarity to reckon with;
of aristocracy... of flattery. All the same, after sifting & filing, much, I am sure, remains. Shall I stay with her?’
By December Virginia was pronounced sufficiently recovered to brave a change of scenery, and on 17
December was efficiently ‘carried off’ by Vita to Long Barn, where she stayed for three nights. It was during
this weekend that the goddess Astarte descended upon them and advanced their friendship to the deeper level
of love. Vita made a note in her diary for 17 December: ‘A peaceful evening.’ For the eighteenth, however:
‘Talked to her till 3 a.m.—Not a peaceful evening.’
Virginia too recorded the event—a little defensively: ‘These Sapphists love women: friendship is never
untinged with amorosity.’ But, she went on,

I like her & being with her, & the splendour—she shines in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks
with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered,
pearl hung. That is the secret of her glamour, I suppose. Anyhow she found me incredibly
dowdy, no woman cared less for personal appearance—no one put on things the way I did.
Yet so beautiful, etc. What is the effect of all this on me? Very mixed. There is her maturity
& 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 control silver, servants, chow dogs; her motherhood...her being in short (what I
have never been) a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are
ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then
she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is
what I have always most wished from everyone.

From Long Barn, Vita wrote about her side of the adventure to Harold. Having suffered only a few
years earlier through Vita’s devastating affair with Violet Trefusis as well as through the slightly less
destructive liaison with Geoffrey Scott, Harold was understandably worried. But he had no reason to be, Vita
assured him on 17 December, for she would not ‘fall in love with Virginia’, nor would Virginia fall in love
with her. On the eighteenth, Vita assured again: ‘She says she depends on me. She is so vulnerable under all
her brilliance. I do love her, but not b.s.ly [back-stairs-ly, i.e. homosexually].’And again on the nineteenth:
‘We have made friends by leaps and bounds in these two days. I love her, but couldn’t fall “in love” with her,
so don’t be nervous.’

In the years ahead Virginia would return again and again to that precious image of Vita ‘pink with pearls’ in a
Sevenoaks fishmonger’s. In her mind, that memory marked a change in her fife. But here and now, in January
1926, Virginia realized that she was almost completely in Vita’s thrall, and the departure for Teheran was
dreadful. ‘Parting’, as the poet said, would ‘turn their hearts into clocks. ’They were both dedicated, literary
women, however, and in the months that followed they created an epistolarium of love that was large,
complicated and obsessive.
So the weeks passed—and the months. Vita returned to England in May, and Harold, who had
remained in Teheran, needed once more to be reassured: ‘Oh my dear, I do hope that Virginia is not going to
be a muddle! It is like smoking over a petrol tank.’ But there was no muddle, Vita insisted.

I love Virginia—as who wouldn’t? But really, my sweet, 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 is, I suppose, owing to her funny mixture of hardness
and softness—the hardness of her mind, and her terror of going mad again. She makes me
feel protective. Also she loves me, which flatters and pleases me.... I am scared to death of
arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don’t know what effect it would
have, you see: it is a fire with which I have no wish to play. I have too much real affection
and respect for her.... Besides, 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. Now you know all about it, and I hope I haven’t shocked you.

Vita was an impresario of passion and there were times when her life rang with a chorus of lovers; but she
showed great wisdom in having ‘too much real affection and respect’ for Virginia to play with her emotionally.
Virginia possessed artistic genius, something Vita greatly valued and would have liked herself to have had. It
is true that the few sexual episodes between them flattered Virginia’s vanity, but their real emotional centre
lay elsewhere. Vita idolized the mistress of letters and felt compassionate love for the vulnerable child who
resided within; and with Vita’s extraordinary competence so much on display, it was easy for Virginia to forget
that underneath was a woman who also needed understanding and love. As usual, however, the old conflict
reared its uncompromising head: so long as Vita’s need for affection vied with her need for independence, and
so long as both of these opposing urges claimed equal ascendancy, she would never be on open and equal
terms with anyone, Virginia included. Nor, it seems, did Virginia realize how often she threatened Vita’s
loyalty with her inquisitorial cross-examinations and sometimes exasperating demands for attention. It is no
wonder that below her patrician surface Vita felt unsatisfied and solitary; even less wonder that she was
promiscuous and sometimes ruthless with her lovers. They did not understand her, and she simply could not
help them to. That would have amounted to confessing how much she needed their affection, and that would
have betrayed her own weakness. It was easier to see herself in command in a world of strife. Maintaining that
magisterial posture at least justified her craving for autonomy. And so she continued to force the people in her
universe to conform to her own limitations. What Vita did not perhaps realize was that at the loneliest of times,
when she managed to laugh, she should have permitted herself to weep. For with the laughter, the real woman
went deeper into hiding, and the Sovereign Vita climbed a step higher, hardening even further the already
brittle architecture of conflict.
The nicknames Virginia and Vita used with one another identify the alternating roles they assumed.
When Virginia addressed ‘dearest Vita’ she was appealing to the loving, protective maternal figure. When
‘Donkey West’ was summoned, she sought the haughty and glamorous woman who wrote novels and poetry.
On Vita’s side, when a letter began with ‘My dearest Virginia’ she was talking to her ‘lovely and remote’
mistress of prose. When ‘Potto’ was called upon, it was the child in Virginia who was being invited out for a
romp.
Thus at least two Vitas were in constant negotiation with at least two Virginias. Their ten-year age
difference really mattered very little in the organization of their relationship, although Virginia did occasionally
resort to her seniority when it suited her plan or when she needed to scheme for sympathy. And there was
plenty of room for confusion in the intense, and sometimes untidy, game of love they so beautifully dramatized.
How often Virginia, with one breath, shouted at ‘Donkey West’ for muddling up human relations and, with
the next breath, implored her ‘Dearest Vita’ to repeat to her on which ‘rung of the ladder’ Potto stood in Vita’s
affections. In other words, at any given moment the elegant writer of prose called upon the aristocratic woman
and wheedled her into repeating how much the dominating mother loved the anxious child. This could be very
confusing indeed.

There is something ‘obscure’ in you, Virginia unexpectedly wrote to Vita one day. It was a flaw in Vita’s
make-up which affected everything she did and everything she wrote. ‘There’s something that doesn’t vibrate
in you: It may be purposely—you don’t let it: but I see it with other people, as well as with me: something
reserved, muted— God knows what.... It’s in your writing too, by the bye. The thing I call central trans-
parency—sometimes fails you there too.’
Who can say from what depths of perception Virginia came to identify the very conflict which Vita
worked so hard to conceal. It was a conflict, nevertheless, which Virginia thought responsible for blocking her
expression of feeling with people as well as in her books. Vita wrote to Harold,

Damn the woman, she has put her finger on it. There is something muted.... Something that
 doesn’t vibrate, something that doesn’t come alive.... It makes everything I do (i.e. write) a
little unreal; gives the effect of having been done from the outside. It is the thing which spoils
me as a writer; destroys me as a poet. But how did Virginia discover it? I have never owned
it to anybody, scarcely even to myself. It is what spoils my human relationships too....

Virginia saw it, Vita should have realized, because Virginia suffered from the same affliction—the need of
affection in combat with the need for independence. There was one great difference between the two women,
however. Virginia, we know, like many another writer, shielded herself from life’s insults with pen and ink.
But her particular sense of intellectual superiority, pressed directly beside a pronounced emotional sub-
missiveness, permitted her as a novelist to surrender herself completely and willingly to the mental
atmospheres of her characters. With astonishing ease she could crawl in and out of her characters’ minds,
however different from one another they might be, and record for each of them feelings so deeply wrought as
to bear the stamp of lifelike authenticity. That is, she was sure enough of herself intellectually and compliant
enough emotionally to abdicate her deepest self in order to imagine the emotions of others during the act of
creation. And this was something Vita simply could not do.
Vita’s orientation to the world was one of competition and conquest, and hers was an aggressive stance.
The very notion of submission was foreign to her nature and menacing to her deepest and most vulnerable
sensibilities. In consequence, she often wrote lavish descriptions about her characters’ feelings, but rarely
permitted herself—and hence the reader—a taste of what the experience itself felt like. Her basic timidity,
hidden under the aggression, in combination, did not allow her to enter the minds of her fictional people and
surrender herself to the experience of their feelings. This explains why she wrote ‘from the outside’.
Virginia had somehow ferreted out her secret, and the discovery seemed to make a difference to their
relations in the months ahead. Vita would have given anything to be able to write ‘from the inside’, and so she
began to look at Virginia’s art with greater concentration. Virginia may have found Vita’s attention
intellectually flattering, but certainly not emotionally satisfying. For now the affectionate Potto—the thirteen-
year- old Virginia—would have to move over and make room for Virginia, the ‘gentle genius’ of fiction. She
would now assume the part of literary mentor, and Vita would follow her like ‘a puppy on a string’ and wag
an appreciative tail for whatever morsels she might sniff out. In this vaguely defined office, the gentle genius
had now become ‘essential’ to Vita.
‘I don’t know how I shall get on without you, ’Vita wrote at her second departure for Teheran. ‘Darling,
please go on loving me—I am so miserable—Don’t forget me—.’ On the next day: ‘I shall work so hard, partly
to please you, partly to please myself.... It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me
intellectually than anyone, and for that alone I love you.... You do like me to write well, don’t you? And I do
hate writing badly—and having written so badly in the past.’
Again what seems not to have crossed Vita’s mind was not that her writing was bad—for she was
indeed a proficient novelist—but that her writing was so different from Virginia’s; and that difference had its
provenance in the structure of her personality, not in her performance as a writer. What she could not have
known at the time, however, was that eventually she would hit upon a subject for a novel for which her exterior
mode of writing would be not only appropriate, but necessary to its success. That novel would be The
Edwardians.

Vita returned from Teheran in 1927 at about the same time Virginia’s To the Lighthouse was published, and
she was ‘dazzled and bewitched’ by it. ‘Darling, it makes me afraid of you,’ she wrote. ‘Afraid of your
penetration and loveliness and genius.’ In this novel, Virginia had performed one of her most brilliant analyses
of the minds and motives of her characters. ‘Only if I had read it without knowing you, I should be frightened
of you, ’Vita added.
Virginia’s ‘penetration’ was indeed frightening, for in Vita’s mind it translated as domination over
people; it was an advantage which Vita as an exterior writer didn’t have. Hadn’t Virginia’s ‘penetration’
already discovered Vita’s weak spot? Wasn’t it possible that she might unearth others and render Vita even
more vulnerable than secretly she already was? There was something terrifying about being under Virginia’s
intellectual and moral scrutiny.
There were other matters, too, troubling Vita. She was frustrated. She needed an adventure, not minute
cerebral dissections. Her months away from England had lowered what little immunity she had to Cupids
darts—Virginia or no Virginia. And the adventure she hankered for now appeared in the person of Mary
Campbell, wife of the poet, Roy Campbell. (Vita, one might add parenthetically, had a tendency, perhaps even
a talent, for coming between husbands and wives. Danger may have been part of the attraction, and of course
the challenge too. Earlier she had been in part responsible for the marital warfare between Violet and Denys
Trefusis; she had been the cause of Geoffrey Scott’s divorce; and there was even some suspicion that she had
been instrumental in separating Dorothy Wellesley from her husband.)
Vita met Roy and Mary Campbell on 22 May. On the twenty-third the Campbells dined with her at
Long Barn. On 1 October they moved into Long Barn cottage, by which time Vita had become Mary’s lover—
and her mother as well. Soon there would trail behind Mary a small procession of new love affairs and
passionate encounters: of which Margaret Voigt, Hilda Matheson and Evelyn Irons would be the first in fine.
Yet Vita’s love letters to Virginia continued without interruption as though no one else in the world existed.
Fear sharpens one’s perception and Virginia sensed immediately that something was amiss. She had
warned Vita only a few months earlier to be careful in her ‘gamboling, or you’ll find Virginia’s soft crevices
fined with hooks. You’ll admit I’m mysterious—you don’t fathom me yet—.’ She was right. Virginia kept a
good deal of herself ‘up her sleeve’, as Vita phrased it, and there were still large unknown areas to be explored.
Little did Vita know that when Virginia felt threatened by her lapses in fidelity, she would seize whatever
opportunity chose to offer; and as it happened opportunity put pen and ink within easy reach. The result was
to become one of the most personal footnotes in English literary history—a fictional biography of Vita
Sackville-West.
The Campbells had moved into Long Barn cottage on 1 October 1927, and on the fifth Virginia noted
in her diary the idea for ‘a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called
Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another’; and she began immediately to write it. On
9 October she wrote to let Vita know that she was indeed aware of the beautiful Mary Campbell’s existence,
as well as to tell her about the birth of Orlando. ‘But listen,’ she urged, ‘suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita;
and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go
gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell).... Shall you mind? Say yes, or No.’ Five days later, in a more
tranquil mood: ‘Never do I leave you without thinking, its for the last time.’ (Vita confessed to gallivanting
because Virginia left her ‘unguarded’.) ‘If you’ve given yourself to Campbell,’ Virginia went on, ‘I’ll have no
more to do with you, and so it shall be written, plainly, for all the world to read in Orlando.’
There was more truth in that statement than Virginia herself knew at the time. She was aware of Vita’s
past love affairs; and she knew too that, temperamentally and psychologically unsuited as she was, she had
never and could never satisfy Vita’s passionate physical appetite, and about that there was little to be done.
But there was nothing in the world of fiction or fantasy to prevent her from inscribing for posterity Vita’s lusty
delinquencies, fierce ambitions and yearnings for fame. With all the elegance at her command, Virginia would
show the world a Vita in full plumage—and in all her magnificent contradiction.
Thus in much the same proprietorial spirit as Browning’s jealous Duke, preserving for himself his
‘Last Duchess’ in a portrait, so Virginia preserved for herself the Vita she loved in the spectacular world of
Orlando. No matter how many slips in fidelity or how much gambolling there might be in the months and even
years ahead, Orlando— the seductive aristocrat of Virginia’s imagination—would remain inviolate, safely
beyond the menacing lure of other women, and permanently beyond the threat of loss. The Orlando of
Virginia’s book had stepped outside the irrelevancies of fife and into the purer chambers of art, where she
would remain forever. Others might seduce Vita in the flesh, but no one could sully the Vita of Virginia’s
creation.

While Orlando was in the making, Virginia became a little philosophical about Vita, even a little withdrawn.
So much of what Vita had done was not an affirmation of love, in any of its ambiguous senses; and that
knowledge was too alive and too submerged in Virginia to be ignored. But art, not life, now consumed her
attention. ‘I’m not afraid of your not wanting me,’ she wrote in October, ‘only of what one calls circum-
stances.... My questions about your past can wait till you’re in London.’ But by November Roy Campbell,
having discovered the affair between his wife and Vita, threatened first Mary’s life, and then divorce. Vita
turned to her biographer for help. Virginia listened carefully. She weighed the pros, considered the cons, and
then reproached Vita roundly for disrupting the fives of others—her own included. Vita left in tears. She ‘was
a failure all round’.
‘You made me feel such a brute, ‘Virginia wrote the next day, ‘and I didn’t mean to be.... And I’m
half, or 10th, part, jealous, when I see you with the Valeries and Marys: so you can discount that.... I’m happy
to think you do care: ...’Yet however open-minded or generous Virginia wanted to be, the little girl inside
would inevitably erupt in molten jealousy. ‘Promiscuous you are,’ she would soon write, ‘and that’s all there
is to be said of you. Look in the Index to Orlando—after Pippin [Vita’s dog] and see what comes next—
Promiscuity passim.’
Vita’s affair with Mary Campbell meanwhile grew stronger as the months passed. By early December
Vita had written fourteen sonnets to her, while Virginia continued assiduously to weave the fantastic world of
Orlando.
Following a visit to Long Barn in the summer of 1928, Virginia, in a contemplative mood, pondered
her changing relations with Vita:

I’m interested by the gnawing down of strata in friendship; how one passes unconsciously
to different terms; takes things easier; dont mind hardly at all about dress or anything.... Lay
by the black currant bushes lecturing Vita on her floundering habits with the Campbells for
instance. Mrs C. beat by her husband, all because V. will come triumphing, with her silver
& her coronets & her footmen into the life of a herring cooker. She cooks herrings on her
gas stove, I said, always remembering my own phrases [in Orlando],

Virginia’s detachment at this time probably puzzled Vita, for she now looked analytically on Vita’s affair with
Mary, and saw it as some grim charade of love gone wrong; yet there could be something in it which she might
sift out and weave into the gauzy web of biographical prose. But the ground on which she and Vita now stood
was shifting perceptibly, and Virginia found herself often comparing the Vita she was in the process of creating
to the living model who stood before her. She wondered at the difference, pondered the similarities, and tried
to imagine new variations.

In September 1928 the two women finally made the trip to France they had planned for so long. It was the first
and only expedition they would make together, and the first trial of what the close company of day-to-day
living might produce. ‘This is written on the verge of my alarming holiday in Burgundy,’ Virginia confided to
her diary. ‘I am alarmed of 7 days alone with Vita: interested; excited, but afraid—she may find me out, I her
out. ‘Virginia’s fear notwithstanding, the expedition turned out to be a success. The French countryside was
beautiful, the food delicious, and the days full of adventure. From Burgundy, Virginia wrote to Leonard: ‘Vita
is a perfect old hen, always running about with hot water bottles, and an amazingly competent traveler. as she
talks apparently perfect French.... The truth is she is an extremely nice, kind nature; but what I like, as a
companion, is her memories of the past. ‘To Harold, Vita wrote: ‘Virginia is very sweet, and I feel
extraordinarily protective towards her. The combination of that brilliant brain and fragile body is very lovable.
She has a sweet and childlike nature, from which her intellect is completely separate. ‘To her diary: ‘In the
middle of the night I was woken up by a thunderstorm. Went along to Virginia’s room thinking she might be
frightened. We talked...and then as the storm had gone over I left her to go to sleep again.’
It is not by chance that both the letters and the diary entry call attention to Virginia’s need for protection
and Vita’s need to protect her. Virginia’s childlike helplessness stimulated Vita’s sense of domination.
Virginia’s fragility aroused her sense of power. It fed and simultaneously appeased the deep vein of aggression
which ran through Vita’s nature. Strong, self-sufficient women, however brilliant or beautiful, would never
have great appeal to her. To need her protection, however, to be dependent upon her, was always a deep though
temporary satisfaction, and the closest Vita would ever get to achieving simultaneously the privacy she coveted
and the intimacy she craved. Her bounty, her protection, her passion—these were not love, exactly, but they
were the only generous expedients she could offer in its place. Virginia came close to describing the dominant-
compliant character of their relations when she said to Vita just after their expedition: ‘I have seen a little ball
kept bubbling up and down on the spray of a fountain: the fountain is you; the bah me. It is a sensation I get
only from you.’
They returned to London and to the publication of Orlando .Vita had up to this time been kept entirely
in the dark about the book. She had not been allowed to read even a single line. But now it was here, finished,
for all the world to see. And it was a great success. Reviewers couldn’t find words enough in praise. As Nigel
Nicolson said, Orlando was ‘the longest and most charming love letter in literature.... ‘More than that, the fact
that Lord Sackville had died when the book was half written made Orlando, in one sense, a kind of ‘memorial
mass’; and Vita was enchanted, ‘under a spell’.
Harold Nicolson wrote to Virginia from Berlin: ‘It really is Vita—her puzzled concentration, her
absent-minded tenderness.... She strides magnificent and clumsy through 350 years.’ One black cloud hovered
over the book’s publication, however, and that cloud was Lady Sackville. ‘You have written some beautiful
phrases in Orlando,’ wrote Vita’s mother to Virginia, ‘but probably you do not realise how cruel you have
been. And the person who inspired the Book has been crueller still.’ (Beside Virginia’s photograph, which she
pasted into her copy, Lady Sackville wrote: ‘The awful face of a mad woman whose successful mad desire is
to separate people who care for each other. I loathe this woman for having changed my Vita and taken her
away from me.’)
Orlando, however, affected Vita in a very private way. As it happened, in January of this year—1928,
the year of its publication—Vita’s father had died. His death made a reality of the one thing Vita dreaded most:
her permanent loss of Knole. As a woman, she no longer had any legitimate claim to her ancestral home. With
Lionel Sackville’s death, Knole now passed to Vita’s uncle Charles and would in turn eventually fall to her
cousin, Edward Sackville-West. That monumental loss and all it represented to Vita was monstrous. With the
birth of Orlando, however, its edge had been dulled. For in the deepest symbolic sense, Knole had been restored
to her. Their pasts had been reunited. ‘You made me cry with your passages about Knole, you wretch, ’Vita
wrote to its maker.
But there was something else Virginia had done in Orlando which was harder to talk about, and that
was her uncovering of the hidden side of her subject. Virginia had indeed ‘found her out’. There for all the
civilized world to read was Orlando’s violence; his lust for glory and his swings of temper; his rages, his
dreams, his wish for solitude; and there was that terrible flaw in his nature of substituting ‘a phantom for
reality’. Virginia came nearest to touching the very soul of her subject when she said that Orlando would
surrender everything he owned in the world ‘to write one little book and become famous’. ‘Desire for fame’—
that was the vital force in Orlando’s fife. And in Vita’s too. ‘There was a glory about a man who had written
a book.’
So much of Vita’s life—past, present and future—could be understood if one knew how much that
fame meant to her. With it, she had approval, power, recognition. It was the achievement of glory that excited
her most extravagant passions. If she could not be remembered in the histories of England as the successor to
Knole, surely she could take her place forever as one of England’s poets. Fame was the hidden key. And
Virginia had unearthed it. Vita saw that at once. If Virginia’s penetration into the human heart in To the
Lighthouse had made Vita ‘afraid’ of her, we must try to imagine how unshielded she felt now with Orlando
staring at the world from the windows of bookshops. Virginia had been relentless in her search and brilliant in
her exposition. Indeed the entire creation had about it a kind of ruthless virtuosity.
Now there was nothing, Vita realized, either too private or too personal, she could withhold from
Virginia, and with that realization her feelings for her began once more to change. Towards Virginia the artist
Vita’s adoration increased, but so did the distance which would now separate them further. ‘Darling, you’re
my anchor, ’Vita said, following the debut of Orlando. ‘An anchor entangled in gold nuggets at the bottom of
the sea. ’And she began to drift more openly from her adored Virginia. The anchor would remain forever
steadfast. Of that she was certain, and with that certainty the restless Vita bobbed and plunged and dipped on
the sea above. Just as she had had her adventures in the past, so she would have them in the months ahead.
Virginia would continue to love her, perhaps with greater ease, now that she was captured in the permanent
edifice of words. So that while the jealous child remained cradled in Vita’s affection, the author of Orlando
stood poised, watchful and just a little out of reach.
In the often bewildering interplay of these multiple roles, there was always a danger: the more openly
Virginia tried to monopolize Vita, the greater the strain she put on their relations. Vita was generous with
everything she had, except her personal freedom, the emotional franchise her biographer repeatedly put to the
test. Virginia, however, was reasonably assured of Vita’s yielding to her whenever her maternal susceptibilities
were touched, and she frequently took advantage of that weakness. How often she waved goodbye to Vita
feeling like ‘a baby having drunk sweet milk’. liven in her chronic illnesses, Virginia knew that she could
arouse Vita’s protective instincts more effectively by pretending she was well when she wasn’t—and Vita
knew that she wasn’t— than by acting the simpering, propitiatory invalid. Vita never failed to come to her
side. The lover posed all kinds of difficulties. But Vita, the mother, was as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar.
Much of this maternal benevolence Vita carried into all her intimacies, and it made her strangely and
even paradoxically inaccessible to the women she attracted. For, in secretly guarding her privacy, Vita made
it impossible for them ever to know her well enough to meet her securely on an open and emotionally equal
footing. Her generosity and protective affection tended to deny her love partners the privilege of behaving
maturely and responsibly toward her. They became something like dependent and loving children. For this
reason, in none of these intimacies could Vita feel very much fulfilment, for they did not allow her to
experience herself as an entire and fully-valued human being in her own right. In other words she was unable
to feel loved, valued and validated by an adult woman, because her loving beneficiary, in submitting to Vita’s
protective embraces, simultaneously forfeited her status of equality.
As if still under the feudal system of old, the lord dispensed her bounty and guardianship, and her
vassals pledged in return their fealty. Vita gave. They took. Vita requisitioned. They supplied. The intimacies
were skewed, unbalanced, unsymmetrical. But there seemed no other way for her to assuage her deep and
abiding sense of isolation. When these women asked for genuine love, Vita would be made to realize once
more that love was not hers to give. She wrote somewhere that her mother, for all her amorous extravagance,
‘was a dictator: not a colleague’. In a much subtler way, this applied to Vita as well.

‘I...would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.’ How easy it is to imagine those words coming from
Orlando, so charged are they with dramatic heroism. But in fact they were written by Vita herself when the
idea came to her for The Edwardians—six weeks before the publication of Orlando. Virginia, in the early
months of her work on the book, had recruited Vita’s help in collecting facts about Knole: tracing its history,
taking photographs, wandering through its great halls. It appears that in the process of Virginia’s creation,
Vita’s own imagination began to kindle. What was there to prevent her from making up her own story of
Knole?
In early February 1929 Vita wrote from Germany, with a Tauchnitz edition of Orlando before her, that
she could not read it without shedding tears. ‘Whether it is the mere beauty of the book, or whether it is because
of you, or because it is Knole,’ she did not know; but in late June she began writing at top speed about her
magnificent ancestral home in a novel she would call The Edwardians, a book that would mark a major change
in her fife as a writer.
From Savoy, where she continued to work on the book, she wrote to Virginia one of her most private statements
as a writer: it is the letter of one novelist to another:

This is perhaps not what you call an intimate letter? But I disagree. The book that one is
writing at the moment is really the most intimate part of one, and the part about which one
preserves the strictest secrecy. What is love or sex, compared with the intensity of the life
one leads in one’s book? A trifle; a thing to be shouted from the hilltops. Therefore if I write
to you about my book, I am writing really intimately, though, it may not be very
interestingly.... But you would rather I told you I missed Potto and Virginia, those silky
creatures.. .and so I do....

At the beginning of their friendship, Virginia had written a little unfairly to the artist Jacques Raverat
that Vita wrote ‘with complete competency, and with a pen of brass....’The truth is that Vita was a very skilled
writer, and as for the ‘pen of brass’— well, that was rather a matter of taste. Vita’s novels almost always sold
well, and she had considerable popular success—more, in fact, than Virginia herself. But Vita Sackville- West
could not write like Virginia Woolf, any more than Virginia Woolf could write like Vita Sackville-West. One
does not criticize a pianist, however, for failing to play like a harpsichordist. Moreover, what Virginia thought
of Vita’s writing is ultimately beside the point. What does matter is that Virginia, from the very start, saw in
her a highly marketable author, and (fame aside for the moment) with the publication of The Edwardians in
1930 Vita made a great deal of money for the Hogarth Press, as well as a great deal of money for herself—
money that would soon be put to use in realizing one of her most persistent dreams.
In early March 1930, as it happened, the view from the terrace of Long Barn was being threatened by
poultry farmers who were negotiating the purchase of a neighbouring farm. The thought of having in the future
to look out on chicken-houses appalled Vita. It was time to move on. And so she began looking for another
house. On a rainy 4 April she discovered Sissinghurst Castle, a monumental ruin set gloriously in acres of mud
and rubble. ‘Fell flat in love with it, ’Vita wrote in her diary. Her offer of .£12,375 was accepted and
Sissinghurst was hers.
With the money that she would earn from The Edwardians in the months ahead, Sissinghurst was to
become something like her own private version of Knole. The Castles traceable history went back at least as
far as Orlando’s. Was it not morally right that Sissinghurst should eventually come into Vita’s hands? Orlando
had sought fame and glory through writing a book. Now Vita’s book had earned her that fame, and Sissinghurst
would turn her glory into something tangible and material. Thus the dream and the quest of a lifetime
converged in The Edwardians , materially and metaphorically. There was an additional prize. Sissinghurst had
a rose-brick tower which would soon become Vita’s most guarded sanctuary and most bastioned citadel. If she
wanted solitude and safety, she would have them—but now with a certain lofty splendour.
All Passion Spent, another success, followed in 1931, and in 1932 the Nicolsons left Long Barn to take up full-
time residence at Sissinghurst. During this interval, although Vita and Virginia saw each other from time to
time and exchanged letters, the rift widened, on Vita’s part primarily. She had a castle to restore, a garden to
create, and a great deal more money to earn; and Harold, who had resigned from diplomatic life, was now
living permanently in London and about to turn his talents to literature and politics.
The space left by Vita in the early 1930s was taken, to some degree, by Ethel Smyth, composer,
autobiographer and incurable egotist. Now well into her seventies, she became Virginia’s most frequent visitor
and correspondent, and her insatiable curiosity about Virginia’s personal history was undoubtedly flattering.
This new friendship, however, did not usurp or even disturb Vita’s place in Virginia’s heart. Her love for Vita
simply folded its wings and waited in silence.
Virginia spoke of Vita in her diary from time to time, as though to keep the image sharp: ‘Vita last
night:’ she wrote in January 1931,‘...she says she gets more pain than pleasure from praise of her books, which
I believe to be true. Never was there a more modest writer. And yet she makes £74 in a morning—I mean a
cheque drops in for a story.’ In March 1932:‘We went to Sissinghurst.... Vita in breeches & pink shirt. We
went over the grounds...ate cold salmon & raspberries & cream & variegated chocolates given by Lady
Sackville... & drank lots of drinks; & then climbed Vita’s tower; lovely pink brick; but like Knole, not much
view, save of stables that are to be guest rooms. So home.’
Like many another rejected lover, out of sheer self-protection Virginia shut her eyes to a good many
changes in Vita which were so obvious to others; but she continued to see the essential portrait, and her own
deep sense of honesty forbade her to falsify that portrait, as the following letter to Ottoline Morrell testifies:

I remain always very fond of her—this I say because on the surface, she’s rather red and
black and gaudy, I know: and very slow; and very, compared to us, primitive: but she is
incapable of insincerity or pose, and digs and digs, and waters, and walks her dogs, and reads
her poets, and falls in love with every pretty woman, just like a man, and is to my mind
genuinely aristocratic; but I cant swear that she won’t bore you.... But do let her come from
her rose-red tower where she sits with thousands of pigeons cooing over her head.

But Virginia persisted. She began a letter of April 1934:

Yes, I must really write to you, because I want to know what is happening. But that said,
I’ve nothing to say. Thats because you’re in love with another, damn you!.... The week after
next we go to Ireland.... And there I may be windswept in to the sea. But what would Vita
care. “No”, she’d say, we had Petulaneum Ridentis in that bed last year: we’ll try
Scrofulotum Penneum there this.” So she’d bury me under, wouldn’t she Vita?

In her diary she wrote a few months later: ‘Vita to lunch, after many weeks, yesterday.... She has grown opulent
& bold & red—tomato coloured, & paints her fingers & Eps which need no paint...underneath much the same;
only without the porpoise radiance, & the pearls lost lustre.’ So Virginia ended, thinking back once more to
December 1925, a scene touched with the loving brush strokes of nostalgia.
Then, finally, the diary entry of 11 March 1935:‘My friendship with Vita is over. Not with a quarrel,
not with a bang, but as ripe fruit falls.... But her voice saying “Virginia?” outside the tower room was as
enchanting as ever...& thats an end of it. And there is no bitterness, & no disillusion, only a certain emptiness.’
The friendship did not come to an end. It was Virginia’s depression that spoke. The deaths of Lytton
Strachey and Roger Fry had cut her off from two of her closest friends. The Years had got out of control and
was causing her months of tortured writing. She was in her fifty-third year and feeling old, unendorsed and
irrelevant. All of these troubles coalesced in her mind and pressed her into a state of vulnerability not far from
despair. Her rapport with Vita had now reached, for Virginia at least, a less fanciful, more realistic footing that
would endure for the remaining years of her life; but the diminished privilege in their relations appeared to
Virginia as a separation: the voluptuous aristocrat she loved so much was drifting beyond her reach; the
passionate woman with gypsy blood coursing her English veins was moving away from her anchorage, and
there was no thing Virginia could do to stop it.
Sissinghurst Castle, with ah its symbolic meaning, was becoming the centre of Vita’s world, a safe
reclusive world of continuity and pattern. She strode her own grounds now, attired almost exclusively in
whipcord breeches and high boots, pearls and earrings. Her earliest fantasies of manhood were swelling to life,
and her craving for self-governance was now taking the shape of solitude in the guarded privacy of her tower
room. There Vita sat, alone for long periods, writing her books and scanning her poems with ‘thousands of
pigeons cooing over her head’. Within the next year or two, she would be ready to write ‘Solitude’, the poem
which had for so long been accumulating in some sequestered corner of her mind.
Lady Sackville died in 1936, and Vita discovered among her papers the testimonies from Spanish witnesses
she had collected in 1910 in preparation for the Knole succession case. The testimonies came from people who
had known Lady Sackville as a child as well as Pepita, Vita’s Spanish gypsy grandmother. The discovery made
her ‘mouth water’. Here was a book Vita must write. The materials were made to order, and at once her
imagination went to work. Pepita was begun in August 1936 and was published in October 1937 by the
Hogarth Press. Ten thousand copies were sold within the first eight weeks of publication. She had scored
another success.
The second half of the book was devoted to ‘Pepita s Daughter, 1862-1936’, that is, to Vita’s mother;
and of course the years from 1892 to 1936 include Vita herself. As we read through those pages today, we
cannot fail to notice that Vita was not writing about her mother alone. As principal observer and participant in
the drama of Lady Sackville s life, Vita, without realizing it, was also writing a kind of oblique memoir of her
own youth and young womanhood. Her values, her attitudes, her preoccupations permeate every page. In her
effort to get her mother into perspective, Vita, now in her rose-brick tower at Sissinghurst, was forced to take
a long, unflinching look at her earlier self. And she didn’t like everything she saw. With the passage of years,
she began to realize how much terrible waste there had been in her many adventures into passion. Now she
saw them as

Those cheap and easy loves!...

Those rash intruders into darkest lairs?...
That lure the flesh and leave it slightly smutched....

Such were the fines Vita would write into ‘Solitude’. To have abandoned so much of her life to the rituals of
passion had been destructive and wasteful. Worse than that, she had repeatedly dramatized a scalding rapture
without feeling the salve of love. It had been so much caressing without much caring.
Virginia was the one exception. But then she understood Vita as the others had not. She knew that
there was something blocked, hidden, permanently frozen. That knowledge by no means diminished the
intensity of her feeling. In understanding the source of Vita’s ‘floundering habits’, however, the ‘gentle genius’
of letters saw the ‘cheap and easy loves’ and did her best to wait in patience, while the possessive child, the
demanding Potto, continued to squirm in pain and fear and anger.

With the approach of the Second World War in 1938, international tension was mounting. The tension in
Virginia’s workroom mounted too. She had just gone through five years of ‘sweat and tears’ with her longest
and most troublesome book, The Years. Her nephew Julian Bell had recently been killed in the Spanish Civil
War. Her world was becoming a madhouse of brutality and slaughter. And it was in this strange atmosphere
of noisy emptiness and in a state of increasing exhaustion that she wrote Three Guineas, a passionate
denunciation of wars and the men who fought them. The book was published in 1938, and it provoked one of
her very few notable, quarrels with Vita. Three Guineas, Virginia said, was meant to stir up popular feeling;
she had meant to ‘say irritating things’, to ‘rouse objections’; but Vita’s charge that the book advanced
‘misleading arguments’, amounting to dishonesty, made her wince. The pain turned quickly to anger, and the
anger brought Virginia’s professional integrity surging to the surface. What, she wanted to know, did Vita
mean by ‘misleading arguments’? Did she mean that Virginia had arranged the facts in a dishonest way so as
to produce a desired effect? If so, then they would have to have the matter out—‘whether with swords or
fisticuffs. And I dont think whichever we use, you will, as you say, knock me down. It may be a silly book,
and I dont agree with you that its a well-written book: but its certainly an honest book....’
Vita’s letter had stung, but Virginia stood firm, even refusing to read Vita’s manuscript until the matter
was settled. In July, another letter to Sissinghurst was fired off:

I feel I cant read your poem impartially while your charges against me...remain
unsubstantiated.... You said something about its [Three Guineas] being ‘misleading’ and suggested
that if only you weren’t incurably clumsy honest and slow-witted yourself you could
demolish my specious humbug. You could knock me down with your honest old English
fists and so on. And then you sicklied me over with praise of charm and wit.

‘Horrified by your letter,’ Vita wired her. More letters shot back and forth before Virginia was certain that she
had not been accused of dishonesty—‘and thats the only thing I mind. So forgive and forget,’ said Virginia a
little submissively, just as so much else, whether rightly or wrongly, had been forgiven and forgotten. Where
Vita was concerned, the stakes were too high, the potential loss too great. Virginia would continue to remain
compliant.
Far more serious trouble lay ahead, however. The Years had been an enormous drain not only on
Virginia’s energy, but on her confidence as a writer, and the hostility Three Guineas aroused in some quarters
did little to bolster her flagging self-assurance. When she began the life of Roger Fry as well as Pointz Hall
(Between the Acts) in April of 1938, it was, therefore, rather in the spirit of defeat. The Fry biography, because
it was so personal, caused her endless trouble and doubt; and the more she struggled with it, the less sure of
herself she became. She had convinced herself that it was not going to be a good book. Leonard Woolf, always
Virginia’s most reliable critic, found it inadequate, and told her so.
Over all of this private hardship loomed the dark shadow of Hitler, threatening the fate of the civilized
world. An approaching war, and all of its companion horrors, added considerably to an already heavily charged
atmosphere. To both novelists this meant a shift to herd conformity. It meant relinquishing private satisfactions
for the benefit of the greater good. To Virginia this was intolerable. To Vita it was necessary. In fact, the very
differences which separated them in their private fives differentiated them too in their response to the war.
When the bombs began to fall on England Vita’s intrinsic mood for combat was quickened to life. She might
write pastoral verse and reflective poetry in the solitude of her pink tower, but in the crisis of war she rolled
up her sleeves and took over civic duties. The urge to literary creation yielded to the spirit of patriotism. War
to Vita was one thing. Writing was another. She could take it up. She could put it down. Her writing was not
inextricably woven into her sense of self, and the two never got confused.
For Virginia, however, war held a different meaning. She was always actively a part of the world in
ordinary life; but when she came to write, she invariably drew apart from it. On one level war of course meant
loss and privation. At a deeper level, however, it meant having no readers; and to Virginia’s way of thinking,
without readers there was no writer. Numerous other circumstances in her life during this period of trial
conspired to exaggerate her situation, to get things out of all proportion. And it took no great stretch of
imagination for her to begin to feel herself a piece of excess baggage. More than that, war meant the end of
personal independence, the end of public recognition. Everything she had worked for now hung in the balance.
Without readers, without the public echo, there was nothing.
 It is not clear whether Virginia herself understood the struggle within during these last years. If she
did, it is unlikely that she would have mentioned it to Vita, for the struggle was too close to death, and death
was ‘the one experience I shall never describe’, she had once said. Perhaps there was no need to.
There is no effective way to document loneliness at times like this. One can only try to approximate
the sense and the intensity of emptiness a human being is capable of feeling. As often happens, however, when
one’s world is threatened with annihilation and death lurks just around the corner, people who at some earlier
time have loved deeply tend to want to relive those earlier feelings and recall once more the happiest of those
times past. And in this crisis, Vita seemed to realize more than ever before just how much Virginia meant to
her. For they lived through these dark days with the full knowledge that every visit might be their last. Bombs
were falling near Sissinghurst, just as they fell in Virginia’s garden at Monk’s House.
‘I did like your letter,’ wrote Virginia in the autumn of 1939,‘And if I’m dumb and chill it doesn’t
mean I dont always keep thinking of you—one of the constant presences is yours, and so—well, no more.’ In
March 1940:‘.. .how I long to hear from your own lips whats been worrying you—for you’ll never shake me
off—no, not for a moment do I feel ever less attached.’ A few days later, with the enemy aircraft closer than
ever: “What can I say—except that I love you.... You have given me such happiness.’
By October 1940 the Woolfs’ two London houses had been either destroyed or made uninhabitable by
German air attacks. Whatever remaining possessions they could salvage, they moved to Rodmell in Sussex,
where Virginia was trying desperately to finish Between the Acts. And it was during this time and in the early
months of 1941 that she began to drift: into a strange kind of serenity, something like a state of exhausted
euphoria. The strain of war, the fatigue of compulsive writing, the terror of failing as a novelist, the horror of
old age and dependency, her fear of madness—all converged, finally, and reversed the spurious euphoria into
the blackest of depressions. But Vita knew nothing of this.
 In her letter to Sissinghurst dated Saturday 22 March Virginia inquired about Vita’s dying birds—her
budgerigars. The Woolfs’ housekeeper kept budgerigars too, but ‘Louie’s survive: and she feeds them on
scraps—I suppose they’re lower class, humble, birds. If we come over, may I bring her a pair if any survive?
Do they die all in an instant? When shall we come? Lord knows—’
Those were her last words to Vita. Virginia ended her life on Friday 28 March 1941.
There is a curious little detail connected with Virginia’s last reference to dying birds. In the closing
scenes of Between the Acts, posthumously published in July 1941, there is a line about ‘birds syllabling
discordantly life, life, life.... ’ When Vita read this passage, some months after Virginia’s death, she could not
have failed to recognize its origin in Orlando, which runs:

Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and
the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird
than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dust bin, whence he picks among the
sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life,
Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard....

In 1945, four years after Virginia’s death, Vita, together with Harold Nicolson, compiled an anthology of
poetry called Another World Than This.... In that volume is a ‘poem’ by Virginia Woolf which Vita lineated
from this Orlando passage:

Let us go, then, exploring

This summer morning,
When all are adoring
The plum-blossom and the bee.
And humming and hawing
Let us ask of the starling
What he may think
On the brink
Of the dust-bin whence he picks
Among the sticks Combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask;
Life, Life, Life! cries the bird
As if he had heard....

That Vita should have chosen this very passage from Orlando, Virginia’s longest love letter to her, has by
itself a certain commemorative importance. But its valedictory significance to Vita only becomes clear when
we remember that, in her teens, Virginia had had lessons in Latin and Greek. For in this posthumous novel
‘Life, Life, Life!’ translates into Latin as ‘Vita, Vita, Vita!’ And nothing could have been more fitting for
Virginia’s last farewell to Vita, who had given her so much life—with all its happiness and sorrow—in almost
twenty years of love and friendship.
 The Letters of
Vita Sackville-West
to Virginia Woolf
March 1923 - Early 1924
Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf first met at a dinner party given by Clive Bell in London on
14 December 1922. Soon afterwards Virginia dined with Vita at her house in Ebury Street, and on
11 January 1923 Vita paid her first visit to Hogarth House, Richmond, where the Woolfs had begun
to print short books, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Their friendship at first seemed to
develop rapidly. After her visit to Richmond Vita wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson, ‘I love Mrs
Woolf with a sick passion’, but it was more instant admiration than instant infatuation. Then, for the
remainder of 1923 and early 1924, there was a hiatus in their relationship. They seldom met or
corresponded, for Vita felt snubbed by Virginia’s refusal to join PEN, as the first of these letters
records. Besides, Vita had fallen temporarily in love with Geoffrey Scott, wrecking his marriage in
the process. She lived mostly in the country, writing novels, while Virginia was working on Mrs
Dalloway and The Common Reader.

To Virginia Woolf
182 Ebury Street
London SW1
26 March

Dear Mrs Woolf

I write this tonight, because I think you said you were going to Spain on the 27th and I want it to catch you
before you go. The PEN club committee1 are very anxious for you to join the club, and at their request I
proposed you,—now will you be nice and let them make you a mem for my sake if for no other reason. It is
only a guinea a year, and they would be so pleased. They dine once a month; it is quite amusing. Do, please,
and come to the May dinner when they are entertaining distinguished foreign writers. There was a little shout
of excitement from the Committee about you, and Galsworthy (so to speak) got up and made a curtsey.
I hope you will have fun in Spain. It is the best country I know. Please let me know when you come back, as I
do want you both to come and stay at Long Barn, 2 and come up to Knole with me. And I shan’t know when
you are back unless you tell me.

Yours very sincerely

Vita Nicolson
To Vita Sackville-West
Hotel Ingles
Madrid
Good Friday [30 March]

1 Vita was a member of the Committee of PEN, the international authors’ society of which John Galsworthy was chairman. Virginia had received a
previous invitation from PEN in the autumn of 1921 and had refused it.
2 Vita’s home in Kent, two miles from Knole, the great house of the Sackvilles where she was born in 1892.
Dear Mrs Nicolson,

(But I wish you could be induced to call me Virginia). I got your letter as we left Richmond. I am much flattered
that the P.E.N. should ask me to become a member
I would do so with pleasure, except that I don’t know what being a member means. Does it commit
one to make speeches, or to come regularly, or to read papers or what? Living so far out, dinners are apt to be
difficult, and I cant speak....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
8 April

My dear Virginia

(You see I don’t take much inducing. Could you be induced likewise, do you think?)
It is nice of you to say you will join the PEN club provided you don’t have to make speeches. I can
guarantee that, as by one of the club rules they are forbidden. The most you ever get is a statement from the
chairman. Nor need you go to any dinners unless you want to. Nor does anyone read papers. You just go to a
dinner when the spirit moves you, and take your chance of sitting next to Mr H.G. Wells or an obscure and
spotty young journalist.
I don’t suppose this letter will ever reach you. It always seems to be quite incredible anyway that any
letter should ever reach its destination. But I seem to remember that you have already said—or, rather,
written—all that there is to be said about letters. So I won’t compete.
I am envying you Spain more than I can say. I wish I were with you—But the lady’s smocks are very
nice, along the hedges, and my tulips are coming out.

Yours very sincerely

Vita Nicolson

[Written in pencil] This paper is like blotting paper to write on in ink.

To Vita Sackville-West
Murcia
Spain
15 April

Dear Mrs Nicolson

The secretary of the P.E.N. club has written to me to say that I have been elected a member. Very regretfully
I have had to decline—since I see from the club papers that it is wholly a dining club, and my experience is
that I can’t, living at Richmond, belong to dining clubs. I’ve tried two dining clubs, with complete disaster But
I’m very sorry, as I should like to know the members, and see you also.
But this last I hope can be managed in other ways…
March - December 1924
In March 1924 the Woolfs moved from Richmond to Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, taking the
Hogarth Press with them, and Vita was among their first visitors. Virginia invited her to contribute
a book to the Press, and she responded by writing Seducers in Ecuador while on a walking tour
through the Dolomites with Harold. Virginia was impressed by it, and began to regard her with new
respect and admiration. In July she paid her first visit to Long Barn in Kent, Vita’s house, and to
Knole, the ancestral home of Vita’s father, Lord Sackville, who had been separated from his wife
since 1919. Lady Sackville, who figures frequently in this correspondence, lived alone in a huge house
in Brighton. In September Vita paid a return visit to Monk’s House at Rodmell, in Sussex, where the
Woolfs spent the summer and many weekends. Their friendship was still not intimate.

To Virginia Woolf
Tre Croci, Cadore
[Italy]
16 July

My dear Virginia

I hope that no one has ever yet, or ever will, throw down a glove I was not ready to pick up. You asked me to
write a story for you. On the peaks of mountains, and beside green lakes, I am writing it for you. I shut my
eyes to the blue of gentians, to the coral of androsace; I shut my ears to the brawling of rivers; I shut my nose
to the scent of pines; I concentrate on my story,3 Perhaps you will be the Polite Publisher, and I shall get my
story back—‘The Hogarth Press regrets that the accompanying manuscript,’ etc.—or whatever your formula
may be. Still, I shall remain without resentment. The peaks and the green lakes and the challenge will have
made it worth while, and to you alone shall it be dedicated. But of course the real challenge wasn’t the story,
(which was after all merely a ‘commercial proposition’,) but the letter. You said I wrote letters of impersonal
frigidity. Well, it is difficult, perhaps, to do otherwise, in a country where two rocky peaks of uncompromising
majesty soar into the sky immediately outside one’s window, and where an amphitheatre of mountains encloses
one’s horizons and one’s footsteps. Today I climbed up to the eternal snows, and there found bright yellow
poppies braving alike the glacier and the storm; and was ashamed before their courage. Besides, it is said that
insects made these peaks, deposit on deposit; though if you could see the peaks in question you would find it
hard to believe that any insect, however industrious, had found time to climb so far towards the sky.
Consequently, you see, one is made to feel extremely impersonal and extremely insignificant. I can’t tell you
how many Dolomitic miles and altitudes I have by now in my legs. I feel as though all intellect had been
swallowed up into sheer physical energy and well-being. This is how one ought to feel, I am convinced. I
contemplate young mountaineers hung with ropes and ice-axes, and think that they alone have understood how
to live life—Will you ever play truant to Bloomsbury and culture, I wonder, and come travelling with me? No,
of course you won’t. I told you once I would rather go to Spain with you than with anyone, and you looked

3 Seducers in Ecuador.
confused, and I felt I had made a gaffe,— been too personal, in fact,—but still the statement remains a true
one, and I shan’t be really satisfied till I have enticed you away. Will you come next year to the place where
the gipsies of all nations make an annual pilgrimage to some Madonna or other?41 forget its name. But it is a
place somewhere near the Basque provinces, that I have always wanted to go to, and next year I AM GOING.
I think you had much better come too. Look on it, if you like, as copy,—as I believe you look upon everything,
human relationships included. Oh yes, you like people through the brain better than through the heart,—forgive
me if I am wrong. Of course there must be exceptions; there always are. But generally speaking....
And then, I don’t believe one ever knows people in their own surroundings; one only knows them
away, divorced from all the little strings and cobwebs of habit. Long Barn, Knole, Richmond, and Bloomsbury.
All too familiar and entrapping. Either 1 am at home, and you are strange; or you are at home, and I am strange;
so neither is the real essential person, and confusion results.
But in the Basque provinces, among a horde of zingaros5we should both be equally strange and equally
real.
On the whole, I think you had much better make up your mind to take a holiday and come.

Vita
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Lewes
Sussex
19 August

My dear Vita,

Have you come back, and have you finished your book—when will you let us have it?
Here I am, being a nuisance, with all these questions.
I enjoyed your intimate letter from the Dolomites. It gave me a great deal of pain—which is I’ve no
doubt the first stage of intimacy—no friends, no heart, only an indifferent head. Never mind: I enjoyed your
abuse very much....
But I will not go on else I should write you a really intimate letter, and then you would dislike me,
more, even more, than you do.
But please let me know about the book.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
22 August

4 Santiago de Compostela.
5 J Gipsies.
My dear Virginia

Aren’t you a pig, to make me feel one? I have searched my brain to remember what on earth in my letter could
have given you ‘a great deal of pain’. Or was it just one of your phrases, poked at me? Anyhow, that wasn’t
my intention, as you probably know Do you ever mean what you say, or say what you mean? Or do you just
enjoy baffling the people who try to creep a little nearer?
My story I fear is but a crazy affair. If you gave me a severe date by which it must reach you, typed
and tidy, I should obey, being very tractable. If you say you must have it next week I will sit up all night and
finish it. If you say ‘any time will do’ I shall continue to glance at it disgustedly once a day and shove it back
into its drawer with no word added. Three-quarters of it exist at present, and your letter gave it a fillip. Please
issue an irrevocable command.
‘Dislike you more, even more.’ Dear Virginia, (said she putting her cards on the table,) you know very
well that I like you a fabulous lot; and any of my friends could tell you that. But I expect you are blasée about
people liking you,—no, you aren’t, though,—I take that back.
I nearly came to see you last Sunday, as I was coming back from my mother at Brighton, but I thought
you mightn’t like it. And it was such a horrible day of gale and rain.
Now I had better go on with that story.

Vita
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
Monks House
Rodmell
Lewes
26 August

My Dear Vita

The position about your story is this: if you could let us have it by Sept. 14th, we should make an effort to
bring it out this autumn; if later, it is highly improbable that we could bring it out before early next year....
But really and truly you did say—I cant remember exactly what, but to the effect that I made copy out
of all my friends, and cared with the head, not with the heart. As I say, I forget; and so we’ll consider it
cancelled....
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Lewes
Sussex
Sunday [31 August]

My dear Vita,

...could you come on Saturday 13th, not Sunday 14th, as Leonard has to disappear6 on Monday at dawn, and
therefore wouldn’t see you at all.
I ought to warn you of the inconveniences and discomforts of this house, especially when it rains, but
they are too many to begin on. Anyhow, we shall enjoy seeing you.

6 To Yorkshire.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
[15 September]

My dear Virginia

In the first place this must be a Collins7 to thank you for the great enjoyment of my hours with you, 8 and in
the second place it must be an explanation, for I find I have cut a paragraph out of my story, meaning to insert
it in another place; so if you came on any passage which failed to make sense, that is the reason.
It is quite a short paragraph, and I can put it into the proof.
(I like the way I go on the assumption that the story has found sufficient favour in the eyes of the Press,
when all the time it may be in the post on its way back to me.)
I have not forgotten the Flying Terrapin,9 but can’t find it. Someone must have taken it. I will send it
when it turns up.
I have ordered a dozen ilium croceum for your garden, just to convert you to Dutch bulbs.
Will you ask Mr Leonard if I may review10 a book of poems by Claude Colleer Abbott, which is to
appear shortly? I don’t like the man, but they are country poems lamentably like my own, and I thought some
of them rather good. So if he is sending them to anyone, may it be to me?
I did love being with you both; I was so happy there. I look forward to coaxing you to Knole in
December!

Yours affect’ly
Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
Monks House
Rodmell
Lewes
Monday [15 September]

My dear Vita,

I like the story11 very very much—in fact, I began reading it after you left...went out for a walk, thinking of it
all the time, and came back and finished it, being full of a particular kind of interest which I daresay has
something to do with its being the sort of thing I should like to write myself. I don’t know whether this fact

7 A thank-you letter named after Mr Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.
8 Vita spent her first night with Virginia and Leonard Woolf at Monk’s House, Rodmell, on Saturday 13 September 1924. In her diary of 15 September
Virginia wrote about her: ‘A perfect lady, with all the dash and courage of the aristocracy, and less of its childishness than I expected.’ ’They also
visited Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, at nearby Charleston.
9 The Flaming (not Flying) Terrapin, a book of poems by Roy Campbell.
10 For the Nation and Athenaeum (called Nation throughout this volume), of which Leonard Woolf was then Literary Editor.
11 Seducers in Ecuador
should make you discount my praises, but I’m certain that you have done something much more interesting
(to me at least) than you’ve yet done....
I am very glad we are going to publish it, and extremely proud and indeed touched, with my childlike
dazzled affection for you, that you should dedicate it to me. We sent it to the printers this morning.
...By the way, you must let me have a list of people to send circulars to—as many as you can. And to
do this you must come and see me in London for you should have heard Leonard and me sitting over our wood
fire last night and saying what we don’t generally say when our guests leave us, about the extreme niceness
etc etc and (I’m now shy—and so will cease.)

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
17 September

My dear Virginia

I have walked on air all day since getting your letter. I am more pleased than I can tell you at your approval,
and if I can tighten I will,—I felt myself that it needed this. Any suggestion would be welcomed?
I will make out a fist for circulars.
I sent the Terrapin—also the typist’s address, which I forgot to give you:
Mrs Candy
Hi Amore
Richmond Park Avenue
Bournemouth
How charming of you to sit on the millstones and say nice things. Altogether after reading your letter
I felt like a stroked cat. You see, I appreciate the fact that you are neither of you easy-going critics... whether
of work or persons.
The small stout key which I have lost unlocks a cupboard in which reposes not only my reputation but
my stationery,12 so as I can’t get at my envelopes I must use an old one to fit the Terrapin. Forgive it. The
Terrapin is a wild uneven thing, almost ridiculous in parts, almost magnificent in others. I wonder what you
will think of it.

Yours ever
Vita
Sussex

12 The key to the cabinet where Vita kept all her private letters, and her ‘confession’ about her love affair with Violet Trefusis, later (1973) published
by her son, Nigel Nicolson, in Portrait of a Marriage.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1 [4 October]

We are just back; what did I find on the drawing room table, but a letter from which (to justify myself and
utterly shame you) I make this quotation:
“Look on it, if you like, as copy,—as I believe you look upon everything, human relationships
included. Oh yes, you like people through the brain, rather than through the heart” etc: So there. Come and be
forgiven. Seducers in Ecuador looks very pretty, rather like a lady bird. The title however slightly alarms the
old gentlemen in Bumpuses.13

To Virginia Woolf
66 Mount Street
W1
Thursday [6 November]

My dear Virginia

I came to Tavistock Square today. I went upstairs and rang your bell—I went downstairs and rang your bell.
Nothing but dark inhospitable stairs confronted me. So I went away disconsolate. I wanted

(a) to see you.

(b) to ask you whether any copies of our joint progeny had been sold, and if so how many.14
(c) to ask for some more circulars.
(d) to ask you to sign two of your books which my mother had just been out to buy.
(e) to be forgiven.

I came away with all these wants unappeased.

Now I am going back to my mud till December 1st when I remove to Knole.
I await reviews in some trepidation.
I got a nice letter from Raymond Mortimer.

Yours ever
Vita

13 Booksellers.
14 Seducers in Ecuador
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Sunday [9 November]

My dear Vita,

You have added to your sins by coming here without telephoning—I was only rambling the streets to get a
breath of air—could easily have stayed in, wanted very much to see you....
...I will sign as many books as Lady Sackville wants. No: I will not forgive you. Wont you be coming
up for a day later, and won’t you let me know beforehand?

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
13 November

My dear Virginia

I have just received from your press a surprise packet of which the enclosed is the invoice. As I didn’t ask for
any of these books, I imagine they were meant for some one else, so let you know at once. I am however
keeping the books, as I shall easily use up 7 Seducers for Xmas—and I am glad to have the other two.
This in haste.
I shan’t be up till December now, but will then take the precaution of telephoning! Only I hate
bothering people on the telephone.
I was grateful for the little bulletin—I hope the 430 copies15 will increase in splendour.
SINS:
1. Saying V.W looked on friends as copy.
2. Coming without telephoning. 16
What else?
I will try to make up by passing on some remarks I got in a letter today, ‘I am reading Jacob’s Room
again. I think it is one of the first books of the day. It terrifies me. It is a book that leaves every other book both
commonplace and common. One’s own stuff seems horrible and vulgar.’
There now: incense to your censer.

Vita

I suppose a review copy went to the Observer? as Garvin17 wrote to me to say he hoped to get one.

15 Of Seducers in Ecuador.
16 To 52 Tavistock Square.
17 J. L. Garvin was Editor of the Observer.
January — November 1925
At the beginning of 1925 Vita and Virginia met infrequently in London. Vita was occupied with gently
shaking herself free of her lover, Geoffrey Scott, and beginning to write her long poem The Land.
But during the summer she turned increasingly to Virginia, and Virginia to her, both finding a
common bond in literature, especially each other’s books, and in their growing mutual sympathy.
Although Virginia was suffering from periodic bouts of headaches and exhaustion, she had started to
write To the Lighthouse. Then, in early November, Harold Nicolson was posted by the Foreign Office
to the British Legation in Teheran, and the friendship between the two women blossomed suddenly in
December.

To Virginia Woolf

Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
26 May

My dear Virginia

I have been horribly remiss in writing to thank you for “Mrs Dalloway”, but as I didn’t want to write you the
‘How-charming-of-you-to-send-me-your-book-I-am-looking-forward-to-reading-so-much’ sort of letter, I
thought I would wait until I had read both it and The Common Reader,18 which I am sorry to say I have now
done. Sorry, because although I may and shall read them again, the first excitement of following you along an
unknown road is over, and nothing gives way so quickly as surprise to familiarity. I feel however that there
are passages of The Common Reader that I should like to know by heart; it is superb; there is no more to be
said. I can’t think of any book I like better or will read more often. Mrs Dalloway is different; it is a novel; its
beauty is in its brilliance chiefly; it bewilders, illuminates, and reveals; The Common Reader grows into a
guide, philosopher and friend, while Mrs Dalloway remains a will-of-the- wisp, a dazzling and lovely
acquaintance. One thing she has done for me for ever: made it unnecessary ever to go to London again, for the
whole of London in June is in your first score of pages. (Couldn’t you do a winter London now? with fogs and
flares at the street corners, blue twilights, lamps, and polished streets?)
How I envy you your English—How do you manage to make it as limpid as French, and yet preserve
all the depth of its own peculiar genius?
When will you come here? for a weekend or in the week? and who am I to ask to meet you? You did
promise to come in the summer, you know,—if a promise given on your area steps can bind you. I am going
away for Whitsun, but apart from that I propose to be here immoveably for several months. I cannot write, so

18 Mrs Dalloway was published by the Hogarth Press on 14 May. The Common Reader had appeared on 23 April.
am keeping chickens instead.
Please come. I shan’t think you ‘nice’ any longer if you don’t.

Yours ever
Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
London WC1
Wednesday [27 May]

My dear Vita,

Hah ha! I thought you wouldn’t like Mrs Dalloway.

On the other hand, I thought you might like The Common Reader, and I’m very glad that you do—all
the more that its just been conveyed to me that Logan P. Smith thinks it very disappointing. But oh, how one’s
friends bewilder one!—partly, I suppose, the result of bringing out two books at the same time. I’m trying to
bury my head in the sand, or play a game of racing my novel against my criticism according to the opinions of
my friends. Sometimes Mrs D. gets ahead, sometimes the C. R.—

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
25 August

My dear Virginia

Last Friday at midnight I stood on the top of your Downs, and, looking down over various lumps of blackness,
tried to guess which valley contained Rodmell and you asleep therein. And now comes your letter, making me
think that on the contrary you were probably awake and in pain.19 But knowing nothing of that at the time, I
reluctantly recovered my dogs who had been galloping madly across the Downs, climbed into the motor, and
drove on along deserted roads and through the sleeping villages of Sussex and Kent, with the secret knowledge
in my own mind that I had paid you a visit of which you knew nothing,—more romantic, if less satisfying,
than the cup of tea to which Leonard had bidden me on Saturday
I like extremely your corybantic picture of me and Eddy dancing in the vats.20 Please preserve it. I will

19 Virginia had collapsed on 19 August in the middle of a celebration for her nephew Quentin Bell’s birthday and the marriage of Maynard Keynes and
Lydia Lopokova.
20 Virginia had written: ‘I have a perfectly romantic and no doubt untrue vision of you in my mind—stamping out the hops in a great vat in Kent—
stark naked, brown as a satyr, and very beautiful.’ Eddy Sackville-West was Vita’s cousin.
not tell you the truth, of stained fingers and the East End21 let loose. Yet a page later you contradict yourself
in your magnificent manner, and call loudly for exactitudes of the most prosaic description. Oddly enough,
you have hit on the very things with which my poem (which is not at all beautiful) does deal;22 you could run
a small-holding on the information supplied. I tell you exactly how and when to cut hay, cereals and beans;
how to stack, thatch and thresh; how to spray orchards against the woolly aphis, the blossom weevil and the
apple saw-fly. It is crabbed enough even for your avowed taste. Which reminds me, our argument at the
Morrells23 took Crabbe as a spring-board, and the third person concerned was your lovely young god,
Rylands.24 We have not met since, which is a pity. But to revert to my poem, (you see what an egoist I am,) I
have come to the conclusion that there is no longer any room for merely purple poetry; only for the prosaic,
(which has its own beauty,) or for the intellectual. A bad definition, but no doubt you will get my meaning.
Purple occurs incidentally, but only with its roots ground stalworth in heavily manured soil—My interest in
my own poem was dying down like an old fire, but you’ve fanned the embers and today there is quite a little
blaze.
Why do you give so much of your energies to the manuscripts of other people? You told me in London
that you had at least six novels in your head but were being severe with yourself until you should get to
Rodmell. Now you are at Rodmell, and what of the six novels? Between Ottoline, Gertrude Stein, and bridal
parties which make you faint, what time is left for Virginia? Also you go whoring after Vogue and suchlike,—
though you did make The Common Reader up out of these things, and though I did quite particularly like your
observations on Genji. But I’m becoming a bit of a Logan about Vogue, especially for you. Why should Todd25
batten at your expense? I should like to see all literary papers suppressed, always excepting, of course, The
Nation.
If ever you feel inclined, let me come and carry you off from Rodmell. I know that road so well, from
going to see my mother at Brighton, that I can bundle along it with my eyes shut. I could devise many places
to take you to,—Amberley, Bodiam, Romney Marsh.
I am enclosing a cheque for the 100 Seducers; I sent a wire about them today. I will recover it from
the misguided enthusiast26 who wanted them. And will you tell Leonard that I will try to concoct an article on
hop-picking for him? in about a fortnight’s time—if that will do. Sciatica has abandoned me. I hope he can say
the same.
Do take care of yourself.

Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Tuesday [1 September]

21 Hop-pickers.
22 The Land, a long pastoral poem, mainly about the different functions of the farming year.
23 Lady Ottoline and Philip Morrell.
24 ‘George (‘Dadie’) Rylands had written a poem, ‘Russet and Taffeta’, dedicated to Virginia. The Hogarth Press published it in December 1925.
25 Dorothy Todd, Editor of Vogue. Logan Pearsall Smith had abused Virginia for writing articles for the magazine.
26 Lady Sackville.
My dear Vita,

How nice it would be to get another letter from you—still better, to see you. I haven’t suggested it since the
headache has been an awful nuisance this time, and I have had another week in bed. Now, however, even
Leonard admits that I’m better.
My notion is that you may be motoring past and drop in and have tea, dinner, whatever you will, and
a little conversation. One day next week? I’m going to be awfully quiet, and don’t dare suggest what I long
for—a drive to Amberley.27 But when I’m in robust health, as I shall be, could it really be achieved?...
In bed I have been fuming over your assumption that my liking for the poet Crabbe is avowed. I assure
you I bought a copy out of my own pocket money before you were weaned. What’s more, I have read Peter
Grimes I daresay 6 times in 10 years; “But he has no compassion in his grave”—That is where that comes
from. There is also a magnificent description of wind among bulrushes which I will show you if you will come
here. But I find to my surprise that Crabbe is almost wholly about people. One test of poetry—do you agree?—
is that without saying things, indeed saying the opposite, it conveys things: thus I always think offens, marshes,
shingle, the East Coast, rivers with a few ships, coarse smelling weeds, men in blue jerseys catching crabs, a
whole landscape in short, as if I had read it all there: but open Crabbe and there is nothing of the sort. One
word of description here and there—that is all.... So if your poem 28 is as you say all about the woolly aphis, I
may come away from it dreaming of the stars and the South Seas. But hurry up, and write it.
I must stop: or I would now explain why its all right for me to have visions but you must be exact. I
write prose; you poetry. Now poetry being the simpler, cruder, more elementary of the two, furnished also with
an adventitious charm, in rhyme and metre, can’t carry beauty as prose can. Very little goes to its head. You
will say, define beauty—
But no: I am going to sleep.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
[2 September]

My dear Virginia

How much I like getting letters from you.

With what zest do they send me to meet the day.
So much do I like getting them, that I keep them as the last letter to open of my morning post, like a
child keeps the bit of chocolate for the end—
But I like it less when I read that you have been ill for a week. It makes me feel guilty for every moment
that I have spent, hearty and well, in such gross pursuits as gardening and playing tennis—
I shall be going to see my mother next week, one day. May I stop at Rodmell for dinner on my way
back? (But not if it is a bore.) I would let you know which day. This depends on my mother. Early in the week,

27 West Sussex.
28 The Land.
I expect. I shall suggest, to her, Monday or Tuesday. And Amberley any time you like—you may see in my
underlining, a readiness to throw over any other engagement in order to fall in with your plans—
What nonsense you talk, though. There is 100% more poetry in one page of Mrs Dalloway (which you
thought I didn’t like) than in a whole section of my damned poem. And as for Mr Palmer! 29 ‘yes I daresay
you did give him pleasure, but only to him. Not to his readers. I can’t forgive Desmond 30 for Mr Palmer,—his
ewe-lamb, his dove.
There are two people in the room, now, talking; and such fragments of their talk as reach me, make
me write frenziedly and-in-italics to you—out of a furnace of indignation—If my letter seems disjointed and
hysterical, you must forgive it on that account.
I am puzzled by your resentment over my saying that your liking for Crabbe was avowed, that I am driven for
explanation to the very improbable theory that you had forgotten what ‘avowed’ means! Or did you simply
mean that I thought you had concealed it up till now, and were at last coming out into the light? For the rest,
if one could at will convey one thing by saying another, one would indeed have mastered half the secret of
poetry—But how is it done? By what formula of allusion, sounds of vowel or consonant? by what sheer noise
suggesting a complementary noise, as blue suggests red, or whatever it is? Why should ‘bare ruined choirs’ 31
sound so very twiggy?
And along with this power, goes the faculty of kindling the desire to write in others—at least I find it
so. I know just what to pick out of the shelf in order to strike sparks off myself, don’t you? Or are you tinder-
and-flint in one? I suspect so.
Will you give Leonard a very tiresome message from me? with apologies? It is this: I can’t possibly
review John Drinkwater,32 1 know him too well, and there is nothing I could say which wouldn’t offend him
horribly. If Leonard will say what he wants done, I will send the books to anyone he wants. I feel this must be
one of the typical trials which beset an editor.
I have been making a tiny garden of Alpines in an old stone trough—A real joy. It makes me long for
the spring. My botanical taste tends more and more towards flowers that can hardly be seen with the naked
eye—Shall I make an even tinier one for you? in a seed pan, with Lilliputian rocks? I’ll bring it next week. But
you must be kind to it, and not neglectful. (This all fits in with the theory that people who live in the country
and like flowers are good.)

Yours ever
Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Monday [7 September]

29 Herbert E. Palmer, Songs of Salvation, Sin and Satire, printed by the Hogarth Press and published in October 1925.
30 Desmond MacCarthy.
31 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73.
32 The poet, playwright and actor (1882-1937). Leonard had sent Vita his New Poems (1925).
My dear Vita,

Well, I dont see why you don’t write to me, but perhaps it is my turn, only you are better situated for writing
letters than I am. There are two people in your room, whom you can hear talking. There is one dog in my room,
and nothing else but books, papers and pillows and glasses of milk and quilts that have fallen off my bed and
so on. This has bred in me such a longing to hear what your two people are saying that I must implore you to
tell me.... Tell me who you’ve been seeing; even if I have never heard of them—that will be all the better. I try
to invent you for myself, but find I really have only 2 twigs and 3 straws to do it with. I can get the sensation
of seeing you—hair, lips, colour, height, even, now and then, the eyes and hands, but I find you going off, to
walk in the garden, to play tennis, to dig, to sit smoking and talking, and then I cant invent a thing you say—
This proves, what I could write reams about —how little we know anyone, only movements and gestures,
nothing connected, continuous, profound. But give me a hint I implore.
...“Avowed” should be simple; but has now taken the meaning “protested insincerity”; for me at least,
who am, I suppose, grown hoary in sin, and impute meanings to good English words which, I agree, they dont
bear. But write to your affectionate villain all the same.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [8 September]

My dear Virginia

I am so sorry...
Your tale of fallen quilts really wrings my heart. And I am going to Brighton today, over your Downs,
and shall leave this letter on your door step together with your garden-in-a-saucer. It looks dull at present, but
in the spring it will give you flowers. You must keep it well watered.
The two people in my room were really Bulldog Drummond and Benjamin Constant.33 They didn’t
know it, and elected to go about their business under quite other names, but that’s who they were. You may
imagine that there were many points on which they didn’t see eye to eye; and what irritated me was that I kept
finding myself in agreement with both of them at the same time. My contrariness was aroused both ways at
once. I disliked Drummond for his bulldoggery, and Constant for his inconstance, yet wanted to inoculate each
with a dash of the faults of the other. This however appears to be an impossibility to the English character.
I went hop-picking, and have written half an article for Leonard.34 I’ll try to finish it today or tomorrow,
or all the hops will have turned into beer by the time it reaches the Nation.
My spaniel has seven puppies. My cat has five kittens. The spaniel steals the kittens, and, carrying
them very carefully in her mouth, puts them into the puppies’ basket. She then goes out for a stroll, and the cat

33 Bulldog Drummond was the main character in H. C. McNeile’s (‘Sapper’) series of adventure novels. Benjamin Constant, the French politician and
writer (1767-1830), was in Vita’s mind because she was reading Geoffrey Scorfs Portrait of Zelide in which he figures prominently.
34 ‘The Garden and the Oast’ (Nation, 10 October 1925).
in search of her progeny curls up in the basket and suckles the puppies. The spaniel, returns, chases out the cat,
curls up in the basket, and suckles the kittens. I find myself quite unable to cope with this situation. The kittens
will bark and the puppies will mew,—that’s what will happen. But at present it makes a charming family
party,—such a warm soft young heap.
I wish you were well and that I could see you. This is not really as selfish as it sounds, because most
of all I wish that you were well, even if I were not to benefit. Is there anything you would like and that I could
get you? Books,—but like the housemaid’s mother, ‘She’s got a book.’ I feel quite helpless, yet would like to
please you. So you have only to say.
It will be very tantalising, stopping at your house. I shan’t even ring the bell, but trust to luck that
Leonard will fall over the saucer as he goes out.

Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Tuesday [15 September]

Oh you scandalous ruffian! To come as far as this house and make off! When the Cook came up to me with
your letter, and your flowers and your garden, with the story that a lady had stopped a little boy in the village
and given him them I was so furious I almost sprang after you in my nightgown....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
18 September

My dear Virginia

You are a very, very remarkable person. Of course I always knew that,—it is an easy thing to know,—the
Daily Xpress knows it,—the Dial35 knows it,—organs so diverse,—the Daily Herald quotes you as an authority
on the vexed question as to whether one should cross the road to dine with Wordsworth,—but I feel strongly
that I have only tonight thoroughly and completely realised how remarkable you really are. You see, you
accomplish so much. You are one perpetual Achievement; yet you give the impression of having infinite
leisure. One comes to see you: you are prepared to spend two hours of Time in talk. One may not, for reasons
of health, come to see you: you write divine letters, four pages long. You read bulky manuscripts. You advise
grocers. You support mothers, vicariously You produce books which occupy a permanent place on one’s
bedside shelf next to Gerald [sic] MANLY Hopkins and the Bible. You cast a beam across the dingy landscape
of the Times Literary Supplement. You change people’s fives. You set up type. You offer to read and criticise

35 Of New York.
one’s poems,—criticise, (in the sense which you have given to the word,) meaning illumination, not the
complete disheartenment which is the legacy of other critics. How is it done? I can only suppose that you don’t
fritter. Now here am I, alone at midnight, and I survey my day, (the first that I have spent in peace for some
weeks,) and I ask myself what I have done with it. I finished the hops for Leonard, found an envelope and a
stamp, and sent it off. I planted perhaps a hundred bulbs. I played tennis with my son. I endeavoured to amuse
my other son, who has whooping-cough, and tries to crack jokes between the bouts. I read a detective story in
my bath. I talked to a carpenter. I wrote five fines of poetry. Now what does all that amount to? Nothing. Just
fritter. And yet it represents a better day than I have spent for a long time.
Do you do it by concentration? Do you do it by organisation? I want a recipe so badly.
I assure you, it was misery to stop your anonymous little village boy and turn him into the Mercury
who would ultimately reach your cook, who would ultimately reach you. It was unselfish, wasn’t it? also, to
be honest, I was frightened of Leonard. I knew he would look disapproving if I appeared at the house. He
would look the more disapproving because he wouldn’t know how much I approved,—of his care of you, I
mean. After leaving Rodmell I took a road that wasn’t a road at all; that is to say, it started by being a road and
then melted away into grass, so that the last five miles of my journey were accomplished over pure Down,—
very bumpy, but full of larks. A shepherd whom I met stared incredulously at the appearance of a blue motor
in the middle of miles of rolling turf.
Yes I will send you my georgics36 when they are more consecutive; at present there is a spider here
and a farrowing sow there, not tied together by an intelligible link. I will take advantage, quite unscrupulously,
of your offer; but I shall continue to wonder how you fit it all in.
I like the sense of one lighted room in the house while all the rest of the house, and the world outside,
is in darkness. Just one lamp falling on my paper; it gives a concentration, an intimacy. What bad mediums
letters are; you will read this in daylight, and everything will look different. I think I feel night as poignantly
as you feel the separateness of human beings; one of those convictions which are so personal, so sharp, that
they hurt. It seems to me that I only begin to live after the sun has gone down and the stars have come out.

Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Wednesday [23 September]

My dear Vita,

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 of complete trash read, you not seen, but what was
the good of asking you to come for half an hour, and then being furious to see you go? The blessed headache
goes—I catch a cold or argue violently and it comes back. But now it has gone longer than ever before, so if I

36 The Land.
can resist the delights of chatter, I shall be robust for ever. But what I was going to say was to beg for more
illusions. I can assure you, if you’ll make me up, I’ll make you....
This is miserable scribbling, the effervescence of idleness. (I’m waiting for luncheon) but I shall rouse
up in London. However, I’m going to live the life of a badger, nocturnal, secretive, no dinings out, or
gallivantings, but alone in my burrow at the back. And you will come and see me there—please say you will:
if you’re in London, let me know. A little quiet talk in the basement—what fun! And then I’m going this winter
to have one great gala night a month: The studio will be candle lit....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Sunday [11 October]

My dear Virginia

I wrote to you to Rodmell before I had got your letter telling me that you were going back to London. A simple
calculation leads me to the conclusion that you will receive these two letters simultaneously,—or possibly even
this one before the other. It all depends on the Rodmellian posts. I will therefore conceal from you the
destination of my journeying, so that the other letter should not be deprived of its little bit of news. (Although
news is the last thing one wants or expects to find in letters.) I will only tell you that it is not the Riviera or
Italy, or even Egypt, but some country wild, beautiful, and unsophisticated; further away in time, though not
in space, than China.37 The ideal travel letter should be without address, I think; it should arrive like the Dove
at the Ark, with no hint of where it has come from, so that it may evoke a landscape romantically beautiful but
geographically vague. How I shall enjoy writing to you; how poignant it will be to feel that ink is one’s only
means of communication; how ruthlessly I shall lay upon you the burden of writing to the absent friend.
You might think from all this that I was taking some interest in my travels. I am not. I am taking
interest only in the toothache which is boring its little hot gimlet into my head. The world centres there, and
nothing else really matters. Did you feel like this about your headache? How cruel of your headache to destroy
a six weeks which would otherwise have been crowded with achievement. It is not a fair argument against
yourself, to say that you don’t achieve, when an entirely outside thing happens to prevent you. I shall continue
to think of you as a monument. Besides, you manage to be a lamp surrounded by bumping moths. All this
takes a lot of time. I still don’t see how you do it. You seem to combine in yourself at least six whole-time
jobs: novelist, journalist, printer, publishers reader, friend, relation. Each of these an occupation in itself; and
none of them scamped. And now you are going to be a Lady Colefax38 once a month and give parties! I shall
come to one, (if you will ask me, that is,) like the opposite of a ghost,—what is that? Not one returning, but
one about to depart.

Vita

37 Harold Nicolson had been informed by the Foreign Office that he had been posted to the British Legation in Teheran.
38 Sibyl Colefax, the famous London hostess. Vita and Virginia spelt her first name alternatively Sibyl or Sybil. The correct spelling is Sibyl. In this
volume the spelling has been corrected throughout without further comment.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Tuesday [13 October]

My dear Vita,

But for how long?

For ever?
I am filled with envy and despair. Think of seeing Persia—think of never seeing you again.
The Dr has sent me to bed: all writing forbidden. So this is my swan song. But come and see me.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
13 October

My Dear Virginia

No, not for ever. And not even immediately. Harold goes’ next month39, and I follow in January, to return in
May, and then go again next October. So you see there will be a good deal of coming and going. In the
meantime what concerns me much more is you and your evident un-wellbeing; I can’t tell you how sorry I am.
Of course I will come and see you if you are really allowed to see people. Leonard wrote me a letter which
moved me almost to tears; please tell him this from me, and thank him, and tell him I wrote forty lines of
georgics on the strength of it. It is nice to be told one will be missed. Tell him too that I will turn myself into
a Mrs Eliza Fay40 for his benefit, and make the desert flower.
I don’t expect any answer to this, you know, because I know you are not allowed to write.
I wish you could see Harold’s luggage,—half tropical and half arctic. Fur coats and sun-helmets; skates
and khaki shorts. I dress him up to look like a game of Consequences. You soar from the desert to mountain-
passes, putting on an extra garment with every thousand feet. I wish you would both come to Teheran. But it
seems improbable that this wish will ever be fulfilled. And indeed it is a devil of a way.
Please, please get better—and be careful of yourself. You have been ill such a long time, and it must
be so wearying. If I may come to see you, I shall observe the 4.30 to 5.30 to the minute, and feel guilty even
then.

Vita

39 To Teheran.
40 The eighteenth-century traveller who wrote spirited letters home from India and other Asiatic countries.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn Weald
Sevenoaks
23 October

My dear Virginia

When I got home the other day I found that the puppet show of memory41 had disappeared, so I ordered it to
be sent to you; I hope that it has turned up.
You let fall some words to the effect that they ‘wanted you to go away’ presently; if you want a refuge,
will you come here? I shall be all alone after Harold has gone, and I can promise you that you should be neither
worried, excited, nor disturbed— also it would be easily accessible for Leonard. You could stay in bed all day
if you wished; write if you wished, and talk if you wished.
I’ve evolved some theories about friendship, but as I’ve got a cold in the head I will leave their
exposition for another day. I feel like a roll of cotton-wool,—not even medicated. I think, among other things,
that a set hour is full of peril; what one wants is the sudden desultory talk,—the look-up from the book one is
reading, the burst of argument between two regions of silence. The set hour is first-cousin to being presented
with an ear-trumpet into which one has to improvise a remark.
All this is to invite your attention to the advantages of Long Barn as a convalescent home.
I enclose a poem in case Leonard would like it.42
I do hope I didn’t tire you—I was afraid I had.43 If you came here I should leave you alone to the point
of neglect. I should realise my responsibility fully—

Vita
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
[26? October]

My dear Vita—only it ought to be all execration—

I asked you to LEND me M. B.—Now you GIVE him. Very well—I’ll never ask you for so much as the loan
of a boot button again.
Nevertheless, your present was perfectly timed—All Friday I was sick without stopping (my own
fault—I refused to believe the doctor who said it would stop if I ate a mutton chop—when I did I was cured
instantly) but by 6 p.m. I was almost extinct with the horror and then your present came: I ate my chop, revived,
and read till I fell asleep. Nothing could have suited better....

41 ‘The Puppet Show of Memory (1922) was Maurice Baring’s autobiography.

42 ‘On the Lake’ (Nation, 26 December 1925).
43 Vita had had tea with Virginia on 19 October.
 L. likes your poem, and is printing it. I like it—I’ll tell you why, if you can face another hours torture.
You did not tire me: it was enchanting: and next time I would arrange for some silence for you—

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Saturday 31 October

My dear Virginia

Yes, I thought I should get into a row. My intentions however were quite honourable, until I arrived home to
discover that someone had made away with my Puppet-Show, so I ordered one hoping that you wouldn’t notice
it came from a shop. I hope that this explanation may earn forgiveness for me, and restore you to that frame of
mind in which you might regard my boot-buttons as yours if you stood in need of them.
I was distressed to hear from Sibyl1 that you were ill again; I had meditated a descent upon you, but
that news caused me to change my mind. If you are truly better, and no longer require chops, shall I pay you a
brief visit on Tuesday next between 5 and 6? I shall be driving Harold about, while he makes his little round
of farewells, and while he is in your romantic neighbourhood I could come in for a minute. A postcard to 182
Ebury Street, where I go on Monday, will find me. But not if you are not well.
Leave it as open as you like about coming here. I shall be here till 20 December. I would love you to
come, as you know; I can’t say more—

Yours ever
Vita
Sussex
December 1925 - January 1926
On 17 December Virginia went to stay for three days with Vita at Long Barn (Harold being in
Teheran). Here their love affair began—without alarm, it seems, on Virginia's side, nor guilt on
Vita's, who hinted at it in letters to Harold, but lied when challenged by friends like Virginia's brother-
in-law Clive Bell. Leonard, who very quickly became aware of what was happening, did not interfere,
and joined them at Long Barn on 19 December. During the next few weeks Vita and Virginia met
often, first at Charleston, Vanessa Bell's house near Rodmell, and then in London, until Vita's
departure for her first visit to Persia.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Tuesday 8 December

My dear Virginia

I have been doing something so odd, so queer,—or rather, something which though perhaps neither odd nor
queer in itself, has filled me with such odd and queer sensations,—that I must write to you; (The thing, by the
way, was entirely connected with you, and wild horses won’t drag from me what it was.) And high time, too,
that I did write.44 I meant to come and see you last Friday, but the fog and a variety of complaints prevented
me. I was furious. Next morning I had to come home early I motored down. everything was white; and the
hedges looked as though they had grown old in the night. everything glistened and was still; the whole country
was like Sleeping Beauty’s park. Now it has all gone, and there is only slush.
May I come and see you on Monday 21st? which is my nearest London date.
I never said you were cruel. You must have been answering someone else’s letter when you wrote to
me. (I suspect you of dozens of correspondents.) I did say ‘esteem’. But I meant ‘love’. Only I was afraid of
getting snubbed. You see you have only to be a little testy with me to get the truth.
I contrast my illiterate writing with your scholarly one, and am ashamed.
So dull, I am; dull outwardly, at least; all oafish and muddy; but not dull inside. A week’s solitude
restores me to the sense that I am a person and not a rag-heap for other people to pick over.
I got an advertisement addressed in your handwriting this morning, which gave me a shock. I thought
it was a letter, till I turned it over and saw it was only a postcard,—and printed at that—Why do you address
advertisements? Has it a hypnotic effect on you? I can think of no other reason why you should do it.
A mine seems to have exploded under all my friends, blowing them first sky-high, and then peppering
them down neatly in various distant places: one in Sumatra, another in Mexico, a third in India, myself in

44 On 7 December Virginia had written in her diary that she was feeling depressed. ‘It is partly that devil Vita. No letter. No visit. No invitation to Long
Barn. She was up last week and never came.’
Persia. All this quite suddenly. Can you see me and Raymond in the Syrian hills together?45 No, of course not.
Yet so it will be. I have become a planet-snob—drunk with journeying.
This makes me savour my last days here all the more keenly.
May I, too, like the school girls, be told how to read a book?46 1 am in such a temper with Proust.

Yours
Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Wednesday [9 December]

My dear Vita,

The dr. says I may go away. Would you like me to come to you for a day or two, if you are alone, before the
20th? I expect this is too late and too difficult; I only suggest it on the off chance....

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Thursday [10 December]

My dear Vita,

Would Tuesday afternoon suit you?

Should I stay till Friday or Saturday?
Should Leonard come and fetch me back?
Should you mind if I only brought one dressing gown?
Should I be a nuisance if I had breakfast in bed?

45 Raymond Mortimer joined Harold and Vita in Teheran in April 1926.

46 Virginia’s lecture, given to a girls’ school at Hayes Common on 30 January 1926, was published as ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ (Yale Review,
October 1926).
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
15 December

My dear Virginia

I am so sorry to have put you off till Wednesday, but I had a sick servant. It will be all right tomorrow. Will
you come by the train you mentioned? 4.18 at Sevenoaks, I think.
Yes you can have breakfast lunch and dinner in bed if you feel like it.
Yes bring a dressing gown.
Yes let Leonard come whenever he likes.
What a pity you can’t stay till Sunday—as I am going up on Sunday morning and it would have been
nice to have taken you up—
It will be a great joy to have you. I will look after you very well, and you shan’t be bothered by anybody.
Yours ever
Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Tuesday 22 December

I am dashing off to buy a pair of gloves. I am sitting up in bed: I am very very charming; and Vita is a dear old
rough coated sheep dog: or alternatively, hung with grapes, pink with pearls, lustrous, candle lit, in the door of
a Sevenoaks draper. I’ll ask Nessa whether Saturday or Sunday47 and write to Knole. But do not snuff the
stinking tallow out of your heart—poor Virginia to wit, and Dog Grizzle (who is scratching under my bed)
Now for a Bus down Southampton Row.
Ah, but I like being with Vita.

47 Vanessa Bell, at Charleston. See note to next letter.

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Sevenoaks
Kent
Christmas-eve [24 December]

Virginia, dear and lovely

Saturday be it, 48 with this sole reservation: that IF by any evil chance my mother should have asked people to
lunch that day, I must come to you after lunch only; but this is as unlikely as it would be unfortunate. I wrote
to ask her, but thanks no doubt to Xmas I’ve had no reply I will appear at about 1 and please remember that
your household will alarm me exceedingly—except Clive—who is a refuge—
I shall be oh so glad to see you again. So glad, that it makes me incapable of writing to you now. I
must write you either a long letter, or else a note to say I will come to lunch. (‘Damn you then, Vita, why not
let it be the long letter?’)

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Sherfield Court
Sherfield Upon Loddon
Basingstoke
1 January

My darling Virginia

I write to you in a state of extreme perturbation—I’ll tell you why, when I see you.49
I was taken off my guard.
It’s early morning in the new year. I’ll write you a proper letter—but I am upset now—it is Clive who
is responsible.
The house is full of children 50 and noise.

Your bewildered
Vita

48 Virginia had invited Vita to lunch at Charleston (Vanessa’s house) on 26 December. The others present were Clive Bell, Duncan Grant and Vanessa’s
three children, Julian, Quentin and Angelica.
49 Sherfield Court was Dorothy (Dottie) Wellesley s country house in Hampshire where Vita was spending the New Year. Clive Bell, another guest,
asked Vita whether she and Virginia had slept together. Vita firmly denied it.
50 Valerian and Elizabeth Wellesley, Benedict and Nigel Nicolson.
To Virginia Woolf
Sherfield Court
Sherfield Upon Loddon, Basingstoke
[3 January]

It might seem strange, at first sight, that I should have talked of you so little, having thought of you so much.
I had, after all, Clive at my elbow,—not merely your brother in-law, but an authority who had loved you in his
day,—yet I chose not to profit by his presence. Something kept me back; and now of course I regret the missed
opportunity. No, that’s not true: I don’t. If I had the last three days over again, I should do the same.
I think I prefer making my own explorations. Also I don’t fancy the idea of taking a false advantage.
I was rather indiscreet, all the same.
The conversation last night was free. I don’t know what you would have thought, or what contributed.
I wondered several times. I wondered also what report Clive would give you, if any. Can I see you on
Wednesday? afternoon? I have asked for an appointment to be inoculated (damn it) at 5.1 put it off as late as
possible, because I suppose I must go home directly afterwards, mustn’t I? This inoculation nonsense makes
me furious.
Such a lot of noisy children here, banging about the house. My head whirls with them.
Keep some more circulars for me to put into envelopes. I was very happy doing this on your floor. Or
if it is fine we might go to the aquarium and look at the fish who are, after all, so like one’s friends.
And it’s on Wednesday fortnight that I go.51 Melancholy descends on me; but perhaps it’s a good thing.
What effect does absence have on you? Does it work like the decreasing charm of Dog Grizzle, which endears
her to you the more?
I hope so, otherwise....

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Tuesday [5 January]

Yes, my dear Creature, do come tomorrow, as early as possible...and we’ll stick stamps or see fish—But I want
to know why you were perturbed, and wrote in such a whirl, and what your fire talk was about—oh and crowds
of things.
But I’m in a rush—have just taken Grizzle to a vet, in the Grays Inn Rd. and now must dash off—Ah,
if you want my love for ever and ever you must break out into spots on your back....

51 To Persia.
To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Thursday [7 January]

This is simply to ask how you are.... Feeling very miserable, half asleep, taking a little tea and toast, and then,
I daresay, towards evening becoming rather luminous and remote, and irresponsible. All this takes place in a
room in the middle of Knole—What takes place in all those galleries and ballrooms, I wonder? And then, what
goes on in Vita’s head, lying under her arras somewhere, like a tiny kernel in a vast nut?
...But tell me what you are feeling? Are you aching? And if you were asked, do you like Canute,52
Canute’s wife, or Virginia best, what would you say?
I left a rain coat, a crystal ruler, a diary for the year 1905, a brooch, and a hot water bottle somewhere—Either
Long Barn or Charleston—and so contemplate complete nudity by the end of the year.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Friday 8 January

You angel, to have written. And I like your attitude towards illness: ‘luminous and remote’, where most people
would have said ‘hot and sticky’. I had (and have) a damned sore arm, but otherwise I didn’t disenjoy the
Asiatic plagues53. I lay in an immense bed, with firefight flickering on the ceiling, and read a book by a
theosophist. He had it revealed to him, by psychometry, that the Pyramids and Stonehenge, far from having
been built by a mere Cheops and mere Druids, were really the work of occult survivors from the Atlantean
continent, after the final disappearance of their country in 11500 BC. And did they employ anything so gross
as mechanical resources? no! Not for them were the cranes and levers of the barbarous Egyptians. Standing
beside the Nile, or in the middle of Salisbury Plain, they moved granite blocks or trilithons by the simple
expedient of mesmerically depriving them of weight; in other words, they levitated. So next time you go to
Stonehenge you may picture this little group of Atlantean ‘adepts’ standing by, while tons of stone slowly rose
of their own accord, floated feather-wise in the air, and finally settled themselves across the uprights already
raised for their reception.
Eddy54 limped into my room, wasted away to a ghost, and limped out again, back to bed. He had had
a visit from the devastating Tomlin 55—Will Tomlin devastate Virginia? and precisely how susceptible is
Virginia? this is a thing I should very much like to know. Oh what a lot of little things there are in life: Xmas
boxes for the postman, wages for the gardener; and tonight Boy Scouts, good God. The black baby is still here.
I was right when I foresaw that I had him for ever. And in all these little things, where’s the place for poetry?
And I have cut my finger, and my handkerchief is all bloody, and I can’t blow my nose.
Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as
beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude. You see that I am extremely sentimental. Had you suspected that?

52 Vita’s elk-hound.
53 ‘Her inoculations.
54 Eddy Sackville-West.
47 Garrow Tomlin, who was killed flying in 1931, aged thirty-three; he was the elder brother of Stephen Tomlin, the sculptor, who did a bust of Virginia
in 1931.
 Christ, how vaccination tickles. What I would give for a good scratch.
I must go back to Knole. I get the illusion of living here; my sitting-room unaltered, and no one but
my old Louise56 bunching about. It is difficult to remember that one is a straw whirling down a drain.
Why does one ever read anybody but Shakespeare? He is coming to Persia with me,—complete works.
Hot-water bottle: not here.
Diary: not here.
Brooch: I must ask my maid who is at Knole.
Rain-coat: not here.
Crystal ruler: not here—
Italian note book: here, and rescued, and shall be brought on Tuesday.57
Somebody sent Ben an unexpurgated edition of Gulliver for Xmas. He had read most of it before I
discovered. It was disguised as a child’s book. What is to be done?
Oh dear, I must go. Bother.

V.

Poor Canute, his feelings would be so terribly hurt if I answered your question truthfully, that loyalty forbids
me. Are you coming to Clive’s farewell parry on the eighteenth?

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Saturday [9 January]

Isn’t it damned? Here I am in bed with the flu, caught the moment I’d written to you about the delights of
fever. Hot and sticky describes it....
But it is a great comfort to think of you when I’m not well—I wonder why. Still nicer—better to see
you. So I hope for Tuesday....
A very nice dumb letter from you this morning. Tell me about the Boy Scouts?

56 Her maid.
57 All the above were objects that Virginia thought she had left behind at Long Barn. The ‘diary’was her own for 1905, which was found elsewhere
and is now in the Collection.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [11 January]

Oh my poor dear, ill again, and the novel thwarted58—How maddening for you. I have a great deal to say.
Firstly that I don’t care a damn, not a little row of pins, whether I catch it 59 or not; I’d travel all the way to
Egypt with the fever heavy upon me sooner than not see you—so rule that out please. Secondly that not for all
the world would I tire you; so if you want to lie in a miserable heap, alone, just say so. I’ll ring up at luncheon
time tomorrow, and you can say ‘Come’ or ‘Go to Hell’ as you feel inclined. Thirdly, I am glad you are not
susceptible to the mind, for otherwise you would find mine but a dingy thing. (I have just lunched, off a veal
cutlet and cabbage, divinely cooked by Louise, with Mrs Dalloway open on my knee, and am consequently in
a mood of intellectual humility.) Fourthly, the Tomlin who went to see Eddy was not the right one60, ’but his
brother. Fifthly, my letters are not dumb, but vociferous: it is you who do not know how to read. And you
presume to lecture to schoolgirls on this subject! Sixthly, that letters are the devil, disregarding Einstein and
being subservient to so fallacious a thing as time, e.g. if you write to me in Persia and say you have got the
ague it is no use my writing back to say I’m so sorry, because by the time you get it you’ll have recovered,
whereas if I write from the Weald you’ll still be wretched when you get it and my condolence will be of some
slight grain of use, but my feelings will be the same, whether in Persia or the Weald. Seventhly that I have got
to give a lecture in Sevenoaks tonight and have LOST IT. Eighthly that I find life altogether intoxicating,—its
pain no less than its pleasure,—in which Virginia plays no mean part.
The Boy Scouts were adorable, with their little pink bare knees and eager eyes. And Knives stuck into
their belts.61
And I have such a lot to do—and I know perfectly well that I shall slip away without doing it, and in
May I shall come back to find Ossa piled upon Pelion, and the salmon-like fecundity of neglected duty busily
at work.
I know I had lots more to say, but I forget.
How do you manage to keep your head at all, in the exciting fife you lead?
Now I must go and talk to the gardener.62 He has a moustache like a walrus.
Eddy and I talked emotionally till one o’clock last night.
I am glad you are not bad (if that is true.) You will be truthful on the telephone tomorrow?

58 Virginia’s To the Lighthouse.

59 Influenza.
60 Stephen Tomlin. See note 2 to Vita’s letter of 8 January [on page 71].
61 A Scout Jamboree had been held in the park at Knole.
62 Barnes.
To Virginia Woolf
66 Mount Street
W1
[13 January]

How are you today? I am all right—No

Are you all right, my dear? I don’t like your being ill.
I am just off to acquire a fresh dose of the plagues.63
I made a mistake: Clive’s party is the night before I have to take my children to the play. So, so far as
I am concerned, there is no reason why he shouldn’t have his party at 10.30. Will you tell him, if you feel you
are able to come?
There is a packet of Zoo tickets lying on this writing table—I have amused myself by altering ‘adult’
to ‘adulterer’ on each.
I’ll write from Brighton. This is just to ask how you are,—oh yes, and I had a letter from you this
morning, which you had sent to Ebury Street—
Your faithful Towser doesn’t like your being ill—
It was nice yesterday,—wasn’t it?
I’ll see you on Monday? and Tuesday? And then no more for months....

Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Friday [15 January]

Dearest Creature,

I saw Clive yesterday, who says will you and Leonard and I dine with him on Monday at the Ivy? If you cant,
(as I fear) come to his rooms as soon as you can—We will come at 10.30, but I suppose I shan’t be allowed to
stay late.

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
[17 January]

Snow means such special things to me. It means a fat soft plop, plop, as it is shovelled off the roofs and falls
into the courtyard below. It means the strange melancholy halloo by which the deer are called to be fed, and
which brings them bounding from all corners of the park. It means these things in an intimate way, like the
ticking of the clock in one’s own room means something; and is part of one.
I was dining out tomorrow, but have quite cynically chucked, so I can dine with you (with Clive I

63 ’Inoculations.
mean) at the Ivy. So you see that if my letters are dumb, my actions aren’t. They are a practical demonstration
of my wish to be with you. Will you tell Clive? Eddy is very anxious to come to Clive’s party. He will be
staying with Raymond.64 May he? I said I would ask.
I hope Clive’s version didn’t differ materially from mine, otherwise it is clear that one or the other is
breaking the ninth commandment. And did your answer differ from mine? alas no.
Such a fuss here. The luggage all plastered with labels. Things scattered all over the room. And Eddy
chattering while I try to remember what I have to pack. ‘Do you know Tom Eliot?’ ‘No, I don’t.—Kodak films,
aspirin, fur gloves, tooth powder.’ ‘Aren’t the woodcuts in the Anatomy of Melancholy too lovely!’ ‘No, Eddy,
I think they’re quite awful.—Don’t put my riding boots in my suitcase, one doesn’t ride on board ship.’ ‘Shall
I have my sitting room pink or yellow? ’And so on. So is my packing conducted. Where is Virginia’s quiet
room, with the scaffolding outside?
I will come there tomorrow and hide for a bit, say 4.30? but Tuesday too, please, for longer. A message
to Vic. 5194 will stop or alter me tomorrow, if you are busy. I shall be at Ebury St. (i.e.Vic. 5194) at 10.45 for
a minute.Oh curse, here are people and I must stop as the post goes early. I’m longing to see you. Someday
I’ll write and tell you all the things you mean to me in my mind. Shall I?

64 Raymond Mortimer.
January - February 1926
Vita left London on 20 January, bidding goodbye to a disconsolate Virginia on the doorstep at 52
Tavistock Square, and writing her first ‘Persian’ letter in the train to Dover. She was accompanied
as far as India by Dorothy Wellesley, but Dorothy is mentioned only three times in the long letters
which Vita wrote to Virginia from Italy, the Mediterranean, Egypt, Aden and India. Then she went
on alone by sea through the Persian Gulf, when she fell ill, to Basra, and thence to Baghdad, where
she stayed with Gertrude Bell. The onward journey was by car, through the snowbound mountains
on the Persian frontier, to Kermanshall, where Harold met her and escorted her to Teheran. The
whole roundabout journey, described in her book Passenger to Teheran, took six weeks.

To Virginia Woolf
21 Acacia Road
Balham65
[20 January]

No, it’s no good: the train is too shaky to allow me to pretend. I am in the train, and there are sensational labels
on my luggage—so there it is—and I did leave Virginia standing on her doorstep in the misty London
evening—and God knows when I shall see her again. You said one thing which pleased me so much: namely,
that you would try not to be in France when I came back. This gave me a real sense of counting in your life.
Bless you.
I have got your little Pope in my pocket—and have already presented it instead of my passport. This
will happen all along the line—
Oh dear it has all been so bloody—and as for mixed emotions I think I’ve lived through them all.
Gone, the quiet room with the crane.
Goodbye, my darling; and bless you. 66

Your
Vita

65 A joke address
66 In her diary of 19 January Virginia wrote: ‘She is not clever, but abundant and fruitful, truthful too. She taps so many sources of life: repose and
variety, was her own expression.’
To Virginia Woolf
Milan [posted in Trieste]
Thursday 21 [January]

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare
hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way You, with all
your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it.
And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would
lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed;
and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how
essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you,
spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—But 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.
However I won’t bore you with any more.
We have re-started, and the train is shaky again. I shall have to write at the stations—which are
fortunately many across the Lombard plain.
Venice. The stations were many, but I didn’t bargain for the Orient Express not stopping at them. And
here we are at Venice for ten minutes only,—a wretched time in which to try and write. No time to buy an
Italian stamp even, so this will have to go from Trieste.
The waterfalls in Switzerland were frozen into solid iridescent curtains of ice, hanging over the rock;
so lovely. And Italy all blanketed in snow.
We’re going to start again. I shall have to wait till Trieste tomorrow morning. Please forgive me for
writing such a miserable letter.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Tuesday 26 January

Your letter from Trieste came this morning—But why do you think I don’t feel, or that I make phrases? ‘Lovely
phrases’ you say which rob things of reality. Just the opposite.
Always, always, always I try to say what I feel. Will you then believe that after you went last Tuesday—exactly
a week ago—out I went into the slums of Bloomsbury, to find a barrel organ. But it did not make me cheerful....
And ever since, nothing important has happened —Somehow its dull and damp. I have been dull; I have missed
you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, your a longeared owl and ass. Lovely
phrases?...
But of course (to return to your letter) I always knew about your standoffishness. Only I said to myself,
I insist upon kindness. With this aim in view, I came to Long Barn. Open the top button of your jersey and you
will see, nestling inside, a lively squirrel, with the most inquisitive habits, but a dear creature all the same—
To Vita Sackville-West
The Hogarth Press
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Sunday 31 January

Look, I have stolen a piece of the press notepaper to write on, and it is Sunday morning about half past eleven,
and I have written all I am going to write this morning.... Shall I write the letter I made up in bed this morning?
It was all about myself. I was wondering if I could explain how miserable I have been the past 4 days, and why
I have been miserable. Thought about, one can gloss things over, bridge them, explain, excuse. Writing them
down, they become more separate and disproportioned and so a little unreal—Only I found I had to write the
lecture for the girl’s school, and so had to stop writing To the Lighthouse. That began my misery; all my life
seemed to be thwarted instantly: It was all sand and gravel; and yet I said, this is the truth, this guilty misery,
and the other an illusion....

...Yes, I miss you, I miss you. I dare not expatiate, because you will say I am not stark, and cannot feel
the things dumb people feel. You know that is rather rotten rot, my dear Vita. After all, what is a lovely phrase?
One that has mopped up as much Truth as it can hold.

To Virginia Woolf
[In the eastern Mediterranean]
Saturday night
23 January

We are somewhere off the coast of Greece, and pretty beastly it is too: very rough, and the boat rolling about
like an old tub. She has a deck too many, and consequently is top-heavy. There were a lot of things I wanted
to ask you: whether you couldn’t invent a new form of type for emphatic passages; a new system of
punctuation; whether you shared my preference for the upper berth in a wagonlit (which I believe to be atavis-
tic,) and my dislike of scraping past the stomachs of Frenchmen on the way to the wagon restaurant; and
whether you would one day come on a journey with me? (Dottie says she will give me a good character.) But
the elements have put all these things out of my head. You must imagine me please, as sitting up in a small
bunk, at an angle of 45°, with my suit-case tobogganing up and down the floor, and all my possessions
disappearing under my bed; the ship filled with the clatter of crockery at every lurch; and me trying to write to
you. But you see one’s whole system of values changes, and the important thing is merely to keep one’s
balance—
Sunday night. I had to stop writing, it was impossible; and now my eyes are filled with the beauty of
Crete struck by a sudden rainbow. But it’s still pretty rough, and at one moment today I thought the boat was
going to turn turtle, as her sister-ship did on her last voyage. (This encouraging piece of information was given
me by a fellow passenger.) I have picked up a young Italian who is more Boccaccio than you can conceive,
with golden hair and the figure of a greyhound; he is going to ride through Persia from Bushire through Shiraz
and Isfahan, to Teheran like Marco Polo. A most romantic young man, but very sea-sick poor dear. I shall look
forward to seeing him ride into Tehran on a fine April morning.
Have you ever seen Crete? If not, you should.
My dear, I’ll write you from Cairo. This is hopeless, and I must go to dinner.

V.

I wrote you a frantic letter from Trieste.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
3 February

Heres a letter from Cairo, I mean from the shores of Greece67, come this morning, a dumb letter; but I’m getting
good at reading them. I did like it. And I wrote to you yesterday, to Baghdad, and see that I must write now to
catch the mail, to Teheran; so theres no news—Also, you’ll be so excited, happy, and all that. You’ll have
forgotten me, the room, the crane. We cut a very poor show against Teheran....
On Friday (but this will have happened weeks ago) we go to Rodmell. Dearest, how nice to have you
there, in a month or two. I made £20 unexpectedly yesterday, and vowed to spend it perfecting the water closet
on your behalf. But Teheran is exciting me too much. I believe, at this moment, more in Teheran than in
Tavistock Square. I see you, somehow in long coat and trousers, like an Abyssinian Empress, stalking over
those barren hills. But really what I want to know is how the journey went, the 4 days through the snow, the
caravan. Shall you write and tell me? And the affectionate letter—whens that coming?

To Virginia Woolf
[Luxor
Egypt]
[29 January]

[Picture postcard]

67 Crete.
This is the entrance to the tomb of Tut-ankh-amen—or rather to the tomb of Rameses, and that of Tut etc. is
below it.
Isn’t the scenery superb? They are Eon-coloured rocks. Desolation like the mountains of the moon.

V.

Two days ago they found two more chambers full of things.
To Virginia Woolf
Luxor
29 January

The only way I can deal with Egypt is as Molly MacCarthy did with Christmas: alphabetically. Amon,
Americans, alabaster, Arabs; bromides, buffaloes, beggars, Bronx; camels, crocodiles, colossi, Cook’s;
donkeys, dust, dahabeeaths, dragomen, dervishes, desert; Egyptians, Evian; fezzes, fellaheen, feluccas, flies,
fleas; Germans, goats, granite; hotels, hieroglyphics, hoopoes, Horus, hawkes; Isis, imshi, irrigation,
ignorance; jibbahs; kites, Kinemas, Kodaks; lavatories, lotus, Levantines; mummies, mud, millionaires; Nubia,
Nile; ophthalmia, Osiris, obsidian, obelisks; palms, pyramids, parrokeets; quarries; Rameses, ruins; sunsets,
sarcophagi, steamers, soux, sand, shadoofs, stinks, Sphinx; temples, tourists, trams, Tut-ankh-amen; Uganda;
vultures, Virginia; water-bullocks, warts; Xerxes, Xenophon; yaout; zest, (my own). Having said this, there
doesn’t seem to be anything else to say, except that Mr Robert Hichens68 is living in this hotel and that I met
him today riding a fiery Arab stallion. But indeed, and there is much more to say, only I can’t say it: there is
the great untidy desolation of Karnak, and the mountains-of-the-moon landscape of the Theban hills, where I
am going to build myself a brown mud house and end my days. And I dined with some super-millionaire
Americans, and found The Common Reader in their sitting room. It gave me a shock. There was your name
sprawling on the table. They had just arrived from Thibet, where they had dragged forty-seven Innovation
trunks and twenty-five pieces of smaller luggage over the spurs of the Himalaya on yaks, an animal which
hitherto I believed to exist only in Belloc.69 The Common Reader had been to Thibet with them, and was about
to engender copies of all your other works. As they didn’t and still don’t know that I knew you, this was a
perfectly unsolicited testimonial.
What else? I miss you horribly, and apart from that am permanently infuriated by the thought of what
you could make of this country if only you could be got here. You see, you ought to. However, that sounds too
much like your own parody of my probable letters, so I’ll refrain from saying it.
What fills me with dismay is the idea that I cannot hear from you till I get to Bombay, another fortnight
at least. I wish I had given you an address at Cairo. You may be ill or anything. It is an odd sensation being so
cut-off. And even the clock different. We kept dropping half-hours at sea. What becomes of those poor waifs
of one’s existence over which one has skipped? Mine are flotsam and jetsam now somewhere on the Adriatic.
Do thin silk clothes and sunburn make you envious? No, you wretch, you prefer your old misty
Gloomsbury and your London squares. The wish to steal Virginia overcomes me,—steal her, take her away,
and put her in the sun among the objects mentioned alphabetically above. You know you liked Greece. You
know you liked Spain. Well, then? If I can get myself to Africa and Asia, why can’t you? (But with me, please.)

68 Robert Hichens (1864-1950), the writer of popular novels, of which the best known was The Garden of Allah (1904). He spent much of his life
travelling in Egypt.
69 Hilaire Belloc, The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896).
I sent you a picture postcard today, just as an insult. I went down into the bowels of the earth and looked at
Tut-ankh-amen. At his sarcophagus and outer mummy-case, I mean. This is merely of gilded wood. The inner
one is at Cairo, (I saw it,) and is of solid gold. You know, the Valley of the Kings is really the most astonishing
place. Tawny, austere hills with a track cut between them; no life at all, not a bird, not a lizard, only a scavenger
Kite hanging miles high; and undiscovered Kings lying lapped in gold. And English spinsters in sun-helmets
and black glasses. But then I got away from the spinsters and climbed where no one was, and looked down
into the Valley on one side, and on to the Nile on the other, a fine contrast in barrenness and fertility; and got
into a state of rapture.
You see, I have really got a very cheap mind. (You say you like to know what goes on inside, so I tell
you.) If human beings are one-half as exciting to you as natural objects are to me, then indeed I see why you
like living in London. I cannot explain why they should have this intoxicating quality. I can quite see why
human beings should have. But why the yellow mountains, and yellower pariah dog with whom I shared my
lunch? But there it is. And,—mark you,—I do care so satisfactorily for the few people that matter to me. (For
Virginia? oh dear me YES, for Virginia.) Please solve this riddle for me.
I am now going to Karnak70 It is full moon, and it quite frightens me to think what it will be like. Damn
that you’re not here.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
17 February

You are a crafty fox to write an alphabet letter, and so think you have solved the problem of dumbness....
...I’ve been awfully worried by elderly relations. Three old gentlemen, round about 6o, have discovered
that Vanessa is living in sin with Duncan Grant, and that I have written Mrs Dalloway—which equals living
in sin. Their method of showing their loathing is to come to call, to ask Vanessa if she ever sells a picture, me
if I’ve been in a lunatic asylum lately. Then they intimate how they live in Berkley Square or the Athenaeum
and dine with—I don’t know whom: and so take themselves off. Would this make you angry?
...Do you know it was four weeks yesterday that you went? Yes, I often think of you, instead of my
novel; I want to take you over the water meadows in the summer on foot, I have thought of many million things
to tell you. Devil that you are, to vanish to Persia and leave me here!... And, dearest Vita, we are having two

70 The temple of Amon, just north of Luxor, on the east bank of the Nile.
waterclosets made, one paid for by Mrs Dalloway, the other by The Common Reader: both dedicated to you.

To Virginia Woolf
SS Rajputana
In the Red Sea
4 February

My darling Virginia

I feel as though I should like to write you a long letter. An endless letter. Pages and pages. But there is too
much to say. Too many emotions, and too much Egypt, and too much excitement. And really it all reduces
itself to the perfectly simple thing that I wish you were here.
You see it is so easy for you sitting in Tavistock Square to look inward; but I find it very difficult to
look inward when I am also looking at the coast of Sinai; and very difficult to look at the coast of Sinai when
I am also looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.
So this combination makes my letter more dumb than usual.
You manage things better. You have a more tidily sorted mind. You have a little compartment for the
Press, and another little compartment for Mary Hutchinison,71 and another for Vita, and another for Dog
Grizzle, and another for the Downs, and another for London fogs, and another for the Prince of Wales, and
another for the lighthouse,72—no, I’m wrong, the lighthouse is allowed to play its beam over the whole lot,—
and their only Common Denominator is your own excitability over whichever compartment you choose to
look into at the moment. But with me they all run together into a sort of soup.
Ever since I left England I’ve been like a person in an advanced stage of intoxication. Cocktails made
not of gin and vermouth, but of thrill and misery, adventure and homesickness. So I can’t write you a tidy
letter.
And so many people, too. The young man who wants one to play deck tennis. The young woman who
wants one to take a ticket in a sweepstake. The Captain who wants one to sit at his table. (Avoided, this, so far.
But only by dint of starving and remaining absent from meals. And now, like a beleaguered city, we’re on the
point of capitulation.) There is all one’s luggage, too: the extra bits one has brought because one couldn’t re-
pack one’s belongings into their original boxes; and then the American millionaires gave me a gramophone,
and a refrigerator. And then pictures in the mind of things seen, like photographs pushed higgledy-piggledy
into a drawer, waiting to be stuck into an album, in that pathetically optimistic way old photographs have. And
pictures of things not yet seen,—India, Agra, Baghdad, snow mountains,—negatives not yet developed. All

71 With whom Clive Bell was having a love affair.

72 Meaning To the Lighthouse.
this is very confusing. And the solid, known life of England, which is at one and the same time a fact that one
can bang about, and a vision as fantastic as the actual distant shores of Arabia.
We returned from Luxor to Cairo with the train on fire; the dining car blazing merrily behind us like
the tail of a comet. Nobody seemed to mind, except my beautiful Bedouin, who lingered for comfort round the
door of my compartment until in self-defence I went to bed. It was a nice scene for Virginia: the long slim
white train pulled up in the night, and flames licking out from under the carnage, and a crowd of dark men
throwing buckets of water. I talked to the engine driver; a tiny black man in a scarlet turban. He said it was a
single line, and that as there was another train due we should probably run into it. He said also that robbers
were in the habit of putting boulders on the fine, but that he never took any notice of these, but drove full speed
at them, lest by pulling up he should be accused of complicity with the robbers. I had a lingering regret for the
South-Eastern.73
Feb. 6th. I have no brain left. It has melted. I am sticky from head to foot. And I have made friends
with a Parsee who specialises in Persian, and has determined that I should become proficient in the language
before I reach Bombay. So I’m having a wretched time,—kept at work as hard as a schoolboy, and no brain to
do it with. I like the night-sky, though, with the stars getting bigger and bigger, and odder and odder, and the
phosphorus in the water.
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?
Near Aden. Your faithful Towser is extremely sticky. A vile climate: very hot, very relaxing, with a
strong hot wind.
It transpires that my Parsee is High Priest Designate of all the Parsees in India, and is on his way home
to take up the duties of his high office. He is taking me ashore at Aden, where I’ll post this. I greatly prefer his
sister, who has an olive skin and gazelle eyes; but there it is: the High Priest is bent on making the most of his
last secular days, and dogs my footsteps.
Oh my dear Virginia. Is there really a London? and are you in it? or am I thinking of, and writing to,
a wraith? Don’t get ill. Be severe with les importuns. How is the novel? Blown by this hot gale, I can’t write
a word. But I hope my little granary is filling up, under the Southern Cross. If I don’t get a letter from you at
Bombay, I shall die of disappointment—
My love to Leonard.

V.

73 The railway which served Kent and Sussex from London.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
1 March

Yes, dearest Towzer, it is all very well about Bloomsbury being a rotten biscuit, and me a weevil, and Persia
being a rose and you an Emperor moth—I quite agree: but you are missing the loveliest spring there has ever
been in England. We were motored all through Oxfordshire two days ago....
The people who took us were Leonards brother and his wife. I promptly fell in love, not with him or
her, but with being stock brokers, with never having read a book (except Robert Hitchens) with not having
heard of Roger, or Clive, or Duncan, or Lytton. Oh this is life, I kept saying to myself; and what is Bloomsbury,
or Long Barn either, but a contortion, a temporary knot; and why do I pity and deride the human race, when
its lot is profoundly peaceful and happy?...
I’ve arranged our French motoring so that we shall be back by May 10th. So please see to it that you
land that day. A lovely dumb letter from you came on Saturday, written on board ship. I extract by degrees of
great deal from your letters. They might be longer; They might be more loving. But I see your point—life is
too exciting....

To Virginia Woolf
SS Rajputana, Indian Ocean
8 February

Such an absurd day at Aden yesterday: tearing across salt-marshes in a small open motor, in a hot gale; cyclones
of dust; hundreds of tiny windmills madly spinning; salt-heaps in rows like the tents of a regiment; tunnels
under hills; empty tanks of a hundred-milllion-gallon capacity, (there are no springs, and it hasn’t rained there
for 10 years;) small black boys at the bottom of the tanks, like bears at the Zoo at the bottom of the Mappin
Terraces, beating their stomachs and crying reverberatingly ‘No father, no mother, thank you’; Scotch soldiers
in kilts; then Aden again, and lions74 suddenly in the middle of a Ford lorry garage; and tea with an old Parsee
in cool rooms over an apothecary’s shop. Pure Conrad, this: the merchant-prince of Aden in a shiny black cap,
and shrewd eyes twinkling behind owlish glasses. A photograph of the King on a table. Bunches of herbs
strung up to keep illness and misfortune from the house. Photograph groups of Parsee generations. Ledgers; a
globe; models of ships. A dark young secretary in a suit of white ducks. Sweet biscuits. Talk of cargoes for
Somaliland. And Aden lying outside, swept by its hot wind, the most god-forsaken spot on earth. And then a
motorlaunch, and the ship again, with gulls and hawks wheeling together above the refuse, and sellers of shells

74 The lions were in fact caged.

bobbing round in tiny canoes, and the Resident coming on board.75 And then the steaming out into the night,
and no more land ahead for two thousand miles, and the self-contained life of the ship closing round one once
more.
The Indian ocean is grey, not blue; a thick, opaque grey. Cigarettes are almost too damp to light. At
night the deck is lit by arc-lights, and people dance; it must look very strange seen from another ship out at
sea,—all these people twirling in an unreal glare, and the music inaudible. One’s bath, of sea-water, is full of
phosphorus: blue sparks that one can catch in one’s hand. The water pours from the tap in a sheet of blue flame.
The parties of Proust gain in fantasy from being read in such circumstances, (I don’t mean in the bath, but on
deck;) they recede, achieve a perspective; they become historical almost, like Veronese banquets through
which flit a few masked Longhi figures, and ruffled by the uneasy impish breeze of French Freud. I re-enter
their company after struggling with the Persian irregular verbs. My own poem76 on the other hand has ceased
to have any existence for me at all: it seems just silly. I thought I should be able to stand back and look at it;
but no: it is crammed right-up against my nose, and I can’t see it at all. Mme de Guermantes and Khwastan-
rasi alone have reality.
But by the time I come home I shall have written a book, which I hope will purge me of my travel-
congestion, even if it serves no other purpose.77 The moment it is released, it will pour from me as the ocean
from the bath-tap—but will the blue sparks come with it, or only the blanket-grey of the daytime sea? (By the
way, I have discovered since beginning this letter that one can draw pictures on oneself with the phosphorus;
it’s like having a bath in glow-worms; one draws pictures with one’s fingers in trails of blue fire, slowly
fading.)
For the rest, it is a perpetual evading of one’s fellow-beings. Really what odd things grown-up,
civilised human beings are, with their dancing and their fancy-dress, (Charles I stalking the deck with his head
under his arm like an umbrella,) and their sports, and their blind man’s buff, and an indignant Wellesley78
being forced to give away prizes. (‘Really I do think it’s a little hard that because I happened to marry Gerry79
should have to make a fool of myself on a P. & O.’) But I come up on deck at dawn when there is no one about
but a stray Lascar cleaning brasses, and watch the sun rising straight ahead, out of the east, and the sky and sea
are like the first morning of Genesis. This is all before the hearty clergymen are awake, or the people who
approach and say they think they know one’s aunt. (Why have aunts so many friends?)
I expect you think this is a dumb letter. It is rather. But of such things fife is made at present. everything
else has been stripped away, and one remains a sponge, just drinking things up. What will happen when it’s
all over, do you think? What would happen to you, I wonder chiefly, if you could be so thoroughly disturbed

75 Aden was a British Protectorate, under the control of the Viceroy of India.
76 The Land.
77 Vita’s travel book, Passenger to Teheran, was published by the Hogarth Press in November 1926.
78 Dorothy Wellesley.
71 ‘Lord Gerald Wellesley (afterwards 7th Duke of Wellington). They separated in the mid-1920s.
out of Bloomsbury? my greatest desire at present is to try that experiment. Also I want nine lives at least,—
another desire. And nine planets to explore. You have no idea how silly the tiny refinements of introspection
can become.
If all this happens on a mere passage to India, what oh what is going to happen to poor Vita when she
reaches the heart of Asia?
Perhaps some sense of selection will blessedly return, to order the traffic, like an archangel, or a policeman.
We have crept onward a few hundred miles since I began this letter, and the sun has come tropically
out, and the clergymen have put on their sun-helmets. Tomorrow I shall be bouncing across India in a dusty
train.
Have you quite forgotten this poor pilgrim? I haven’t forgotten that I am to tell you I think of you, but
I think that will be a nice occupation for the Persian Gulf. In the meantime I think of you a terrible great deal.
You make a wonderful cynical kindly smiling background to the turbulence of my brain. Shall I find a letter
from you at Bombay I wonder?
I don’t mind if you do laugh at me—

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Delhi
14 February

We arrived at Bombay at four in the morning; it was the silence that woke me, acclimatised as I was to noise.
After four days of blank ocean, there was suddenly a harbour, ringed with fights, and pale colours beginning
behind the hills. We were still moving when I looked out, though the engines were shut off; we were gliding
quite silently across a black mirror of water. At first I couldn’t think where we were. After four days of ocean
one forgets about the land. And Aden, two thousand miles away, was the last land I had seen. Since then there
had seemed no particular reason to believe we were making for one place rather than for another, or indeed for
any place at all. Still more miraculous did it seem,—when one came to think of it,—that out of the immensity
of ocean one should hit off one small particular spot of land. Then I got a stab: India!
Well, I had India to myself for a couple of hours, while the stars paled and the dawn spread over it;
and then the usual row began, and I met the Parsee in the customs house looking very foolish with a garland
of white waxen flowers round his neck, over his petit complet gris-perle, like a sacrificial heifer. And I went
for my letters, but there was none from you, which blackened India until I remembered that I had told you to
write to Rocky Hill Flats—We drove there for breakfast, and although the rooms were cool and creamy, with
the windows open on the sea, and punkahs stirring the air, and great jars of oleander everywhere, still there
were no letters. And as I had been counting on that letter for at least three weeks, the delicious fruits that I was
given for breakfast might have been handfuls of dust for all I cared. But then suddenly a black servant (whose
name appeared to be Vita,) entered with armfuls of correspondence. And of course there was quite a simple
explanation, that your letter had travelled with me on the Rajputana. So I sat in the window above the bay and
read it, and below me was a Hindu burning-ground with a cremation in full progress, and beyond that the sea,
and behind me Irene Forbes Adam80 nursing her fortnight-old baby,—a sight that you would have appreciated.
You will agree that it was a pretty setting for your letter to be read in, that had been written in the dark
north—and frightened out of its life in a mail-bag down in the hold of a ship? Poor little thing, if I had know
that it lay cowering there, I would have rescued it. But no; the seals of the GPO are inviolable, (like Virginia).
It is nevertheless an odd sensation to peer down in to the hold, to see the brown mail-bags lying there higgledy-
piggledy, with bits of names appearing: NDIA, or YLON, or PER, as I saw those in the Rajputana, and to reflect
that therein hides a letter which will someday come into one’s own hands. It is a sensation of the same family
as that which you experienced when you wrote to me knowing that I had but five minutes earlier left your
doorstep, or as one experiences when one writes a letter, designed to be found on arrival, to a person who is
still in the house, or the very room, with one.
But to return to your letter—I cannot believe that any absurdity of mine blossoms in your mind,—
except that you are truly a picture-maker,—I wish I could believe it more, for I might then translate to you a
few of the seeds which have fallen on my own mind and promise to grow into a banyan-tree—(observe the
local colour of the horticultural image.) Only, if I do so, you must not be pained and disappointed at meeting
those seeds again later on in a more finely developed form! Because I must write about all these things, and
naturally my stock is not infinite, though rich. In fact I must write a traveller’s tale, when I get to Persia and
have a writing table instead of a knee to write on. I was never at my best on my knees. And some chapters will
make articles for Leonard,—if he still wishes to have them—
I hope that you have not outgrown the fifty pages of fertility,81 or else that that intoxicating feeling has
accompanied you beyond its usual limit; what I mean is, that I hope you are still happy about your book, and
that birds as varied, as decorative, and as stimulating as the birds of India continue to beat in flocks against the
windows of your Lighthouse, so that you have to drive them away rather than entice them in. I was terribly
pleased when I read that you had been excited, writing. Also terribly envious. And yet I feel, you know, that
if I could get really embarked on something I should become excited about it too. But of course there is nothing
like a novel for that peculiar thing: as good as conducting an orchestra, or modeling in clay. A sense of really
giving shape. Very Elusive, too, for I suppose that of all works of art the novel is about the most shapeless—
But it is the life of fictitious people that gives their author the illusion of shaping; making it out of nothing, like
those slates that children rub with a magic pencil, and out of nothingness a picture appears.
Well, I must go to sleep, for I am spending four out of six nights in the train, and had another 3 a.m.
arrival last night,—this time at Agra, where at the sleeping hotel we were greeted by two men with spears.

80 The wife of Colin Forbes-Adam, an employee of the Indian Civil Service, and in 1926 Secretary to the Governor of Bombay. She was then thirty-
six. Vita had known her since childhood, when she was Irene Lawley. Her son Desmond was born on 27 January 1926.
81 Virginia had written to Vita: ‘I have been very excited writing. I have never written so fast.’ (7i> the Lighthouse.)
Why spears? But then why anything, indeed? One very quickly ceases to think anything out-of-the-way. Dottie,
who is a romantic and has romantic ideas about India (which I’m glad to say are rapidly dissolving under the
beams of experience,) is trying to shake snakes out of her shoes.82 But the only snake I’ve seen so far was a
poor dear drugged old python, wound in comfortable somnolence round the neck of a charmer. He blew into
a little gourd which made a noise like a punctured bag-pipe. The python took no notice at ah.
The tree-rats are very sweet. Like tiny green squirrels. I tried to catch one, and it bit me. Not like
Virginia, who has inquisitive habits, but is a dear creature, and for whom I have a terrible and chronic
homesickness. It is a persistent complaint,—sortes virginiana.

Your
V.
Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
SS Varela
At sea
[In the Persian Gulf]
20 February

So many strange faces have floated up at me since I last wrote to you, faces of animals and of men; buffaloes
and Hindus, horned or turbaned; faces of Eurasians, oddly wrong; faces of young soldiers. Faces of monkeys
in the trees; of a dead but still sacred cow lying in the road; of an ah-but dead Babu flung almost into our cab
from his bicycle. Then stations,—little noisy jabbering stations which I shall never see again, and flashed
through once, or perhaps snatched an orange at. Jungle on either side of the train; rocks looking like mediaeval
castles; peacocks paddling in the village pond. Roads tracked in the dust, seen from train windows, leading
where? A jackal staring in the scrub. An English general. The Taj Mahal like a pure and sudden lyric. And
everywhere squalor, squalor, squalor. Children’s eyes black with flies. Men with sores. Mangy dogs. Filthy
hovels not fit for pigs. And a bridge that was a concourse of men and animals and carts, all shoving, huddling,
shouting, as our motor clove its way through like a snow-plough. Noise and squalor, squalor and noise
everywhere.
Then there was a deserted city,83 which was a pool of miraculous silence; the abandoned capital of the
Moghul emperors, inhabited only by monkeys, goats, parrots and tree-rats. On the height is the vast red palace

82 See Dorothy Wellesley’s account of this journey in Far Have I Travelled (1952).
83 Fatehpur Sikri. Vita added a few lines to The Land after her visit there: ‘I have known bees within the ruined arch Of Akbar’s crimson city hang
their comb...’ and used the same scene in her novel All Passion Spent (1932).
of Akbar, and, in a courtyard, the tiny red house of his Poet! And views over miles of country,—India,
apparently uninhabited too, in spite of its 320 millions. But they are the same colour as the earth, so they don’t
show up. It was very quiet at the deserted city, and aromatic herbs grew in the ruins. It was very hot, and a
naked man dived eighty feet from a rampart into a well.
Now I am on a ship again, limping about with two sticks on a sprained ankle; and all last night I had
fever and a sore throat, and was quite certain through my nightmares that I should be put ashore at Karachi
with diphtheria and left there alone. But today the fever is gone, and the throat better, and I am limping about
again as saucily as a jackdaw with a broken leg. There are whales about; they have been spouting. I am all
alone, and there is no one on this ship who cares whether I live or die. 84 This is very wholesome, I suppose,
and quite all right at 3 o’clock on a sunny afternoon when one feels well, but not so pleasant at 3 in the morning
with a temperature of 102, and crippled into the bargain.
There is a Hindu temple appeared now, on a promontory, and the steerage passengers are casting
coconuts into the sea towards it; not so much for the sake of using it as a coconut-shy, but as a mark of respect.
Just see what funny and charming things drift in and out of life when one travels. You cannot imagine coming
round the corner from the Coliseum, and seeing Lady Colefax throwing coconuts at St Martin-in- the-Fields.
But India is a loathsome place, without one shred of any quality, and I never want to go there again. A
fortune teller at Luxor, however, told me that Harold would be Viceroy, so perhaps I may yet return. But I fear
I should not, in that case, be tolerated by Virginia any longer, so Harold’s career will have to be wrecked before
it reaches that stage.
I meant to have written such a lot, but somehow I haven’t; there is always a whale or a murder to look
at, (a tortoise or a theorbo!) so I have written a few letters,— precious few,—and read a lot of Proust, and
that’s all. But I shall begin now to try and collect myself, and write some articles. I don’t know whether to be
dejected or encouraged when I read the works of Virginia Woolf. Dejected because I shall never be able to
write like that, or encouraged because somebody else can? (I sound rather like the young ladies of Hayes
Common, who wished to model their style upon yours.)
My next letter will be posted at Baghdad and written in the Persian Gulf. It will be all about Virginia.
Indeed it may arrive before this one, as it will go part of the way by air.

V.
Sussex

To Virginia Woolf

84 After Agra, Vita and Dorothy Wellesley went to New Delhi, where they met the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, and saw his half-finished Government
House. Dorothy then returned home, while Vita continued her journey to Persia alone.
 British India Steam Navigation Co. Ltd
SS Varela
23 February

In how fastidious and amused a grin (like Grizzle’s) would your Ups curl if you could see me at the present
moment. Somewhere off the coast of Baluchistan, lame, and newly risen from three days of fever, I have
literally pushed the other passengers (five in number) into each other’s arms to dance to my gramophone. They
were really too dreary for words; something had to be done about it; so I hauled the gramophone out from
under my bunk, and now they are all as merry as crickets. They consist of the chief of police in Karachi, (CIE,85
and don’t you forget it,) a MAJOR from Mosul, the wife of a railway engineer in Baghdad, and a pair of young
lovers, avocation unknown. You see, I am so pleased to find that I am not, after all, going to die and be buried
at sea, swathed in a Union Jack and decently weighted, that I am full of the milk of human kindness towards
my fellows. If anyone had told me, quite simply, that newcomers were liable to fever in these parts, I should
not have lain envisaging (1) diphtheria (2) dysentery (3) plague (4) scarlet fever alone in my cabin for three
days, but according to my all- too insular ideas one does not suddenly shoot up to 103 without good reason.
Here, however, apparently one does. I said to myself ‘Perhaps Virginia will be a little sorry.’ I wrote to you,
in fact, I think, just when it was beginning. I composed telegrams so moving that when I realised I should not
have to send them, I was quite disappointed. I thought it was almost as good as Rupert Brooke 86 to be thrown
overboard in the Gulf of Oman.* I wondered whether it would make my books sell any better. I feared not.
And now I am quite spry again, and have even written six pages of my new book. 87 It is a rambling,
discursive sort of affair. And I think of your lovely books, and despair.
Why is it that critics pay so little attention to style and surface-texture? It is the last thing you ever see
mentioned, whether for good or evil. Either you go in for style or else you don’t; the Russians apparently don’t,
judging by the translation which I somehow feel reproduces pretty exactly the manner of the original; but if
you do, then I think you ought to get credit for it. Now you (oh yes, I know I said I would write about Virginia
going up the Persian Gulf,) have the mot juste more than any modern writer I know. The only rival I could
advance in that particular fine would be Max.88 I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble, or
springs ready-armed like Athene from the brow of Zeus? I don’t believe it does cost you trouble (confound
you!) because you have it in your letters too, where you certainly haven’t made a draught (draft?), and where
there is never anything but an impatient scratching or two.

(“If yee-ou knee-ou See-ousie,

as I know See-ousie...”

85 Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire, an honour awarded to British civil servants in India.
86 He was buried on Skyros in 1915.
87 Passenger to Teheran.
88 Max Beerbohm.
oh God, why did I ever bring that gramophone on deck?)
But to go back to Virginia and leave Susie. To Virginia herself, and not her Godgiven style. (Le style
c’est la femme?) The funny thing is, that you are the only person I have ever known properly who was aloof
from the more vulgarly jolly sides of life. And I wonder whether you lose or gain? I fancy that you gain,—
you, Virginia,— because you are so constituted and have a sufficient fund of excitement within yourself,
though I don’t fancy it would be to the advantage of anybody else. I feel with Proust, ‘Il faut avoir passé par
là.’ You will say you have. But not in precisely the way I mean. (You’ll think I’m perpetually trying to pull
you down from your pedestal, but really I like you best up there. Only it would be fun to transplant you,
pedestal and all, just once....)
No, I don’t really mean that. What I should really like to do would be to take you to some absurdly
romantic place,—vain dream, alas! what with Leonard and the Press—Besides, by romantic I mean Persia or
China, not Tintagel or Kergarnec. Oh what fun it would be, and Virginia’s eyes would grow rounder and
rounder, and presently it would all flow like water from a Sparklets siphon, turned into beautiful bubbles.
But I am writing nonsense, and anyway this letter cannot be posted till Baghdad. So that you will get
two together, and that will be a bore.
Goodnight, darling and remote Virginia.

V.

*Oman, not Onan, the person in the Bible who spilled his seed upon the ground.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square London
WC1
16 March

...As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter, it is all rhythm. Once you get that,
you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with
ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound,
what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before
it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working
(which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words
to fit it: But no doubt I shall think differently next year. Then there’s my character (you see how egotistic I am,
for I answer only questions that are about myself) I agree about the lack of jolly vulgarity. But then think how
I was brought up! No school; mooning about alone among my father’s books; never any chance to pick up all
that goes on in schools—throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarity; scenes; jealousies—only rages with my half
brothers, and being walked off my legs round the Serpentine by my father. This is an excuse: I am often
conscious of the lack of jolly vulgarity but did Proust pass that way? Did you? Can you chaff a table of
officers?...
Yes, dearest Vita: I do miss you; I think of you: I have a million things, not so much to say, as to sink
into you.
To Virginia Woolf
Baghdad
28 February

Still limping across Asia you see, I have reached this city of fabulous romance, which is not, believe me, as
we saw it in Hassan89, but just a merry muddle of donkeys, motors, Arabs, dogs, mud, cabs, and camels. Whips
crack, boys shout, pistols go off, cars remain stuck in the mud, enormous bales fall off the back of tiny donkeys
and burst in the road,—nothing seems to matter. The mud is such that you would hesitate to drive an ordinary
English farm-cart though it—Yet motors career gaily, sliding sideways like crabs; if you stick, everybody
pushes, and there you are,—what a pleasant happy-go- lucky life.
Ah, let me see, what have I seen, done, or felt since I last wrote? I was very miserable in the Gulf with
incessant fever; then I landed at Basrah, and was carried off by the Consul, and plunged for twenty-four hours
into his family life. Kind people, Scotch, living in a big shadowy house; of Mrs Berry it is related that once
when the tribes rebelled and the consulate was stormed by wild Arabs bent on murder, her only concern was
that she had not had time to bring in the washing. That sums up her whole attitude towards life. Then I learnt
all the local gossip, and what I now don’t know about the goings-on of Molly Brown and Mirabelle Kernander
isn’t worth knowing. But one isn’t a pilgrim for nothing, and next day I had to leave this kind new home, with
its dogs and all, (‘We were rather intellectual just then, so we called the dogs after books we had been reading:
Tarzan and Bindle,’) and start off again across Iraq, which, if it is really the Garden of Eden, then I agree with
the Tommy who said it wouldn’t need a flaming sword to drive him out of it. A yellow plain, strewn with
skeletons of animals; a lump on the horizon,—Ur of the Chaldees; 90 another lump,— Babylon, under the moon.
And then Baghdad in the early morning, with a little pastoral life charmingly going on in the station yard; a
flock of goats browsing off bits of paper between the lines, a couple of tents pitched, a tethered horse; then the
Tigris, and a drive through the streets, lurching and pitching; a door in a wall, a garden, pigeons, dogs asleep,
a verandah, a cool room, hot water, coffee, Gertrude Bell.91
Very kind she is; we went to tea with the King, too, and Lady Colefax came to dinner—or so like as
makes no difference. And during the day the overland mail came in, and brought me an evil-looking typed
envelope, which I thought could only be a solicitor’s dun, but it poured two generous sheets from Virginia into
my lap. But you mustn’t abuse me if by 2 February you hadn’t heard from me from Egypt, remember I only
landed there on the 26th. I go into this question, because it alarms me to think that you are one of those who
makes no allowance for the poor letter having to travel too, nor for the ever-widening distances.
My heart goes out to you over the hat, and the mattresses, and the impossibility of privacy; I live

89 By James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915).The play (posthumously published) has been seen by Vita and Virginia in January 1923.
90 The Sumerian city, c. 2500 BC, which was then being excavated by Sir Leonard Woolley. Vita went by train from Basra to Baghdad.
91 The traveller and writer. She was then Director of Antiquities in Iraq and political advisor to the Iraqi Government. Vita stayed with her for four
nights. She died four months later, aged fifty-eight.
permanently in that state; but beware: it becomes a mania. It has poisoned my life. I have quarrelled with at
least three people because of it. I feel very strongly about it. I go down into precisely those troughs of
desperation which you describe. Not so much through shops, which I like, as through the privacy problem. It
cuts one’s life up into little dice like lumps of sugar,—no, not even that, for they haven’t the dignity of a cube;
it’s just slices, snippets,—and then one is expected to write. One is told that one has had two days undisturbed,
when one is feeling like a rag-bag, a waste-paper basket, a dust-heap.
It exhausts the nerves so much less to travel from London to Teheran, than from London to Sevenoaks,
or from Tavistock Square to Heal’s in the Tottenham Court Road.
I am ordering The Common Reader for my hostess—She already has Jacob’s Room. Its yellow face
greeted me friendlily at breakfast.
I’ve bought a dog. The garden here has been filled with dogs that were potentially mine,—all come in
from the desert, led on leash by Arabs. This one is a marvel of elegance,—long tapering paws, and a neck no
thicker than your wrist. So off we set together tonight, the sloughi92 puppy and I, to face the snows in the high
passes.
Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss me. I miss you oh so much. How
much, you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you
know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign
of vitality. (No pun intended.)

V.
Sussex

92 Saluki.
March - May 1926
Vita loved Persia, but not the diplomatic life. She did her duty as Harold's wife in the social world of
the Legations, and helped to organize the coronation of the Shah, which she enjoyed more. She
escaped as often as she could to the local bazaars and the hills that surrounded Teheran, and paid
one extended visit to Isfahan. She made many last additions to The Land, and wrote a large part of
Passenger to Teheran in Persia itself. Virginia, who was a less adventurous traveller, missed her
dreadfully but did not envy her. Her loving replies to Vita's letters reached her at long intervals. After
four months' absence, Vita returned home by the shorter route via the Caspian Sea, Moscow, Poland
and Germany, and arrived in London on 16 May.

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran Persia
9 March

You can’t think how much I enjoy writing the above address. I have discovered my true function in life: I am
a snob. A geographical snob. livery morning when I wake up, with the sun flooding into my white conventual
room, I He bewildered for a minute; then very slowly, like a child rolling toffee round in its mouth, I tell myself
‘You are in Central Asia.’ And on the way here93, crossing the brown plains, whenever the car stopped I got
out, and taking a clod of earth in my hand looked at it and gave it its name: It satisfies my soul as the dissection
of the human insect satisfies yours; and so, being satisfied, my soul is not prominent; a great mercy.
Now I shall not tell you about Persia, and nothing of its space, colour and beauty, which you must take
for granted—but please do take it for granted, because it has become a part of me,—grafted on to me, leaving
me permanently enriched. You smile? Well, I have been stuck in a river, crawled between ramparts of snow,
been attacked by a bandit, been baked and frozen alternately, travelled alone with ten men, (all strangers,) slept
in odd places, eaten wayside meals, crossed high passes, seen Kurds and Medes and caravans, and running
streams, and black lambs skipping under blossom, seen hills of porphyry stained with copper sulphate, snow-
mountains in a great circle, endless plains, with flocks on the slopes. Dead camels pecked by vultures, a dying
donkey, a dying man. Came to mud towns at nightfall, stayed with odd gruff Scotchmen, drunk Persian wine.
Worn a silk dress one day, and a sheepskin and fur cap the next. Met Harold, with letters in his pocket,—two
letters from Virginia, which I read first. Been taken to a party, and introduced to about 500 English people,
500 foreign diplomats, and 1000 Persians. Dined with the Prime Minister, who has a black beard. Began to
stammer in Persian. And today’s my birthday.94
But all this, as you say, gives no idea at all. How is it that one can never communicate? Only imaginary
things can be communicated, like ideas, or the world of a novel; but not real experience. I see you very clearly,

93 From Baghdad Vita went by train to the Persian frontier, and then joined a convoy of cars over the mountains to Kermanshah, where Harold Nicolson
met her. They reached Teheran on 5 March.
94 She was thirty-four.
though, going to Rodmell, and lunching with Eddy; but that’s because I know Rodmell and I know Eddy I
should like to see you faced with the task of communicating Persia. How I wish I could bring you here; couldn’t
you and Leonard come next spring? No, of course you won’t: what, leave the press? I don’t believe Isfahan
and Persepolis are any temptation to you. I wish life was three times as long, and every day of it 48 hours
instead of 24.
I have got to go to tea with Bridges’ daughter;95 she has married a Persian, and has square red hair and
a square white face. I have also met Mrs Arfa, (Hilda something,— can’t remember her name,—Berwick?
Bewick?) but she is going to England in ten days’ time. Shall you see her? I believe you know her, or anyway
she knows all your friends. She is the only attractive person here, but the country makes up for the people; and
as you know, I am not good at people. I have to be rushed.... Oh, and Raymond 96 is coming. But you must
know that. I’m coming back through Caucasus. They say it is possible. I have got England in wonderful focus
here. One sees the people who go out like candles, and those who remain as, fixed stars. Such unexpected
people float suddenly into one’s mind, too, apart from the permanencies. I wish I had a photograph of you.
(Has mine ever turned up?) It is a torment not being able to visualise when one wants to. I can visualise you
as a matter of fact surprisingly well,—but always as you stood on your door-step that last evening, when the
lamps were Et and the trees misty, and I drove away.
There will be a vast gap between the letters I sent from Baghdad and this one, and you will think I
have forgotten; but I haven’t. The post-bag goes only once a fortnight from here. That in itself makes life
different. One had come to take the ordinary conveniences of civilisation so much as a matter of course; but
here one hears otherwise ordinary people talking in the mediaeval way of ‘So-and-so was three weeks on the
road’, or ‘Snow has fallen and So-and-so won’t get through’, or ‘So-and-so is going down to Baghdad and can
take letters.’ All values are altered. Consequently you can imagine the scramble that takes place when the mail-
car drives in between saluting soldiers through the Legation gates, caked in mud, with bent mud-guards, and
the words ‘TRANS-DESERT MAIL’ barely legible on the bonnet.
This is how you must imagine your letters arriving, and me carrying them off to read in peace, and
saying ‘oh darling Virginia’, and smiling to myself, and reading them all over again. Whereas mine just come
with the postman.
The mid-day gun, and the bag shuts at half past! I will try writing through Russia, but it’s very
uncertain. Think kindly of your exile, distant but very very loving. And very constant. I must write you a letter
about constancy. Now that I have come to the end, I think of all sorts of things I wanted to write about. Bother.

V.

95 Elizabeth Dayrush, daughter of Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, and herself a poet. Harold called her ‘a shy, defensive, little blue-stocking with a
pudding face’.
96 Raymond Mortimer.
To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
15 March

Today being the birthday of the Shah, (though common report has it that he knows neither his birthday nor his
age, being of low extraction,) 97 last night a dinner was given in his honour at the Foreign Office. So at 8.15,
an immense yellow motor draws up at the door: Harold in uniform and gold lace, little sword getting between
his legs; Vita derisive, but decked in emeralds; escort in scarlet and white, (the Minister is all for swank,—
thinks it impresses the Persians;) the yellow motor proceeds down the street. Pulls up at the Foreign Office.
Sentries present arms. The scarlet escort escorts. The sentries’ boots are muddy; everything is very shoddy
here. Seventy people to dinner; the china doesn’t match,—not enough to go round,—the Persian ministers
wear their robes of honour: grubby old cashmere dressing-gowns, with no collars to their evening shirts; dinner
cold; I escape the awful fate of sitting between two Persians who talk nothing but their own language, and get
Sir Percy,98 who is nice, and the Belgian minister, who tells me about the Emperor of Korea. (I never knew
there was such a person; he sounds incredibly romantic; Hakluyt’s voyages, and all that.) Suddenly, an awful
pause, and we stand up to drink the health of the eleven states represented. But first their national anthems
must be played; and, glass in hand, we endure God Save the King, the Brabançonne, (I feel the Belgian minister
at my side stiffen to attention,) the International Soviet Hymn, the Marseillaise, the Wacht am Rhein, and six
unidentifiable minor powers. An unfortunate incident ushers in the ceremony: all the dirty plates have been
stacked under Sir Percy’s chair, all the dirty knives and forks under mine, so as we rise to our feet shoving
back our chairs there is a clatter.... Having drunk to our respective sovereigns and presidents, we drink to the
Shah. We adjourn. There are fireworks. Now the Persians are really good at fireworks. The garden, from the
balconies, coruscates with wrestling babies of Herculean promise, taxi-cabs with revolving wheels, aeroplanes
with revolving propellers, Catherine wheels, and VIVE SA MAJESTE IMPERIALE PAHLEVI in letters of gold
reflecting in the central tank,—all very lovely, really, and fantastic, seen through clouds of smoke from above;
while Tamur Tasch,99 officially Minister of Works, but really the Power behind the Throne, enquires in my ear
as to the merits of Thos. Goode and Son, South Audley Street, and the Army & Navy Stores.
This is diplomatic life.
This morning, the yellow motor again; and Sir Percy and Harold, both in uniform again, with fluttering
plumes in their hats, (Sir Percy loving it, and Harold wretched,) going off to the Shah’s reception, the scarlet-
and-white servants and the Indian lancers trotting before and behind the car.
Do not imagine, however, that life is all like that. There are days of going into the mountains, and
eating sandwiches beside a stream, and picking wild almonds, and of coming home by incredible sunsets across
the plain. And every morning at seven we ride, and the freshness and beauty of the morning are inconceivable.
Then once a fortnight the muddy car comes in, and there are letters: the only rift opening on the outside
world. Otherwise it is all very self-contained,—what with the old white horse who goes his rounds every
morning, bringing two barrels of water to every house in the compound, and the Sanitary Cart, which drawn
by a donkey performs a sordid emptying function henceforward unknown at Rodmell....100 There is a great

97 Riza Khan Pahievi, a soldier who rose from the ranks and in 1925 seized the Persian throne from the Qajar dynasty which had held it for 150 years.
In 1926 he was about forty-nine.
98 Sir Percy Loraine, British Minister in Teheran, 1921-26. He was known to his staff as ‘Ponderous Percy’. Harold satirized him as ‘Lord Bognor’ in
Some People.
99 See note 2 to Vita’s letter of 25 February 1927 [on page 156].
100 Virginia and Leonard had just replaced the earth closets in their Sussex house with flush lavatories.
deal of compound life. (The compound is really the Legation garden, surrounded by a mud wall; and, dumped
down among the plane-trees, are the various houses: the Military Attaché’s house, the Secretaries’ house, the
Counsellor’s house, the Consul’s house, and houses E.-and-F.-on-the-office-plan, from which on Sunday
mornings proceed the plaintive sounds of an harmonium.) Compound life means that at 8 a.m. the Consul’s
son aged ten starts an imitation of a motor horn; that at 9 a.m. somebody comes and says have I been letting
all the water out of the tank; that at 10 a.m. the Military Attaché’s wife strolls across and says how are your
delphiniums doing; that at 11 a.m. Lady Loraine appears and says wasn’t it monstrous the way the Russian
Ambassador’s wife cut the Polish Charge d’Affaires’ wife last night at the Palace; that at 12 noon a gun goes
off and the muezzins of Teheran set up a wad for prayer; that at 1 p.m. it is time for luncheon, and Vita hasn’t
done any work.
Then in the evening the white stems of the plane-trees turn pink, and the stars come out, and the little
owls begin to hoot, and Vita says to the servant in very careful Persian, thought-out in advance, ‘If anybody
calls say I’m not at home.’ And then gets our Roget’s Thesaurus of the English language, a rhyming dictionary,
and the proofs of her poem (alas alas alas that they don’t bear the superscription of the Hogarth Press.)
This brings me to what I really wanted to say: that you upset me dreadfully about the central transparency.101
Because it is what I have always felt myself. Only how to do it? If only you had put down those unexpressed
thoughts instead of letting them fall on the carpet! How invaluable they would have been.
You see from this that the muddy car has come in, and that I have had a letter from you (with a picture
enclosed, which was an insult,—an insult to you, I mean.) You had fallen in love with being a stock-broker.102
Well.... And I had galvanised you into asking Leonard to come to the South Seas; but, darling Virginia, that
wasn’t the point at all. The point was that you should come to Persia with me; that I should waft you to these
brown plains; not that you should matrimonially disappear for a year out of my ken. Or were you teasing me?
You see, it becomes clearer and more clear that I shall spend the next two years in tearing backwards and
forwards across Europe and Asia, and it is my dream to take you with me. Leonard would like it too; he can
fish and shoot here, if he likes that; and there are at least twelve horses to ride. Believe me, Burmah is not a
patch on Persia;103 it has no classical traditions, and the architecture is abominable. As for the South Seas, I
am sure they are over-rated; vulgar to a degree; and you wouldn’t like hibiscus. Whereas this ancient country....
This is the place for you. Indeed, if you won’t come by kindness, I shall have to make you come by main force.
But it would make me so happy, that I am sure no one as kind-hearted as you could refuse me that pleasure?
We would come by the desert, and go back through Russia, which with your Soviet connections you would
appreciate. Certainly it must be done.
25 March. Do you know what nice little job I have on hand now? Arranging the palace for the
coronation.1041 go down there and put on an apron, and mix paint in pots in a vast hall, and wonder what the
Persian is for ‘stipple’. At one end of the hall is the Peacock Throne, and all round the walls are ranged glass
cases containing every conceivable sort of object from Sevres vases to the late Shah’s toothbrush. This is
known as the Museum. Lady Loraine is away, so I’m responsible. I’ve got to re-organise the Museum next
week, and shall make Raymond help. He will trot about, under giant scaffolding, carrying alabaster bowls,
while the paint drips on him from the brushes of the men skied up against the ceiling. I am sure the Shah will
come to the coronation in tennis-shoes, with the twin-diamond of the Koh-i-Nur blazing in his hat. This is the

101 Virginia had written to Vita about The Land : 'I imagine it wants a little central transparency. Some sudden intensity.’
102 Virginia had been staying with Leonard’s brother Herbert, a stockbroker, and envied him and his wife their unintellectual, unadventurous lives.
103 Virginia had written to Vita: ‘I worried Leonard for an hour about taking a year off and seeing the world. We will go to Burma, I said: the South
Seas.’
104 The Shah was to be crowned on 25 April.
principle upon which everything is conducted here.
Why do grammars only teach one such phrases as ‘Simply through the courage of the champion’s
sword’, when what one wants to say is Bring another lamp?
Now this letter is long if apparently un-loving, but a lot of love gets spilt over them, like sand to dry
the ink, of which no trace remains when the letter arrives, but which nevertheless was there, an important
ingredient. And I send you a picture, much nicer than the one you sent me. I perceive there are a lot of questions
I wanted to ask you, such as Who is Clive’s new hand?105 (said by him to be more like the Knave than the
queen of spades,—but girls will be boys,) also how is dear Grizzle? no longer like a rainbow trout, I trust; and
why were you tired for two days? and is the Press overworking you? I suppose you will be motoring about
France when this arrives; be careful, I pray; though I’m sure the dangers of motoring in France are nothing to
the re-adjustment of standards which I have had to undergo here, with precipices and what-not. (I daren’t
however spin you too much of a traveller’s tale, since Raymond is coming; he has squared my pitch badly.)
The little owls are hooting, and the bag leaves tomorrow on its long journey. You can write me only
one more letter after you get this, for I shall be starting home. Or, if you are in France, address it to me here,
and put it in a covering envelope addressed to Charles Hartopp Esq., The Residency, Cairo, and mark the inside
envelope By airmail via Baghdad. It will reach me quicker so. Your letters are always a shock to me, for you
typewrite the envelope, and they look like a bill, and then I see your writing. A system I rather like, for the
various stabs it affords me.
Now this letter is really getting disproportionately long, and you will be bored. It leaves such chasms
of non-information, too; regular continents of unwrapped territory. I have added bits to my poem, but they are
nothing without the context. As you may suppose, they are almost entirely Asiatic in character. I mind about
that poem, never having minded about any other book. I hope you will think I have improved it. My interest
in it is however almost completely cancelled by the fact that I couldn’t give it to you.106 I do see that it would
have been impossible, but nevertheless am full of resentment.
What fun it will be to sit on your floor again and stick on stamps. And to carry you off in the little blue
motor. If you knew what you meant to me you might be pleased.

Your V.

105 Virginia had written: ‘Clive would parade a new affair of his. “I’ve been dealt a new hand,” he kept saying. “It takes me, I’m glad to say, into the
lower walks of society.’”
106 The Land was published by Heinemann, to whom Vita was committed by contract, and not by the Hogarth Press.
To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
8 April

Persia has turned magenta and purple: avenues of judas-trees, groves of lilac, torrents of wisteria, acres of
peach-blossom. The plane-trees and the poplars have burst into green. I know you had a lovely Easter in
England,—Reuter chronicled it. (Reuter is a great joy us, because it always arrives all wrong, e.g. ‘Lady Fisher
has just completed her 27 days’ fast, undertaken to cure her of an illness caused by General de Bility.’) But I
suppose you are in France now, tearing about,—well, I, too, am about to tear, for we are going down to Isfahan.
And, dear me, I can write you only one more letter after this, for the next fortnightly bag will bring me to the
eve of my starting for home. I have been studying Mme Dieulafoy107, a ravishing character, in fact I wrote an
article about her, which you may see in Vogue.1 (Vogue is illustrated, and Mme Dieulafoy is incomplete
without a portrait, or I would have sent it to Leonard.) Raymond 108 and I have agreed to divide the world;
rather like the Versailles peace conference we are: he is to have Palestine, Syria and the desert, and I am to
have Persia, for journalistic purposes. (We are both rather resentful of Aldous Huxley.)109 Raymond has
arrived, you see; he fell over a precipice and was fired on, but survived. It seems odd to see him here. He is
very happy, and as good as gold: scribbles away, and gives no trouble. But we both find it difficult to write
about travel. My drawer is full of loose sheets, that refuse to connect up. I daresay you are right about rhythm;
all I can say is, that rhythm and I are out of gear. I have finished my poem though, and it goes off by this bag.
There are large patches of Asia in it now. Will you approve, I wonder?
But indeed my bringing-up wasn’t so very different from yours: I mooned about too, at Knole mostly,
and hadn’t even a brother or a sister to knock the corners off me. And I never went to school.110 If I am jolly
and vulgar, you can cry quits on another count, for you have that interest in humanity which I can never
manage,—at least, I have the interest, but not the diabolical skill in its practice which is yours. And as I get
older (I had a birthday only the other day,) I find I get more and more disagreeably solitary, in fact I foresee
the day when I shall have gone so far into myself that there will no longer be anything to be seen of me at all.
Will you, please, remember to pull away the coverings from time to time? or I shall get quite lost. It is, I think,
a pity to allow oneself to come to that stage when one only wants to be with people with whom one is intimate
or perhaps in love. One ought to have a larger repertoire. But there, you see, am I saying ‘one ought to,’—and
that gives away the whole trouble: that I live by theories, or rather they revolve and jostle in my head, and then
I neglect to put them into practice, or perhaps am incapable of so doing. And that perhaps is one of the reasons
why I like women better than men, (even platonically,) that they take more trouble and are more skilled in the
art of making friendship into a shape; it is their business; men are too spoilt and lazy.
There now is a long egoistic passage; but from time to time I get seriously worried, and have a longing
to be gregarious, and pour it out on poor Virginia.
I met a young American poet called MacLeish111 who has a passionate admiration for you. He is a
serious young man, who has come here on an opium commission. You and Eliot are the only two writers in

107 Mme Dieulafoy’ (I4^ue,June 1926, pp. 77,112). Jane Dieulafoy travelled overland to Persia with her husband Marcel in the 1890s, and together
they excavated the palace of Darius at Susa. She wrote an account of her adventures which attracted great acclaim. Vita reprinted much of her article in
Passenger to Teheran.
108 Raymond Mortimer.
109 Huxley was travelling round the world, and described his journey in Jesting Pilot (October 1926).
110 She did. She regularly attended the school run by Miss Woolff in Mayfair and won most of the prizes there. (See Victoria Glendinning, Vita (1983),
pp. 22-26.)
111 Archibald MacLeish
England today, etc. etc. By the way I would like to read Middleton Murry’s invectives, but you didn’t say what
they were in.112 Will you keep them for me?
Darling Virginia, you mustn’t write me any more, because I shall be coming home. On the 25th is the
coronation; then we are going to climb a mountain, then I am going to start. I can’t find anything about my
journey; tourist agencies are unknown here, and the continental time-tables ignore Russia altogether. So I shall
just launch off into the blue and trust to luck, and ought to reach England on the fourteenth, laden with rugs
for old Bridges.113 If you aren’t very careful I shall really bring you a tortoise, as the place is alive with them.
(Have you read Lawrence, D. H., on tortoises?)
Have you read ‘Comment débuta Marcel Proust’?114 1 cried over it. (By the way, that might be a good
book to publish in translation; it’s quite short.)
How pleased I shall be to sit on your floor again.
I have got to go and see the Crown jewels, which is unexpectedly cutting my letter short, and I daren’t
risk the bag not being closed when I get back—I’m also going to see that they’ve painted the room the right
colour for the coronation, and am to be rewarded for my trouble by being allowed to pour bowls of emeralds
through my fingers! So, at least, says the high functionary who is gracious enough to accord me this favour. I
am taking Raymond. I must fly—

Your
V.

Postscript. Just back from the palace, with an hour before the bag shuts.
I am blind. Blinded by diamonds.
I have been in Aladdin’s cave.
Sacks of emeralds were emptied out before our eyes. Sacks of pearls. Literally.
We came away shaking the pearls out of our shoes. Ropes of uncut emeralds.
Scabbards encrusted with precious stones. Great hieratic crowns.
All this in a squalid room, with grubby Persians drinking little cups of tea.
I can’t write about it now. It was simply the Arabian Nights, with decor by the Sitwells. Pure fantasy.
Oh, why weren’t you there?

112 In the Adelphi of February 1926, in which Murry abused Jacob’s Room and The Waste Land.
113 Robert Bridges.
114 By Louis de Robert (1925).
To Vita Sackville-West
The Hogarth Press
52 Tavistock Square
London WC1
29 March

...Now you must pretend to be interested in your friend’s fortunes: but it will all seem so remote and silly to
you: you have forgotten a paper called The Nation; Leonard was literary editor once: and since Wednesday he
is no longer. We have resigned. Thank God. What a mercy—no more going to the office and reading proofs
and racking ones brains to think who to get to write. We shall have to make £500 a year...but this is the first
step to being free, and foreign travel and dawdling about England in a motor car; and we feel 10 years younger,
utterly irresponsible, and please, dearest Vita, do make Harold do the same thing....
I cannot think what it will interest you to be told of, now you are embedded in Persia....
[There was] a ghastly party at Rose Macaulays, where in the whirl of meaningless words I thought Mr
O’donovan said Holy Ghost, whereas he said “The Whole Coast” and I asking “where is the Holy Ghost?” got
the reply “Where ever the sea is” “Am I mad, I thought, or is this wit?” “The Holy Ghost?” I repeated. “The
Whole Coast” he shouted, and so we went on, in an atmosphere so repellent that it became, like the smell of
bad cheese, repulsively fascinating...until Leonard shook all over, picked up what he took to be Mrs Gould’s
napkin, discovered it to be her sanitary towel and the foundations of this tenth rate literary respectability (all
gentlemen in white waistcoats, ladies shingled, unsuccessfully) shook to its foundations. I kept saying “Vita
would love this”. Now would you?

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran 17 April

I left you blinded with pearls, and now ten days have gone by, and meanwhile Teheran has been slowly filling
up with barbarians who have ridden in from the mountains for the coronation, and who parade the streets on
their wild ponies, dressed to emulate the plumage of peacocks,—huge turbans of silk and fur, wide sashes like
Joseph’s coat, stuck with silver-mounted weapons of every description; all 15th-century, not a day later. And
now comes your letter, late, because of floods, (Baghdad was saved only by the skin of its teeth,) positively
bursting with news: The Nation gone, the Press perhaps to go.115 Please not the latter. I didn’t know what an
affection I had for the Press till I heard it was threatened. Besides, it keeps you in London; and if it disappeared,
you might disappear too, and be off to—oh, anywhere but Persia. It is all very exciting, and I congratulate
Leonard upon his rashness. You might exert your influence over Harold next year to do likewise.
We are going to Isfahan tomorrow, but heaven knows if we shall get there, as the floods are said to be
all over the road; brown torrents, and bridges swept away. And this will be my last letter. The next thing you’ll
know of me, will be that I walk in and fondle Grizzle. Unless, indeed, I fall into a Russian prison on the way.
What have I been doing? I went to a Persian tea-party. Ravishing women, almond eyes, red lips,
babbling like little birds, pulling their veils about them whenever they heard a noise. Completely silly, but oh
so lovely! Much better than your stockbrokers. And one old monster of a mother-in-law, hanging over them,
like a hawk over a flock of doves.

115 Leonard had resigned as Literary Editor of the Nation but was persuaded to remain until 1930. The Woolfs were also thinking of selling the Hogarth
Press, but never in fact did so.
 Have you seen Harold’s Swinburne116 it is out. It appears that you told him you wanted to review it,
which he hasn’t forgotten, even if you have. We haven’t got it; very tantalising. I’ve written a good deal, but
all pretty bad,117 (I send a chunk to Leonard by this post,) and envy your thousands of words. Is it all west coast
of Scotland?118 I think I had better take you there, in the blue motor.
I had a long, obscene letter from Eddy, but for some dim psychological reason cannot bring myself to
answer it. He says he ‘never enjoyed himself so much in his life’ as the evening when he induced you to dine
with him. He says he ‘paid you compliments, without being vulgar, which is more than a mere womaniser
could have done’. What with my correspondence, and Raymond’s and Harold’s, we get most of your London
happenings as seen from three different angles, and spend some happy evenings piecing the different accounts
together. It is much more amusing than seeing the actual thing,—an exercise of the imagination. But none of
us, alas, have heard from Sibyl.
A curious fact: nearly all letters seem to contain at least one irritating phrase, but yours never. They
leave one feeling more intelligent, charming, and desirable than one really is.
I wish you would do your 150 pages which shall sum up the whole of literature.119 It would tidy up the
rubbish-heap of many people’s minds, not least my own. And please don’t give up the Press.
My mind is such a rubbish-heap; it distresses me.
This is a silly letter, but I shall arrive a week after it. In the meantime I am (as we say here) your
sacrifice. I will recite Hafiz to you, bring you silks and scents, and make myself generally agreeable. I’ll do
Viola’s index for you if you like.120 Or anything else, and try to corrupt you in every possible way. I’ve ordered
a barrel of the Spanish wine you liked, so you will have to come and drink it. Like Belloc, who says he has
just bought 2000 bottles of Burgundy at 2 X d a bottle. You will be very nice to me please? because you know
what a miserable letter I wrote from Trieste, and I shall be exactly correspondingly glad to see you again.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
13 April

...How odd it is—the effect geography has in the mind! I write to you differently now you’re coming back.
The pathos is melting. I felt it pathetic when you were going away; as if you were sinking below the verge.
Now that you are rising, I’m jolly again.

116 Harold’s Swinburne was receiving generally favourable reviews but a few were condemnatory of his unfairness to his subject.
117 Passenger to Teheran.
118 To the Lighthouse was ostensibly set in the Hebrides, but its setting was in fact derived from Virginia’s memories of Cornwall.
119 Virginia started this book in the last year of her life (1940-41), but did not complete it. Her draft was entitled Anon. See Brenda Silver, ed., ‘“Anon”
and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’ (Twentieth Century Literature, Virginia Woolf Issue, Fall/Winter 1979, 25: 3-4).
120 Viola Tree, Castles in the Air: The Story of My Singing Days, published by the Hogarth Press in April 1926.
May - September 1926
The hot summer of 1926 was spent by both women in the country, Vita at Long Barn, Virginia at
Monk’s House, and they frequently visited each other. There were a few expeditions: to Oxford
(separately) to visit Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, and by Virginia to see Thomas Hardy in
Dorset. Vita took her two sons on holiday to the Loire valley. She finished her Persian travel book,
and The Land was published, to great acclaim, in September. The Vita—Virginia affair continued
intermittently, but with less intensity than before. Vita wrote to Harold on 17 August, ‘I am sagacious,
though probably I would be less sagacious if I were more tempted, which is at least frank.’ She was
seeing more of Dorothy Wellesley, to whom she dedicated The Land, than of Virginia.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1 Wednesday [19 May]

...Everybody is longing to see you. Grizzle in paroxysms. Lunch here at 1. Friday. Better still come to the
basement at 12.30 and have a preliminary talk...with me in my studio—then 6 or 7 hours upstairs, (unless
you’ll dine with me on Thursday, when I happen to be alone)

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Saturday [22 May]

...You said you were going to finish a book in Persia. Would you let us have it? The point is I dont want to
press you, if you feel, as you may, that Heinemann’s has a right, and is, as maybe too, more profitable. At the
same time I dont want these refinements of feeling to lose us a chance which would give a great fillip to our
autumn season. So consider.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
29 May

My darling Virginia

This intoxication of solitude.... All day I weed,—a fine crop of potatoes coming up in the new flower beds,—
take the puppies for a walk through the buttercups, hear the cuckoo, see him even, —flying in a festooned
flight from spinney to spinney,—come in to dinner, a lonely dinner: cold lamb and the Spanish wine you liked;
then the old problem: what shall I read at dinner, propped open by a fork? decide finally on Virginia, grab the
common reader, a pair of spectacles, a pencil, go in to dinner, get into conversation with the highly respectable
old butler121 through saying we must look over Harolds clothes that they be not mildewed; ‘Are there Court
clothes, madam? gold braid needs black tissue paper’, ‘No, he’s got his uniform with him’, (visions of Harold
in a vile temper, tumbling over his sword); ‘Ah yes, so he would have, madam; and a very long time it must
seem, if I may say so, madam, for Mr Nicolson not to see the young gentlemen.’ ‘Have you ever been abroad?’
I ask, embarrassed. ‘To the Argentine, madam, with two gentlemen; at least, not reeel [sit] gentlemen they
weren’t, if I may so express myself, madam; but very interesting all the same, but Egypt now, that’s the country
that always took my fancy, if only I could get there, perhaps with Mr Nicolson if he was Viceroy, that’s been
my dream always.’ (Dear me, how romantic the English are, I think to myself; and aloud:) ‘Why Egypt
particularly?’ ‘Well, madam, I understand as how the Sanitary Arrangements are greatly improved there from
what as they used to be.’
This baffles me; I can’t follow the train of thought at all. I wish to pursue the conversation, but am
interrupted by Pippin starting to have puppies under my chair. Hasty exile of Pippin to the shed. Louise, who
indulges Pippin’s every whim, obviously thinks me a brute. The atmosphere becomes suddenly and horribly
obstetrical. The butler, feeling this is a Woman’s Job, retires to the pantry. And here I am now, feeling curiously
paternal, while Pippin yelps in travail in the shed,—all my fault, for having caused her to be sent to the
champion red spaniel of England while I was safely in Asia two months ago. (63 days; to be exact.)
My travel book: I see that I must quarrel with Heinemann for your sake; so be it. You shall have it.
But I warn you that it is not worth having. And oh, dear, idolised Virginia that you are, how could you publish
Viola?122 it makes me vomit. I don’t like you to sell your soul.
How is Leonard’s cold’ and your headache? Tell Leonard my cold was a fiend; and thank him for
nothing.
My mother is not coming here; she has got to stay in London and have her food weighed for a month.
I saw her on Thursday, more lovely and charming than words can say. So I am at liberty to have parties. So
will you both be my first and probably only party, and come here for next weekend, (5th-7th, I think.)
Signed:

Sibyl Colefax

Anyone you like I’ll ask, or no one else at all; just as you like. Or you come on Friday and Leonard on Sat.—
just what suits you—only tell me. I have a village maiden to cook for me, and no coal, but am felling an oak

121 George Horne, nicknamed Moody.

122 Viola Tree.
to show my rustic independence of the coal strike.123
How happy you must have been among your water-meadows these days; and pulling the plug and
what-not.
My garden was nice, but every tulip has been finished off by the wind—There will be nothing if you
come—and you will think me a bad gardener.
I have shingled my hair.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Tuesday [1 June]

It is all infinitely good of you—what we thought of, for your travels, was to have large, numerous photographs.
At the same time, we are a little conscience (oh damn! I’ve been addressing envelopes all the afternoon,
and cannot write a word) I was saying we feel a little guilty about taking you from the prosperous Heinemann.
Lets talk it over in cold blood

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn 2 June

Dearest, I don’t like to drag you down here just for one night,—it’s tiring and unsettling for you,—besides I
should like Leonard to come, so I’ll be unselfish and forgo the joy of having you here on Friday, and say
‘Come both of you on Sat. the 12th,’ though by then all the lupins and irises will have gone, and nothing will
have taken their place, and Leonard (who is a gardener) will think my garden nasty.
What a dazzling life you do lead,—Gertrude Stein and the Sitwells!—you make me feel a bumpkin.124
I can’t interpret Sibyl’s dream. 125 Are you dining with her on the 15th? I am; but I feel you would
certainly have been used as a decoy if you were going.
Are you all right? and headaches gone?
Of course if you could come on Friday 11th, so much the better, but I suppose that’s too much to hope
for?

V.

The puppies are well, thank you, but Pippin is greatly distressed because we have cut their tails off with a
carving knife.

123 The General Strike, which had disrupted British transport and industry, ended on 12 May, but the coalminers remained on strike for several more
months.
124 Virginia had written to her sister Vanessa Bell: ‘We were at a party at Edith Sitwell’s last night, where a good deal of misery was endured.... It was
in honour of Miss Gertrude Stein who was throned on a broken settee... (VW 1644).
125 Sibyl Colefax’s dream was that Virginia had been twice to the theatre with Dorothy Wellesley.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Monday [7 June]

Not much news. Rather cross—Would like a letter. Would like a garden. Would like Vita. Would like 15
puppies with their tails chopped off, 3 doves, and a little conversation. The Sitwells was a ghastly frost. I put
it in to make you feel a bumpkin—and it did, and thus confirmed my view that other peoples parties have a
mystery and glamour one’s own are without. Are you writing poetry? If so, then tell me what is the difference
between that emotion and the prose emotion? What drives you to one and not the other?...

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Thursday 17 June

Dear Mrs Woolf

I must tell you how much I enjoyed my weekend with you....

Darling Virginia, you don’t know how happy I was.
I am sorry you should think me crafty. I don’t think I am half crafty enough.
About prose and poetry, and the difference between them. I don’t believe there is any, with all due
respect to Coleridge. It is surely only a question of the different shape that words assume in the mind, not a
question of drunkenness and sobriety. All too often the distinction leads people to think they may mumble
inanities which would make them blush if written in good common English, but which they think fit to print if
split up into lines. This alone shows that there isn’t any real difference. None of the definitions fit. Matthew
Arnold says that poetry describes the flowing, not the fixed; why should not prose?
A brilliant gathering at Sibyl’s,—what you missed! The drawing room at Argyll House126 coruscated.
Sibyl was, I thought, very stuffy about you; evidently cross at being cheated of a star in her firmament. ‘If she
could come up to London with you,’ she snapped, ‘she could have come here tonight.’ I drew a touching picture
of your frailty; she sniffed. Molly McCarthy [sic] looked amused.
Now, having annoyed you (as I hope) by telling you what you missed and what bad odour you are in
with her ladyship, I’ll tell you that I disenjoyed myself extremely; would have exchanged all the champagne
in the cellar for a glass of Rodmell water; would have sent everybody flying with a kick. Sibyl tried to draw
me about Persia; I turned sulky, wouldn’t be drawn, shan’t be asked again, and let Aldous Huxley have it all
his own way as the only traveller. 127 Then I came down here next day, composing on the way a very beautiful
speech to be addressed to girl-guides; discovered on arrival that they were shop girls not girl-guides at all; had
to improvise; was bunched with sweet peas; felt like Princess Mary;128 had to buy a lot of things I didn’t want;

126 In Chelsea.
127 See note 3 to Vitas letter of 8 April 1926 [page 102],
128 Daughter of King George V
went to Knole and saw The Comedy of Errors played in the garden; and so home, feeling very miserable
because I had lost you and because I had had a bad report about my mother. So I collected as many dogs as I
could to take to bed with me; and rats ate the doves during the night.
But this morning I thought of you writing away as hard as you could go, and that consoled me. I hope
it was a true and right thought?
If you should feel inclined to write to me, send it to Sherfield Court, Sherfield on Loddon, Basingstoke
where I go on Saturday after the eighty publishers. I shall expect to find that you have prepared a little store of
trouble for me with Clive.
Desmond said suddenly to me, ‘I see that Clive is going as minister to Teheran.’129 To me there is only
one Clive:130 my world reeled.
I wish I were back at Rodmell. I wish you were coming here. Is it any good suggesting (you see that I
am in a despondent mood,) that you should do so? It is very nice here, you know; but I expect you are busy.
Only, it would be a nice refuge if you wanted to escape from London, and I would fetch you in the motor. In
any case I shall see you on Friday? a damned long way off, too. Is this a dumb letter? You did spoil me so at
Rodmell. I was terribly happy. Tell me how you are.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
17 June

Ha, Ha! Look what I’ve found. Only send it back, please, because it’s too precious to lose. I like my name,—
I mean, Harold’s name,—spelt wrong. 131
I shall have, however, to give up reading your works at dinner, for they are too disturbing. I can’t
explain, I’ll have to explain verbally some day. Unless you can guess. How well you write, though, confound
you. When I read you, I feel no one has ever written English prose before,—Knocked it about, put it in its
place, made it into a servant. I wonder perpetually how you do it; like one might see a conjuror do a trick over
and over again, and be none the wiser. Only one knows that it will always come off. There is an odd effect
peculiar to a few writers, I don’t know if you will know what I mean, and if you don’t it is hopeless to make
you understand: they exercise some mysterious power over print, to make certain words,—perhaps quite
ordinary words,— start up out of the page like partridges out of a turnip field, getting a new value, a new
surprise. I suppose it is really done by context. You have it; Lawrence has (or used to have) it; de la Mare (who
bores me now) has it; Max 132 has it.—But, as I say, you won’t know what I mean.
I am an awful snob about you. About your writing, I mean.
God, how it rains—A pigeon has come to live with me. I think it must be the ghost of the dove that

129 Sir Robert Clive, who had been British Consul General in Munich and Tangier, was now appointed Minister to Teheran, where he remained until
1931.
130 Clive Bell.
131 One of Virginia’s first letters to Vita had begun: ‘Dear Mrs Nicholson’.
132 Max Beerbohm.
flew out of the Ark. I do wish you were here. Tomorrow I have to dine with an old bibliophile who also collects
water-colours of the most horrible description; two old brothers; the younger is the echo of the elder; they have
First Editions, and a Cellar, and they tell Anecdotes.133 I love them, and they ceremoniously flirt with me. They
are the sort of people you fall in love with,—like stockbrokers.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Friday [18 June]

...Yes, I do write damned well sometimes, but not these last days, when I’ve been slogging through a cursed
article, and see my novel134 glowing like the Island of the Blessed far far away over dismal wastes, and cant
reach land.

To Virginia Woolf
Sherfield Court
Sherfield Upon Loddon
Basingstoke
[20 June]

Commanded to write to you about Sunday, what am I to say?

But first of all: YES, come on Thursday if any chance offers. It fits in admirably, because I must be in
London that day to go to a matinee with my mother (who has a strange incongruous passion for matinees, and
always has a row with the person behind her because she won’t take off her hat,—so now has a black lace veil
which becomes her admirably,) and can fetch you afterwards in the motor; moreover will bring you up on
Friday—so you’ll have no trouble with trains and stations. So let me know—to Long Barn.
I had a fright there yesterday: I was fetched as I was goodly gardening. ‘There is a long telegram for
you on the telephone, from Monk’s House.’ ‘My God!’ I thought, ‘something has happened to Virginia.’ I
rushed, I flew; arrived all out of breath. And then it was only a telegram from some people called Monk at
Oakhampton [sir] who wanted to buy a puppy. I stuck on a guinea, just to pay them out.
My first glimpse of Clive was somehow suitable: I ran into him as he emerged from the rear, 135 doing
up his buttons. But he was prim about it, ignored my grin of welcome, my outstretched hand—nay, my opened
arms,—scurried back, attended to his toilet, re-appeared, not pleased to see me a bit: I was damped, crushed.
During the course of the 24 hours he has recovered himself, and become friendly again; so friendly indeed that
we walked round the moat after dinner, on a warm misty evening, and talked, and he made some bad breaches
in my little fort of discretion.136 You see he was skilful enough to pique me with remarks about your general

133 The two bachelor brothers Johnson, solicitors of Sevenoaks, Kent, who had been Vita’s friends since her childhood and remained Trustees of the
Knole Estate.
134 To the Lighthouse.
135 A lavatory.
136 Vita wrote to Harold on the same day: ‘Clive follows me all over the place. Have I been to bed with Virginia yet? If not, am I likely to do so in the
indifference, lack of response etc, and I rose like a trout to the bait. Still, I don’t think I’ve very seriously
compromised you, and Clive, at any rate, was entertained. Then Sir Arthur137 had to be rescued from
Desmond,138 or rather Desmond had to be rescued from Sir Arthur, and we got separated—which was perhaps
fortunate.
Eddy tells me he is going to meet you at Garsington.139 Now I can forgive Eddy much,—inheriting
Knole instead of me, for instance,—but not this.
This letter has been written in bits.
Who made you a declaration of love? and what did Wells say?140 You know quite well that you will
tell me, so why so coy?
I shall tell Clive that he is not to open this letter and read it in the train. It will, I fear, burn a hole in his
pocket. He is a pet, anyhow, and I have ever such a warm feeling for him. I meant to flirt with him, didn’t I?
and forgot. I was too much engaged in fencing about you. What a disturbing element you are to be sure!
Bless you.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Tavistock Square Tuesday
[22 June]
[Typewritten]

Darling Mrs Nicolson,

I think I won’t come on Thursday for this reason; I must get on with writing; you would seduce me completely;
I have to spend two nights (I suppose) at Garsington...
Also will you come on after your play on Thursday and see me alone? I’ve put off Sibyl in case you
can. Come early on Friday The typewriter calls you instinctively Darling Mrs Nicolson....
Of course, if you want to meet Sibyl and you’ve only to say so. Will you dine with me off radishes alone in
the kitchen?

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
[15 July]

Dear Mrs Nicolson,

near future? If not, will I please give it my attention? As it is high time Virginia fell in love.’ (Lilly Library, Indiana University.)
137 Sir Arthur Colefax (1866-1936), husband of Sibyl, an eminent lawyer, but usually regarded by her friends as tedious, loquacious, and no match for
his wife.
138 Desmond MacCarthy.
139 Home of Lady Ottoline Morrell.
140 H.G. Wells had told Leonard that Virginia was ‘too intelligent—a bad thing’. (See Virginia’s diary entry for 9 June.) The ‘declaration of love’ was
from Philip Morrell.
This is only business, not affection—I suppose you’re not coming to see me; so please, as a darling, send me
(oh but better far come and bring me—)
(1) Tennyson by H. N.141
(2) Venetian Glass Nephew the authoress142 said severely “Really! Not read any of my books!” Oh what an
evening! I expected a ravishing and diaphanous dragonfly, a woman who had spirited away 4 husbands, and
wooed from buggery the most obstinate of his adherents: a siren; a green and sweetvoiced nymph—that was
what I expected, and came a tiptoe in to the room to find—a solid hunk: a hatchet minded, cadaverous, acid
voiced, bareboned, spavined, patriotic nasal, thick legged American. All the evening she declaimed
unimpeachable truths; and discussed our sales: hers are 3 times better than mine; naturally; till thank God, she
began heaving on her chair and made a move as if to go, gracefully yielded to, but not, I beg you to believe,
solicited, on our parts. Figure my woe, on the stairs, when she murmured, “Its the other thing I want. Comes
of trying to have children. May I go in there?” So she retired to the W.C., emerged refreshed; sent away her
cab, and stayed another hour, hacking us to pieces. But I must read her book.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn Weald
Sevenoaks
Friday [16 July]

Poor Towser is sadly distracted, and has a stary coat: can’t write, and does nothing but run up and down stairs
with telephone messages. My mothers visit is being prolonged; and although I adore having her, it interrupts
the pursuit of literature. I can’t get to London till the 28th,—will you be gone to Rodmell? Or if I came up in
the evening of the 27th instead, would you dine with me? Otherwise I can see nothing for it but that you should
both come here with Clive, which would be perfect,—Though not so perfect as having you alone.
(1) I sent you Tennyson today.143
(2) The Venetian Glass Nephew was borrowed by Wellesley, who, has been told to send it direct to you.
What did you think of her poem?
(3) The coronet appears to be an English marquis’ coronet; see accompanying illustration; remove the
cushion, and the rest is identical. But of course a French marquis’ may be the same, and I have no
book which will tell me.—Yes, I have, though, and it isn’t.—The motto and arms do not belong to any
present English marquis, as I have looked them all up. But it may be extinct. See also accompanying
postcard, 144 which gives you the titles of two books on English family mottos; I have neither of these
books, but London Library? British Museum?
(4) What is the matter with Sibyl? I got a cryptic phrase in a letter from her: ‘How naughty to have given
E.G.’s message to Virginia. ’This mystified me completely till I thought of Edmund Gosse and his

141 By Harold Nicolson, published 1922.

142 Elinor Wylie.
143 By Harold Nicolson, published in 1922.
144 Virginia had sent Vita a picture of a coronet which had descended to her great-aunt, Julia Margaret Cameron, the photographer. Vita had identified
it as the coronet of an English marquis, not that of the crest of the eighteenth-century Chevalier Antoine de l’Etang, Julia Margaret Cameron’s
grandfather, as Virginia had hoped. Also enclosed was a Chevalier de l’Etang bookplate. The Chevalier de l’Etang’s motto is: sicut flos inter spinas.
On the postcard was written: ‘Fairbairn: Book of family crests. 1856.Wachbourne: Book of family crests. 1882. 2 vols.’
 remarks about your father.145 Have I made mischief? I didn’t mean to. I don’t know what else she can
mean, however I shall see her tomorrow as I have got to take her and some bloody American over
Knole; they, (the Colefaxes) aren’t coming here for the weekend after all, as I have had to put them
off on account of my mother.

Last night Pippin returned home from hunting and proceeded to have convulsions. With my usual
efficiency I diagnosed strychnine, and rushed her into Sevenoaks at 2 a.m. to the vet. We gave her a morphia
injection, and she was immediately and magnificently sick,—really impressive it was,—and so her life is
saved. But it was a dramatic dash. I felt like the person who brought the good news from Aix to Ghent.146
A New Zealand poet walked in, two days ago; damn bad his poems were, but he was an interesting young
man, penniless, tramping England selling his poems for 6d for a living. So you are not alone in your association
with authors.
Oh dear I do so want to see you.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square WC1
[19? July]

You are an angel, but I didn’t mean you to take so much trouble. God knows about the Marquis. Probably the
whole thing is different in France—he may have been the son or the nephew of a Marquis (I think that was the
legend), and anyhow I suppose I can say, vaguely, ‘aristocratic’, and leave it. I want to prove her base and
noble—it fits in with her oddities. I might spend a lifetime over her; but can’t face going to my halfbrother
who knows all about the Marquis.Tennyson has not yet come; but will, I make no doubt. I quail before the
Venetian nephew. Another meeting with that arid desert147 has sickened me....
...About coming—I’m dashing off, you’ll be amused to hear, on my chronic visit to Hardy.148 1 expect
I shall be back on Saturday: I shall only stay one day and drink one cup of tea, and be so damned nervous I
shall spill it on the floor, and what shall I say? Nothing, but arid nonsense. Yet I feel this is a great occasion....
...I’m sitting in an old silk petticoat at the moment with a hole in it, and the top part of another dress
with a hole in it, and the wind is blowing through me, and I’m reading de Quincey, and Richardson, and again
de Quincey—again de Quincey, because I’m in the middle of writing about him,149 and my God Vita, if you
happen to know do wire what’s the essential difference between prose and poetry—It cracks my poor brain to
consider.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn

145 See VW 1726.‘Gosse still says, only two weeks ago, “Ah Mrs Woolf! doesn’t respect her father.’”
146 The reference is to Robert Browning’s poem: “How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix.”
147 Elinor Wylie.
148 Virginia’s visit to Thomas Hardy at Max Gate in Dorset on 23 July is fully described in her diary two days later.
149 Impassioned Prose.
 Weald
Sevenoaks
Wednesday [23 July]

Yes, please, I would very much like you to come on Monday. I would still more like you to come on Saturday,
and shine, but I see quite clearly that you don’t intend to do that.
But why, instead of going up to London again on Tuesday morning and down to Rodmell that
afternoon, not let me motor you over to Rodmell on Tuesday? it seems to me that it would save you trouble
and fatigue. But you decide on this when you come.
I am glad you are going to Rodmell at last. I am sure all these excitements are not good for you.
And old Hardy! Well, well. You will come back quite converted, as you always are by Public
Monuments,—George Moore, Bridges,—and with no use for your contemporaries.
Raymond is back and is coming here on Saturday. You may have seen him, but he has gone dutifully
to visit his aunt.
I’m glad Leonard will print ‘Gertrude Bell’. 150 I sent the proof back by return. I’ve written to Byard
151
to tell him you’re going to have that book152—as he will be cross if he first learns it from an advertisement.
He will be cross anyhow, but I have told Ozzie153 to pacify him in Venice.
Did you know Ozzie was motoring to Italy with Sibyl? What will be left of all our reputations!

To Virginia Woolf
Sherfield Court
Sherfield upon Loddon
Basingstoke
4 August

If I have not written to you, it is because I have been writing for you,—tyrant, slavedriver, how am I to write
20,000 words in 10 days, tell me? I turn a deaf ear to all pleadings; will I play tennis? will I come out in the
punt? will I come and bathe? no, no, no, I say, you remember Mrs Woolf? Well, I have got to finish a book for
her to publish, so run away darlings, and don’t worry; and then back I go to Isfahan; and meanwhile Virginia
sits in the water-meadows and thinks about the Hebrides. (What, exactly, is a he-bride? see Raymond Mortimer
on a ‘Defence of Homosexuality’.154 Raymond Mortimer was here for the weekend; had rather a bad time in
the shape of a good many home-truths; but happy on the whole.)
Now that’s all, because I have two chapters still to write, and several to finish, and am getting frantic
about it. Dome says I am a bore. I tell her that it is your fault. I am a bore, I know, and nobody is allowed near
the writing-table except me. As for the children, their passion for Mrs Woolf is rapidly on the decline.
Mine, alas, is not.

V.

150 Vita’s article,‘Gertrude Bell in Baghdad’, (Nation, 24 July 1926).

151 Theodore Byard, director of Heinemann’s.
152 Passenger to Teheran.
153 Oswald Dickinson (1869-1954), the bachelor brother of Violet Dickinson, Virginia’s intimate friend in adolescence.
154 A pamphlet which he wrote for the Hogarth Press, and which they were advised by their lawyers not to publish.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Sunday [8 August]

Yes, it does seem hard, that we should make you spend all the fine weather with your nose to the pen.155 But
think of your glory; and our profit, which is becoming a necessary matter, now that your puppy has destroyed,
by eating holes, my skirt, ate L’s proofs, and done such damage as could be done to the carpet—But she is an
angel of fight. Leonard says seriously she makes him believe in God...and this after she has wetted his floor 8
times in one day.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
[19 August]

Will you come on Wednesday? to lunch at 1? Leonard will be in London for the day. Would you like me to
ask Clive? If so, let me know. Sleep night.
You’ll be even more uncomfortable than usual.
I say, please bring 2 bottles wine (not cider) which I want to BUY.
Cant get any.

155 Writing Passenger to Teheran.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Friday [20 August]

What is this alarming invitation156 you have sent on to me? I take it that you are not going; and as for me, I
should be much too frightened to go,—even under your wing, I think.
I am going to Normandy for a week, 157 with the boys, on the 28th, but am going to Brighton on
Wednesday—could I see you? How could I see you? Sleep Wednesday night? or lunch Thursday? We ought
to decide about these photographs, and other details. I am calling it “Passenger to Teheran”, which I think
covers everything, 1) not too dull, 2) not too romantic, 3) explicit. Anyhow I can’t think of anything better. I
will bring the thing completed on Wednesday,—a bit late, I fear, but my calculations were completely thrown
out by Mothers visit. Otherwise you should have had it a fortnight ago. It is very bad. I feel ashamed; but
perhaps it will sell.
I have been amusing myself by filling in the religious questionnaire,158 and showing the result to the
tutor159 who is reading for the Church.
Do let me know about next week. To stay the night Wednesday would be nicest, but just as it suits
you.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Sunday [22 August]

Yes—that will be perfect. I think I shall be alone on Wednesday—couldn’t you come early and enjoy a
scrambly lunch?
The title160 seems very good—far the best. I’m longing, in spite of having read 3 mss, to read yours—
a great testimony to you: I’m compunctious that you should have worked so hard. Seven hours a day My
God....

Damn you for going to Normandy—I have just refused to stay with Ethel Sands, in order to write
But whats one’s writing worth that one should refuse to cross the Channel?—at this moment the thing
I long for: Shall we go in Sept.?

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell

156 To Charleston?
157 And then to the Loire valley, with Ben and Nigel, and Dorothy Wellesley, from 28 August till 6 September.
158 In the Nation, starting with the question, ‘Do you believe in a personal God? ’The answers, tabulated, were printed in the issue of 16 October: yes—
743, no—1,024.
159 Charles Farrell.
160 Passenger to Teheran.
 15 September

They’ve only just sent the second batch of proofs161 which I have swallowed at a gulp. Yes—I think its awfully
good. I kept saying ‘How I should like to know this woman’ and then thinking ‘But I do’, and then ‘No, I
dont—not altogether the woman who writes this.’ I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties: Here’s a brave
attitude— emeralds, staircases, Raymond subjugated—thats familiar enough: but not the sly, brooding
thinking evading one. The whole book is full of nooks and corners which I enjoy exploring Sometimes one
wants a candle in one’s hand though—Thats my only criticism—you’ve left (I daresay in haste) one or two
dangling dim places....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn Weald
Sevenoaks
17 September

So happy tonight because I had your letter. But what have you done to your finger? and how cut your chin?
Yes, I expect Grizzle is in for it; and ah your fault. What would be the result if Grizzle mated with a dog twice
her size? God! what a monster!
I am glad you like the book. I did write it in a hurry, you know, so no wonder there are dim dangling
places. I’m glad too that you would like to know me: we must get some common friend to arrange a meeting,
dear Mrs Woolf, when I am next in London. At present I am oppressed by the thought of having to give a
lecture there in October162—can think of nothing else, and the horror of it. Fool that I was, rash fool, ever to
accept.
Could you understand the map?163 1 can’t, and feel that I am the one sane person left in a world of
lunatics, for everyone else seems to fall naturally into the map-maker’s distorted vision. Oh, I am very glad
you like it. I had such qualms after you sent if off without even reading it. No, of course The Land is not out,
or you should have had a copy.164 It will be out next week or week after that,—I forget which, 30th Sept. I now
hear. I am in a bit of a turmoil, (1) The Land coming out, (2) got to give a lecture, (3) Virginia likes my book.
These three things trot round and round in my head, making a tune like the wheels of a railway train.
At this point sleep overcame me and I went to bed. It is now Saturday morning, and Leonard’s letter
has come about the map. I am relieved to find that I am not quite an idiot after all. Tell him from me: Scrap
map, and go ahead. I only hope it has not delayed the book already. Tell L. too that I did give the man the right
proportions, and can’t think why he ignored them. I will retrieve the offending object when I come to retrieve
the album.165 I’m now longing for the book to come out. When will that be?
This to catch the early post so you ought to get it today. Must send it—

V.

161 Of Passenger to Teheran.

162 On 27 October, to the Royal Society of Literature, about modem poetry, Gosse was in the chair, Virginia in the audience.
163 Intended for Passenger to Teheran, but not printed.
164 Vita’s The Land was published on 30 September 1926.
165 Her photograph album.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Lewes
21 September

[Typewritten]

Hope to bring out book in early Oct. Any names to send cards to? If so please let me have them. What is your
lecture about? When? Where? May I come? Will clap. Grizzle seduced again....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [21 September]

Oh darling Virginia! damn, I can’t come tomorrow, got to go to Brighton—but would love to come Thursday,
if I can get away. I’ll send you a line from Brighton tomorrow when I know how long Mother wants me to
stay. I’ll bring lots to drink. If I looked tired it was because I had been up all night,166 and went to bed at 6 a.m.
that morning, with a cold dawn creeping over the sea. I’ll bring the circulars, and list.
Rather harassed, thank you.
Do just as you like about Clive; yes, I’d like to see him and hear his jolly laugh.
I sent you The Land yesterday. Doesn’t it look pretty in its cover? How is the finger?

166 With Lady Sackville

October 1926 -January 1927
Virginia now began to introduce Vita more frequently into the Bloomsbury circle, which alarmed her
(she called it Gloomsbury—‘All the old vocabulary trotted out’), and she was also scared of Leonard,
whom she described to Harold, unfairly, as ‘a funny, grim, solitary creature’ in contrast to Virginia,
who was ‘an angel of wit and intelligence’. Virginia came for several weekends to Long Barn, spent
Christmas in Cornwall, and went again to Knole for two nights in mid-January, where, said Vita,
‘We wandered all over the house, pulling up blinds. She was thrilled.’

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Sunday [3 October]

I feel I have been very tiresome, what with saying I would come and then not coming, and one thing and
another. But if you knew how uncertain everything has been, and how I have been kept dangling about, and
had my plans upset several times, you would perhaps forgive me. Will you?
Will you tell Leonard I received and have returned the proofs of the illustrations? I am glad he warned
me, but even so I didn’t think them so bad. I think it is rather a pity they did not enlarge the small one, but I
suppose it is too late now that the block is made?
That aeroplane nearly fell on my head yesterday,167 and was still blazing on the ground when I reached
it. It flew right over Long Barn in flames. Such a horrible sight I shall never forget. There was nothing to be
done, as they were all dead, and men were dragging out the bodies with wooden hay-rakes.
Shall you be in London on Thursday when I dine with Clive?
Oh by the way I told Tanqueray to send you a dozen of the Spanish wine. They will send you the
bill,—30/ so don’t start getting angry with me. It will go to Tavistock Square.
I’m glad you thought The Land looked pretty. I await reviews in trepidation. I have never minded
before, and am cross with myself for minding now. It’s silly.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
Sunday [10 October]

167 It crashed in the fields near Long Barn. Five people were killed.
Darling Mrs Nicolson,

Could you be an entire angel and tell me (for the 50th time) the name and address of the old widow who
typewrites? Lost again,’ and needed instantly.
Well, did you like Squire? I did: I think the better of him for it, though his manner is always that of a
curate, a grocer, a church-warden, someone sticky with jam and buns at a School treat, however, he admires
you; and I’m jealous. Yes: that yellow moon is rising on the horizon—Everyone admiring Vita, talking of Vita.
Now there remain the Times Literary Supt. for which I have an unreasoning respect: Nation: New Statesman.
All of these are negligible compared with one word of mine or any other casual vivid outspoken human being:
but one can’t see it oneself—not the author....

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
[12? October]

Mr Barrington Gates (the Nation reviewer) says may he take a whole column for The Land, as in his opinion
it is ‘so outstanding’ that it should not be lumped in with others.... So there He’s going to have a column.

To Virginia Woolf
182 Ebury Street
SW1
Thursday evening [18 November]

My darling Virginia

I am really miserable that you are ill—Put me off tomorrow if you are no better.
In any case I’ll escape tomorrow afternoon—and we’ll go off to Kew—if you want to send a message
to put me off, ask to speak to me—and don’t give a message— as I shan’t say where I am going or I shall be
lunching here for certain.
I do hate your having a headache—my poor darling—

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
[19 November]

You are a miracle of discretion—one letter in another. I never thought of that. I’ll answer when I see you—the
invitation, I mean. Oh dear, Sibyl has given me a headache. What a bore I cant write, except to you. I lie in a
chair. It isn’t bad: but I tell you, to get your sympathy: to make you protective: to implore you to devise some
way by which I can cease this incessant nibbling away of life by people: Sibyl, Sir Arthur,168 Dadie 169—one
on top of another. Why do I put it on you? Some psychological necessity I suppose: one of those intimate
things in a relationship which one does by instinct. I’m rather a coward about this pain in my back: You would
be heroic:...
But dont you see, donkey West, that you’ll be tired of me one of these days (I’m so much older) and
so I have to take my little precautions. Thats why I put the emphasis on ‘recording’ rather than feeling. But
donkey West knows she has broken down more ramparts than anyone. And isnt there something obscure in
you? There’s something that doesn’t vibrate in you: It may be purposely—you dont let it: but I see it with other
people, as well as with me: something reserved, muted—God knows what.... It’s in your writing too, by the
bye. The thing I call central transparency—sometimes fails you there too....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Saturday morning [20 November]

My poor darling, I am so sorry about the headache. I haven’t time to write much of a letter as unless I catch
the early post you won’t get this till Monday; so only time, really, to say how sorry I am and how angry with
that stuffed Ethiopian mummy170 for giving it to you. Also this: that if it is not gone, utterly and completely
by, Monday morning, you must put me off. I won’t have you made ill, by myself any more than by anybody
else.
Look here, your sister asks me to her party, 171 but I am in a quandary: what am I to call her? She calls
me Vita, quite rightly. I shall send a telegram.
I must send this, my darling, but I can’t bear to think of you ‘lying in a chair’ with a pain in your back.
I wish I were there, you here, or at all events that you were recovered.
Another book from the Laureat172 this morning!

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Sunday [21 November]

Enclosed you will find a miserable poem written on the strength of your letter. I think you are a witch, or a
dowser in psychology. You must be. My respect for you increases.
Look here, if you would like to go to the ballet tomorrow night (and Leonard) will you ring me up

168 The Colefaxes.

169 George Rylands.
170 Sibyl Colefax.
171 A party given by Vanessa Bell on 24 November.
172 Robert Bridges.
before twelve and say so? I only suggest it because it is the first night of l’Oiseau de feu, and I would get
tickets. I should like to go, but will only go if you will come.
I am longing to see you and have been in a state all yesterday and today I spent most of yesterday in
bed which is why I said next weekend would be better than this. I have been in a black temper (with myself,
not with you,) and have travelled over a lot of country. If I were not going to see you tomorrow anyhow, I
should take steps to do so. Are you recovered from Sibyl? Furious with that woman for giving you a headache.
Altogether I am in a rage.
I’ll come in by the basement at 2.30 or thereabouts.173 Thank Heaven for that.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
66 Mount Street W1
Saturday night [27 November]

My beloved Virginia, I am worried about you—I thought you were tired and depressed. What is it? were you
just merely tired? I feel a brute for having let you come here.174 Was it just the bloody flux? I oughtn’t to have
let you come. Don’t you know that there is nothing I wouldn’t do to save you a moment’s pain, annoyance,
fatigue, irritation? and then I go and let you come all this way to see me! I could kick myself— Please forgive
me: my only consolation is that you had the motor. My darling, I will try to make up to you for the past
weekend. I would ring you up and say all this instead of writing it, but the reason why I don’t is obvious. I will
dine and fetch you on Saturday. I miss you dearest. Perhaps I will see you on Monday? I’ll ring up on Monday
at 2.30.1 can’t get you out of my mind tonight; the corner of the sofa where you sat is haunted for me by your
presence, the whole flat seems full of you—

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
182, Ebury Street SW1
[30 November]

It made me wretched to know you were tired yesterday, darling. Do take my scolding to heart! and don’t be so
social—you’ll get like Sibyl Colefax, and develop a bright beady eye, looking for new guests. I hope you’re
none the worse today; would like to ring you up; but I don’t want to bother. So I write.
Just off to Brighton, not looking forward to it much, thank you. I dislike the feeling that one is walking
on spikes, with bare feet.

173 They met in London next day. Virginia wrote in her diary afterwards: ‘She was sitting on the floor in her velvet jacket and red striped silk shirt, I
knotting her pearls into heaps of great lustrous eggs.... So we go on—a spirited, creditable affair, I think, innocent (spiritually) and all gain, I think;
rather a bore for Leonard, but not enough to worry him.’ Vita wrote to Harold about the same meeting: ‘I am a little bothered about Virginia, but
fortunately she is a busy and sensible person and doesn’t luxuriate in vain repinings. She is an absolute angel to me, and the value of her friendship is
not to be measured in gold.’ (Lilly Library, Indiana University).
174 To Dorothy Wellesley’s flat.
 I expect you both Thursday. You couldn’t stay two nights, I suppose? no, I suppose not.
We were taken by main force by Mary175 to Mr Kitchin’s party.176 1 decided I would never never go to a party
again. I saw Clive looking distraught and scattered.
Well, I must start. Do be good, strong-minded, self protective. I hate it when you get tired and droop.
It really hurts me. Bless you, sweet.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Wednesday [1 December]

Very nice to get a letter from you, dear Creature—No, it wasn’t the people yesterday— I had the shivers, due
to getting wet through at Rodmell—that was all—I went to bed, took aspirin, hot bottle, quite all right today,
only incredibly sleepy. Still I agree— people are the devil....
Moreover, you cant talk—lunch at Woking, tea Virginia, Cocktail Raymond, dine Mary, supper
Kitchin—There I was warm in bed, and glad to hear it was a ghastly failure. And now you’re off to Brighton
heaven help you! I wish you hadn’t that before you, but could drop in and talk—Here I am sitting or rather
lying in front of the gas fire in perfect quiet.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Wednesday [1 December]

My darling, is this yours? It is a young cuckoo in my nest, anyway, and I think I borrowed it off you once.
Last night I went to bed very early and read Mrs Dalloway. It was a very curious sensation: I thought
you were in the room—But there was only Pippin, trying to burrow under my quilt, and the night noises
outside, which are so familiar in one’s own room; and the house was all quiet. I was very unhappy because I
had had a row with my mother and very happy because of you; so it was like being two different people at the
same time, and then to complicate it there was a) the conviction that you were in the room, and b) the contact
with all the many people that you had created. (What a queer thing fiction is.) I felt quite light, as though I
were falling through my bed, like when one has a fever. Today I am quite solid again, and my boots are muddy;
they weight me down. Yet I am not as solid as usual,—not quite such an oaf,—because there is at the back of
my mind all the time (slightly lifting the top off my head,) a glow, a sort of nebula, which only when I examine
it hardens into a shape; as soon as I think of something else it dissolves again, remaining there like the sun
through a fog, and I have to reach out to it again, take it in my hands and feel its contours: then it hardens,
‘Virginia is coming on Saturday.’ I am going to dinner at Knole tonight, and I shall meet an oil magnate and
his wife; but it will be there all the time, a will o’ the wisp that lets itself be caught, ‘Virginia is coming on
Saturday.’
But she won’t, she won’t! something will happen. Of course something will happen. Something always
does, when one wants a thing too passionately. You will have chicken pox, or I shall have mumps, or the house

175 Mary Hutchinson.

176 Clifford Kitchin, writer and barrister, was the author of Streamers Waving (1925) and Death of My Aunt (1929), both published by the Hogarth
Press.
will fall down on Saturday morning. In the meantime there are three cows staring over the stile; they are waiting
for cake. There is a nebula in their minds too, ‘At four o’clock we shall have cake. ’And for them, lucky brutes,
nothing will happen. But for me there is the whole range of human possibility.
If ever you tried not to have chicken pox, try now. If ever you tried not to be given a headache by Sibyl
Colefax, try now. (I remember, ominously, that you said you were going to tea with her on Friday.) Please try
with all your might not to let anything happen. I will be responsible for you after you have arrived,—only,
please arrive. (I will let you know the trains tomorrow.) Bring your work, I won’t interrupt. I so want you to
be happy here.177 I wish, in a way, that we could put the clock back a year. I should like to startle you again,—
even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T[avistock] S[quare]
Friday [3 December]

No—I cant come. I have caught eczema from Grizzle. My hair comes out in tufts. I scratch incessantly. It
wouldn’t be safe for you, or, what matters more, the puppies. I shall think of you: let that console us.
That joke being done with—yes, I’ll come reaching Sevenoaks at 5.22.
Its true I’m incredibly dirty; have washed my head—hair is down—skirt spotted, shoes in holes—Pity
poor Virginia dragged off this afternoon by Sibyl to meet Arnold Bennett who abused me for a column in last
nights Standard.
Oh I’m so sick of teaing dining, reading writing and everything, except seeing— well it is you, I admit.
Yes it will be nice—yes it will: And shall you be very kind to me?

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Wednesday [8 December]

Pinker and I try to console one another. She sleeps on my bed, and clings to me as the one comparatively
familiar thing in a strange and probably hostile world. She was pleased to see me when I came back from
London, but ran about sniffing and looking for Mrs Woolf. I had to explain that Mrs Woolf lived in London,
a separate life, a fact which was as unpleasant to me as it could be to any spaniel puppy, so she has adopted
me as a substitute. I explained that everybody always betrayed one sooner or later, and usually gave one away
to somebody else, and that the only thing to do was to make the best of it. I have introduced her to the insect,
but he is rather frightened of her because she puts her paw down on him, so he creeps away to his legitimate
abode.
So altogether it is rather a desolate party at Long Barn.

177 Virginia was at Long Barn for 4-6 December. Vita wrote to Harold: ‘We talked about Katherine Mansfield, Rupert Brooke, early Bloomsbury. I
never knew anyone with so much imagination or gives me so much impression of a genius.’ (Lilly Library, Indiana University.)
 Oh, but it was a treat having you here. Such a treat, I haven’t yet got over it. I wish I could think that
you had been one half as happy as I was. Not but what I don’t think that I am very nice, and very good for you,
so you see there is no false modesty on my part. Now I think about Knole, a question over which I am prepared
to make myself really disagreeable, simply because I don’t think I have ever wanted anything so much, and it
will be my last treat before going away. For ever so long. You will come, won’t you?178
Darling, you will come?

V.

I say, did you remember to send Mrs Dalloway to my mother? White Lodge, Roedean, near Brighton. If you
wrote in it she would like that—Sorry to bother you, but you know what she is. I’ve added 7/6 on to my bill
(enclosed). I’ll come on Monday, in the undern.179 Still angry with Arnold Bennett.180 Did Mrs Cameron
boom?181

Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
52T.[avistock] S.[quare]
[8 December]

Dearest Vita,

(Now why did I say that?) Yes, Monday, undern 2.30. Please come, and bathe me in serenity again. Yes, I was
wholly and entirely happy....
But why, darling Mrs N., honourable Mrs N. insist upon Knole? To see me ridiculous, the powder
falling, the hairpins dropping, and not a word said in private between us?...

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Saturday [11 December]

Disaster last night: Pinker, in sportive mood, sprang on to my writing table, upsetting the ink stand, which
poured two floods of ink (one red and the other blue) down over the back of the sofa. Pippin was drenched in
the blue ink, puppy in the red. Today Pippin looks like a bruise, puppy like an accident. You would have
enjoyed the scene. I hope she will have regained her normal colour by January 1st when you have her back.
Oh, and you rang me up. I liked that. But surely you would like to feed stags out of a bucket? I can

178 Virginia spent the nights of 17 and 18 January 1927 at Knole.

179 ‘Undern’ is an archaic word which Virginia and Vita used with each other to denote early afternoon.
180 His critical article about Virginia appeared in the Evening Standard, 2 December.
181 In October 1926 the Hogarth Press had published Juba Margaret Cameron’s Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, with an
Introduction by Virginia.
promise you some good moments at Knole,—and as for no private conversation, why, silly, we should be alone
all day practically. We’ll stick the powder on with [illegible—paper damaged] and padlock the hairpins.
It’s good of you to say you will write a note to Mother, she likes that kind of thing. By the way she is
ordering two copies of Mrs Cameron, to show her appreciation of your advertisements! She says now it is I
who make her ill—This I think is a bit hard. Please don’t tell anybody of my difficulties with her; I oughtn’t
really to have said anything about it, ought I? even to you—but it was so on my mind, but it was disloyal of
me all the same. Not a nice character.
But a loving one in spite of that,—for Virginia.

V.

Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Thursday [16 December]

My lost Virginia, Dottie says she is asking you to dinner on Monday night to read you those incestuous papers;
I hope you will go. I shall be there. 182 She isn’t asking Leonard because she says she couldn’t bring herself to
read them to him\
My mother has almost forgiven me because yours was so beautiful; I don’t follow the logic of this, but
there it is. Your correspondence with her disquiets me rather: I hope she hasn’t been bothering you? She wants
some more of those post-cards,—are there any left?
Puppy very well and happy, in spite of having eaten a whole shoe yesterday.
I am coming to see you on Monday aren’t I? but look here, I don’t want you to waste your time—Do
prepare some job for me to do, good in a corner. It really distresses me to make you idle.
Let’s disappear, shall we? and our books will boom. But not to a hydro at Harrogate. 183 liven with you.
(Yes, I would, though.)
Such a marvellous day, and all the drops twinkling on the trees. How can people live in towns when
they needn’t?

Your V.
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Friday [17 December]

182 Vita and Virginia dined with Dorothy Wellesley at her flat in Mount Street on 20 December.
183 The writer of detective stories, Agatha Christie, was missing from home for two weeks, and was discovered hiding in a hotel in Harrogate, Yorkshire,
by a journalist.
Dear Vita,

Here is your mothers letter, to which I have replied in my well known 18th Century style; no, she has been
most helpful an emollient.... Yes, you are coming on Monday undern: yes, I an dining with Dotty. D’you know
what happened to day? I was rushing into a shop to buy a velvet coat, when a woman said Any stains to take
out? Good God, I said, I have at least 12 on me at the moment—so I bought her ointment, and all my stains
are vanished like snow, and I’d been cleaned unavailingly, so life has turned its rosier cheek, and everything
seems possible—except indeed, I had a tooth stopped. Now my lip my cheek, my chin are all boils and blisters.
When I say to the dentist, why do you do this to me? He replies, But then, Mrs W. your skin is the most
sensitive in London, at which I am flattered, but Leonard paints my skin with zinc ointment which I lick and I
daresay its poison and I shall be dead....

To Virginia Woolf
66 Mount Street W1
Tuesday [21 December]

My darling Virginia, look, here, overleaf you will find a list of books to be sent—Will you pass it on to Mrs
Cartwright184 before you go? cards enclosed. I’ll write to you in Cornwall185—This is merely business—
Oh dear—How agitating life is—What I think of when I walk down the Strand is: how fine this would
have been if Wren’s plans for re-building London after the Great Fire had been adopted. Steps to the river, and
all that—and a broad thoroughfare—
I’ve got lots to say, but it must wait—

Your
V.
Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Christmas-day [25 December]

I am spending my Christmas in bed with influenza. It is very pleasant. I am warm,— everybody comes in
looking blue with cold; an atmosphere of seasonable jocularity prevails, I am sure, in the dining-room,—and I
am exempt from it. Kind people bring me grapes. I have a photograph of Virginia,—not a very good
photograph,—but better than nothing. I He in bed, and watch the fire on the ceiling, and hear the clock strike,
and think how delicious it will be when you come to stay here—I read Haydon,186 and an excellent
Cruickshank-ish book called Murder for Profit187. I have delightful dreams induced by aspirin, e.g. I dreamt
that I dined with Eddy, a party consisting of Eddy, Charlotte Bronte, you, and me. Eddy seemed vexed and

184 Mrs Cartwright joined the staff of the Hogarth Press in July 1925, and remained till 1930.
185 Virginia and Leonard were spending Christmas with the Arnold-Forsters at Zennor, near St Ives.
186 The Autobiography (1847) of Benjamin Robert Haydon, the painter and writer.
187 A famous detective story by W. Bolitho (1926).
anxious, and after dinner took me aside to say, ‘Vita, you must find me very attractive to put up with such a
dull party on my account?’ Altogether it is an excellent way of spending Xmas, and I recommend it.
Are you lugging a spade across the Cornish beaches? Are you happy down there? or rather wistful?
When are you coming back?—But my darling you shouldn’t have sent me Night and Day; I wanted it to give
away! However I am delighted to have it and shall read it as soon as Eddy brings it back. (My pen’s run out of
ink.) We haven’t been able to go to Brighton yet—I see you, don’t I, on my way back from Sherfield? on
Monday of next week? I can dispose of the boys that afternoon—
A silly letter, because in spite of the charms of ’flu I don’t really feel very well— I miss you very
much, and am glad I can look forward to your coming here as otherwise I should be really too depressed—As
it is, I He making lovely plans, all firelit and radiant—My bed’s at least nine foot wide, and I feel like the
Princess and the Pea,— only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself.

V.
Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Sevenoaks
Wednesday [29 December]

Oh Lord! I hope you got my letter at Zennor. They seem to have taken ages.
Brighton tomorrow....
I shiver in my shoes.
Sherfield on Friday, and Clive, and bawdiness, shall I write to you from there?
I’ve just been down to Long Barn, and got such a welcome from Pinker as I never had from anybody,
not even from Virginia. Oh but I do so want to see Virginia, and only a month left to do it in. How frantic fife
is—Xmas trees and what not—and influenza—and making children write letters to say thank you—The next
thing is to settle when you are coming here—that is of the greatest importance—
So many people talking in the room—though not about the League of Nations—-188
I looked out Zennor on the map.
I miss you—

V.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Wednesday [29 December]

Dearest Creature,

I only got your letter this morning, so I rang up a surly butler, and heard Eddy was ill but Mrs Nicolson was
better. I do hope so. Not that Eddy should be ill. Only I hate your having flu....
One thing is I dont think Knole is possible; for this reason: I tore all my clothes on the gorse, and can’t
get any more, and I couldn’t ask your butler to wait on me, noris it for the dignity of letters that I should eat
behind a screen, so I don’t see how I can come to Knole, all in holes, without a pin to my hair or a stocking to

188 Virginia and Leonard had been discussing the League with the Arnold-Forsters.
my foot. You’d be ashamed; you’d say things you would regret. But read carefully whats coming. Its this
I am going to America.
Now thats exciting isnt it?

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
[30 December]

America—
The Tribune’s189 offered me free passages, hotel bills, and £120 to go to New York for a month in the spring
and write 4 articles. I’ve said I will if I can arrange times, and not too much work....
Knole
I was partly teasing. I dont mind being dowdy, dirty, shabby, red nosed middle classed and all the rest—its
only a question when and how—I do want to see you, I do—I do.

To Virginia Woolf
Sherfield Court
Sherfield Upon Loddon, Basingstoke
Sunday [2 January]

So you’re going to Rodmell on Tuesday. Very well: that involves the natural consequence that I’ll come up
tomorrow (Monday,) and come to the basement. Now never say again that I don’t love you. I want dreadfully
to see you. That is all there is to it.
Pinker: I’ll send her to Rodmell—quite easy by train from Sevenoaks—in a hamper. I love her, but
she ought to go back to you, as now that I am not at Long Barn any more she is apt to follow stray people down
the road and I have been in terror of her getting lost.
People are very wearisome, really, aren’t they? I mean I feel I know exactly what they’re all going to
say long before they’ve said it. Not but what they are not all very nice; and to see Ethel190 dancing the House-
Party to Eddy’s accompaniment is a great treat. And we went to Steventon, where Jane Austen lived—They
also discussed you for the whole of one dinner, a discussion to which Vita contributed not one word.
And then arguments about de la Mare, Fromentin, Derain,—and all the old vocabulary trotted out.
It’s time I either lived with Virginia or went back to Asia,191 and as I can’t do the former I must do the latter.
I’m feeling, you see, like a person who has eaten too many sweets.
But a very handsome tribute from Mr Drinkwater192 in the Observer. One is easily comforted.
I shall go for a long walk, alone.
Till tomorrow, then, my dear—and very nice too. You’ll be nice to me, won’t you? and I’ll be nice to

189 New York Herald Tribune.

190 Ethel. Sands.

191 Virginia spent 17 and 18 January at Knole, and ten days later Vita went for the second time to Persia.
192 This year John Drinkwater presented the Hawthornden Prize to Vita for The Land.
you. And we’ll arrange about Knole. I shall pin you down.

Your
V.
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
[4 January]

Came home to find a letter from Harold, begging me to get you to promise to be inoculated—So don’t be a
donkey and promise me to do it—or I won’t come to Knole. Its absolutely necessary. Why risk death and
typhoid and no Virginia for sake of 10 minutes bother?
Harold writes about us too—wont be jealous he says....

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Sevenoaks
Thursday [6 January]

I sent off a furious Pinker,—furious at being put into a basket. By the way may I have the basket back? I could
fetch it at Monk’s House one day next week when I am at Brighton so you would have no trouble with it.
I am so much amused at Harold writing to you (1) inoculation (2) jealousy. Of course I shall be
inoculated. Of course he isn’t jealous.193 But how funny he is, writing to say so. No, you write to him by post:
British Legation Teheran, Persia—because the bag won’t go for another fortnight now Please tell him how
much you like me— because you do don’t you?
The house swarms with children and things—No peace possible—More and more do I marvel at the
way everything conspires to chop life up till there is no continuity left. What is making me wild is the thought
that these last weeks are slipping by and I am not seeing you. Before we know where we are I shall be gone.
Anyway I’ll come on Monday—and please, please remember that I shall be in London 27th and 28th—and I
simply must see you then, as the 29th is the day I go. You are coming here on the 20th? but oh dear it’s a bad
date for certain reasons—damn it—you wouldn’t, would you, consider the weekend of the 16th instead? but
we’ll talk about it on Monday.

Your
V.

PERSONAL, Continued. Blush ye dull and witless Letter Writers of Today, and hang your heads, for this is the
anniversary of the death of the ever adorable Madame de Sevigné.

193 Harold had written to Virginia from Teheran: ‘I am glad that Vita has come under an influence so stimulating and so sane....You need never worry
about my having any feelings except a longing that Vita’s life should be as rich and as sincere as possible. I loathe jealousy as I loathe all forms of
disease.’ (Sussex).
 ‘De toutes façons vous avez droit de plaire,
Mais surtout vous savez nous charmer en ce jour! S.C.

I didn’t know Sibyl Colefax was so great an admirer of Mme de Sevigne.

I feel that the sentiment expressed fits into a nutshell what you feel about me?

Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Saturday [15 January]

You’ve no idea of the intrigues that have been going on here to ensure your getting the room I wanted you to
have,194 —how I have lied shamelessly, tucked Olive195 away in a room she never has, bundled her clothes out,
bribed the housekeeper, suborned the housemaids .You have a curious effect of making me quite unscrupulous,
of turning me into a sort of Juggernaut tiding over obstacles. Now all is well,—do I expect you by the 5.18?
or when? Telephone Sevenoaks 146 to say. But as early as possible, please. I look on it as a swansong. (Not a
permanent swansong; only a temporary one.)
My mother was an angel; I adore her.
I send you lots and lots of money.
Eddy told me he had seen you last night, little pig. He returned, looking rather dissipated and rather
charming—I’m going to the film society with him tomorrow— Wish I could come to see you, but you will be
otherwise engaged.
I’ve got a lovely full moon (or nearly) for you—I’ve just been out looking at the court; it’s now
midnight; I like the battlements in the moonlight and the frost. You will stay over Tuesday night, won’t you?
and I’ll motor you up to London on Wednesday morning. Do remember what a dreadfully long time it will be
before I see you again.
I don’t know, by the way, why I assume that you won’t come till the evening;
come any time you can.
I suppose I can manage to exist till Monday but I’m not sure.

Your
V.

Eddie Marsh196 says I’m the best living poet under 80—so there.

Sussex

194 At Knole.
195 Olive Rubens, Lord Sackville’s boon companion. He wanted to marry her after the death of her husband Walter, but Lady Sackville refused a
divorce.
196 Edward Marsh had edited five volumes of Georgian Poetry.The fifth volume (1924) had contained seven poems from Vita’s Orchard and Vineyard
(London, John Lane, 1921).
January - February 1927
On 28 January Vita left London for her second visit to Persia, having spent that morning alone with
Virginia. She was again accompanied on this journey by Dorothy Wellesley, and by another friend,
Leigh Ashton, who later became Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. They travelled by rail
through Germany to Moscow, and from there to Baku, where they took a ship across the Caspian to
northern Persia. Virginia's grief at her departure was not quite so acute as it had been the year
before, and her letters to Persia were among her most brilliant, drawing forth more incisive replies
than usual from Vita.

To Virginia Woolf
182 Ebury Street
Pimlico
[28 January]

Beloved Virginia, one last goodbye before I go I feel torn in a thousand pieces—it is bloody—I can't tell you
how I hate leaving you. I don’t know how I shall get on without you—in fact I don’t feel I can—you have
become so essential to me. Bless you for all the happiness you give me. I’ll write in the train. Bless you, my
darling, my lovely Virginia.

Your Vita

Such ages before I can hear from you too! Please write by post soon—in fact at once— I can’t bear to wait
long for a word from you. Please, please.
[In pencil] Put ‘honey’ when you write—
Darling, please go on loving me—I am so miserable—Don’t forget me—

To Virginia Woolf
London-Dover
[28 January]

My darling, it’s so shaky I can hardly write, we are tearing through my Weald—(see Passenger to Teheran,
Chap. 2 passim.) So odd to have all the same emotions repeated after a year’s interval—but oh worse where
you are concerned. I really curse and damn at the pain of it—and yet I wouldn’t be without it for anything—I
shall remember you standing in your blue apron and waving. Oh damn it, Virginia, I wish I didn’t love you so
much. No I don’t though; that’s not true. I am glad I do. I don’t know what to say to you except that it tore the
heart out of my body saying goodbye to you—I am thankful to have had yesterday, a real gift from the Gods—
Oh my darling you have made me so happy, and I do bless you for it—and I oughtn’t to grumble now—ought
I? but I really do feel wretched—You won’t be able to read this letter—I sent you a telegram from Victoria—

Your
V.
To Virginia Woolf
 Near Hanover
Saturday 29 [January]

My darling

I hoped I should wake up less depressed this morning, but I didn’t. I went to bed last night as black as a sweep.
The awful dreariness of Westphalia makes it worse: factory towns, mounds of slag, flat country, and some
patches of dirty snow. And you are going to the Webbs.197 Well, well.
Why aren’t you with me? Oh, why? I do want you so frightfully.
The only thing which gives me any pleasure is Leigh’s get-up. He has bought a short sheepskin coat,
in which he evidently thinks he looks like a Hungarian shepherd, but horn-rimmed glasses and a rather loud
pair of plus-fours destroy this effect. Dottie on the other hand has appeared in a very long fur-coat, down to
the ankles, so thick as to make her quite round; she looks like a Russian grand-duke. We are ah rather cross,
and have rows about luggage. I want more than ever to travel with you; it seems to me now the height of my
desire, and I get into despair wondering how it can ever be released. Can it, do you think? Oh my lovely
Virginia, it is dreadful how I miss you, and everything that everybody says seems flat and stupid.
I do hope more and more that you won’t go to America,198 1 am sure it would be too tiring for you,
and anyway I am sure you wouldn’t like it. Come to Beirut instead??
So we bundle along over Germany, and very dull it is—Surely I haven’t lost my zest for travel? no, it is not
that; it is simply that I want to be with you and not with anybody else—But you will get bored if I go on saying
this, only it comes back and back till it drips off my pen—Do you realise that I shall have to wait for over a
fortnight before I can hear from you? poor me. I hadn’t thought of that before leaving, but now it bulks very
large and horrible. What may not happen to you in the course of a fortnight? you may get ill, fall in love,
Heaven knows what.
I shall work so hard, partly to please you, partly to please myself, partly to make the time go and have
something to show for it. I treasure your sudden discourse on literature yesterday morning,—a send-off to me,
rather like Polonius to Laertes. It is quite true that you have had infinitely more influence on me intellectually
than anyone, and for this alone I love you. I feel my muscles hardening,

‘II poeta e un’ artiere

Che al mestiere
Fece i tnuscoli d’acciaio....’199

Yes, my very dear Virginia, I was at a crossways just about the time I first met you, like this:

197 Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the sociological and political writers, with whom Virginia stayed on 29 January at their house in Surrey.
198 Virginia had been invited by the New York Herald Tribune to visit the United States, but after some hesitation she declined.
199 ‘A poet is a creator/Who through his work/Makes sinews of steel,’ (d’Annunzio).
You do like me to write well, don’t you? And I do hate writing badly—and having written so badly in the past.
But now, like Queen Victoria, I will be good.
Hell! I wish you were here—The team of ponies prances with temper. Send me anything you write in
papers, and send ‘On reading’. Please. I hope you will get my letters quick and often. Tell me if I write too
often. I love you.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Moscow
Monday 31 January

I tried to write to you in the train, but it was so shaky I gave it up in despair. Oh, my head is in a whirl: little
patches of snow in Germany, more snow in Poland, all snow in Russia. Dark fir-woods weighted down with
snow; peasants in sheepskins; sleighs; green, glaucous rivers immobilised into ice. All very beautiful, and
endlessly melancholy. Fancy living in this country, feeling yourself to be only a little black dot in the middle
of a flat whiteness stretching away to China. Then Moscow, with gold, green, red, blue roofs above the snow;
and the scarlet Soviet flag, lit up from below at night just like the columns of Selfridge’s, floating over the
Kremlin; and all the traffic passing to and fro over the frozen river as though it were a road; and sleighs
everywhere, and coachmen stuffed out with straw I went to see Lenin tonight. He lies embalmed in a scarlet
tomb just below the red flag, and the crowd walks round his glass case two by two. A woman had hysterics
just behind me; screamed like an animal; sobbed; screamed again; nobody took any notice—And oh my God,
there’s a dinner party of twenty-two people tonight200—and I collided with Denys Trefusis in the hail—and is
he coming to the dinner?201 and shall I be put next to him? and then there’s to be a concert—when the only
thing I want is bed and sleep. I so nearly sent you a telegram, but thought you would think that silly; I had
written it out, and then tore it up. Would you have thought it silly? or been pleased? and do you know where I
am, I wonder, or have you lost count? It’s seven o’clock here, but only five in London—so you’re having Sibyl
to tea at this moment, instead of me, and she won’t sit on the floor or say my lovely Virginia, and you won’t
rumple her hair—and it won’t be nearly so nice. I hope you miss me, though I could scarcely (even in the
cause of vanity) wish you to miss me as much as I miss you, for that hurts too much, but what I do hope is that
I’ve left some sort of a little blank which won’t be filled till I come back. I bear you a grudge for spoiling me
for everybody else’s companionship, it is too bad—
Oh heavens, I must dress for this thrice bloody dinner party, when I want to go on writing to you. And
how angry it makes me that you shouldn’t be here, and I do ache for you so ah the time—damn it—it gets no
better with time or distance.—and I foresee that it won’t—Nor shall I have a word from you for ever so long—
oh damn, damn, damn—You would be pleased if you knew how much I minded—

Your
V.

200 At the British Embassy.

201 Denys Tretuns, husband of Violet (with whom Vita had eloped to France in 1920). He was an ardent Russophile, and died, more or less estranged
from his wife, in 1929.
To Virginia Woolf
Rostov-on-Don
Wednesday 2 February

Beloved Virginia—two days of snow-bound steppes, in an overheated train with hermetically sealed windows,
have dulled my fancy. So I have smashed the window with a corkscrew, and a thin shrill pencil of frozen air
rushes in reviving us, giving us stiff necks, but bringing with it a blast of freshness reminiscent of Long Barn
in winter, where the plaster has retreated from the beams and a smear of pale blue sky squints at one as one
lies in one’s bath—I don’t know if you have ever noticed this—I read Boswell’s tour in the Hebrides and
speculate agreeably on the probable difference between Boswell’s conception of the Hebrides, and yours202—
The train bumbles along at a pleasantly slow pace,—the Ukraine under snow, the Sea of Azov, then Rostov
where Leigh danced the Highland fling on the platform to the great delight of a crowd of Cossacks—who
pressed round us saying ‘Whisky.’ But we hadn’t any—but they kissed their hands to us all the same as the
train drew out of the station on a fresh lap of its interminable leisurely journey Meals happen at unusual hours:
lunch at 3, and dinner at 5; we manage very nicely, on caviare and vodka. Miss Jebb 203 fits in very well;— a
jolly girl, who can swing herself by one hand from the luggage rack,—Miss Elgood204 fits in less well, but is
inoffensive enough,—fetches and carries for us, and has but one standard for everything in life—‘Naice,’ or
‘Not very naice.’ I think Leigh will probably propose to Miss Jebb before he has done; I’ve already told him
to—and he agrees he might do worse. But oh my God, I’m glad I don’t five in this country. The unutterable
dreariness of the little Cossack villages isolated there out in the snows of an endless plain! Dr Johnson205
appears marvellously civilised—I feel he would have been in agreement with Desmond206 on almost every
point—except that he had 100% more vigour than Desmond can ever have had—even before he (Desmond)
faded away into a mere refinement of himself and became obliterated like a foot-print after a fresh fall of snow.
For the rest, it is just the existence one settles down to on a long journey, the sponge-bag has its place,
and the bottle of mineral water, and the penknife for sharpening pencils, and the books, and the hold-all—and
then the extraordinary mixture of one’s thoughts, half one’s brain being concentrated on looking out of the
window, and not losing the tickets or the passports or the money, and the other half living with a greater
intensity in the fife one has left behind,—what does Leigh think of? what does Dottie? what does Mrs Jebb?
what does Miss Elgood? of the museum? Sherfield? Lower Sloane Street? Hurstmonceux? and what do I think
of? Virginia in her blue overall, leaning against the doorpost of Tavistock Square, and waving, while the rapid-
ly greying glass of milk stands in front of the gas-fire in a hopeless effort to get warm, and Gissing207 lies on
the table—That’s what I think of, here in the steppes, with a twisted heart and an ache of homesickness and a
regret for the second night at Knole— which now cannot be made up for until Long Barn in May when the
nightingales sing outside in the thorn bush and the irises come into flower in the night between sunset and
sunrise—My darling, you will be in England, won’t you, when I come back? and I can come and see you, the
first person in London? You see, I’m already thinking of that—and I shall think of it for the next three
months—

202 Virginia’s To the Lighthouse was set in the Hebrides, although she drew on the landscape of the Cornish coast where she had spent summers during
her childhood.
203 Maijorie Jebb, the sister of Gladwyn Jebb, Third Secretary at the British Legation in Teheran.
204 A Foreign Office secretary who was travelling with them to join the Legation staff in Teheran.
205 Journey to the Hebrides.
206 Desmond MacCarthy.
207 George Gissing.
 Your
V.
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Monday 31 January

My dear Honey,

It was nice to get your telegram and letters—write as many as you can. It gives one a fillip. The only good
thing thats happened to me is that the moment you left I became involved in a series of telephones, notes,
scenes with Clive and Mary, all very emotional which left me so angered, so sordidified, so exacerbated that I
could only think of you as being very distant and beautiful and calm. A lighthouse in clean water.... Clive
giving champagne suppers to Mary. I was amused to think how angry certain charges made against me by
Mary would have made you—God, if you’d been here, what fun we should have had.
But the main good was that I’ve been kept on the hop the whole time: so I’ve been restless and
scattered; its like taking sleeping draughts: I try my best to put off thinking about you....
...D’you know its a great thing being a eunuch as I am: that is not knowing what’s the right side of a
skirt: women confide in one. One pulls a shade over the fury of sex; and then all the veins and marbling, which,
between women, are so fascinating, show out. Here in my cave I see lots of things you blazing beauties make
invisible by the light of your own glory.
No: I’m not going to America. They write that they are entertaining me at dinners, but not, apparently
paying my hotel bills. So the cost would swallow up all my earnings, and I think we can cry off and go to
Greece....
I’ve not got a cold in my head, but its like having a cold in the head, sitting here writing to you and
everything at sixes and sevens. I feel dissipated and aimless for some reason.... Then its you being away—I
am at the mercy of people, of moods, feel lonely, like, something pitiable which can’t make its wants known.
How you have demoralised me. I was once a stalwart upstanding woman. Then its not writing novels: this
journalism is such a thin draggled straining business, and I keep opening the lid and looking into my mind to
see whether some slow fish isn’t rising there—some new book. No: nothing at the moment.
Yes, I like you to write good poetry. My parting lecture was not very coherent. I was trying to get at
something about the thing itself before its made into anything: the emotion, the idea. The danger for you with
your sense of tradition and all those words—a gift of the Gods though—is that you help this too easily into
existence....
February - May 1927
In Teheran once more, Vita felt acutely homesick, in spite of Harold’s presence (‘God, the people
here! ‘she complained—by which she meant not the Persians but the diplomats), and missed Virginia
‘damnably’, proposing that they should meet in Greece on her return journey to shorten the period
of absence. She found herself unable to write, even journalism. But after nearly two months in
Teheran she embarked with Harold and two friends on an adventure which resulted in her next book,
Twelve Days. They travelled via Persepolis and Shiraz to the wild Bakhtiari mountains in southern
Persia, and crossed them by foot and on muleback to the Persian Gulf. This time Harold returned
home with her, through the Mediterranean, and they arrived at Long Barn on 5 May to find, on this
its publication day, a copy of To the Lighthouse. Only a few days earlier Virginia and Leonard had
returned from a month’s holiday in France and Italy.

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
9 February

My darling,

I hardly know how to write to you, everything is so confused, so Einsteinian, an effect which I never can hope
to communicate to you, so I won’t try. Anyway, I am here. I have come over those familiar mountains, and
crossed that familiar plain—and it seemed from the first as though I had never been away. My mind adjusted
itself instantly to the proportion and shape, smell and colour, of Persia; just slipped click into gear. And now I
don’t know whether England seems near or far—It is a mixture: England itself seems a dot on the map,
populated only by three or four figures of natural size, which makes them bulk unduly large on the tiny island
on which they have their being. This, I think is as it should be: the place dwindles, but the humans remain.
The moment we had arrived we began talking about how to get back. For one moment our mountain
expedition seemed in danger, but now it is re-established; for another moment it seemed that we should return
by Constantinople and Athens, by ship, in which case I conceived the dizzy idea of meeting you there; but now
that is abandoned. Would you have fallen in with that plan? (always assuming that you go to Greece and not
to America,) would you have come on board at the Piraeus and found me waiting for you at the head of the
gangway? Then we would have returned together through the Greek seas, which would I think completely
have unhinged my reason. Greece, with you—in May.
God, the people here! They’re still talking about the same things as when I left, only now they have
got me as a new victim,‘Alors, chère amie, vous avez fait bon voyage?’‘Etes-vous contente, chère madame,
de vous retrouver a Teheran? ’And I behave so pretty, and answer it all as though it were the most important
thing in the world. Dottie says she never knew I had such nice manners. (She has written to you, by the way.)
But, darling beloved Virginia, I can’t believe that I was intended for the diplomatic career. Harold
unfortunately seems to think that he was. This is a theory which I count upon you to dispel.
But what is really odd, is that I should be sitting again at the same table, with the sun pouring in through
the plane-trees, writing to you as I used to do last year, and feeling again that helpless sense of impotence,
travel being, as you know, the most private of pleasures. And your studio seems so much more real, and you
waving on the doorstep. Oh, how I wish you would explain life to me, so that I might see it steadfastly and see
it whole, or whatever the quotation is. I find it more and more puzzling as I grow older. I shall read Gide’s
memoirs208 and see if that helps at all.
But at the same time it is very exciting, and I suppose it is good for the soul to be hurt and perplexed
perpetually. I know at least that I miss you damnably: that is a good fixed star. I do, Virginia; and would rather
be hurt by that, and have something solid to hold on to, than flounder in a quicksand that never bruises but
only smothers. Oh dear, you won’t understand a word of all this, and small blame to you either.
The bag is going, but I can write by post. Russia was bloody and I was nearly raped in the train—but
for Leigh’s timely interference. So he came in useful after all.
Midday: the cannon: the muezzins loosing their cry in the street: the sun: a little flute from an orange-
seller—Do you remember once writing to me from Spain, years ago,209 about a religious procession? How glad
I am that you exist.

Your
V.
Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
19 February

Virginia, listen. We are coming back by Greece. (‘We’ means Harold and I, i.e. Dottie is going home earlier.)
We arrive at the Piraeus on Thursday April 28th, and leave again the same day for Trieste by Lloyd Triestino.
Now, if you go to Greece, I imagine that you would be returning about the same time? Why not make it exactly
the same time? Why not make it, in fact, the same boat? I cannot tell you the name of the boat yet, but I shall
soon be in a position to do so, and in any case the Lloyd Triestino which leaves Athens on April 28th should
not be hard to identify. Now will you give your mind and energies to arranging this matter? I write of it in this
practical and business-like way, leaving it to your imagination to reconstruct what it would mean to me if I
saw you coming up that gangway; I hope, also, that it would mean something to you—though with a cold fish
it is difficult to know for certain. Harold says he would like nothing better, so let’s have no silliness about
that—and do not, oh I beseech you, do not let us miss such a chance through any muddle or mismanagement
on your part. It’s a good rendez-vous, you’ll agree: meet me in Athens on April 28th at dawn.
Now for more practical information: the last bag by which you can write to me here is the one which
leaves London on Thursday March 17th. But you can, if you will, write to me c/o the High Commissioner,
Baghdad, Iraq, where I shall be for one day on April 20th. I don’t know how long a letter to Baghdad takes,
but I should think about a fortnight. You can also write to me c/o Sir Ronald Storrs, 210 Nicosia, Cyprus, where
I shall be on April 24th. It would be nice to find a letter from you in that romantic place.
For a whole fortnight I shan’t be able to write to you or to anybody, while we are camping. You

208 Si le grain ne meurt (1926).

209 See VW 1375.
210 Storrs was Governor of Cyprus. Vita in fact never went there.
remember when I dragged you to see the film called ‘Grass’?
I’ve had one letter from you, full of mysteries about Clive. What on earth did Mary accuse you of?211
How unkind to arouse my curiosity and then to allay it. I nearly sent you a telegram at 5/- a word. But I like
people who get angry, whether it’s Mary or Lord Gladstone, and whether their anger is justified or not. Don’t
tell me that it was over you that they had quarrelled—however it’s no good asking you now—but I’ll get it all
out of you as we sail up the Corinth Canal.
Darling... the queerness of human beings strikes me more and more forcibly here. You see, it is just
the opposite of London. In London people meet together because some common interests bind them; here, we
are just a collection of people thrown together through a purely fortuitous circumstance, with nothing in
common except the place we happen to find ourselves in. So that is the one and only topic. I go to call on some
bloody Pole or Belgian, and we know that there is nothing to talk about except the Trebizond road, or the
Shiraz road, and whether one has done it or not, and whether one is going away for the summer or not, and
whether we may expect more snow. There is nothing else, except the cardinal facts of life, and foreign
diplomats do not talk about copulation with the same ease, candour and readiness as our friends in England.
Correctness is the order of the day, so we never get any further. I should like to see how you would manage it.
I said to the clergyman’s daughter, how was she liking Teheran? and she replied, ‘Well, really, the theatricals
seem to be the only excitement.’ Persia, Rheza, the swarming bazaars, Asia,—these are not excitements, nor
is a civilisation thousands of years old, nor the spectacle of a worn-out nation. But Mrs Fairley comes to tea,
and Mrs Wilkinson212 comes to luncheon, and so it’s not so bad, and one can always watch the football, and it
is possible to get Karmalade though it’s more expensive than it ought to be, ‘but I don’t like that pomegranate
jam, do you?’ Meanwhile I cannot write, so am miserable—Instead of the odder, more angular thoughts I
produce exquisite platitudes fit only for the fire. But I looked into my ring today,—an old Persian topaz, pale
pink,—and saw there reflected a plane tree, some blue sky, and a white mountain, all tiny and coloured, and
this seemed to me worth while, so I daresay there is still something left to write about. And we are going to
Shiraz and Persepolis.
If I could know that we would meet in Athens, I should, of course, start writing at a hundred miles an
hour, just from sheer joy. By the way, we’ll be in London on May 2nd.
Oh, I got a letter from Sibyl. Would I please let her know the date of our return, so that she could
arrange a party.
On the whole one can get a certain amount of fun out of the people. There is the fat clerk who says ‘I
don’t like gentlemen, Mrs Nicolson, if you’ll excuse my saying so, but I should like my sons to be one.’ There
is the assistant military attaché, whose standard of civilisation is Quetta.213 There is the governess (Eton crop,
hands in pockets,) who says ‘Oh but you know, Mrs Nicolson, those boys in the Air Force are so
naughty....’And we have bought a new motor car,—big, shut, blue,—which has sent up our credit in Teheran.
And everybody refers slily to my book, which is supposed to be kept a secret from the Persians.214
I say, will you tell Leonard to make whatever arrangement he thinks best with Doran?2151 know he’ll

211 Clive Bell’s long affair with Mary Hutchinson was ending in mutual desolation.
212 Wives of Legation officials.
213 In Pakistan (then India).
214 In Passenger to Teheran Vita had referred to the Shah as ‘a Cossack trooper., .with a sullen manner, huge nose, grizzled hair and a brutal jaw’.
Although in the book she never mentioned her connection with Harold or the Legation, this was thought to be highly offensive to the Sovereign to
whom Harold was accredited.
215 Doran, the New York publisher, was considering an American edition of Passenger to Teheran.
do the best he can, both for the Press and for me, so I’m more than content to leave it in his hands. I telegraphed
at once.
It is fun about the bookshop.2161 hope it won’t prevent you from going to Greece though. I never did
approve of America and am relieved that you are not going there.
Can you read the inscription on my seal?217
The insect is frightfully excited about meeting you in Greece. You wouldn’t have the heart to
disappoint it,—would you? For you have a kind heart really, and are rather clever at managing what you want
to manage. I feel that if I can enlist you as an ally, the thing is as good as done. Please write me nice letters—
A week is a very long time to have to wait, from one post to another—and if go to Greece God knows how
long letters will take—oh no, of course they’ll go by Constantinople and Khartoum.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
London
Saturday 5 February

Dearest Honey,

No letter since you were careering through the snow in Westphalia—that is nothing since Monday. I hope this
doesn’t mean you have been eaten by brigands, wrecked, torn to pieces. It makes me rather dismal. It gets
worse steadily—your being away. All the sleeping draughts and the irritants have worn off, and I’m settling
down to wanting you, doggedly, dismally, faithfully—I hope that pleases you. It’s damned unpleasant for me,
I can assure you. I had a sort of idea that I’d cheat the devil, and put my head under my wing, and think of
nothing. But it wont work—not at all. I want you this Saturday more than last and so it’ll go on.
...I sit over the gas in my sordid room. Why cant I write except in sordid rooms? I dont think I could
write a word in your room at Long Barn. Furniture that people can sit in implies people, and I want complete
solitude—thats at the back of my mind, and so I get sordider and sordider. The Voyage Out was written in
comparative splendour218—a maid, carpets, fires; To the Lighthouse was written—as you know So the next
book will necessitate a shed. This fits in with my mood at the moment. I have banged my door on parties, dug
myself into a dank dismal burrow, where I do nothing but read and write. This is my hybernating season....

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
23 February

Yesterday the Russian post came in; at least, half of it did, for the Persians are incapable of delivering the
whole of the post at one go, and think us most unreasonable for expecting them to do so, so that it arrives in

216 Leonard was proposing to buy the bookshop in Bloomsbury founded by Francis Birrell.
217 Nos patriae fines et dulcia linquitnus arva. (‘We have left the borders and dear fields of our native land.’)
218 In Fitzroy Square.
driblets, spread sometimes over three days; but it was the right half that came yesterday, for it contained a
letter (a nice, long, missing-me letter,) from you. I had been entertaining the Sheikh of Mohammerah, who
most disconcertingly called upon me in state at eleven in the morning. He is a superb black-bearded old Arab
with the most beautiful hands I ever saw (always excepting yours,) and a large emerald ring; and then after
half an hour of difficult conversation, and endless cups of tea, he took his departure and I was at liberty to read
my letters.
One from Raymond, 219 one from you. I went down into depths of despair and self-reproach because I had not
telegraphed to you. I did want to; then I thought Leonard would open it and be annoyed; then I hoped Mother
would let you know, as she did last year. (I say: I can’t bear there to be yet a third year of this business. But
Harold is in a very Empire-building frame of mind. Enormous skill will be necessary to get him out of it.)
I dreamt at great length, having read your letter, about what it would have been like to bring you here.
Would you have got very tired on the journey? Do you like travelling? Are you the sort of traveller who
constantly says ‘Oh look!’? Or do you take everything for granted? What would you like best here? Are you
so much amused by people,—just as human beings,—that you have no surplus energy left for places? What
would it be like to have you sitting in the room now? People become so different once they are taken away
from their own surroundings—however well one knows them one discovers that one doesn’t know them to the
extent of being able to predict how they will react. E.g. Dottie,—I never realised what a luxury-child she was,
being accustomed to seeing her always in England, where comforts happen automatically—she thinks Teheran
uncivilised,—no electric light, scanty baths,—what would she be like really roughing it, if, for instance, she
was allowed to come on our Bakhtiari expedition, which she isn’t? Leigh, now,—he gets the hang of the place
at once, knows the name of the streets, is full of curiosity. Dottie doesn’t, she just allows herself to be taken
about as a parcel. It irritates me, and I abuse her for it.
I never allowed myself to indulge in these speculations about you last year,—it was too painful and
made me long for you too much,—and why pray do I indulge this year? why, for two reasons, (1) there is the
chance of meeting you at Athens, and (2) there is that scheme of yours about Italy in October. Yes, indeed, I
should think there jolly well were ‘private reasons’ against your going to Spain in May with Dadie;220 1 don’t
think I could ever forgive you that. But come home from Greece with me.
I haven’t written a line since I’ve been here. It is really awful. I don’t believe I’m a writer at ah,—no,
nor even a journalist. If I were, I should at least have turned out a round dozen of articles. And certainly not a
poet. This dreadful brain stagnation. But the literary side of one’s brain is so odd a thing that one never knows
when it won’t make a sudden spring and land firmly on all four feet. It’s due partly I think to an increase in
my sense of self-criticism; but for that, I should no doubt now be turning out another of those lamentable
novels. Oh, why hadn’t I got you in those days to say ‘This won’t do at all?’ Now, ideas come along, and I
simply turn them all down, with the result that nothing gets done. I am reading Gide’s memoirs, very
disappointing I think, so far; I have found hardly anything that pleased me except the marble that had been
dropped into the hole in the door. I read Jesting Pilate221 and liked it. I have tried Arabia Deserta222 for the
fiftieth time, but can’t manage it. Yet no doubt it is a more monumental work than Jesting Pilate. What is the
secret of the whole business? I wish you could tell me. And then this question of intelligence,—are we too
much, too readily impressed by mere articulateness? I mean, is Raymond really a more intelligent person than

219 Raymond Mortimer.

220 George Rylands.
221 By Aldous Huxley (1926). An account of his tour round the world in that year.
222 By Charles Doughty (1888).
the subaltern here who has commanded Indians all his life? How would Raymond come out of it, if he were
suddenly put into a position of responsibility and authority? How would his appreciation of the finer shades
serve him then? And which is the more important? Or is it merely a question of difference, not of degree?
Besides, so far as feeling goes, I suspect there is as much feeling in the terse remarks of the subaltern,—
‘Jolly day,—-jolly the mountains look,—topping view,’—as in any amount of verbiage.
It’s all very difficult.
The Union Jack floats languidly over the guard house, a flute player passes in the street, at midday the
muezzins let out a yell. There, across the way, are the Consulate and the Chancery, with all their paraphernalia
of government,—providing security for us who doze in the sun and speculate on subtleties. Why should Gide’s
marble in the door give me more pleasure than the sight of active men going in and out of the consulate carrying
papers? I wish I knew what fife was all about, and what place literature really held in it, to a God’s-eye view.
I wish at least that I could be content to accept things because they are, instead of trying to poke back to their
origins and discover why they are, and what they are made of.
In the meantime Clive quarrels with Mary, and is reconciled to Mary, and goes to France, and doesn’t
go to France, and it’s all very intriguing, and comes to me in your letters like an echo,—a pleasant echo that
makes me smile because 1 am fond of Clive.
I’m afraid there must have been a long gap between the letter I posted to you at Baku and the first one
I wrote you from here. You see, there was no post out for nearly a week after we had arrived. You can’t
imagine,—you who collect letters six times a day out of the wire mouse-trap at the foot of your stairs,—you
can’t imagine
the enormous importance of THE POST in this place. It is the only thing which punctuates our otherwise
eventless weeks. Thus the servant rushes in with a beaming face to say ‘The post has come! ‘There is always
a spice of the miraculous about it. The post has come; that is, there has been no storm on the Caspian; the ship
has not been wrecked; the motor has not gone over a precipice; the pass has not been blocked by snow; the
bridge has not been carried by a flood. The post has come!
I have not yet found a coat for you, though I have searched. I think Isfahan will be the better place,
and it’s more fun to have one from there. Or Shiraz. When will you get this letter? On March 14th I suppose.
Remember that the bag of the 17th is the last one which will catch me here—and that indeed won’t catch me
here—but the letters will be brought down by hand to us at Isfahan before we set off for Bakhtiari. I shall try
to write something about that Expedition—Persia re-visited? From the Caspian to the Persian Gulf? My God
how hot it will be on the Gulf and in the desert. I shall return to you as thin as a rail and as brown as a nut and
as muscular as a settler,— at Athens, that is, on the 28th of April. Have you got that date firmly fixed in your
mind?
Yes, I am glad you miss me, even if it is ‘damned unpleasant’. I thought from your first letter that you
didn’t miss me at all, and was sad about it. Now I am all pleased again. Selfish, isn’t one? But I go through it
too, you know,—this missing you, and wanting you,—so that I know exactly how damned unpleasant it is, and
probably even better than you do. The insect cries sometimes, and I have to mop him up. I think he’s a little
scared by Persia altogether,—it’s too big for him.
By the way, send Pinker to Louise223 if you want a home for her while you are in Greece. Mlle Louise
Genoux her name is. She would love to have Pinker to look after.
Now I shall have to stop. Have you got your blue apron on? in your funny sordid room? No I can’t

223 Vita’s maid.

believe that a carpet would interfere with your solitude—I want to write a poem about solitude-

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
25 February

The world in which we live is Proustian; i.e. if you did it on the principle of naming race-horses, it would run:
By Proust out of Miss Mitford: Teheran. (Not ‘also ran’ but ‘tehe’ ran. Bad joke.)
Last night, for instance. A dinner of thirty people at our legation. Long dinner table; candles; full length
of portraits of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra; the Minister, 224 very distinguished, white hair, le type
Gainsborough, soft sensitive mouth; too exquisite of manner to show how bored he is; perfect courtesy. A
dollop of British colony: the doctor (who hates his wife so much that he wants to commit suicide;) the doctor’s
sister with a black eye and swollen nose, the result of playing hockey; the manager of the Imperial Bank of
Persia, (Wilkinson,) who has been here 23 years, hates Persia, pines for Godaiming; Mr Campbell, very Scotch,
agent for the Trans-desert mad; Mrs Drurie, cousin of Yeats and proud of it, (‘I always say, Mrs Nicolson,—
of course I may be wrong,—that Persia reminds me,—but of course you may laugh at me,—of the west of
Ireland;’) Miss Bill, long-toothed, horsey; Miss Palmer-Smith,— but Miss Palmer-Smith defies description:
She must be seen to be believed in. A dollop of Americans: Mr Poland, who has come to prospect for a railway,
(‘Now for every citizen of the United States, Mrs Nicolson, 13/ horse power of machinery is at work; and in
this country, how many? Why, I’ll tell you: NIL.’) A dollop of Persians: Teymourtasche,225 the power behind
the throne, the Man who has the Shah’s Ear, very Parisian, very boulevardier, very moche; wears his black fez
on one side, very rakish; his wife, an Armenian, exuding sex at every pore, still conscious that Teymourtasche
ran away with her a year ago, under a former husband’s nose; Abdullah Khan, very would- be English, talking
slang and getting it just all wrong. A dollop of foreign diplomats....We sit down to dinner. We have too much
to eat; too much to drink,—above all, too many different sorts of things to drink: sherry, white wine, claret,
champagne, liqueurs. After dinner we play poker,—at least, the more fortunate among us do; the less fortunate
engage in conversation. That is, they talk to people in whom they have no interest about subjects in which they
have no interest. And what is the net result?
The net result is that next day the doctors wife asks the secretary responsible for the arrangement of
the table, why the doctor was not given a higher place? Why Lady Wellesley was sent in below the wife of the
Belgian minister? Why Miss P.S. (‘that common little woman,’) was asked at all?
In such a world, my dear Virginia, I live and have my being. And behind it ah,— just as in Proust,
behind the figures of Mme Verdurin and Monsieur de Charlus lurks the stormy tragedy of Dreyfus and
perversion and jealousy,—behind it ah lurks the storm-cloud of Russia and conflicting interests, and poor
Persia, divided, rotted by disease, poverty and helplessness; and the concupiscence of short sightedness, and
greed of man.

224 Sir Robert Clive.

225 Prince Meyhpour Teymourtasche, Minister of the Persian Court,‘a slightly ridiculous personage, a professed ladykiller and socialite’. (James Lees-
Mime, Harold Nicolson, I, p. 270.)
To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
4 March

I have a game which I play all by myself. It consists in finding, and piecing together, the scattered fragments
of Virginia’s world. You see, this world was once whole and complete, and then one day some inner cataclysm
burst it into pieces, like the planet which burst into what is now the asteroids, (there is one little asteroid, called
Ceres I think, only four miles across, the same size as the principality of Monaco, on which I have often thought
I should like to live, revolving in lonely state round the sun. It would be even better than my island in the South
Seas.226 Did you know I had got an island in the South Seas? It has a banana tree on it. But I must tell you more
about Virginia’s world, and never mind the South Seas.)
Well, Virginia’s world was, then, whole and complete, so that it is quite easy to recognise the bits
when one comes across them. One bit got itself precipitated into the caves at Cheddar, as you know, and
another bit shot into the Shah’s palace at Teheran. This bit was made entirely of looking-glass. Some of it flew
up and flattened itself against the ceiling of a large room; some of it disposed itself round the walls in the shape
of a dado. The ceiling part, of course, reflected everything upside down; not only the room, the carpet, and the
furniture, but also the dignitaries who were walking about on the floor or sitting on the chairs; even to the King
of Kings himself; aft were faithfully reflected, upside down, foreshortened, stumpy, absurd. The dado part also
had great fun. It reflected people’s legs up to the middle of their calves as they walked past,—big feet, little
feet, flat feet, arched feet, thin legs, fat legs. But it wasn’t going to be content with doing merely that,—not it.
It came, remember, from Virginia’s world, and consequently was mischievous, rude, irreverent, poking fun at
Grand Viziers and European ladies alike. So it arranged itself in such a way as to reflect the floor going either
uphill or downhill, or simply at a tilt, so that the feet climbed a cliff or descended a precipice of carpet, or
clung sideways like a fly, all down the length of the great room, right up to the Peacock Throne which stands
at the end, and round the corner to the Bed of the Wife of Fath’Ah Shah, which is encrusted with jewels, and
which has at its head a clock-like device, with jewelled hands, and the loudest tick you ever heard,— a real
joke of a tick,—designed to keep the occupants from going to sleep at inopportune moments. An excellent
device, I thought, and one which might advantageously be adopted by Messrs Heal.
Then there were some other looking-glass bits of Virginia’s broken world, which had arranged
themselves in a facetted pattern in an alcove, so that they reflected only a portion of face at a time,—a nose,
an eye, a chin,—endlessly repeated as one looked upward.
Great fun it all was, and I enjoyed myself very much that afternoon.
There is indeed a good deal to keep one amused. There is, for instance, the story of the clergyman who
was recently stripped of all he possessed by robbers on the road, but for one garment, which they allowed him
to keep on his plea that it would not be fitting for a man of God to enter Shiraz (whither he was travelling)
stark naked. This one garment, however, happened to be a cut-away tail coat. The clergyman, after some
perplexity, solved the difficulty by putting it on back to front, and made his entry into Shiraz in that guise.
Yes, there is plenty to keep one amused in a small way, but I pine for Virginia, and, to make matters
worse (1) the Russian post has run amok now for two weeks, and (2 ) our bag, which ought to have come in
yesterday, has missed the aeroplane and will not be here for a solid fortnight. This means that I get no letters.

226A tiny islet which she had bought for ^5 from an advertisement in 1922, but never visited.
That I shan’t know for ages whether you are definitely going to Greece. That I shan’t even know whether you
have forgotten me or not. That I shan’t know if you are well. All this is damnable. The Russian post will turn
up in time; it indulges in these antics occasionally. But I shall send this if possible by a woman who is leaving
for England tomorrow.
(Tomorrow! how silly to put ‘tomorrow’! It won’t be ‘tomorrow’ or even ‘yesterday’ when you read
of it.)
We’ve had a series of dinner parties, thank you, one of them indistinguishable from the other. I don’t
mind so much when I can play poker, which is nearly always. I’ve written nothing. That is hell. Harold, who
is kind, says there must always be periods of incubation. But that is just his heart of gold, and it doesn’t console
me, and I still sit biting the end of my pen. And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I
wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate
out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is
to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head.
I had a letter from Eddy about a party he had been to; it made me sick. Do let us try and do something
about these young men. You could work wonders. I am beginning to feel like Molly227 about them. I wouldn’t
mind so much if they were more vigorous about it all, but they do so mince.
I’ve read a lot, Boswell, de Quincy, Tom Jones, Plutarch. One sits in the sun, until the heat of it drives
one indoors again. Then we have the telegraph clerks to lunch, and the young men from the Bank. And so it
goes on.
How nice it would 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.
In the meantime I should be happy if I could get another letter from you, but I can’t hope to do that for
at least a week. Damn these incompetent posts. It is maddening to think that our mail-bags are lying somewhere
in a heap, being of no use to anybody, when we want them so badly. Or, at least, I do.

Your
V.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Wednesday 16 February

Anyhow, dearest Honey, you are safe at Teheran. I saw Ozzie who let this pearl fall from his dribbling lips:
also your mother has written one of her most gracious letters “Dear Mr and Mrs Woolf, bless you for being so
good to my child”, to which I have answered, suitably, I hope, in deep humility. Harold is a happy man and I
am an envious woman....
Do you realise how devoted I am to you, all the same? There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you, dearest
Honey. Its true, the other night, I did take a glass too much. Its your fault though—that Spanish wine. I got a
little tipsy. And then Bobo Mayor is a great seducer in her way. She has gipsy blood in her: she’s rather violent
and highly coloured, sinuous too, with a boneless body, and thin hands; all the things I like. So, being a little
tipsy about twelve o’clock at night, I let her do it.
She cut my hair off. I’m shingled. That being so—and it’ll look all right in a month or two, the

227 Molly MacCarthy.

hairdresser says—bound to be a little patchy at first—lets get on to other things. Its off; its in the kitchen
bucket: my hairpins have been offered up like crutches in St Andrews, Holborn, at the high altar.
.. .You shall ruffle my hair in May, Honey: its as short as a partridges rump.

To Vita Sackville-West
52T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Friday, 18 February

Sweet Honey,

...Yes I want you more and more. You’ll like to think of me unhappy I know. Well, you can....
We’re still talking, you’ll be surprised to hear, about love and sodomy.... Then Morgan228 says he’s
worked it out and one spends 3 hours on food, 6 on sleep, 4 on work, 2 on love. Lytton229 says 10 on love. I
say the whole day on love. I say its seeing things through a purple shade. But you’ve never been in love they
say.

Monday, 21 February
It gets worse you’ll be glad to hear, steadily worse. Todays the day when I should be trotting out to buy you
your loaf, and watching for your white legs—not widow Cartwrights—coming down the basement steps.
Instead you’re on the heights of Persia, riding an Arab mare I daresay to some deserted garden and picking
yellow tulips.
My solace is what?—dining with Ethel Sands...and laboriously correcting two sets of proofs. My
goodness how you’ll dislike that book!230 Honestly you will—Oh but you shan’t read it. Its a ghost between
us. Whether its good or bad, I know not: I’m dazed, I’m bored, I’m sick to death: I go on crossing out commas
and putting in semicolons in a state of marmoreal despair. I suppose there may be half a paragraph somewhere
worth reading: but I doubt it.
Wednesday
...Philip Ritchie231 told me I was the chief coquette in London, “allumeuse” Clive corrected him. Then my
suspenders came down, dragging with them an old rag of chemise....

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
11 March

The posts are all awry and amok; a stray Daily Mail trickles in, then a detective story for Harold, then a letter
for me posted on Jan. 30th, but no nice big lumps of post come as they ought to do. As for our missing Foreign
Office bag, it hasn’t turned up yet. And I haven’t heard from my mother for four weeks! So Heaven knows
when this letter will reach you.

228 E.M. Forster.

229 Lytton Strachey.
230 To the Lighthouse.
231 A barrister, the eldest son of Lord Ritchie of Dundee. He died young, in 1928.
 But at least, among the trickles of the Russian post, is a letter from you, of February 16th. I gather
from internal evidence that one is missing,—it’ll come in the bag next week, I expect. But are you really
shingled? is it true? Oh darling, do I like that? I think I preferred the dropping hairpins, that cheerful little
cascade that used to tinkle onto your plate. But Mary232 says you look nice shingled, does she? and Mary ought
to know. It makes you go all wrong in my mind, and the photograph of you at Knole no longer tells the truth,
which upsets me.
Otherwise, yes, you are a very bright bead. What amuses me most is the speculation on what you
would be like here. And in Greece: Where shall we go in Octo Avignon? Italy? Or are you going to let me
down over that? Tired of going abroad, after Spain with Dadie!
Meanwhile our plans are ever so slightly changed: we cannot reach Athens on April 28th as I told you
before, but on May 5th,—a week later. Is there any hope that you will still be there? We shall be on the Lloyd
Triestino (Carinthia, Camiola or Trento, according to which boat is running,—we can’t discover exactly
which,) which will reach the Piraeus from Cyprus and go on to Trieste. I dare not hope that you will be able to
join it,—or dare I? In any case, we get to London on May 9th, late at night. But oh, if you con Id join the
boat....
Do you know that my time in Teheran is drawing to an end? livery night as I walk across the compound
and look up at the stars through the planes, I wonder if I shall ever seen Teheran again. Everybody asks me if
we are coming back. I say ‘So far as I know.’ But that is just official discretion: I cannot believe that the swords
and silk stockings will exercise their charm much longer. In the meantime I remain wisely silent, observing a
struggle going on in Harold, and knowing that an ill-placed word often makes people turn contrary.
What else? Yes, I have read Cowper:

The stable yields a stercoraceous heap.... 233

It bears an unpleasant resemblance to The Land, doesn’t it? But it has its good moments,

While fancy, like the finger of a clock,

Runs the great circuit, and is still at home.

I read Les faux-monnayeurs234 too. I remember you said you didn’t like it. Yet I wonder you weren’t interested
by the method of springing decisive events on the reader, without the usual psychological preparation. I thought
it gave a strange effect of real life. I liked it better than Si le grain ne meurt, in which I liked only the beginning
of the 3rd volume, about the French litterateurs; I was bored by the African part; I don’t think lust is interesting
as such, and it doesn’t inspire me at all to know that Gide had an Arab boy five times in one night...but the
Wilde part was good although revolting. How beautifully unsubtle Gide makes Fielding appear, with all his
knock about fun in Gloucestershire inns, when you read them as I did in conjunction, dove-tailed, Gide in the
daytime and Fielding at night.
I have come to the conclusion that solitude is the last refuge of civilised people. It is much more
civilised than social intercourse, really, although at first sight the reverse might appear to be the case. Social
relations are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together for purposes of defence; a gathering
of bushmen or pygmies is the real ancestor of a Teheran dinner party; then the wheel comes full cycle, and

232 Mary Hutchinson.

233 William Cowper, The Task (1785), Part III (The Garden), line 463.
234 By André Gide.
your truly civilised person wants to get away back to loneliness. If all my life went smash, and I lost everybody,
I should come and live in Persia, miles away from everywhere, and see nobody except the natives to whom I
should dispense quinine. It is only affection and love which keep one. But I think Lady Hester Stanhope235
must have had a good life.
I’ve been buying, in large quantities, the most lovely Persian pottery: bowls and fragments, dim greens
and lustrous blues, on which patterns, figures, camels, cypresses, script, disport themselves elusive and
fragmentary. How I am going to get them all home God knows. For the moment they stand round my room,
creating a rubbed, romantic life of forgotten centuries. It’s like looking into a pool, and seeing, very far down,
a dim reflection. I make all sorts of stories about them.
Where will you get this letter? in London? in Greece? I wish I had your address. I told Leigh236 he
might run into you there, he’s going to the British School at Athens. Oh God I wish I were going to be in
Greece with you, lucky lucky Leonard. Please wish that I might be there. Please miss me. You say you do. It
makes me infinitely happy to think that you should, though I can’t think why you should, with the exciting life
that you have,—Clive’s rooms, and talk about books and love, and then the press, and the bookshop, and wild-
eyed poets rushing in with manuscript, and all the rest of it.
But I am going to Shiraz, it’s true. This would be heaven if I didn’t so much want Virginia. However,
next time I go abroad it will, it shall, it must, be with you.

Your
V.

P.S. I think it is really admirable, the way I keep my appointments. I said I would be back on the 10th May,
and here I am, rolling up in London at 11.50 p.m. on the ninth, with ten minutes to spare. It’s like the Jules
Verne man who went round the world in eighty days, and who had forgotten to turn off the gas in his flat.

To Virginia Woolf
Teheran
20 March

Post going in half an hour—great hurry—beloved Virginia—so this is just to tell you we don’t now go to
Athens at all—can’t get the Italian boat—but are coming direct to Marseilles—arriving in London late on May
5th—a few days earlier than by the other plan. Write to me c/o British Consulate, Beirut, Syria, where I shall
be from April 24th to April 28th. Don’t write to Cyprus.
Bag in—got two letters from you—but too late to answer by this post. I’ll send a long letter by bag on
Saturday—
God, here’s the man for the letters.
Darling.. .bless you—

V.

235 1776-1839. In 1810 she withdrew from English society and for the rest of her life lived in a Syrian convent.
236 Leigh Ashton.
To Virginia Woolf
Persepolis
30 March

The hawks wheel between the broken columns, the lizards dart through the doorways of the palace of Darius;
Persepolis towers on its great terrace. I’ve driven a motor over nearly a thousand miles of Persia within the last
week. I am dirty, sunburnt, well. We have got up at dawn every morning and gone to bed (on the floor) at 8.30.
We have slept in ruined huts; made fires of pomegranate-wood and dried camel-dung; boiled eggs; lost all
sense of civilisation; returned to the primitive state in which one thinks only of food, water, and sleep. But
don’t imagine that we have nothing but water to drink; no, indeed; we carry a demi-john filled with Shiraz
wine, and though we may discard our beds (which we did on the first day, when our Ford luggage-car broke
down and we strewed the street of a Persian village with chemises and tea-pots,) the demi-john we do not
discard. We get up at dawn, we motor all day across plains and up gorges, tearing along, and at nightfall we
arrive somewhere or other, and shake out our little diminished camp, and fall asleep. A very good life, Virginia.
And now (for I have moved on since beginning this letter at Persepolis) I have seen Shiraz, an absurdly
romantical place, and passed again by Sivand, and slept there, a valley full of peach blossom and black kids,
and came again to Isfahan, where the post was waiting for us, and a letter from you. But before I answer it,
don’t imagine, please, that this life of flying free and unencumbered across Persia is in any sense a romantic
life; it isn’t; the notion that one escapes from materialism is a mistaken notion; on the contrary, one’s preoc-
cupation from morning to night is: Have we cooked the eggs long enough? have we enough Bromo left? who
washed the plates this morning, because I didn’t? who put away the tin-opener, because if nobody did, it’s
lost? Far from finding a liberation of the spirit, one becomes the slave of the practical—
But anyway, my darling, I found a letter from you. There it was (I’ve now unpacked the ink and refilled
my pen.) We topped the pass, and came down upon Isfahan with its blue domes, and there in the Consulate
was our mail-bag full of letters. You were no longer going to Greece but to Rome.237 You won’t like Rome,
with its squealing tramlines, but you will like the Campagna. Please go out into the Campagna as much as
possible, and let your phrases match the clouds there, and think of me. I’ve just been to dinner with a young
Persian,—he’s in love with me,—such a nice creature,—I knew him last year,—he chants Persian poetry so
beautifully—This letter gets interrupted all the time, but I love you, Virginia—so there—and your letters make
it worse—Are you pleased? I want to get home to you—Please, when you are in the south, think of me, and of
the fun we should have, shall have, if you stick to your plan of going abroad with me in October,—sun and
cafes all day, and ? all night. My darling...please let this plan come off.
I live for it.
Do you really get the ‘Femina’ prize?238 And the Hawthornden239 D’you remember our bet? what fun.
Yes, let’s write about solitude. Oddly enough, by the same post as your letter, I got sheets from Ethel Smyth,
largely about that same subject, solitude. She likes it too.
Such a scrawl. By candlelight. The motor leaves at 4. tomorrow morning for Teheran. I’m in a queer
excited state,—largely owing to your letter—I always get devastated when I hear from you. God, I do love
you. You say I use no endearments. That strikes me as funny. When I wake in the Persian dawn, and say to

237 The Woolfs had been taking a holiday at Cassis, in the South of France, with Vanessa and Clive Bell. On 6 April they were leaving Cassis for
Sicily, by boat from Marseilles. They then planned to spend a week in Rome.
238 Virginia received the Prize in 1928 for To the Lighthouse.
239 Virginia had written : ‘Oh and about the Hawthornden—take it for granted that they are putting off the presentation till you come back.’
myself ‘Virginia.. .Virginia....’
The Common Reader was in my room at Shiraz—it gave me a shock.
Look here... you’ll come to Long Barn, won’t you? Quite soon after I get back? If I promise to get
back undamaged? I’ll be sweeter to you than ever in my life before—

Your Vita

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
23 March

Dearest Honey,

Are you well? Did you enjoy the walk?240 241 Were you drowned, shot, raped, tired? Lord! I’d give a good deal
to know. But the silly thing is that I’m writing before you’ve even left Teheran, I suppose. What I pretend to
be past is all in the future. Yet to you, reading this, its over. All very confusing, and pray God I may never
have to write to you in Persia again.
How you’d laugh to see me stretched out comatose recovering from two days high temperature—all
owing to inoculations, and my principles—I know I deserve it. I urged you so lightly into it—how little I pitied
you—and now you shall laugh at me. How I wish you’d walk into the room this moment, and laugh as much
as you like.
Why do I think of you so incessantly, see you so clearly the moment I’m in the least discomfort? An
odd element in our friendship. Like a child, I think if you were here, I should be happy....

To Virginia Woolf
Shalamzar
Persia
4 April

I write to you from a purely fantastic place, my lovely Virginia: an oasis at the foot of the snow-mountains, a
house belonging to one of the Bakhtiari chiefs.242 But such a house! Not, as you might suppose, a mud hut, but
a sort of Versailles, full of strange objects such as gilt ladies holding lamps and other decorations in the Oriental
taste,— and all, of course, falling into decay. I didn’t think I should be able to write again, but the cars which
have brought us the hundred-odd miles out from Isfahan will be returning to Isfahan tomorrow, and I had the
brilliant idea of sending letters back by them.
This is a lonely valley, and behind the house rises the barrier of mountains, with the track leaping in
black zigzags across the snow, and disappearing over a little nick in the top. Our fourteen mules are picketed
outside, and we have a mounted escort which looks as though they might cut our throats at any moment.
Darling, I wrote you a letter from Isfahan; rather excited I was, and over-tired, and wanting you. There was a

241 Vita, with Harold, Gladwyn Jebb, and two American friends, Copley Amory and Lionel Smith, walked tor twelve days through the mountains of
southern Persia where the Bakhtiari tribe migrated annually The journey was described in her book Twelve Days (Hogarth Press, 1928).
242 The Bakhtiari expedition.
new moon over the poplars in the Isfahan garden, the slimmest shaveling of new moon, curtseying away from
a star like the one we saw when we went for a walk at Long Barn, (the evening you behaved so monstrously,)
but in a very different sky; the Long Barn sky was tumbled and stormy; the Persian sky was pale green and
cloudless.
I thought of lots of things on the way here which I wanted to say to you, and now I have forgotten
them all. I was rather sad, thinking of people who had gone out of my life, though why I should think of them
suddenly today I can’t imagine. You are at Cassis. I couldn’t possibly have written to you there or I would
have. Did they like your shingled head? It’s just as well you did it while I was away, or I should certainly have
got the blame.
Lord, what a funny place to be in—and those well unknown mountains lying outside—and night
coming out—and the sound of the muleteers moving about—and a little snatch of song. Oh if only you were
here! I’m alone with four men.
I have millions and millions of things to talk to you about, all very important— general, not personal.
We’ve got 2 huge bottles of wine with us, I insisted on that. Real jorams they are. They’ll dangle on a
mule.
Dinner now, and then steep, and then tomorrow! But do you realise, light of my eyes, that we are on
our way home? Rather an odd way, but still a way. I can come and see you in the morning, can’t I, of May
6th? in the studio? and the grey milk in front of the gas-fire—Because I’ll have to go down to Brighton after
lunch, only I must see you first.

Your, (very much your)

V.
To V. Sackville- West
Villa Corsica
Cassis
[France]
Tuesday 5 April

I was in a towering passion—Clive had a long letter from Harold, I none from you. For some inscrutable reason
after 4 days two arrived from you and one from Dotty. This has assuaged my rage, which threatened to make
our journey one black and bitter pilgrimage of despair. I was very unhappy....

Please darling honey come back safe. We will have a merry summer: one night perhaps at Long Barn:
another at Rodmell: We will write some nice pieces of prose and poetry: we will saunter down the Haymarket.
We will not dine at Argyll House. We will snore.
1. Virginia is completely spoilt by her shingle.
2. Virginia is completely made by her shingle.
3. Virginia’s shingle is quite unnoticeable.
These are the three schools of thought on this important subject. I have bought a coil of hair, which I
attach by a hook. It falls into the soup, and is fished out on a fork.
Are you well?

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
[5 May]
It is marvellous to be actually in England. I passed Cassis yesterday!243 Longed to see Clive.
Darling, darling Virginia, it’s quite incredible that I shall see you tomorrow.

243 Vita and Harold returned by sea from Alexandria to Marseilles. Virginia herself had just returned home from her holiday in Cassis, Sicily and
Rome.
May - September 1927
Harold Nicolson was now on leave, awaiting his next diplomatic posting, but his presence at Long
Barn, and Virginia’s undiminished need for her, did not deter Vita from falling in love with Mary, the
young wife of the South African poet Roy Campbell, to whom she lent her garden cottage. However,
Vita still saw much of Virginia. They went together to Oxford, often spent the night at each other’s
houses, and with their husbands travelled north to watch a total eclipse of the sun. Vita was awarded
the Hawthornden Prize for The Land, and wrote at a great pace a short life of Aphra Behn. She and
Harold developed their garden at Long Barn into a prototype of the famous one they would later
create at Sissinghurst, and gave many weekend parties there; Virginia was not invited, because she
insisted on being alone with Vita. Vita, too, declared her need for solitude, and began her long poem
on the subject, but she enjoyed the company of her friends. This was, indeed, the most social period
of her life.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Sunday [8 May]

Out of the litter of clothes, books, boots, socks, ribbons, bits of Persepolis, letters, string, I rescue a piece of
paper and a pen and write to tell you that Pinker and I will come tomorrow afternoon. I am lunching with Sibyl,
and will go to Ebury Street after lunch to fetch Pinker, so if you don’t want us to come will you leave a
telephone message for me there? Vic. 5194. Otherwise I’ll come with puppy on a string at about 3.30, but put
me off if you want to and I’ll just leave puppy at Tavistock Square and go sadly away.
I found a heavenly letter here from you. It had been to Teheran and come back again. I also found one
from your friend Ursula Greville,244 which for the sake of the ‘mischievous pianissimo’ I can’t resist sending
you. I also found about 150 other letters which entail 150 answers.
Such emotions as I’ve gone through in the last three days: England, Virginia, Long Barn.... I feel like
a small cup held under Niagara. But look here, damn it, when are you coming to stay? Anyway I go with you
to Oxford.245

V.

244 In Virginia’s letter of 6 March to Vita she had referred to the English operatic and concert soprano as ‘a bad singer’.
245 Vita attended Virginia’s lecture at St Hugh’s College, Oxford on 18 May. It was published in the Ncw York Herald Tribune on 14 August 1927 as
‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’.
To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Monday [9 May]

Dearest donkey West,

Did you understand that when I wrote it was my best book I merely meant because all the pages were empty? 246
A joke, a feeble joke: but then it might get round through Jack Squire, through Hugh Walpole to Gosse:
seriously such are your friends.
These things made me shiver like a fish on a hook about 2 a.m. so I am writing.
Then, second: Oxford is May 18th and I’ve written to take rooms at the Mitre.
And shall I see you before? And where does one buy a black coat? I have to broadcast, and think it
should be done in broad cloth.

To Virginia Woolf
Tuesday [10 May]

But of course I realised it was a joke; what do you take me for? a real donkey? Anyway it is a marvellous
book...and I expect you were right. But I haven’t finished it yet.
Much as I love Clive (and I have a real affection for the roystering fellow) I prefer being alone with
you. I was cross and sulky.
One buys black velvet coats (I don’t know about broad cloth) at Debenham & Freebody for 2.5/- Do
get one. You’ll look nice in it.
Oxford: yes: all right. What time? And do you want to go by train or motor?
Don’t, whatever you do, let Mr. Herbert247 take a room for you at the Mitre and for me at the Randolph.
What are you going to broadcast about? I’ll listen to you—or couldn’t I bear that?
Oh darling! it is nice being back, and seeing you. Damn Clive though. Dear old Clive.
I’ve just acquired two goats. They remind me of Persia.
I’m going to Sherfield tomorrow for one night. No London in prospect for the moment.
Harold is writing to Leonard. Don’t let Leonard take you away.

V.

246 Virginia had sent Vita a copy of To the Lighthouse, in which Virginia had inscribed ‘In my opinion the best novel I have ever written.’ All the
pages were blank.
247 Aubrey Herbert.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Thursday evening [12 May]

The clock seems to have been put back a year, for I sit alone after dinner. Harold is in London, but so strong
is the habit upon me that I think he is in Persia. But everything is blurred to a haze by your book of which I
have just read the last words, and that is the only thing which seems real.248 1 can only say that I am dazzled
and bewitched. How did you do it? how did you walk along that razor-edge without falling? why did you say
anything so silly as that I ‘shouldn’t like it’? You can never have meant that though.
Darling, it makes me afraid of you. Afraid of your penetration and loveliness and genius.
The dinner is the part I like best perhaps. Then the deserted house, and the passage of time, which must
have been so difficult to manage and in which you’ve succeeded so completely. And odd bits, like the shawl
over the skull, and a phrase about the unity of things on page 101—oh, and hundreds of phrases, scattered
about, which are so like you (the flesh-and-blood Virginia, warming grey milk by the gas,) that it looks odd to
see them in print. And of course the relationship of Mr and Mrs Ramsay. And her shadow in the window. But
I could go on for ever like that.
My darling, what a lovely book! I love you more for it. But I still can’t think how you did it. It really
bewilders me, even coming from you. It’s as though you juggled with the coloured stars of a rocket, and kept
them ah alight, ah flying.
Of course it is perfectly ridiculous to cab it a novel.
I wonder if you know how like Mrs Ramsay you are yourself? But perhaps that’s because she is your
mother.
I do really love you more than before, for it. You always said I was a snob, and perhaps that is a form
of snobbishness. But I do. Only if I had read it without knowing you, I should be frightened of you. As it is, it
makes you more precious, more of an enchanter.
I don’t feel that this is a very illuminating letter, but I leave that to your clever friends! it is simply
written under a spell—I can’t shake myself free.
I tore up to Hertfordshire today; tore back again; and read after dinner. I was greatly moved, when in
came Louise carrying a huge dead fish on a platter. They had stuffed the hole with grass, where it had been
gaffed. It looked at me with a dead cold eye. But it couldn’t bring me back to my senses.
Now I must go to bed, but there will I think be more dreams than sleep. All your fault. Bless you, my
lovely Virginia.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Friday [13 May]

What a generous woman you are! Your letter has just come, and I must answer it, though in a chaos... I was
honest though in thinking you wouldn’t care for The Lighthouse: too psychological; too many personal
relationships, I think. (This is said not of the dummy copy) The dinner party the best thing I ever wrote: the
one thing that I think justifies my faults as a writer: This damned ‘method’. Because I dont think one could

248 To the Lighthouse was published on 5 May.

have reached those particular emotions in any other way. I was doubtful about Time Passes. It was written in
the gloom of the Strike: then I re-wrote it: then I thought it impossible as prose—I thought you could have
written it as poetry. I dont know if I’m like Mrs Ramsay: as my mother died when I was 13 probably it is a
child’s view of her: but I have some sentimental delight in thinking that you like her. She has haunted me: but
then so did that old wretch my father: Do you think it sentimental? Do you think it irreverent about him? I
should like to know. I was more like him than her, I think; and therefore more critical: but he was an adorable
man, and somehow, tremendous.
...I’m rather bothered about my paper; it mayn’t suit; it may be dull. Ask Harold whether one can say
that God does not exist to Oxford undergraduates?...
So dearest, train, Wednesday, to arrive for dinner. I rushed into a whore’s shop in Leicester Square
and bought a coat

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Saturday [14 May]

But my dearest it’s such a bad story. However, you can have a look at it, only you’re certain to turn it down.
I’ll bring it Wednesday.249
There is a train for Oxford at 4.45 arriving 5.55. Would that do, do you think? The others are all awfully
bad. I’ll meet you at Paddington, or pick you up at Tavistock Square, whichever you like. Harold says be as
rude about God as you would be at Cambridge.
I shall feel rather like puppy, being taken along on a string.
No, of course your book isn’t sentimental—nor irreverent about your father.
In haste with the whole Colefax clan threatening descent. Blast them.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Sunday [15 May]

All right, dearest donkey. I will be outside the place where one buys tickets at Paddington at 4.35 on
Wednesday, carrying a neat bag, otherwise slightly shabby, but distinguished....

249 The Woolfs were planning a series of stories, but only one was ever published (Lord Olivier’s The Empire Builder).Vita’s story cannot now be
traced.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn Weald
Sevenoaks
Friday [20 May]

My darling, I’m still under the spell of being with you.250

This is to tell you that I am going to lunch with that old Lesbian251 on Tuesday, but I have told her I
must be back in London by a 1/4 to 5. So don’t put off Logan252 and the rest. It doesn’t matter if I come in
when they are there, does it? Only don’t leave the bell unanswered!
The Vogue editoresses were overpowering.253 They terrified me. One of them couldn’t speak English.
I wish you could see my garden. It is really pretty, and will be over if you don’t come till the week
after next.
A gentleman writes to know if it is really necessary for him to sow his herb seeds under a waxing
moon. Will they fail if he doesn’t?
Hordes of people are descending on us over the weekend. Amongst others, Elinor Wylie.254 She and
Hugh Walpole are probably at daggers drawn. Lord help me.

Your
V.

[Pasted in the upper left corner is a fragment from a letter on which is written:] It must be very pleasant to
come home to find such a fine piece of work by Mrs Woolf waiting for you.

Yrs
Leigh255

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Sunday [22 May]

Yes, honey, do come on Tuesday. Only stay longer than they do, whatever happens. I don’t like seeing you
between the legs and over the heads of Logans and Hendersons. I think it would be a tactful thing on your part
if you asked L. to come to Long Barn in person. He probably thinks you dont want him etc: being a modest
man....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks

250 At Oxford.
251 Ethel Smyth, whom Vita visited at her house in Woking, Surrey, on 24 May.
252 Logan Pearsall Smith.
253 On 19 May Vita and Harold went to Knole to meet their friend George Plank, an American employee of Vogue; with him were the London editor,
Mrs Chase, and the Paris editor, Mrs Fernandez.
254 Hugh Walpole stayed the weekend at Long Barn, and Vita took him to Knole where they met Elinor Wylie; the American novelist and poet.
255 Leigh Ashton.
 [26 May]

I thought this absurd photograph would amuse you.256 Does it?

Oh dear, are you really better? I know you were feeling ill, but thought it was too many people.
The book to Mother 257 was a great success, and arrived while I was there. She was delighted. She was
too charming for words.
Yes, I’ll send back your paper,258 or give it you Thursday?
Do stay two nights. You know how much I want you to.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square Sunday
[29 May?]

Yes, it did amuse me, the picture of you on your donkey, or was it a mule perhaps?
That damned chill has landed me in a damned headache, so I am staying in bed.
You’re the only person I want to see when I have a headache—thats a compliment—But its going off
fast.
Write, dear honey, a nice letter to me.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Monday [30 May]

It was a mule, of course. One rides donkeys at Margate, not on the Persian mountains.
My poor darling—I do hate these damned headaches that you get. I wish you were ROBUST. I wish
also that you spared yourself a little more. I hate to think of you ill, or in pain.
People swarmed like locusts over Long Barn yesterday, and Dada had a party for Eddy’s sister259 at
Knole which would have amused you: slim young creatures all looking as though they had come straight out
of the Tatler, all indistinguishable one from the other, and young men to match.260 They lay about on the grass,
like aristocratic young animals with sleek heads. I was acutely conscious of the difference of generation.
Will you let me know what train you propose to come by on Thursday? and oh yes, Harold says has
Leonard got any books belonging to him, lent to Desmond? I think it’s two volumes of Hobhouse he is fussing
after.261 And his drawings. Would Leonard bring them?

256 Vita sent Virginia a photograph of herself sitting on a Persian mule. It was included as an illustration in Twelve Days.
257 To the Lighthouse.
258 Virginia’s lecture at Oxford on 18 May about poetry and fiction.
259 Diana Sackville-West.
260 Including Anthony Asquith, the film director and son of the former Prime Minister, and Lord David Cecil.
261 John Cam Hobhouse (1786-1869), later Lord Broughton, Byrons friend.
 The young man’s letter made me smile. What does he mean?
Bring Pinker.
I am terribly excited about your coming here. I hope it won’t rain. I don’t believe you have ever seen
Long Barn in the summer, since the first time you came—and Leonard certainly never has.
Darling, do, do get well.

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [31 May]

My darling, I needn’t tell you that it makes me wretched to know that you are ill. I feared the worst the moment
I saw Leonard’s writing on the envelope. Oh Virginia, I’d do anything to make you well. I wish to God that if
you had got to be ill, it had happened here, and then you’d have been obliged to stay, and I could have looked
after you. But that’s selfish really, because I suppose you’d be miserable away from your own house.
Leonard says will I come and see you towards the end of the week, so you can’t be so very bad. Of
course I’ll come any time you like. I shall be here all the week, so you have only to get Leonard to send me a
postcard—or ring up.
I send you a few flowers. I fear they won’t look as fresh when they reach you as when they leave me.
Put ten grains of aspirin, powdered, in the water to revive them.
Are you in bed? yes, I suppose so. With an aching head. Able to read? Allowed to have letters? I am
asking Leonard to let me know how you are. I do worry so about you, and above all can’t bear the idea that
you should be in pain.

Your
V.
very much distressed.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
[1 June]

I thought you’d like the following compliments to cheer you in your seclusion, even though they are only from
my poor despised friend Hugh.262
‘I’m in the middle of the Lighthouse, ekeing it out so that it will last. Why doesn’t she publish a book
every day? and what fun to be in at the birth of books quite as important as Jane Austen. She is a genius and I
would carry a thousand hair-shedding dogs to the gates of Hell for her did she wish it! You’re lucky having
her for a friend.’
(Am I?)
Darling, I know you are slipping off your pillows, and failing to reach the telephone, having genius
perhaps as Hugh says for writing books, but less talent than anybody I ever knew for making yourself
comfortable. I hope you may have letters, especially those that need no answer. Such as mine. I worry about
you dreadfully, and Mother has sent you a box of chocolates (for you and Leonard) thinking you were coming
here tomorrow. So I shall keep them till you do come. I will try not to eat them myself but won’t promise.
I wrote two poems this morning (both bad) and a bit of my book; so the sap is stirring, if to little
purpose.
Oh my dear, I do hope you are getting better.

Your
V

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn [2 June]

You said you liked getting letters—

Well, I went round to Raymond’s to collect Harold, and collected not only Harold but Raymond also,
who ought to have been dining at the Cranium,263 but preferred to come here (he was coming tomorrow
anyway) and enjoyed the thought that he was sneaking away from a lot of people, including Eddy, who were
to call for him, drink cocktails with him, go to the dinner with him, etc. etc. He allowed himself to be carried
off rather in the spirit of a truant than of a guest. Anyway, here he is, and he and Harold have done nothing but
argue about vaccination and temperamental anarchism and the Times ever since we arrived, till I am sick of it,
and write to you instead. Such a muddle coursed through my mind all through dinner, which made me see how
horribly true your lighthouse dinner party was: the red roses in the bowl, the silver shell with the butter,
Raymond half deferring and half defiant, Pippin chawing bones under my chair; and then Virginia, so lovely
and golden, stretched on two chairs, and more irresistible than ever, with the sparkle gone and only the child
remaining.

Your

262 Hugh Walpole.

263 A Bloomsbury dining club.
 V

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Sunday [5 June]

...Its odd how being ill even like this splits one up into several different people. Here’s my brain now quite
bright, but purely critical. It can read; it can understand; but if I ask it to write a book it merely gasps. How
does one write a book? I cant conceive. It’s infinitely modest therefore,—my brain at this moment. Theres
Vita, it says, able to write books: Then my body—thats another person....
The Seafarers Educational Society has bought 2 copies of The Lighthouse. Its an awful thought that
the merchant service will be taught navigation by me: or the proper use of foghorns and cylinders....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [6 June]

Damn it, I never knew there was a post on Bank Holiday, and was astonished to get letters this morning, yours
amongst them. Or I would have written yesterday. I say, I’ve had some funny people here since I saw you.
Ethel Smyth came to listen to the nightingale. We sat in the wood for three hours. There were at least half a
dozen nightingales, despite my fears that the rain and the cold would have silenced them. I was proud and
delighted. But...she couldn’t hear them. The poor old thing was deafer than I knew. I was in despair. I kept
saying ‘Hush! Listen!’ and darkling she listened, cocking her head on one side, but never a note could she
hear. Then one suddenly burst out in a thorn bush not 10 yards away. She heard that all right; and it sang,
Virginia, that blessed little bird, it sang for a solid hour, and she was enraptured. So Long Barn and the evening
were a great success: ‘Beloved Vita, call me Ethel,’ all thanks to the nightingale. But she’ll never know how
many there really were; she thinks there was only one.
It’s a very good joke about the Seamen’s Union and the Lighthouse.264 I shall send a presentation copy
to the Lifeboat fund. Yes, I do sympathise about John Drinkwater, it is really very humiliating for you. But
you’ll come and support me on the 16th won’t you?265 or you shan’t have your 5£. Three o’clock, and they’ll
send you a card. You know you’ll enjoy it, and you know how you like making fun of me. I shall be in London
two days,—16th and 17th,—shall I see you at all? I dine with Raymond one night and Clive the next. I suddenly
got a letter from Clive asking if he might come here with Mary when she returns, so I shall expect a lively
visit.
You don’t say if you are better, wretch; but as you walked round the square (can one walk round a
square?) and are going to Rodmell, I suppose I may take it that you are. But you were still on chairs,—and
look here: I insist on your having a sofa. If you won’t buy one for yourself, I shall have to buy it for you, and
that will make you furious. So if one doesn’t appear quickly in your room, I shall deliver an ultimatum. Now

264 They had asked for a copy, thinking it was about seafaring life.
265 Virginia had pretended disappointment at not being awarded the Hawthornden Prize, which Drinkwater was to present to Vita for The Land on 16
June. In any case, Virginia was ineligible for the Hawthornden, which was confined to writers under forty-one.
do be sensible and pay attention. It is ridiculous for someone who periodically collapses on two chairs under
a golden cloak, not to have a sofa.
How you will like being at Rodmell! Dear me, what a lucky man Leonard is. I wish you were coming
here instead, though. Bless you, my darling. I shall think of you listening to the ventriloquists266 on the water
meadows.267

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
[7 June]

Health. Better but not quite right yet—I mean I get the jumping pulse and pain if I do anything: Cant write
sense. Will you please be rather strict for a time. Its so easy, with this damned disease, to start a succession of
little illnesses, and finally be sent to bed for 6 weeks....
Sofa: Yes. But the difficulty is that few decent sofas can get up our stairs. I sacrificed my old one for
that reason.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn Weald
Sevenoaks
Wednesday [8 June]

But when have I ever been anything but ‘rather strict’? (except, possibly, towards midnight? But that doesn’t
count.) What counts, is that you shouldn’t lavish yourself on people; and this I urge, even when I myself am
the people. So do you think I’d better come on Friday? or will you promise to shoo me away like a chicken
from your doorstep if you feel in the least tired when I drive up at about 4 on Friday? If you want to stop me,
a postcard to me at White Lodge will do it. A disappointment, but no offence. I am afraid you have been worse
than you admit. No, indeed I don’t think you a molly coddle,—would to God that you were more of one. But
I fancy I can solve the problem of getting the sofa up your stairs.
Can we go for a little walk in the water-meadows? with Pinker?
Perhaps I can come round to you with Raymond after dining with him,—but no: you mustn’t see
people, or be excited. Especially as you dine with Clive next day. Dear Clive, he wrote me such a nice letter;
and what an angel to ask me to dinner the same night as you. I like that, because that was where and how I first
saw you.268 Though no doubt his intention is mischievous, still I am grateful to him, and it provides a look-
forward.

Your

266 Redshanks.
267 See VW 1761.
268 On 14 December 1922.
 V.

To Virginia Woolf
Sherfield
Court Sherfield Upon Loddon
Basingstoke
Sunday [Saturday 11 June]

So you are alone, in your Constable country of elms and meadows, with your blue tit nest (‘a wild bird’s nest
in Helens breast’?)1 and your Ouse, and your shingled church tower; and I am here among all these people,269
270
just a little bewildered and perplexed by all their talk, as is Harold too, from the fresher air of Asia. It seems
to me all a little stale, careful, dead? Are we wrong? or are they?
Do you know what I should do, if you were not a person to be rather strict with? I should steal my own
motor out of the garage at 10 p.m. tomorrow night, be at Rodmell by 11.5 (yes, darling: I did a record on
Friday, getting from Lewes to Long Barn in an hour and 7 minutes,) throw gravel at your window, then you’d
come down and let me in; I’d stay with you till 5 and be home by half past 6. But, you being you, I can’t;
mores the pity. Have you read my book? Challenge,271 1 mean? Perhaps I sowed all my wild oats then. Yet I
don’t feel the impulse has left me; no, by Cod; and for a different Virginia I’d fly to Sussex in the night. Only;
with age, soberness, and the increase of considerateness, I refrain. But the temptation is great.
A thin Clive; a haggard Clive.
Oh Lord! They’ve come to fetch the letters for the post.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
[14 June]

You see I was reading Challenge and I thought your letter was a challenge “if only you weren’t so elderly and
valetudinarian” was what you said in effect “we would be spending the day together” whereupon I wired “come
then” to which naturally there was no answer and a good thing too I daresay as I am elderly and
valetudinarian,—it’s no good disguising the fact. Not even reading Challenge will alter that. She is very desir-
able I agree: very. (Eve)272....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Tuesday

269 A quotation from Vita’s own poem The Land.

270 Clive Bell, Raymond Mortimer and Dorothy Wellesley.
271 Vita’s novel, published only in the United States in 1923, in which she told, thinly disguised, the story of her love for Violet Trefusis.
272 Violet Trefusis.
 [14 June]

‘Chance missed,’—DAMN. We stayed playing tennis at Sherfield and didn’t get home till evening.
I say, I’ll see you Thursday though. I really rather envy you your fun.273 I don’t envy myself at all.
Whenever I think of it, my legs feel like the Charleston.
My mother said something distressing about your being weak. Oh my darling Virginia, are you? Are
you not really better? You ought to have stayed at Rodmell you know. Shall I hear from you, I wonder? I am
rather worried about you.
Sherfield was a success, and Dottie as good as gold. Clive is a pet; I love him.
I’ve got nothing to say, except I wish you were here. I could so easily have fetched you this morning..
.but I expect you would have talked more than was good for you.
What about the sofa?
Harold has ordered his book to be sent to you; they had only one copy, a sort of proof for the cover,
but it will go to you today.274 Raymond was delighted with it.
My mother says your handwriting has an extraordinary effect upon her. What does she mean?
I think the house is going to fall down—It is squeaking ominously.

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Thursday [23 June]

I am furious at not seeing you today. That silly Philip Ritchie275 has gone and got poisoned, and has put his
party off. Harold forgot to deliver my message. What a lovely advertisement276 in the Literary Supplement. I
wonder if it will produce any results?
I enclose a letter277 which I hope will meet the case, and please please, darling, act on it, as I do hate
seeing you only in snippets, and people there half the time too. I would so love to have you here.
Your friend Edith Sitwell seems to be entering upon a regular campaign; whichever way I turn, that
Gorgon’s head springs up on my path.278 I wish you’d draw her about it next time you see her. I am not annoyed,
only vastly amused, and rather puzzled; she says it’s ‘the worst poem in the English language’; now I’m not
vain, as you know, but I’m hanged if it’s as bad as all that!
I say, you are not really well yet, are you? Darling, what a curse. And oh damn not seeing you today.
I would have come up, but I am getting fussed about Aphra Behn which they want by August 15th, and which
I see no prospect of finishing by then. It isn’t even started yet.

273 Virginia was to be in the audience for the presentation of the Hawthornden Prize to Vita.
274 Some People, published on 23 June.
275 See note 4 to Virginia’s letter of 18 February 1927.
276 For The Land.
277 This letter is, in all probability, the one that follows here, written for Leonard to read.
278 Edith Sitwell’s abuse of The Land appeared in the Weekly Despatch (30 January 1927), T. P. ’s Weekly (19 March 1927) and the Daily Mirror (27
June 1927).
 I did a bit of propaganda for you in Brighton to the Sussex Poetry Society,—told them to read your
book.

Your
V.
very melancholy at never seeing you.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
[23 June]

Darling Virginia, I am so sorry about today. I wanted to ask you and Leonard to come for your postponed visit
and was going to suggest the weekend after the eclipse, 279 or any day in the week following that. Will you let
me know some time if you can and will?
Harold loved his evening with you. I am glad you thought him nice. He is nice. He does so much want
you both to come here. You can rest as much as you like,—stay in bed all day if you like!

Vita

279 Vita and Harold, Virginia and Leonard, with Eddy Sackville-West and Quentin Bell, travelled by train to Northumberland to watch the total eclipse
of the sun on 29 June. The entire party returned to London, except Vita who was joined by Dorothy Wellesley. Together they went on to Haworth—
Bronte country— and did not return until 1 July. Virginia later confessed to feeling jealous about this side-excursion, which of course delighted Vita.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Friday [24 June]

...I think I’m going to see Edith280 soon—I like her: she’s a character. I dont think you probably realise how
hard it is for the natural innovator as she is, to be fair to the natural traditionalist as you are. Its much easier for
you to see her good points than for her to see yours. Also, she hates Squire (with some reason—he’s the spit
and image of mediocrity) and the Hawthornden tars you, you must admit, with that brush; and then you sell,
and she dont—all good reasons why being a Sitwell she should vomit in public....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday night [4 July]

See how prompt I am in writing to you now. The truth is, I have missed you horribly this evening. It suddenly
turned to summer; we dined on the terrace for the first time this year; there were warm pockets of air; I wished
ardently that tonight might be the last night; I sat alone on the steps watching a sickle of moon creep out from
behind the poplars; everything was still and scented and soft and romantic; a moth dashed across my eyes. It
is all very well, you know, but these snatches of happiness are extremely exasperating.—And why have you
such an art of keeping so much of yourself up your sleeve? as to make me suspect that after twenty years there
would still be something to be unfolded,—some last layer not uncoiled.
I like making you jealous; my darling, (and shaft continue to do so,) but it’s ridiculous that you should
281
be.
I’m coming to London on Tuesday of next week, the twelfth. Shall we go somewhere nice after lunch?
Kew? the docks? the zoo? the ballet?282 1 lunch with Sibyl, but after that am free. Let’s do something together.
[Pasted on to the verso is an illustration of a dolphin, one of Virginia’s fantasy animals for Vita, with the
accompanying text:]
Dolphin (Delphinus delphis) is an agile animal executing amusing gambols.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Monday [4 July]

Yes you are an agile animal—no doubt about it, but as to your gambols being diverting, always, at Ebury Street
for example, at 4 o’clock in the morning, I’m not so sure. Bad, wicked beast!... But what did I come back to?
A message from Dadie283 and he’s coming in next minute, and I’m alone, and Leonards motoring, and we shall
have 2 or 3 hours tête à tête—I and Dadie. Hah Hah! Bad Wicked Beast.
...You only be a careful dolphin in your gambolling, or you’ll find Virginia’s soft crevices fined with

280 Edith Sitwell

281 Of Vita s other woman friends.
282 They went to the zoo, and afterwards Vita gave Virginia a driving lesson in Regent s Park.
283 George Rylands.
hooks. You’ll admit I’m mysterious—you don’t fathom me yet— Who knows what—but here’s Dadie:
Honey, could you remember to bring my waterproof (rose pink) and my gloves (scarlet) I flung them
down in the hall I think....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Wednesday night [6 July]

Slightly light-headed,—my mother kept me up till 6 a.m. this morning,—an all-night sitting. Slightly tipsy,—
Harold, dismayed by my appearance, filled me up with port,— sensible man. Slightly exhausted altogether,—
a combination of the bloody flux and the all-night sitting. Really my mother is a tragic character.—But there
was a letter from you waiting for me; which made up for much. Am I forgiven? and are you discreet?
I’ll come on Tuesday. But look here, I’ll come early unless you tell me not to, i.e. as soon as I can get
away from Sibyl’s luncheon. That is, about 3. Damn Dadie. What bad taste you have. So shop-soiled.
I sent your mackintosh (rose pink) and your gloves (scarlet) today.
Do you think there’s any thing in my theory of the barrier of incest between Eddy and me? Or is it a
link?
Oh God, I’m so tired.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Sunday [8 July]

Virginia, much as I love you, (and that’s more than I like for your peace of mind,) I couldn’t possibly go to
Hampton Court with you with that party.284 For one thing, not being Eddy; I don’t relish the idea of butting in
where I’m not wanted, and then—oh, lots of other things. Why, you might bring Dadie,—who, by the way,
asks me to tea on Thursday: why? I’m not going—nor am I going to speak at a luncheon for Miss Gertrude
Eileen Trevelyan.285 I’m coming to London on Tuesday only, to see Virginia and to see her by herself.
Harold is doing nicely: flaming reviews286 in the New Statesman, Observer and Saturday Review. He
is surprised and rather shy.
Clive has asked to come here next Friday. I am glad, as I thought he might be X with me. I am fond of
Clive, who is worth a whole bed of oysters. Haven’t I provided you with a splendid tease?287 what a fool I was!
But perhaps I wasn’t: it’s just as well not to buttress you up with too much self-confidence and sense of power.
Darling, write me a little note and say you won’t take me to Hampton Court. I couldn’t endure it—I

284 Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Clive Bell were the party.
285 The winner of the (Oxford) Newdigate Prize for her poem Julia, Daughter of Claudius (1927). She was an undergraduate at Lady Margaret Hall,
and the first woman ever to win this prestigious prize.
286 Of Some People.
287 Virginia had hinted, teasingly, that Mary Hutchinson (‘the oyster’) was in love with her.
shall go off at full gallop if you do.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Sunday [24 July]

Dearest Creature,

(by the way, why is it that you always come into my presence in letters simply and solely—not even My dear
Virginia, whereas I always invent some lovely lovely phrase?) how nice it is of me to be writing to you, when
you’re not writing to me.
...But listen: now what am I to do about powder? Ethel288 will take it ill if I don’t powder my nose.
Once you gave me some which didn’t smell;... Tell me quickly what to get and where. I will rise to powder,
but not to rouge. So thats finished....
You’ll be glad to hear I’ve sold 4000 of the L.289 in America in a month: so they think I shall sell 8000
before the end of the year. And I shall make £800: (that is with luck.)

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [25 July]

I never begin my letters, don’t I, beloved Virginia? But as Clive, (who is an authority or thinks he is on such
matters,) will tell you, that’s the most compromising way of beginning of all.
Well, I sent you a box of powder, same as I gave you before. You must do me credit with Ethel, and
without powder or with the wrong sort you certainly wouldn’t do me credit. So I telephoned to the chemist and
said it must be sent at once. I nearly told him to put in a box of rouge, a bottle of Equid white, a cake of eyelash
blacking, and a scarlet Ep-stick. I say, may I make you up one day? I should enjoy that.
God, I do wish I were going with you, instead of meeting a horde of boys290 at Paddington and trying
to get too much luggage on to the motor.
But that is capital about Thursdays. You will stick to that? B M291 has gone to London, so I shall have
no Brighton obligations and shan’t be made unpunctual. We will walk over the meadows and you will tell me
stories.
I went to Canterbury yesterday, and to Wye because I wanted to see where the incomparable Astrea292
was born. I have killed her off today, which means I have done % of my book. It won’t be as popular as the

288 Ethel Sands, the American painter, whom Virginia was to visit at her house, Auppegard, in Normandy.
289 To the Lighthouse.
290 Her sons Ben and Nigel, on their return from school.
291 B. M. could stand for either Bonne Maman or Belle Mere, and was applied by Vita and Harold to her mother, Lady Sackville.
292 The writer Aphra Behn (1640-89), about whom Vita was writing a short book. She was born at Wye, but soon afterwards was taken by her parents
to Dutch Guiana.
Lighthouse, with 4 or possibly 8 thousand copies in America. What pearls before swine! I resent their reading
it. You don’t, but then you are a purely mercenary writer, like Michael Arlen,293 and think of nothing but your
returns.
There.
I shall write to you at Ethel’s, just to keep myself fresh and green in your mind. No, my darling, I
shan’t be in London tomorrow. Coming up on Wednesday but you’ll be gone.

Your Vita.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
27 July

Today as I was driving down Oxford Street I saw a woman on a refuge, carrying the Lighthouse. She was an
unknown woman,—up from the country, I should think, and just been to Mudie’s or the Times,—and as the
policeman held me up with his white glove I saw your name staring at me, Virginia Woolf, against the moving
red buses, in Vanessa’s paraph of lettering. Then as I stayed there (with my foot pressing down the clutch and
my hand on the brake, as you will appreciate,) I got an intense dizzying vision of you: you in your basement,
writing; you in your shed at Rodmell, writing; writing those words which that woman was carrying home to
read. How had she got the book? Had she stalked in, purposeful, and said ‘I want To the Lighthouse’ or had
she strayed idly up to the counter and said ‘I want a novel please, to read in the train,— a new novel,—
anything’ll do’? Anyhow there it was, one of the eight thousand, in the hands of the Public.
You are in the arms of Ethel (metaphorically, I hope,) by now, being motored about Normandy. You
will motor through Salcavilla,294 probably, though you won’t know it. You will be taken to see Jacques
Blanche.295 You will be given iced grapefruit when you are called. But there won’t be angel fish in your
bathroom, nor many of the other delights you find at Long Barn. Please find out for me exactly what it is that
one likes about Ethel. Is it the sense of civilisation and silver tea-things? Ethel, in analogy, is certainly a tea-
table. But there is a scratch too.
I have got the boys, and the house from being an abode of peace has become noisy. How can one
write? The door bursts open all the time—‘Where is my hammock?’ ‘May we play tennis?’ ‘What can we do
now?’ Nigel, however, who always likes having situations neatly defined, remarks at breakfast ‘How nice it is
to have a family assembled.’ I who detest families deplore this domestic sentiment in my younger son.
Darling, I like solitude, that’s what I like—now do you think my poem on the subject will suffer or
improve from my being thus forcibly deprived of it?296 I don’t know when I shall ever write the poor thing. It
turns over sleepily in my brain and occasionally lays a little egg in the shape of a line. Besides, most people
are so gregarious that it will find no echo in any heart nearer than that of a hermit in Thibet.
My darling, come back soon, I don’t like to feel you are out of England. (This comes well from me,
dashing off to Persia.) I’ll come over to Rodmell when you’re alone there. Not on the 6th because that’s Ben’s

293 (1895-1956.) Born in Armenia, he became a naturalized British citizen in 1922. He is best known for his novel The Green Hat (1924).
294 Vita was referring to Sauqueville, a village near Auppegard, from which the Sackville family came to England in the eleventh century, when she
teasingly wrote ‘Salcavilla’.
295 Virginia met Jacques-Emile Blanche, the portrait painter, at Auppegard.
296 Vita’s poem about solitude was not completed until 1938.
birthday. But soon, please.

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn [1 August]

My darling, I am so upset at your saying you had no letter from me. I wrote you a long letter and posted it
myself early on Thursday last. Has it ever reached you?
Desmond297 and Berners298 here,—Berners painting pictures, and Desmond discoursing delightfully,
in great form—
When shall I see you?

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Wednesday [3 August]

Yes, darling creature, your letter was handed me just as we left Auppegard, and caused me, I suppose, to forget
my box, so that the exquisite butler had to motor into Dieppe after us. Yes, darling, it was a nice letter.
Sauqueville aint a very grand place, all the same. I looked for traces of you. Did your ancestors own a saw
mill?... Then Leonard goes up on Thursday 11th and comes back on Friday. I shall be alone Thursday night.
Could you stay two nights? I dont want to seem as if I had you in secret, though its infinitely more to my taste,
exploring about in the recesses secretly....
My God, how you would have laughed yesterday! Off for our first drive in the Singer: the bloody thing
wouldn’t start. The accelerator died like a duck—starter jammed. All the village came to watch—Leonard
almost sobbed with rage. At last we had to bicycle in and fetch a man from Lewes. He said it was the
magnetos—would you have known that?...

297 Desmond MacCarthy.

298 Lord (Gerald) Berners (1883-1950), an amateur musician and artist of great talent, author of some remarkable volumes of autobiography (First
Childhood, for example), and a brilliant conversationalist.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Thursday [4 August]

NOT FOR PUBLICATION

Roshan-i-chasm-i-man,299
(You won’t know what that means, but you say I never begin my letters, so I try to oblige.)
Tactful letter, or would-be tactful, enclosed. It would in any case be difficult for me to stay two nights,
though if you were alone I would certainly do so.
N.B. It is true about the Weald people.
Are you all right? dispirited? over-fed? not fond of me any longer? Something wrong, I feel, by your
letter; but still am confident that by this time (i.e. midnight) next week it’ll be all right. I’ll come after luncheon,
about 5, shall I? You can’t think how I long to see you. The gaps of time are interminable.
I really would stay the 2 nights if I could, if only to make it not seem deliberate,— for your sake if not
for my own.
A course of Mrs A. B.300 has turned me into the complete ruffling rake. Nor more than Mrs A. B. do I
relish, or approve of, chastity.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Sunday [7 August]

Musha-i-djabah-dal-imam-301

Which being interpreted means, Darling-West-what-a-donkey-you-are-all my letters in future are going to be

addressed to Pippin, since it is clear you cant read them. “Something wrong I feel by your letter.”—What do
you mean? It was the nicest, lovingest, tenderest letter in the world: a little rasped at not seeing you perhaps,
but after all thats to your taste isnt it? Or did you, with the marvellous intuition of the poet, discover what I
have tried to keep concealed from you? that I am loved, by a man; a man with an aquiline nose, a nice property,
a wife of title and furniture to suit. The proposal was made the day before I left, and I have a letter confirming
it. What do you wish me to do? I was so overcome I blushed like a girl of 15...

299 A Persian love-greeting.

300 Aphra Behn.
301 Mock Persian.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [8 August]

I was going into Sevenoaks to pick up the boys, when I saw the postmans scarlet bicycle leaning against the
village letter-box. That meant that the afternoon post had arrived. I stopped; went in; and said Are there any
letters for Long Barn? There were. Among them was a typewritten envelope which contained a letter from
you. I felt myself flush with rage, as I read it,—I don’t exaggerate. I didn’t know I was so jealous of you. I
Who is your damned man with the aquiline nose?302 Look here, I really mind. But if it comes to that, I have on
my table a letter of the same sort,—which I haven’t answered.303 What sort of answer I send, depends on you.
I really am not joking. If you are not careful, you will involve me in an affair which will bore me horribly. If
you are nice, on the other hand, I’ll send my correspondent packing. But I won’t be trifled with. I really mean
this.
For the rest:
(1) I’ll bring my camera, only my charge is £1 per snapshot, not 2/6.304
(2) I won’t bring Pippin, I think, because she might be sick in the motor.
(3) I’ll come at 4 Thursday.
(4) I’ll stay till Friday.
(5) I’d like to lunch at Charleston if you will promise to leave directly after lunch so that I may have you alone
again.
(6) I will certainly lay myself out to please you.
I do get so angry about you.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Sherfield Court
Sherfield Upon Loddon,
Basingstoke
Tuesday [16 August]

My darling

I had hoped that your photographs would have come this morning before I left Long Barn, but they failed to
turn up. I have put in a good piece of work since I saw you: made friends with Lord Gage, and got myself
invited to Firle, which might be useful.305 In the meantime it enrages me to think I might be with you tomorrow.
I have finished with Mrs Behn—and have now only to pack her off. This, in the midst of thousands of
people who arrived at Long Barn at all hours of the day and night—Then a quick dash to Sherfield, and
Raymond again, and Adelaide Livingstone.306 The boys splashing about in the swimming bath, Harold writing

302 Virginia was referring to Philip Morrell, Ottoline’s husband, who had renewed his unwelcome advances to her.
303 Probably from Mary Campbell, the wife of the South African poet, Roy Campbell, both of whom were living in Long Barn cottage.
304 To photograph Virginia for an article by Jacques-Emile Blanche.
305 The 6th Viscount Gage. He owned Firle Place and Charleston, in Sussex.
306 Born in Massachusetts, she came to England when young and was active in many international and charitable causes, especially during the First
World War, when she cared for prisoners of war. She was created a Dame of the British Empire for this service in 1918, and died in 1970.
the history of biography for you, and much tennis. Such is my life—and arguments about feminism, and men
and women, and lots of Alella307—which sharpens the wits even if it undermines the constitution—and
Raymond saying ‘And then Virginia of course who is unquestionably the finest living writer of English prose.’
But in the meantime no sign of life from you,—isn’t it odd, these sudden, spasmodic, and violent
junctions between us, and then these days of complete silence which succeed?
Nevertheless I adore you and am coming on Thursday week am’nt I?

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Saturday 20 August

As you see, the photographs were not very successful. I have a new film, and can take a new lot on Thursday
if you like. I send these for what they are worth.
I like your review of Parson Woodforde.308 I PROTEST: never pay you compliments. My only
difficulty is, to repress my admiration so that it may not appear fulsome. If you wrote anything I mistrusted or
didn’t approve of, I should be down on you like a ton of bricks.
Raymond says I write bad English. I let him read my Aphra Behn, and he pulverised me. I expect you
will agree. It will be out in October,—too late for you to review for America, I think. It will be an easy and
grateful book to review,—very historical —picturesque.
Why do you typewrite your envelopes to me? They don’t look quite like a shop; and then I peer closer,
and when I see EWES309 on the postmark I know it is from you.
If Leonard hears from Adelaide Livingstone about lecturing about history at Heidelberg, I am
responsible. But you better not say so to him, or he will think I have designs of getting you to myself. (N.B. I
have.)
I am reading a delicious book called The Wandering Scholars310—I wish I knew Latin. Having actually
put Aphra in the post, I feel as free as a lark. Free to read, free to garden, free to think, free to be nice to my
children. A delirious sensation,—but already new energies stir in me, 24 hours after Aphra is finished. God
damn this energy; thank God for it,—such are my alternative emotions. I can’t be happily idle, I sometimes
wish I could.
I have lost my fountain pen and am writing with a new one which is more like a pin than a pen.
Shall you see Eddy and Raymond at Charleston tomorrow I wonder?
It is late, the house is asleep, and I sit up alone. Nigel hurt himself today dreadfully on a sharp-cornered
piece of furniture and had to be put to bed. Pippin is all lascivious-minded, and goes to Hertfordshire in a
hamper on Monday. You are with stockbrokers. I remember you wrote me a letter about them when I was in

307 Spanish wine.

308 ‘Life Itself’, (New Republic, 17 August 1927), review of The Diary of a Country Parson, vol. 3, James Woodforde, ed.John Beresford, reprinted in
Nation, 20 August 1927.
309 For Lewes.
310 By Helen Waddell (1927). The book, which was about the study of Latin in the Middle Ages, attracted attention far outside professional academic
circles. She followed it by an equally successful novel, Peter Abelard.
Persia. I get odd hankerings for Persia from time to time,—painful and queer.
I send you a supplementary photograph,311 which I had in Persia, and which lived stuck into my looking
glass there, and one which I took here the other day. May I have the Persian one back please? it is precious,
and I don’t know where the negative is. The others do not matter as I have the negatives.
Write to me?

Your
V.

311 Of Virginia
Knole (near Sevenoaks. Kent), which the Sackvilles had owned since the mid-sixteenth century and where
Vita spent her childhood.
Vita Sackville-West, 1922.
Virginia, photographed by Vita at Monk’s House, June 1926.
Vita in 1928, a photograph taken by Leonard Woolf as an illustration to Orlando.
Virginia, with Benedict and Nigel Nicolson (right) at Knole, during the writing of Orlando, 1928.
Virginia at Monk’s House, photographed by Vita, circa 1928.
Virginia in the French countryside, photographed by Vita in September 1928.
Vita at Long Barn, 1929.
Vita’s sitting room at Long Barn.
Long Barn, summer 1929.Vita and Harold with their two sons Benedict and Nigel (right).
Harold and Vita at Sissinghurst, 1932.
Vita’s tower room at Sissinghurst.
 I

Vita and Pinker at Sissinghurst, circa 1932.

Vita, Rollo and Martha (alsatians), Whitie (terrier), at Sissinghurst.
Vita at Sissinghurst, circa 1940.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Tuesday [30 August]

It wasn’t very nice, no, it wasn’t, leaving you standing in the gateway on Saturday with Tray312 and Leonard.
Lucky Tray. Lucky Leonard. But this is really to say, I behaved with my usual efficiency, caught Mr Harold
Monro 313 on the telephone, made him come down here last night, and pushed him and Dottie into each other’s
arms. It was a great success. They liked each other; and they are going to spend tomorrow afternoon together
at the bookshop. I think something may come of it. But Mr Monro takes literature seriously,—likes poets to
read aloud.—likes encouraging secondary school teachers in the appreciation of poetry—and I doubt whether
Dottie will be allowed to introduce more than one oyster and one bottle of champagne into the bookshop in
the course of a twelvemonth.
She has just handed me her letter to you, to read. I am shocked. I am seldom shocked, but this time I
am. I have told her so. She says ‘Will Virginia be?’ I say ‘Yes,’ but she is sticking up the envelope and
addressing it all the same. The truth is, her head is slightly turned by her success with Mr Monro. He has
straight black hair and Slavonic cheekbones and a strong mouth. I should think he was a very devil of obstinacy.
My darling, I had lots to say to you. Harold has heard from the Foreign Office this morning. They are
all going off to Geneva this week, and they want him to wait till their return, about September 20th, and then
go to London to ‘have a talk’. Anyhow that is a respite, but I would rather have things definitely settled.
A retired business man wants me to tell him how to be happy living with an invalid wife in a small
hotel in Kensington. How should I know? I’m not a novelist. Shah I send you the letter to answer? It seems to
be more in your line than mine. He encloses an essay on rabbits.
Dear me, I do wish I had you always in the house. Have you read Oroonoko? Do you like it?314 Do
you like me? Would you miss me if I disappeared? Have you been depressed? Do you still think you are a bad
writer? Did you like Harold the other day?
Sheep are bleating on the road outside. That sound whisks me straight back to the Bakhtiari road. How
hot it must be there now, and how deserted. I wish I were there in camp, with you.

V.

312 Raymond Mortimer.

313 (1879-1932) Poet and editor, founder of Poetry Review, and owner of the Poetry Bookshop, which he hoped Dorothy Wellesley would subsidize.
314 Virginia had asked Vita to lend her the most romantic novel Aphra Behn had written. Oroonoko (1688) was about a slave whom Mrs Behn met in
Dutch Guiana.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Friday 2 September

Dearest Mrs N:

Well its all settled. Lady G. Wellesley has bought me. She paid £25 thousand down and the rest on mortgage,
so I’m hers for life. I have the use of the Rolls Royce and wine to taste.
Speaking sober prose, however, I wont belong to the two of you, or to the one of you, if the two of us
belong to the one. In short, if Dotty’s yours, I’m not. A profound truth is involved which I leave you to discover.
It is too hot to argue: and I’m too depressed.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Friday night [16 September]

In spite of Heaven bringing you and Dottie together,315 she is not coming here before Monday. She is staying
till Wednesday morning. So if you and Leonard come, come on Monday or Tuesday, not Sunday; that is, if
you wish to see her. Come to lunch anyhow, and not at 2.30—a ridiculous hour to arrive at. Telegraph.
I am sorry and shocked about Philip Ritchie.316 1 had no idea he was so ill. I hardly knew him, but he
had a good brow and Eddy was fond of him, also Tray. Besides, it is wrong that people of 28 should die.
I am ashamed to say I forgot Mrs Campbell’s317 Shelley. (I don’t often forget things for you.) I sent it
this morning.
I can’t come next Thursday damn it because it is the boys’ last day at home. They go back to school
on Friday. I could come Thursday week if that’s any good?
Don’t go right away from me. I depend on you more than you know.

V.

315 Dorothy Wellesley had now given up the idea of taking a share in Monro’s bookshop, and proposed instead to edit and finance the Hogarth Press
series of contemporary poets, a project which succeeded.
316 Ritchie died on 13 September from septic pneumonia after an operation to remove his tonsils. He was twenty-eight.
317 Olwen Ward Campbell.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Wednesday [21 September]

...Very hurried, so I cant write. And rather melancholy. This I’ll explain when we meet, if you are kind.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Thursday [22 September]

My darling, why melancholy? I thought you were not quite yourself the other day, and wondered if it was all
my imagination. I expect tomorrow in London will be pretty hopeless for me, as (a) I shall have Nigel, and (b)
it is B M’s birthday so I’ll have to go to Ebury Street—but if I can look in during the morning for a minute,
even with Nigel (who can be left in the car) I will. Ben has now got influenza, and can’t go to school for a few
days. I say, I hope I didn’t give it to you on Monday. My temperature went up to 103 after you had gone, I was
horrified thinking I might have given it to you—did I? I’d have avoided you, if I’d known, and left you to talk
to Dottie alone— but I thought I just had a cold.
Tell Leonard I’m sorry my review of Gertrude Bell’s letters318 was so bad. I’m writing an article which
I will offer him if he likes.
I wish I were with you today, damn it all; I want to know what is the matter.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Sunday [25 September]

Look here, I want to be told,

(1) how you are, truthfully.
(2) any news from Foreign Office?
Hows Ben? Anybody else got it? My God, I do think you deserve death and disaster for coming to
London in that flood after a temperature of 104!...
But I own I’d like to see you. Then I’d tell you about my melancholy and a thousand other things. Its
the last chance of a night before London’s chastity begins....

318 In Nation, 1 October 1927.

October - December 1927
On 9 October Virginia wrote to Vita, almost casually towards the end of a long letter, that she had
decided to write a book about her, to be called Orlando. Vita was delighted by the idea, and felt no
alarm about being publicly identified with the subject by character, dedication and photographs. She
and Virginia returned to Knole to research pictures and source material. For the next year the book
became a game between them, Virginia demanding details of Vita’s past life, Vita trying to prise out
of Virginia something more of her intentions—but she was not allowed to read a word of it until
publication day. Meanwhile Vita wrote Twelve Days, and continued her affair with Mary Campbell,
which hitherto she had attempted to conceal from Virginia, (though she could not do so from Roy).
On 10 November she made Virginia a complete and tearful confession. In mid-December she spent a
week in Berlin, where Harold had been posted as Counsellor to the British Embassy, and was at
Knole for Christmas.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
9 October

Look, dearest what a lovely page this is, and think how, were it not for the screen and the Campbell,319 it might
all be filled to the brim with lovemaking unbelievable: indiscretions incredible: instead of which, nothing shall
be said but what a Campbell behind the screen might hear....
Yesterday morning I was in despair.... I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head
in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando:
A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. I
wrote rapidly till 12.... But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of
your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with
Campbell).... Shall you mind? Say yes, or No:...

319 Mary Campbell.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Tuesday [11 October]

My God, Virginia, if ever I was thrilled and terrified it is at the prospect of being projected into the shape of
Orlando.320 What fun for you; what fun for me. You see, any vengeance that you ever want to take will lie
ready to your hand. Yes, go ahead, toss up your pancake, brown it nicely on both sides, pour brandy over it,
and serve hot. You have my full permission. Only I think that having drawn and quartered me, unwound and
retwisted me, or whatever it is that you intend to do, you ought to dedicate it to your victim.
And what a lovely letter you wrote me, Campbell or no Campbell. (How flattered she’d be if she knew.
But she doesn’t and shan’t.) How right I was,—not that it needed much perspicacity,—when I realised at
Clive’s that here was the most...what shall I say? you want duty and devotion, but if I wrote what I really think
you would only say that Vita was laying it on a bit too thick. So I better not expose myself to your jeers. But
how right I was, all the same; and to force myself on you at Richmond,321 and so lay the train for the explosion
which happened on the sofa in my room here when you behaved so disgracefully and acquired me for ever.
Acquired me, that’s what you did, like buying a puppy in a shop and leading it away on a string. Still trotting
after you, and still on a string. For all the world like Pinker.
Last night was the most beautiful misty moonlight night I ever saw in my life. No, I did not go down
the lanes. I hung out of my window and listened to the dead leaves twirling down in the stillness. I thought
how lovely and lonely it must be at Laughton.322 I was sorry about Laughton,—a fairy-story place for Virginia
to live in.
Moody323 is writing a novel. About spiritualism.
No, I have never heard of Mr Cecil Beaston [sir]324 but please do go and be photographed and give me
one.
Darling, I can’t come up tomorrow, and am sending you a telegram to that effect. I won’t tell you
why,—a squalid reason. I shall come up next week though, and probably stay a night in London. And what
about you coming here one of these days? You said you would and the advantages are obvious.
Not a word from that bloody Foreign Office. I fear they are plotting something very dark. Harold
approaches his correspondence more and more gingerly. Oh, by the way, he finished his book today and it has
gone to be typed.325 So you will have it soon.
I wish you were here. The days and nights are beautiful as only autumn can be. This sounds like Clive
when his autumn fires are best, and ripe apples dropping on his head, but I assure you I am not in the same
mood as Clive. No. My delight is purely aesthetic, and country bumpkin I am good, industrious, and loving;
how long will it be, though, before I break out? I would never break out if I had you here, but you leave me
unguarded. Now, none of that means anything at all, so don’t imagine that it does. I am Virginia’s good puppy,

320 On 5 October Virginia had written in her diary: ‘And instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500
and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita, only with a change about from one sex to another.’
321 In January 1913.
322 Laughton Place, near Glynde, was a sixteenth-century moated house which the Woolfs were tempted to buy.
323 George Home, the butler at Long Barn.
324 Virginia twice refused to be photographed by Cecil Beaton.
325 The Development of English Biography, published by the Hogarth Press in February 1928.
beating my tail on the floor, responsive to a kind pat.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Friday [14 October]

Darling, this is a letter written in a hurry and a furious temper to say that Harold is going to Berlin next week.326
Shall you be free on Tuesday if I come after lunch for a bit? We are so cross, but it appears to be inevitable.
We only heard this morning. Berlin for three years! Good Lord deliver us.

V.

I shan’t go there till the end of January.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock Square]
Friday 13 [14] October

...Never do I leave you without thinking, its for the last time. And the truth is, we gain as much as we lose by
this. Since I am always certain you’ll be off and on with another next Thursday week (you say so yourself, bad
creature, at the end of your last letter, which is where the viper carries its sting) since all our intercourse is
tinged with this melancholy on my part and desire to be white nosed and so keep you half an instant longer,
perhaps, as I say we gain in intensity what we lack in the sober comfortable virtues of a prolonged and safe
and respectable and chaste and cold blooded friendship....
Orlando will be a little book, with pictures and a map or two. I make it up in bed at night, as I walk the
streets, everywhere. I want to see you in the lamplight, in your emeralds. In fact, I have never more wanted to
see you than I do now—-just to sit and look at you, and get you to talk, and then rapidly and secretly, correct
certain doubtful points. About your teeth now and your temper. Is it true you grind your teeth at night?... What
and when was your moment of greatest disillusionment?...
Please tell me beforehand when you will come, and for how long: unless the dolphin has died
meanwhile and its colours are those of death and decomposition. If you’ve given yourself to Campbell, I’ll
have no more to do with you, and so it shall be written, plainly, for all the world to read in Orlando....

326 He was posted as Counsellor to the British Embassy there.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Friday [21 October]

...I’m not afraid of your not wanting me; only of what one calls circumstances. So please say honestly.... My
questions about your past can wait till you’re in London. I should hate forever to be for an instant a burden to
you....

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Sunday [23 October]

I’m afraid you are feeling lonely tonight. I wish I were with you. Harold is a very nice man, and I’m glad I
know him.
Would Wednesday, Thursday suit you for me to come, suppose Friday was difficult? But I’m not sure.
What used you and Lord Lascelles327 to talk about?...

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [25 October]

Darling lovely Virginia

I can’t make out from your letter,—do you mean Wednesday or Thursday? because Wednesday I have got to
dine with (don’t laugh) the King of Iraq.328 But Thursday I shall be here. And alone. I shan’t stay up in London
Wednesday night but shall come down after dinner. I nearly came to see you yesterday, when I was in London,
but I thought you might be busy and I didn’t want to be a bore. I was so depressed.329 I was grateful to you for
your letter, it was so welcome and badly needed.
I will try to remember what I talked to Harry Lascelles about! He was always very tongue-tied, so we
didn’t get very far. He had nice hands.
Darling I have found some lovely pictures at Knole. I do want you to come. Pippin has six puppies.
Tell Pinker. Bring her when you come. Oh I do want you to come. Let me know: Thursday or Friday—or
Saturday or Sunday if you prefer.

V.

327 Lord Lascelles, who had been in love with Vita in 1912-13, is the Archduchess Harriet in Orlando. In 1922 he married Princess Mary, daughter of
King George V.

328 Whom Vita had met in Baghdad on her way to Persia in 1926.
329 Harold had left that day for Berlin
To Virginia Woolf
Friday morning [11 November]

I have been so really wretched since last night.330 I felt suddenly that the whole of my life was a failure, in so
far as I seemed incapable of creating one single perfect relationship—What shall I do about it, Virginia? be
stronger-minded, I suppose. Well, at least I won’t create any further mistakes! My darling, I’m grateful to you;
you were quite right to say what you did; it has given me a pull-up; I drift too easily.
But look here, remember and believe that you mean something absolutely vital to me. I don’t
exaggerate when I say that I don’t know what I should do if you ceased to be fond of me,—got irritated,—got
bored. You disturbed me a good deal by what you said about Clive even. Surely you can’t mean anything
serious? Oh no, that’s too unthinkable. I shan’t worry about that—There’s plenty else to worry about.
Darling forgive me my faults. I hate them in myself, and I know you are right. But they are silly surface
things. My love for you is absolutely true, vivid, and unalterable

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Friday night [11 November]

Dearest Creature,

You make me feel such a brute—and I didn’t mean to be. One can’t regulate the tone of one’s voice, I suppose;
for nothing I said could in substance make you wretched for even half a second—only that you cant help
attracting the flounderers.... And I’m half, or 10th, part, jealous, when I see you with the Valeries and the
Marys: so you can discount that.
And thats all there is to it as far as I’m concerned. I’m happy to think you do care: for often I seem
old, fretful, querulous, difficult (tho’ charming) and begin to doubt....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Thursday [17 November]

It is absolutely damnable: before getting your letter I promised to go to Brighton on Monday evening, and now
I can’t get out of it though I have tried. BM was here today, and I left your letter unanswered hoping she would
let me off, but it was no good, and now you will think ‘Oh damn Vita there she is cluttered up again,’—that’s
just my luck. I shan’t blame you if you do think that. What is so maddening is that you say you’ll be alone
Monday evening. I wish you’d said so the other day—on Monday last I mean. I better not come to lunch, then?

330 Vita had told Virginia about her affair with Mary Campbell, and about Roy’s fury when he found out. Vita was reduced to tears.
even if I don’t steal you from the Press afterwards.
Oxford was a repetition of your Oxford: dinner with Mr Aubrey Herbert, and then that assembly at St
Hugh’s My paper, and then heckling. A bottle of hock on return to the hotel (the Mitre this time, not the
331

Clarendon,) and so to an exhausted sleep. I wondered why you hadn’t been more tired? I felt like a dry
sponge—but I remembered that you were as lively as a cricket.... How I wished you were there. It all came
back to me with a painful vividness. Why haven’t we got more things to look back upon? The very few days
that we have had together away from London stand out for me with just that difference that there is between
that stereoscopic photograph I showed you, and an ordinary photograph.
I say talking of photographs I went off with that portfolio of Lenare’s332 by mistake. Shall I send it
back? The Kodak people promised that film for today, but I haven’t had it yet.
Is this a loving letter? Not very, you will think, and yet there’s a lot behind it, if you only knew.
Are you well? are you fond of me? Shall I see you at all on Monday or not? I get into despair when
these contretemps happen.
Where is the French that I am to translate?333 And most important of all, when are you coming here to
stay? I feel this is not only important, but vital. Why not come next Saturday and I’ll motor you up on Sunday
in time for Osbert’s play.334 Give this your consideration, as really I do feel that it is urgent. You may not, but
I do. I want you to come.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Oxford
Tuesday [22 November]

I enclose three communications which concern you. What are we to do about the Sitwell play? Would you like
me to give up my place to Leonard? I don’t want to, but will do so if you like—Or could he go in Clive’s box?
Or could he have a press ticket? They must have sent one to the Nation. I am sorry about it.
Ethel335 is a trump, isn’t she? I have accepted 336 and have put off going to Berlin till the third instead
of the first—all for love of Virginia.
I am not enjoying myself here very much, thank you, but the operation was what they call successful,
so that’s a comfort.337 I don’t know how long I shall have to stay here, but I should think until Thursday. Rather
grim.
What do you make of Sibyl’s letter? I think it sounds sinister. She must have a rod in pickle for me.

331 Vita spoke on modern poets.

332 Photographer.
333 See Vita’s letter of 26 April 1928.
334 Osbert Sitwell’s play, All at Sea, was performed at the Arts Theatre Club. Although all three Sitwells appeared on the stage, and Cecil Beaton
designed the scenery, the play was a total flop and was taken off after only three performances.
335 Ethel Sands.
336 Ethel’s party, on 2 December.
337 Ben Nicolson had had an emergency operation for tonsillitis.
 You were a nice Virginia yesterday—very nice—even nicer than usual. Why? I was glad I had come
up.
I say, I do hate being here—and I hate myself for hating it. How selfish one is.
I expect it is good for the soul. Is it? I wish you were here, then I should love it.
Bless you, darling darling Virginia—you don’t know how much I love you—how deeply—and how
permanently.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square Monday
[5 December]

Shall I come Saturday for the night?—seems the only chance. Let me know....
Should you say, if I rang you up to ask, that you were fond of me? If I saw you would you kiss me?
If I were in bed would you—
I’m rather excited about Orlando tonight: have been lying by the fire and making up the last chapter.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Tuesday [6 December]

I am in despair: Saturday is the one and only evening I have somebody coming, Dottie to wit—I have tried to
put her off but she says it is the only day she can come. Curse and damn. Could you come either Thursday,
Friday, or Sunday, possibly? I am going to Brighton tomorrow for the night, so answer to the Metropole
please338—If you can come, all your questions shall be answered in the affirmative. It is practically impossible
to get in or out of the house here, as there is a gaping hole in front of every door,339—one has to jump—very
dangerous but rather exciting. And stinking men crawling like beetles all over the floor. But no matter—only
make a great effort,— come—and see how nice I’ll be.

338 The Metropole Hotel in Brighton, where Lady Sackville was spending the winter.
339 Central heating was being installed at Long Barn.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1 [21 December]

...I have been buying presents, and feel degraded in consequence—but I bought 2 yards of pearls at Whitworths,
or is it Woolworths, for 6d to wear tonight. Shan’t I look nice? Heres 12/6.1 like writing cheques, it makes me
feel more like other women....

To Virginia Woolf
Knole Sevenoaks
Kent
Thursday [29 December]

Will this ever reach you? are you completely snowed up? is it very beautiful among the Downs? does Pinker
like it? have you perhaps gone back to London? have you anything to eat? Shall I ever get to Sherfield
tomorrow? shall I ever see you again? shall I ever write another book? I feel that the answer to most of these
questions is in the negative.
I cashed your cheque, not because I wanted the 12/6—but because I thought that would make you feel
even more like other women—and I knew it would come back to you eventually with my endorsement on the
back, quite as though you were a really grown-up person. Now tomorrow I shall be confronted with Ethel and
her eagle eye; I must display, I feel, no enthusiasm about any of my friends; or I say, shall I drag a completely
red herring across her path? That would be rather fun. I’ll invent a new beauty, whom nobody has ever seen,
I’ll ask Ethel if I may bring her to dinner, a dinner which on one pretext or another will have to be permanently
put off. What shall we call her? You think of a suitable name, something very romantic like Gloria
Throckmorton, or Lesbia Featherstonehaugh. She is only nineteen, has run away from her family in Merioneth,
and taken a flat in London. She is more lovely than Valerie, 340 more witty than Virginia, more wanton than
Mary, and a better golfer than Miss Cecilia Leitch.341
On Xmas day I went to Brighton, throwing up floods on either side, and in torrents of rain. I looked
wistfully to the left as I passed through Lewes.
Knole is all soft and white, and the snow falls in great flumps as the men shovel it off the roof. We are
quite cut off except by walking. No motors, no telephone. I wish you were here. You’re coming to Long Barn,
aren’t you though? and in no Puritanical frame of mind?

Your
V.

340 Valerie Taylor, a young actress with whom Raymond Mortimer had been in love.
341 Winner of the British Ladies’ Golf Championship in 1914 and again in 1920-21. She called herself Cecil, not Cecilia.
January - April 1928
January 1928 was a sad month for Vita. Her father, Lord Sackville, was slowly and painfully dying
at Knole. The end came on 28 January, and Virginia was her main source of consolation, for the loss
not only of a beloved parent, but of Knole too, for as a daughter she could not inherit it. The house
and title passed to her uncle, Charles. In late February she went to Berlin to be with Harold, and
disliked the diplomatic parties even more than she had disliked them at Teheran, because Berlin was
uglier and the parties smarter. There she met Margaret Voigt, an American writer married to a British
journalist, who soon became a rival to Mary Campbell, as Virginia was quick to detect from Vita’s
letters; and began to translate, with the help of her cousin Edward Sackville-West, who was a better
linguist than Vita, the Duino Elegies of Rilke. In March she lectured with Harold in Copenhagen.
Virginia, though often ill, was making good progress with Orlando.

To Virginia Woolf
Knole Sevenoaks Kent
Friday [6 January]

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. Darling, Dada has been so ill; 342 we thought it was influenza, and then
it suddenly turned to pneumonia. We had an awful fright, and though he is rather better today the doctor still
won’t say he is out of danger. That is why I am still here, and I think I must stay here all next week—I can’t
leave him alone with servants and nurses in this big house, he’d be too melancholy My fingers itch to suggest
that you should come down for a night—or more—as I shall be alone; I mean, he’ll still be in bed— but I don’t
know if you would like to? It would be very good for Orlando, (say I tentatively) and I find that one can very
soon have enough of the society of hospital nurses.
Rebecca West wrote an article about The Land which succeeded in annoying me; I resent being told
that my feeling for the country is not genuine, but only what I think people ought to feel about the country;
this is not true. 343 Also I was vexed at the Femina prize being given to my bête noire instead of to you; you
see, if you had been given it you could never have poked fun at me again.344 So my literary temper is full of
bile. Also I want to see you, but am tied here —Damn it all—

Your
V.

342 Lord Sackville was ill at Knole with what was thought to be pneumonia.
343 In a review which appeared in T. P. ’s Weekly for 7 January, Rebecca West had described The Land as ‘a poem unlikely to survive’.
344 The Femina Prize had not yet been awarded. It went, in fact, to Virginia for To the Lighthouse.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
[14 January]

Dearest Creature,

I’m frightfully sorry about your father. Lord! What a time you have of it: I do hope he is better: and for God’s
sake dont catch it yourself. Please, darling creature, be careful....
Damn Rebecca—who doesn’t know a turnip from an umbrella, nor a poem from a potato if it comes
to that—what right has she to pontificate about the Land? Let me see it.

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Sevenoaks
Kent
20 January

Virginia darling, I promised to let you know how Dada was—he is terribly ill, with pericarditis—(inflammation
round the heart—) and it is a very slender chance that he may yet pull through. We can only hang on and wait
to see what the next two or three days bring forth. I have wired for Harold who arrives this evening. It is a
nightmare, especially as he suffers agonies of pain and they dare give him hardly any drugs to relieve it. If he
were not in pain it would not be so bad—but as it is, it is simply ghastly to see him—and he is an angel of
patience and uncomplainingness. The whole atmosphere of the house reminds me so vividly of the end of The
Voyage Out.
Don’t bother to answer this but I thought you would be wondering what I was up to.

Your miserable
Vita
To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Sevenoaks
Kent
Tuesday evening [24 January]

Darling, my father is much better, and I think I can come to London tomorrow—in which case I’ll be with you
at 5. I’ll telephone in the morning if I can’t, i.e. if he is not so well. It is absolutely miraculous his having pulled
through—as they had really despaired of his life last Wednesday—Telephone before 10 if you want to put me
off. I long to see you, and am really coming for that—as otherwise I would send the boys345 with Harold—but
I do long to see you so.
Your loving (and rather shattered)

Orlando—
ha-ha!

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Thursday [26 January]

...I’m going to keep quiet so as to get back to Orlando as soon as I can.... I’ve been reading The Land—so
good, I think, some lines.

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Sevenoaks
Kent [27 January]

My darling, I am most terribly sorry to know that Hardy and Meredith have been too much for you, between
them,346 but slightly cheered by hearing from Dottie that she is going to see you this evening. Harold was to
have left today, and I was going up to London with him, but my father was so unwell yesterday that he put off
going, and I am thankful that he did so, as he is very much worse today, and I fear there is now very little hope.
His heart is failing at last after the long strain on it. We can do nothing but sit and wait to see what happens. It
is all the more cruel after his apparent recovery the other day. I am terribly sorry for poor Olive347—it is worse
for her than for anybody.
I would have telephoned to ask how you were but don’t like to bother Leonard: However, I do hope

345 To school.
346 Thomas Hardy had died on 11 January, and Virginia attended his funeral at Westminster Abbey. She was preparing an article entitled ‘The Novels
of George Meredith’, for the Times Literary Supplement of 9 February 1928. and wrote to Eddy Sackville-West that she had had to read all of Meredith’s
novels in a week.
347 Olive Rubens.
that the fact of your seeing Dome means that you are rather better.

Your loving
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Sunday [29 January]

Darling honey,

This is only to send you my love—You dont know how much I care for you.
Joanne Trautmann

To Virginia Woolf
Knole
Sevenoaks
Kent
Monday [30 January]

My darling, thank you for your very sweet little note. I find it difficult to say anything about it all—I will tell
you some day.348 In the meantime nothing but the most grotesque ideas come into my mind, such as what good
copy it would all be for Virginias book. The whole thing is a mixture of the tragic, the grotesque and the
magnificent.
Fortunately one scarcely has time to think. He lies in the chapel, and I wish you could see it. It is very
beautiful, and quite unreal.
I am going back to Long Barn tomorrow after the funeral. I would like to come and see you soon if I
may. In the meantime, please love me, as you say you do—

Your Vita

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Thursday [2 February]

My darling, what an angel you are to me. I wish I was dining with you tonight, but I have carried off Olive
who is staying here with me and whom I do not like to leave alone. She is going away on Monday, and I think
I shall come up to London on Monday, so shall I come and see you then? in the evening. I promise not to be
gloomy—and if you would come down for a night any time next week I should like
nothing better. I needn’t tell you that though. Harold has gone, so I shall be alone. I’m not going to Berlin for
about three weeks.

348 Lord Sackville died at Knole a few minutes after midnight on 28 January.
 I have just come back from Withyham,349 where the floor of the chapel is completely carpeted with
flowers.
Darling, I do love you so, and you are so sweet to me. I do so want to see you—

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Friday [3 February]

Yes, darling honey, I shall be in all Monday evening, and shall expect you any time after five....
Don’t mind being as miserable as you like with me—I have a great turn that way myself—
A thousand useless but quite genuine loves descend upon you at this moment— which is I know very
very horrid, my poor dear honey.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Sunday [5 February]
[In pencil]

My darling, there is nothing in the world I should like better than to dine with you alone tomorrow night—I
did not dare propose it, not thinking that you would be alone— I will come at about 7—shall I?

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Wednesday [8 February]

My darling, I think you are not only the most intelligent but also the nicest person I know. I shall never never
forget how sweet you have been to me. You have only one serious rival in my affections, and that is Bosman’s
Potto.350 I must say he’s irresistible, and so are you,—not that I ever made much attempt to resist, from that
evening here when you behaved so scandalously, down to the present day.
I can’t tell you how much I like ‘The Sun and the Fish’, (all the more because it is all about things we
did together,) and I am ordering a copy of Time and Tide.351 If you come on Friday I shall be overjoyed, but I
don't want you to get tired, and I know you are busy, so don’t feel bound, my darling. But if you come, will
you bring Vanessa’s drawing?

349 The village church in Sussex where the Sackvilles had been buried since the sixteenth century. Vita’s own ashes were placed in the crypt in 1962,
next to her fathers coffin.
350 Virginia’s name for herself when writing to Vita.
351 The Sun and the Fish’, Virginia’s article about the eclipse which she had observed with Vita on 29 June 1927, appeared in Time and Tide, 3
February 1928.
 I have written letters all day, and have nearly come to an end, so perhaps tomorrow I may be able to
write a gloomy little poem for you, all about mortality.
The N.Y. Tribune says The Land is the dullest poem ever written in that genre... I suspect they’re right.
It is all very well for Max Beerbohm to talk, but he doesn’t know what you’re really like—nor what a
heart of gold you’ve got.
I do love you.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Thursday [9 February]

I shall arrive at Sevenoaks at 1.12 tomorrow...—and stay till 6.30 so I’m afraid you’ll have to give me not only
a bun for my tea but a bone for my lunch...and by the way I’m now called Bosman’s Potto, not V.W. by
arrangement—A finer name, don’t you think?...

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Tuesday [21 February]

Darling darling Potto—could you possibly make it Thursday? I’ll tell you why: because if I leave England on
Saturday I shall get to Berlin early on Sunday morning, and Sunday is Harold’s free day—and if I leave on
Saturday I shall have to go up to London on Friday—But if you can’t manage Thursday I will put off going—
it doesn’t really very much matter, but I thought I would ask you on the chance. Will you ring me up tomorrow
morning? I would ring you up now, but I always seem to get Leonard—so choose your own time.
I do hope your throat is better.
What a lovely signature. I can’t rival that.352
I have got the drawing of you353 framed on my writing table.
I can take you up to London by car, whichever day you come—as I shall be leaving then. Mind you
ring me up as I suppose I ought to get my tickets. I have got Dada’s car and it goes as fast as Captain
Campbell.354

Your loving
V.

P.S. Now don’t say in your high-bred mettlesome way ‘I won’t come at all.’

352 Virginia had signed her last letter ‘Bosman’ and had drawn a circle of loops around it.
353 By Vanessa Bell.
354 Captain Malcolm Campbell set a new world land-speed record in his car Bluebird at Daytona Beach, Florida, on 19 February 1928.
To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken-allee
Berlin NW23
Wednesday [29 February]

My darling, well, here I am, feeling rather like a jackdaw with a broken wing again— but I have got a lovely
sheet of paper, haven’t I? to write to Virginia on. Will you, by the way, note the address at the top? and write
to me here, as if you write to the Embassy I don’t get it till luncheon, whereas if you write here the whole
morning is made more exciting by the thought that a post may be brought to me at any moment. This is a
bloody place, to be sure; and my feelings which if I gave way to them would be all rebellion and despair, just
temper and tears,—are complicated by the feeling that I mustn’t hate Berlin because of Harold, i.e. it is an
implied criticism of him, and a resentment, and I can’t bear to harbour any thought which reflects on him—
besides, he can’t help it, I suppose—so what with one emotion and another it is all very difficult. Berlin in the
meantime is doing its best to look gay with flags: the black flag of Afghanistan.355 The officials charged with
preparing the reception of the Afghans were thrown into an agitation, as they were warned that the King wanted
five beds in his room. Was he, then, they asked, bringing four wives? No, he was only bringing one wife, and
one lady who for European purposes was known as his sister-in-law. Why, then, five beds? why not three? It
then transpired that according to Afghan custom, the remainder of the night may not be spent in any bed in
which the act of love has been consummated; therefore, if the King felt inclined to commit that act with either,
or both, of the ladies, there must be two spare beds for them to change over into.
The Germans thought this very odd. I think on the contrary that it reveals a high state of civilisation.
Ask Potto what he thinks. And do you think that Queen Mary is at this moment supervising the installation of
five beds in a bedroom at Buckingham Palace? 356
I say: I can’t be back till the 28th. Is there any chance of your still being there? I’ll tell you why:
because I find that Harold has arranged for us both to go to Copenhagen on the 25th and LECTURE TO THE
DANES—ha! ha!—he on Byron, and I on poetry.
I have a new friend here,357 who for sheer fantasy of nationality and temperament is not unworthy to
be a denizen of Virginia’s world. (Except that, as we know, it is only your world which is fantastic: your
characters are always mild ladies and gentlemen of university education and impeccable refinement.) But as
to my friend: born a Greek, with an Italian mother, she was brought up in Italy, naturalised a Swiss, married a
Swede who was then naturalised a Belgian. There is also a Russian grandmother somewhere in the background.
Very tall and dark, with masses of untidy curly black hair, she decorates her person with apparently every
garment in her wardrobe at the same time: large flowered shawls, ribbons, lace, sashes, bows, scarves, mittens;
and moreover from her wrists dangle fans and bunches of keys. She cannot move across the room without
dropping two or three of these objects on the floor, of which she remains blissfully unconscious. Not content
with this remarkable appearance, she lives in a dark house entirely decorated with spurs. Large spurs, small
spurs, silver spurs, steel spurs, spiky spurs; and a few stirrups thrown in to fill up. She has no mother-tongue,
which is scarcely surprising, but usually talks in voluble and abominable French, and nourishes a posthumous
and entirely Sapphic passion for the Lady of Shalott.358 She is my one amusement and recreation in this dreary

355 King Amanullah had been amir of Afghanistan since 1917, and opened his country to Western influences. Among other unprecedented actions, he
had established Afghan Legations in Berlin, Paris and London. He was now paying state visits to these capitals.
356 The London visit was from 13 to 15 March.
357 Else Lasker-Schiiler.
358 Elaine, the Fair Maid of Astolat, in the Arthurian legends. She was the subject and title of Tennyson’s poem.
city, together with another lady whose morals I strongly suspect,359 and whose principal link with me is a
frenzied admiration for the works of Virginia Woolf. I must tell you that you are the idol of the Berlin
intelligentsia; but that the gros public prefer Galsworthy and—-Jack London!360 who they think is our leading
author.
I propose to translate the poems of Rainer Maria Rilke for Dottie’s series,361 if they have not already
been translated—and if you think it would be a good thing to do? They are rather difficult, but very good. I am
grateful to you for having told me to buy Yeats’ poems, they kept me happy in the train all the way. I like the
one about Leda,

How can those terrified vague fingers push

That feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

They are just what poetry ought to be,—but who could have foreseen that Yeats of ah people would veer round
at the end of his life to your friend Tom Eliot? Rilke is not without a dash of it too,—even to making up
imaginary characters like Mr Sweeney Yet I don’t suppose Rilke ever read Eliot.
You will write to me, won’t you? I do so hate diplomats—but I’m bound to say that most of the people
who come to our house are more or less disreputable journalists—also Sinclair Lewis who is a queer
character—and the woman he lives with.362 All the same I feel an awful fish out of water—and Harold now
says he wants to be an Ambassador—but can you see poor Vita as an ambassadress? I can’t—and the prospect
fills me with dismay. Really fate does play queer tricks on one, when all one wants to do is to garden and write
and talk to Potto—and instead of that one will go to pay calls in a motor with an ambassadorial footman on
the box and a cockade in his hat.
Well, well. Poor Orlando.

Your
V.

359 Margaret Goldsmith, wife of Frederick Voigt, a British foreign correspondent in Berlin, and herself a writer and literary agent.
360 The American novelist and adventurer (1876-1916).
361 Vita did these translations with the help of Eddy Sackville-West, and they dedicated the book ‘To each other’. It was not in the Dorothy Wellesley
series, but published by the Hogarth Press separately.
362 Harold had met Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) on his return to Berlin after Lord Sackville’s funeral. The ‘woman’ was Dorothy Thompson, the
journalist; they married later in 1928 and visited Long Barn on their honeymoon. In 1930 Lewis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Tuesday [6 March]

For Gods sake, translate Rilke: only be sure of your rights; and that there’s no other in English—I read some
(prose) in French; and thought it good up to a point; subtle, melodious; but not quite getting over the obstacle.
His poetry may be better; probably, from what they say, it is. Yes, certainly do it. Did you know that I talk
French very well? That is with great fluency, some inaccuracy, and a good many words not in use since Saint-
Simon? This is the report of my French teacher.... I only want you to know this fact: that I do talk French:
because you will never hear me; and then I get a little more even with you in real-womanliness—All real
women talk French, and powder their noses....

To Virginia Woolf
British Embassy
Berlin
8 March

I know you are still alive, because Clive mentions you in his letters to Harold, (yes, those documents continue
to pile up, and are a source of great amusement to us,) but I don’t think you can love me any more because I
haven’t heard a word from you. Yet I wrote you a long long letter. Have you forgotten me? or are you just
busy? or is Potto jealous?
Have you ever heard of a fellow author of yours, called Phyllis Bottome?363 Hitherto I have always
pronounced her name as the part one sits on, but I now learn that the correct pronounciation is Botome.
Anyway, this lady has but one desire in life, and that is to make your acquaintance. As she thinks this is beyond
her reach, she has consoled herself by writing a story in which she describes the meeting between you and
herself. She describes you as she imagines you to be. Now how much would you give to read that story?
Personally I would give a great deal, and am trying to obtain it. (It exists only in manuscript.) Miss Bo-tome,
who apparently is a best seller, does not live here, but in Switzerland somewhere. The friend who told me of
this takes it quite seriously, and says it is not funny at all, but extremely pathetic; I have however persuaded
her to write for the story.
Darling, could you send me a copy of Seducers and a copy of Passenger to Teheran, by Foreign Office
bag? It leaves London on Tuesday. This is BUSINESS, as I might get Seducer translated. You mark the parcel
By bag to Berlin.
Any books to review? except that I was so awfully late with the last one that I don’t suppose Leonard
will ever give me one again.
Oh dear, I am so homesick.

Your
V.

363 (1882-1963.) The popular novelist and short-story writer, whom Vita had already met in Berlin.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
12 March

...I fell in love with Noel Coward, and he’s coming to tea. You cant have all the love in Chelsea—Potto must
have some: Noel Coward must have some. I played a funny trick. I had no hat. Bought one for 7/11 3/4 at a
shop in Oxford Street: green felt: the wrong coloured ribbon: all a flop like a pancake in midair. Even I thought
I looked odd. But I wanted to see what happens among real women if one of them looks like a pancake in mid
air. In came the dashing vermeil-tinctured red-stopper-bottle-looking Mrs Edwin Montagu. She started. She
positively deplored me. Then hid a smile. Looked again. Thought Ah what a tragedy! Liked me even as she
pitied. Overheard me flirting. Was puzzled. Finally conquered. You see, women cant hold out against this kind
of flagrant disavowal of all womanliness. They open their arms as to a flayed bird in a blast: whereas, the
Mary’s of this world, with every feather in place, are pecked, stoned, often die, every feather stained with
blood—at the bottom of the cage.
Darling, are you happy or unhappy? Writing? Loving? Please send me a long letter, on big paper,
because Potto likes that best....

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken-allee
[Berlin] NW23
14 March

Here is the nice big paper that Potto likes—I have got some very smart blue paper with the address stamped
on it, and telephone number Moabit 37-94, but if Potto likes this best he must have it. I have been coming to
the not very original conclusion that Virginia is in every way the most charming person in the world—in fact
I have spent the last three or four days thinking of very little else and being very happy in my absorption; it
has been like living a little secret life that nobody knew anything about. And listen: I have got Bottome’s story
for you—and it will follow in a day or two. There must be this delay because the person who got it for me
wants to read it again before I send it off. Bottome is so thrilled at the idea of your reading it that she rings up
Berlin on the telephone out of Switzerland to know if it has yet been posted to you—and she wishes you to be
told that ‘the idea came to her in a dream’. You are called Avery Fleming in the story. You must return it when
read.
I have been getting into a row with the Hogarth Press, as you will see by the enclosed bill, the reason
being that I thought they would just knock it off my royalties if ever any became due to me; but I hurriedly
and apologetically enclose a cheque now. I suppose making up our books means the final withdrawal of
Angus.364 And more business before I go on to any more personal matter or geisterforschung: there’s a woman
here called Margaret Voigt-Goldsmith, who is a literary agent and who wrote to you some time ago to ask if
she could deal with your books to get them translated into German. You referred her to Curtis-Brown, who
sent her an answer which on investigation proved to be inaccurate; i.e. said that Fischer was doing your books
here, which it seems he is not. Would there therefore be any chance of Margaret Voigt getting the handling of
your books after all? She is extremely nice, and energetic and intelligent; and incidentally a bosom friend of
mine. Though I would not recommend her if I were not sure that you would do well by her. Her address is:

364 Angus Davidson had been Manager of the Hogarth Press since 1924, and was dismissed by Leonard in December 1927.
Mrs Voigt-Goldsmith, 7 Nürnberger-strasse. Really it seems a pity that you should not be translated in German,
as they all know about you here; so if you can do anything about Margaret Voigt I think you should.
There. (Now I am going on like Eddy about Kurt Wagenseil.) 365
I enclose a letter from Louise which will give you her opinion of Clinker.366 ‘Clinker et bien bell’ is
not, I think, meant to be a pun. I hope your spelling of French is better than Louise’s.
I disapprove violently of your driving yourself through France.3671 think it is extremely dangerous—
and what’s all that about flying?368 Am I to understand that you have left the ground and that that experience
is over and need never be repeated? If so, I am thankful. Please write something about it, so that the anguish
of terror which I expect you went through should not be wholly wasted. It is damnable about my not seeing
you before you go, but you see there is Copenhagen, which was not my arrangement but Harold’s. Send me
your address at Cassis, and please don’t stay there too long.
My goodness what shoddy people journalists can be. I have just been sitting with some in the bar of
the Adlon hotel. There was a woman369 who told us about the stockyards of Chicago—how the corpses travel
round and round on moving platforms, and every few yards something is done to them. There was a blind man
who for 35 years had stood there reaching out his hand to pull out a particular bit of intestine as each corpse
passed, and he never missed it. She made a regular epic out of it, but I was so conscious all the time of how
physically repellent she and her colleagues were that I missed half the pleasure of these succulent facts. But I
must say that I prefer this underworld of the international press to the be-starred members of the ambassadorial
circles. No, Virginia, Orlando may have gone on a mission to the Grand Cham, but his descendant was not
meant to be an Excellency. I feel that the next person who kisses my hand will get his face smacked.
What else have I to tell you? Our canary has laid three eggs and is sitting on them. My mother has
written to my uncle asking to take Knole for two years. The young men of Berlin are engaged in a bicycle race
round a track, under arc lights, lasting for six days and six nights. I am going to Leipzig on Monday. We take
long walks every afternoon for the sake of our health through the pine-woods. I look at the pines and the sand,
and reflect gloomily that this type of landscape stretches away unbroken even into Russia. I try to romanticise
Berlin by thinking that Russia lies over there to the east. But the only tangible reminder of Russia is the piercing
east wind which comes to us straight off the steppes. I could gladly do without it; but the sun does shine. And
it is warm in the flat; I give standing orders to the servants that I am always out if anybody calls; and I make
myself happy with Rilke, who is a damned fine poet. That’s my life. Not as exciting as yours, no doubt, but I
think a lot about Virginia—which makes up for much—and really I have been loving Virginia enormously
lately—in an intense, absent way, (absent in distance, I mean,) which has been a great satisfaction to me—
like a tide flowing in and filling a lot of empty spaces. Orlando, I am glad to reflect, compels you willy-nilly
to spend a certain amount of your time with me. Darling I do love you.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West

365 He translated some of Harold’s books into German.

366 Clinker was a spaniel puppy which Vita had given to Angelica Bell.
367 The Woolfs went to France by car on 26 March.
368 Virginia never flew in her life. She had been referring to Shelmerdine s flight, described in the last pages of Orlando.
369 Ms Kuts of the United Press.
 52 Tavistock Square
WC1
[20? March]

[Typewritten]
Dearest, Mrs Nicolson,

O what a curse these translators are! Tell your Bosom friend Mrs Voigt Something or other that all I can say
is that I have received a cheque from, and signed a contract with, the Insel Verlag which is I understand the
Fischer Verlag by which they are to produce Mrs Dalloway this autumn and The Lighthouse later. But all
communications must be through Curtis Brown....

ORLANDO IS FINISHED!!!

[In handwriting]
Did you feel a sort of tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last370 at 5 minutes to one? That was
when he died—or rather stopped talking, with three little dots... Now every word will have to be re-written,
and I see no chance of finishing it by September—It is all over the place, incoherent, intolerable, impossible—
And I am sick of it. The question now is, will my feelings for you be changed? I’ve lived in you all these
months—coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?...

To Virginia Woolf
12 Richelieu Alle Hellerup Copenhagen
[but sent from Long Barn]
3 April

I am not in Copenhagen. But I was when I secured this piece of paper and wrote the address on the envelope
for I fear I should forget it. So I feel justified in filling up, although I am somewhere quite different, (at Long
Barn in fact,) a piece of paper which originally was meant for you.
I have so much to say that it would fill several volumes. Don’t be alarmed: I’ll leave most of it out.
The train is put on to a ferry, several ferries, because Denmark is split up by the sea. One arrives, to find
Copenhagen itself split up by the sea; one crosses bridges which are liable to open suddenly in the middle to
allow passage to ships while all the traffic of the Danes is suspended. A great grievance, and a source of excuse
to all the unpunctual people in Copenhagen, ‘I’m so sorry I’m late, but the bridge was open.’ I found myself
wishing that Piccadilly Circus or the Strand would suddenly gape to allow passage to a Swede. That’s because
I am unpunctual, and I have a theory that everything conspires to render unpunctual people more unpunctual
than they already are,—their taxis break down, they get into 15-minute blocks,—‘to him that is given shall
much be given, but to him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.’
Anyway,—Copenhagen. We fell into a household which was undiluted Ibsen, (how suitable,—though you
mustn’t let the Danes think that Ibsen, or Norway, have anything to do with them.) Our hostess turned out to
be the sister of that Elsie Mackay who had just flown away for ever into the Atlantic, and whose loss had only
been accepted 2 days earlier; our host, her husband, was the most insensitive of men. She had, moreover, a

370 17 March.
baby only a few weeks old.371 There were all sorts of additional horrors,—such as his collection of rowing caps
and oars, (he was once a rowing Blue,) trophies of his athletic prowess enshrined behind glass doors; medals,
and silver cups; her personality was entirely eclipsed. A horrid man, with a voice like a curate. The whole
house was (visibly) dominated by his triumphs, as by his evangelical accents; but underneath it all was her
tragedy, small, crushed, suppressed. We (Harold and I) hated it so much that we bolted; caught the night train
as we couldn’t bear to wait till the morning.
But it’s a whole story, that you ought to write. Incorporating Carl Bodelsen and Else Arnefeldt, and
Doktor Jespersen, and Pastor Storm, and Mrs Picton Bagge. All real people.
Well, then, Harold delivered a lecture on Byron which was most brilliant and amusing, standing up
behind a white-and-gold tribunal; and I delivered a lecture on English poetry which was most boring and
stodgy; and so we came back to Berlin by the train on the ferry, and next night I came on to England, and
found that Leonard had (a) ruined my life by sending me a book on Afghanistan 372 which is the place I most
want to go to, and (b) brightened my life by sending me a most unexpected cheque for £50—will you please
give him both these messages? Also I found Pinker, more like a flounced Victorian lady than ever. (She is very
well.) I say ‘Where’s Leonard? Where’s Virginia?’ and she rushes about sniffing as for a mouse. I showed her
the drawing of you, but I regret to say that she didn’t recognise it. Tell Vanessa that I love it, and that it hangs
in my bedroom. (Ha-ha.)
Oh, and I’ve got so much to tell you: about Berlin, and Else Lasker-Schuler, and Schwichten, and the
nigger who was really a man not a woman; but had all the graces of a cocotte, and the temper too; all an ocean
in my head. And here is Bottome’s story at last, which I forgot to send, but which will be appreciated by your
friends and relations who are fortunate enough to be with you, damn them.
And when are you coming back?
No, of course I never saw Sibyl.
How is the umbrella ?373
How cross I was to reach London and to know that you were not there. An empty London, in spite of
8 million inhabitants or whatever it is. Just a desert, but not so nice as a real desert, (i.e. Afghanistan. All
Leonard’s fault.)
Are you well? Are you in the sun? Oh, and Orlando. I forgot about him. You absolutely terrified me
by your remarks. ‘Do I exist or have you made me up?’ I always foresaw that, when you had killed Orlando
off. Well, I’ll tell you one thing: if you like,—no, love,—me one trifle less now that Orlando is dead, you shall
never never set eyes on me again, except by chance at one of Sibyl’s parties. I won’t be fictitious. I won’t be
loved solely in an astral body, or in Virginias world.
So write quickly and say I’m still real. I feel terribly real just now,—like cockles and mussels, all alive-
oh.
Will you come and stay with me when you come home? When will that be?
Have you taken Potto to Cassis or left him in Tavistock Square? Was he frightened in the motor?
This is the paper Potto likes, only folded in two.
Your adoring and perfectly solid

Orlando

371 Their host and hostess were Eugen Millington-Drake, First Secretary of the British Legation in Copenhagen, and his wife Lady Effie Millington-
Drake. Her sister was Elsie Mackay lost over the Adantic on an east-west flight on 13 March. The baby was James, born on 10 January 1928.
372 Through the Heart of Afghanistan by Emil Trinkler. Vita reviewed it in Nation, 19 May 1928.
373 Leonard’s car.
To Vita Sackville-West
Orange
[France]
31 March

Dearest Honey,

Are you back? At Long Barn? Happy? With the dogs? Comfortable? Well?
I can’t remember how one writes. Nothing but a heart of gold would make me try to write now—
perched on a hard chair in a bare bedroom in a bad inn.... I think of Vita at Long Barn: all fire and legs and
beautiful plunging ways like a young horse.
The day before I left I read in the Times that I had won the most insignificant and ridiculous of prizes374
but I have heard nothing more; so it may be untrue. I dont mind—you will laugh either way....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Sunday [15 April]

I have been wanting to write to you for such a long time, but I thought you would be on your way home. 375
My God, I shall be thankful when I know you are safely back.
I am coming up on Wednesday; shall Pinker and I come in the evening? I am going to broadcast at
9.15, and they want to give me some sort of rehearsal during the day, but I expect they’ll fix a time in the
morning, so I ought to be free the rest of the day Tell me when to come.
And did you ever get Bottome’s story?
Now I shall not write more, because you will find this when you arrive—and you will have floods of
letters—and you will have to be nice to Nellie376—so you won’t want to read letters.

V.

374 The Prix Femina Vie Heureuse.

375 From France.
376 Nellie Boxall, Virginia s maid.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Tuesday [17 April]

...Come punctually at 4 with Pinker, or Leonard will be gone. May I come to the broadcasting with you? And
aint it wretched you care for me no longer: I always said you were a promiscuous brute—Is it a Mary again;
or a Jenny this time or a Polly? Eh?
The truth shall be dug out of you at all costs.
Am I to be wearing my heart out for a woman who goes with any girl from an Inn!

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
[26 April]

[Typewritten]

’I think I met a gentleman of your family in Poland last summer.’

Je crois avoir fait la connaissance d’un gentilhomme qui vous était apparenté en Pologne l’été dernier.’
‘The ladies of the English Court ravish me with their beauty. Never have I seen so graceful a lady as your
Queen or so fine a head dress as she wears.’
‘La beauté des dames de la cour d’Angleterre me met dans le ravissement. On ne peut voir une dame plus
gracieuse que votre reine, ni une coiffure plus belle (élégante?) que la sienne.’
‘Might I trouble you, Sir, to pass me the salt?’
‘Voulez-vous avoir l’obligeance, monsieur, de me passer le sel?’
‘With all the pleasure in my life, Madam.’
‘Avec le plus grand plaisir du monde, madame.’
‘Avec la plus grande joie du monde, madame.’

Nauseating mixture: mélange nauséabond,

or, potion nauséabonde, (if you mean medicine.)
bumpkins: lourdauds. (lit. oafs.)
or: rustres, (lit. yokels.)
or: hobereaux (lit. country noblemen.)
figure of fun: I cannot think of any absolutely literal translation. You could say C’est un véritable épouvantail,
(lit. scarecrow.) or Il a une tête à se tordre de rire.
Rigged up like a Maypole: Une grande perche mal fagotée.
or: mal ficelee.
Of wood, of sackcloth, and of cinders. This puzzles me. If you mean ‘sackcloth and ashes,’ it is ‘le sac et la
cendre’. But cinders is really ‘escarbilles,’—what we also call clinkers or breeze. Wood is of course bois, or
planches if you mean boards. 377

377 In Orlando Virginia used only the first two of Vita’s translations, describing the opening conversation between Orlando and Sasha, the Russian
 [Handwritten] The difference between cendre and escarbilles is, that ashes are fine and powdery;
escarbilles are lumpy. ‘Sac’ seems ambiguous for ‘sackcloth’, unless used in conjunction with ‘la cendre’, as
it can also mean bag. Wouldn’t it be better to leave it in English? if not essential to put it in French?
‘De bois, de sac, et d’escarbilles’ sounds very odd! Darling, is this any use to you? I got a peculiar
jump as I realised that the phrases I was copying were phrases out of that unexplored country, your book. I
tried to build up whole scenes from them,—scenes into which they could possibly fit,—like an anatomist
reconstructing the animal from one bone. I didn’t get very far.
The big crab apple has covered itself with blossom since I left yesterday morning, and the nightingales
are singing in broad daylight.
How is Orlando’s bride in her dress sewn with oranges? and how are the bees? Still busy? And Stella
Benson? 378 And all your life? Oh I am writing on the back of the typing, which you were to have cut off for
your typist. (A typist in German is called a Tippfraülein.) But how is all your life, all the same? Is it really as
enchanted as it appears to me? and as full of Authors? people who have printed a Book? Enviable Virginia—
full of bees and prizes. I won another prize379 the other day—I forgot to tell you—in America—but it was only
a vast anthology of American verse. I had hoped for dollars. [Several words heavily scored over.]
Now it’s no good your trying to read that, because you won’t be able to—It was something very
interesting.
I have stolen an oak. Put a fence round it. I’ll show you when you come—but when will that be? Not
for weeks, if you have to do 10 pages a day.
Tell Leonard that Roy has written to Graves,380 challenging him to a duel, and saying that he shall say
exactly what he likes about him and all pipsqueaks of his sort; but tell Leonard not to repeat this, as Roy may
change his mind—and we mustn’t make bad blood between the poets. I oughtn’t to say it but it will amuse
Leonard. It’s the rudest letter I ever read!

Your Orlando, (quite real)

princess with whom he fell in love. Vita was bilingual in French and English, and so was Orlando, but not Virginia.
378 Virginia and Leonard had invited Stella Benson to dinner. She had been the second choice for the Femina Prize, and according to Virginia, ‘I had
never been so sneered at in my life for getting it.’ However, Stella Benson won the Femina in 1932 for her last novel, Tobit Transplanted.
379 For The Land.
380 Roy Campbell, the South African poet, had quarrelled with Robert Graves, the poet, novelist and author of the autobiographical Goodbye to All
That. He had attacked Graves in the first line of his poem The Georgiad.
To Vita Sackville-West
From Monk’s House
Friday [27 April]

I rang you up just now, to find you were gone nutting in the woods with Mary Campbell, or Mary Carmichael,
or Mary Seton381 but not me—damn you....

381 There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaton, And Marie Carmichael, and me.
From ‘The Ballad of the Queens Maries’. Virginia would use these names for her fictitious novelists in A Room of One’s Own (1929).
April - September 1928
In the summer of 1928 Vita was finishing Twelve Days and Virginia Orlando. Vita’s intimacy with
Mary Campbell and Margaret Voigt gradually drew to an end, to the distress of both women, but not
of Vita, who had acquired a new friend, Hilda Matheson, Talks Director of the BBC, for whom Vita
frequently broadcast. Virginia came several times to Long Barn and had Vita photographed for
Orlando, and Vita attended the presentation to her of the Femina Prize for To the Lighthouse. They
were united in sympathy for Radclyffe Hall, whose Lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness had been
declared obscene by the British Home Secretary. Vita went to Germany again for a month in August—
September, where she continued to translate Rilke’s poems. The relationship between the two women
at this time could be described in these terms: Virginia still loved Vita, and Vita venerated Virginia,
but there was a partial withdrawal on Vita’s side owing to other distractions and the competition of
other women.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Friday [4 May]

Orlando,

I think I must tell Eddy about you.382 What do you say? He is so passionate about Knole and Sackvilles. I feel
it awkward to spring the whole thing without warning—Would he keep it secret?...
I hear Mrs Nicolson and Mrs Woolf gave some offence on Wednesday by coming to the prize dressed
as if for a funeral. Still it was my funeral....

382 Meaning Orlando.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Sunday [6 May]

Yes, do tell Eddy. He’ll be amused, and I hope annoyed. He’s coming here today, to lunch. I think he would
be discreet, if you impressed it well on him. The secret has been so well kept, it would be a pity for it to leak
out now.
Do you know that I came and stood on your doorstep at 11.15 on Wednesday night? but the door was
so firmly shut, and all the windows looked so dark, that I didn’t dare ring the bell, but went sadly away like a
poor dog, and drove myself home to Long Barn through the night. Yes, the nights are marvellous. Full moon,
nightingales, and all that business. But where is Virginia? What about Virginia coming here for a night on
Tuesday or Wednesday? before the moon begins to wane. And the garden is so pretty.
Would you ask Leonard, provisionally, if he would like a companion volume to Passenger to Teheran?
383
I think he said the Press had made over it, in spite of a comparatively small sale. I have a good deal of
material, and some nice pictures. I think I could probably finish it by July, if that would be early enough for
the autumn. But don’t let him hesitate to turn it down if he wants to, on the score of friendship. I don’t want to
be a Polly Flinders384 to you.
Clive asks me to dine on the 17th. Are you going? If so, I will go; if not, I won’t. You looked so lovely
the other day385—but I do think it’s a mistake not to come and stay at the 1st class hotel.

Your most loving

V.

To Virginia Woolf
[11 June]

I am afraid I could not go on Friday to Lenare386 but I could go on Monday if that would do as well,—perhaps
better, if Vanessa is then more likely to be back? Harold leaves on Monday evening so I shall be in London
with him any way that day. Your suggestion of coming here on Thursday delights me, though it would delight
me more if I thought you were coming to stay next week—If you come on Thursday you will find here the
Clives who were in Teheran (I mean, he is minister in Teheran and is now on leave,) but that would not matter
except that it might bore you and personally I prefer to have you alone—But if you are in a hurry?... In any
case I shall see you tomorrow night, shan’t I, if I come in after dinner?
The long letter was to have been about the excitements of wireless,387 but perhaps it is better spoken.

383 Twelve Days, at which Vita had been working since her return from Germany. It was an account of her journey through the southern Persian
mountains in 1927.
384 ‘Little Polly Flinders/Sat among the cinders’ (nursery’ rhyme), i.e. a cause of impoverishment to the Hogarth Press.
385 At the presentation to Virginia of the Femina Prize for To the Lighthouse on 2 May.
386 Photographer.
387 On 4 June Harold had broadcast on biography, and Vita on The Land.The BBC gave them a dinner party at the Savoy to celebrate the occasion.
 Do you think that Osbert’s Proclamation means that Sachie388 gets the Hawthornden tomorrow? I bet
it does. (Not though.)
We come up after lunch tomorrow.
Are your ears still sore? Have you enjoyed the sensation of twiddling the rings when they have stuck?
A new, small, peculiar sensation.389
Have you forgotten your poor Orlando already?

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Sunday [17 June]

...Oh heavens what a bore Orlando is—worse in his death than in his life: I think: I’m so tired of him.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [10 July]

Virginia, will you give your very serious consideration to the possibility of dashing to the vintage 390 with me
between Sept 26th and October? Having got this idea into my head, where it has now been simmering for
several years, I want to execute it more than anything.
And, more immediately, could you go to the BBC with me on Friday afternoon? Will you ring me
tomorrow morning and tell me, and I’ll arrange with Miss Matheson.391 Then I’d come back to tea with you,
and we might also go and look at the things from Ur.
How many illustrations may I have, please? Most of the book392 has gone off to be typed. But I expect
Leonard will refuse it when he has read it. I might as well know about the illustrations though, because I must
get prints made from my negatives.
I’ve been feeling very much chastened since you were here, but also curiously happy. I am never
wholly crushed when you lecture me,393 because it shows that you aren’t indifferent. And really I have a few
good qualities. Ask Potto—to whom my love.
Encouraged by your counsel, I’ve written some lines of poetry in the best Tennysonian tradition.

388 Sacheverell Sitwell did not receive the Prize for his All Summer in a Day. It was awarded to Henry Williamson for Tarka the Otter, and presented
to him by John Galsworthy on 12 June.
389 On 4 June Vita and Virginia had had their ears pierced for ear-rings.
390 Burgundy.
391 Hilda Matheson, Talks Director of the BBC, with whom Vita became intimate, much to Virginias annoyance. See VW 1969.
392 Twelve Days.
393 Virginia had been at Long Barn on 6 July. She wrote in her diary next day: ‘Lay by the black currant bushes lecturing Vita on her floundering
habits, with the Campbells for instance.’ 1 Ozzie Dickinson.
 I say, we must make up for that abortive night soon? But all the same, it had a nice and unusual
character of its own.
I got Harcourt Brace’s autumn list with Orlando in it. Have you remembered to let them know that you
have torn it up?
You were very very charming really in spite of the lecture. And you are definite to me,—my goodness,
you are. My silly Virginia. My darling, darling, precious Virginia.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Monday [23 July]

I was about to write you in protest: on Saturday I caught a gleam of your handwriting among my letters; put it
aside as a treat to read last; and then, coming to it full of expectation, discovered that it was for Eddy....
I don’t, incidentally, know where Eddy is, so sent it to 41 Gordon Square, the last address I had for
him.
Did you know that I was going to marry Eddy? I didn’t know it myself, but my mother told Ozzie394
so. I am going to divorce Harold and marry Eddy, so as to get Knole. That is why I have stolen all her jewels
to give them to Knole.
WilI you come to my wedding?
I hear you rang me up. What was it? I don’t like to bother you on the telephone, but will you perhaps
ring me up tomorrow before ten? Was it to say you would come here?

V.

394 Ozzie Dickinson

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [24 July]

Virginia darling, I am so sorry, I have made a stupid mistake: I quite forgot I had Lady Lindsay395 coming
down for the night on Monday—so I cannot come then. Might I come Sunday instead? or if that isn’t
convenient to you I could come to lunch Monday and get back here in time. Will you say?
I’m so glad you have escaped from London—which must be a furnace. I do hope you’re all right. I
don’t like you to have headaches.

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Thursday [9 August]

But would you really? Come here, I mean? On Sunday? For the night? If October 11th is to see the end of our
romance,396 it would be as well to make the most of the short time that remains to us. Still, there’s that hopeful
if problematical week in France, at the end of September. It doesn’t seem safe to count on that—so I snatch at
Sunday— or Saturday. Either. For the night. Only let me know which.
Saturday afternoon I have someone coming here, but she would be gone by the evening. Someone of
whom I am rather frightened: Princess Lichnowsky.397 I don’t know why I am frightened of her; I have never
set eyes on her. I just feel that she is destined to have a baleful influence on my life—Perhaps Harold will fall
in love with her. Perhaps Ben will. Not me. Anyway, she would be gone by the evening.
I was very jealous of Eddy being with you. Very cross about your being together in the telephone box.
I do want to see you.

V.

395 Elizabeth (daughter of Colgate Hoyt, a New York banker) was the second wife of Sir Ronald Lindsay, British Ambassador in Berlin, 1926-28. The
Nicolsons remained very fond of both of them, and met them again in 1933 in Washington, where Sir Ronald was Ambassador in 1930-39.
396 Orlando was scheduled for publication on 11 October.
397 Princess Mechtilde Lichnowsky (1879-1958), writer, collector of modern paintings and friend of Roger Fry, was the widow of Prince Karl Max
Lichnowsky, German Ambassador in London, 1912-14, where he had been a close friend of Harold s father, Lord Carnock, then head of the British
Foreign Office. Harold had visited them on their German estate just before the Princes death on 27 February 1928.
To Virginia Woolf
39 Manger-strasse II
Potsdam
21 August

I sit on a balcony overlooking a black lake398 hung with weeping willows. The view is not too depressingly
German. By the waters edge there is a little grey pavilion with a domed roof of green copper. Some way off,
in the trees, there is a romantic ruin, like something in one of Eddy’s books. I live entirely in the company of
angels and of obscure but tragic figures from the Italian Renaissance, (whose catastrophes gain by being only
lightly hinted at and not expounded,) because I am translating Rilke. The boys have got a young German tutor
who has (as luck will have it) devoted the past two years to the study of Rilke, and in particular to the study of
the very poems I am translating; his hair stands straight up on end with excitement when he talks about it, and,
his horn-rimmed glasses descend to the tip of his nose, where they remain balanced by a miracle of gravity.
Then he takes the boys off, and I see them dwindling in size as their little boat pulls them further out into the
lake. Then I see two white naked bodies, standing up in the boat, and then a flash and a splash, and then only
two round heads bobbing in the water. And I return to Rilke.

How strange it is to live no more on earth;

To make no further use of customs learnt;
No longer to attribute to the rose
Or anything of fair especial promise,
A metaphor of human destiny;
To be no longer that which once we were,
In ever terrible hands; to throw aside
Even our personal name, a broken toy!
Strange, to desire no more the consummation
Of our desires! How strange to see ah things
Related to this earth, float free in space!
Death is a weariness so void of meaning
That slowly we conceive eternity.399

And next Saturday we give a dinner party to sixty members of Parliament who are touring Europe. ‘His
Britannic Majesty’s Chargé d’Affaires and Mrs Harold Nicolson request the honour....’Will you, please,
Virginia, consecrate a kindly though sarcastic thought to me at 8.30 on Saturday evening? as you wander out
after dinner down to the water-meadows to throw a stick into the Ooze [sic] for Pinker?
Any more developments about France?
I found a very very old letter from you in a book, beginning Dear Vita.400
The German army, or what is left of it, rumbles its artillery every morning over the cobbles, and the
music of a distant military band echoes over the lake. In the intervals of Rilke I think about my novel,401 and a
sort of patch-work counterpane is beginning to form, but so far the patches are only laid side by side and I have
not yet begun to stitch at them. Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is
safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed. Anyhow I don’t care about what

398 The Heiligesee.

399 Vita’s translation of part of the First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Elegies from the Castle of Duino (Hogarth Press, 1931).
400 VW 1412. (July 1923), the only one so addressed.
401 The Edwardians.
is ‘better’, for however many resolutions one makes, one’s pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one
can’t write in any way other than one’s own. At least I feel confident that the rank growth of my early years
has been pretty severely pruned by now—and I hope has made nice strong woody growth instead. We shall
see.
Poor Virginia, she will have to read that novel when it is finished—and what’s more she’ll have to say
what she thinks of it—and with the utmost brutality too. I shall join the company of Doris Daglish402 or
whatever her name is, and the pillmaker.
I do miss you so. I do hope we go to France, but I daren’t think about it yet with any confidence. Will
you write to me?

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
30 August

Why need you be so timid and pride-blown, both at once, over writing your novel? What does donkey West
mean about her ambition and failure?... surely, for the last ten years almost, you have cut back and pruned and
root dug—What is it one should do to fig trees?—with the result that you write sometimes too much like a
racehorse who has been trained till his tad is like a mouses tad and his ribs are like a raised map of the Alps.
Please write your novel, and then you will enter into the unreal world, where Virginia lives—and poor woman,
can’t now live anywhere else....

To Virginia Woolf
39 Manger-strasse II
Potsdam
31 August

Henry (Pinkers younger brother,) the boys, and I went for a walk in Potsdam. We walked down long, tidy,
cobbled streets, with trams squealing round the corners and the dust whirling in clouds before the incessant
wind. I felt extremely depressed. Am I for ever, I thought, to spend my life walking the streets of Potsdam,
Belgrade, Bucharest, Washington? Then I remembered that I had lost my cigarette case, with a £10 note in it,
and my motor licence, and a cheque from the Nation, and another cheque, and a photograph small but precious
of Virginia, and a prescription belonging to somebody else. I remembered also that the Foreign Office had
refused to pay for the dinner to the MPs, which had cost us something over XI00- So my depression deepened.
But then we came home and I found in the letter box a letter which I knew to be from you, even though the
envelope was typewritten, and my spirits rose. I have now thrown the boys into the lake, and am at liberty for
at least half an hour.

402 A woman from a London suburb who had submitted a worthless novel to the Hogarth Press. See VW 1588 (September 1925).
 I feel very violently about The Well of Loneliness.403 Not on account of what you call my proclivities;
not because I think it is a good book; but really on principle. (I think of writing to Jix 404 suggesting that he
should suppress Shakespeare’s Sonnets.) Because, you see, even if the W. of L. had been a good book,—even
if it had been a great book, a real masterpiece,—the result would have been the same. And that is intolerable.
I really have no words to say how indignant I am. Is Leonard really going to get up a protest? or is it fizzling
out? (What a conceited ass the woman must be.) Don’t let it fizzle out. If you got Arnold Bennett and suchlike,
it would be bound to make an impression. (Avoid Shaw, though.) I nearly blew up over the various articles in
the New Statesman. Personally, I should like to renounce my nationality, as a gesture; but I don’t want to
become a German, even though I did go to a revue last night in which two ravishing young women sing a
frankly Lesbian song.
France.... Well, you can get a pale reflection of the matrimonial miseries which I undergo. You hesitate
to leave Leonard for six days; I leave Harold several times a year for several months. I see him off to Persia.
He sees me off to England. We are perpetually in a state of saying goodbye.
By the way, when you say ‘Ethel Sands advises us,’ etc.,405 do you mean (by us) you and Leonard, or
you and me?
I will leave you to your own fluctuations, which amuse me a good deal. I will only say, that you mustn’t
come if it’s going to make you miserable all the time. But you wouldn’t.
Don’t tell me that it is a lovely August in England. It is so cold here that I sit with an eiderdown over
my knees. It rains nearly every day. It is a foul climate. You mustn’t say it is lovely in England, or that the
Downs are golden or whatever it is— because then I rebel against my lot.

Your
V.

My love and a kiss to Potto.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Sussex
Saturday 8 September

Concentrate your mind upon this, and give me your answer. Suppose we start (you and I and Potto) on Saturday
22nd. Sleep in Paris. Get to SAULIEU on Monday.... Do you want to go 2nd or 1st (I insist on 1st on the boat)
If first is much more comfortable, first is advisable. Not otherwise; because first class travellers are always old
fat and testy and smell of eau de cologne, which makes me sick....
...But I was going to say that I like your Tolstoy very much. I think it is your best criticism, so far as

403 Virginia had written to Vita that The Well of Loneliness (1928), an overtly Lesbian novel by Marguerite Radclyffe Hall, had been banned as
obscene, and British intellectuals were rallying to her defence.
404 Nickname for the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, who was responsible for censorship matters and had banned the book, a decision which
was now challenged in the courts.
405 Ethel Sands was advising Virginia about the itinerary of their proposed holiday in Burgundy.
I’ve seen. And as I always take credit for your good writing, I’m pleased with myself.... The question you
should have pushed home—had there been room—is precisely the one you raise, what made his realism which
might have been photographic, not at all; but on the contrary, moving and exciting and all the rest of it.... But
I like you when you write such interesting things—and I have a great deal to say...about your novel. I thought
out, indeed, a long and it seemed then very profound essay upon writing novels... I believe that the main thing
in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words
can’t cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have
a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good
should seem, before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible; so that for nine months one fives
in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all
my novels were first rate before they were written....

To Virginia Woolf
British Embassy
Berlin
Tuesday [11 September]

Your letter has just caught me, as we leave early tomorrow morning. I am absolutely overjoyed to think that
our France may really materialise, and I beg you to get the tickets before you have time to change your mind.
The only thing is, I would rather start on the 24th if it were exactly the same to you, and get back on the 2nd
instead of starting on the 22nd and getting back on the 30th—partly because I have my first wireless article to
do (I can’t do it here, as I have not the necessary books,) and partly because Nigel doesn’t go back to school
till the 26th and I would prefer to be at home with him as long as possible—but that doesn’t really matter—
and I can do the wireless thing in 2 days I suppose—(I say 2 days, because I shall not have much chance of
doing it until I have got Ben off to Eton.) so you decide on the date which suits you. I only made the suggestion
in case it was absolutely the same to you.
I don’t see, however, why you should bother about the tickets, when I shall find Miss Le Bosquet
waiting for me at Long Barn!406 Let me see to it. We’d better go from Newhaven, hadn’t we? I’ll motor there,
and pick you up on the way—and leave the car in a garage there till we come back. I have never travelled 2nd
in France and don’t know what it is like, but am quite agreeable to do so, but agree with you on insisting on
1st class on the boat AND a cabin. Experience has taught me this.
My congratulations to Pinker.407 Leonard very kindly asked if I would like a puppy; may I decide when
I know whether Pippin has had any or not? I have heard nothing from Louise about it. If Pippin has not had
any, as I rather fear, I should love to have a bitch—to keep my stock going.
I suppose you will not be in London on Tuesday 18th? as I must take Ben up on that day and could
come to see you for a minute about France. Send me a line to Long Barn where I arrive on Saturday.
I blushed with pleasure because you liked what I wrote about Tolstoy;408 I wish I could have made it

406 Audrey le Bosquet was Vita’s secretary.

407 Pinker had had four puppies: two male, two female
408 ‘Tolstoy’ (Nation, 8 September 1918).
twice as long. I found that I had come to the end of my allotted words when I had only just begun.
No more,—because I must pack and go on—and also because I shall at last really have time to talk to
you.
I say: is Potto jealous of the puppies? Leonard, I suppose, is in the 7th heaven— and like a regular old
nannie—

Your
V

I think you’d better get a little basket for Potto, with a mackintosh sheet.I think Dottie must have been
conscious of something wrong, as she wrote to me and said she felt she had been absolutely at her worst!409

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Wednesday [19 September]

I write in a hurry because I am just starting for Eton with Ben.

Monday,—yes. Could you send a postcard to say
(1) what time the boat starts,
(2) how much I owe you for tickets
(3) the name of the hotel at Saulieu.
According to the time the boat starts, perhaps I may decide whether to come Sunday night or Monday morning?
I’ll come by train anyhow, and not by motor.
No clothes. A fur coat certainly. The other objects mentioned,—I hope unnecessary. Potto’s basket. A
bib for Potto.
I was in a bookshop in London yesterday and the bookseller said to me knowingly, ‘I saw an advance
copy of Orlando.’
I also am interested in this journey, but not wholly as an experiment.
Will you tell Leonard I was under the impression that the Bookman410 was merely a publishers’ rag?
He can leave the quotation in if he likes.
I must go. Poor Ben.

V.

409 Virginia had written that Leonard became enraged by Dorothy Wellesley s behavior during a recent visit.
410A weekly trade magazine.
October - December 1928
At the end of September Vita and Virginia went on a week’s holiday to Burgundy, their only journey
alone together; they scarcely mentioned Orlando, which was published on 11 October, a few days
after their return. Vita’s reaction to the book—see her letter of that date—was total delight. It received
almost unanimous praise from the critics (the only person appalled by it was Vita’s mother), and
Vita, to her pleasure, was soon publicly acknowledged Orlando’s model. In October Virginia,
accompanied by Vita, gave at Cambridge the first of two lectures on which she based her next book,
A Room of One’s Own. Vita began her short study of Andrew Marvell, and ended the year again in
Berlin.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Friday night [5 October]

My darling

I was enjoying the melancholy pleasure of looking through your letters this evening, when it occurred to me
that it was some time since I had had one from you,—not, in fact, since I was in Berlin. And now you are in
London, besieged by Sibyls and Tom Eliots, not to mention packing up parcels of Orlando, and you won’t
have time to write. Besides, if I have not had letters from you it is because I have been with you, which is
better than ink and paper. And you were here, dear me, no later than yesterday.
It was queer, reading some of your letters, in the light of having been with you so much lately. A fitful
illumination played over them,—a sort of cross-fight,—(do you realise that at Auppegard one is always in a
cross-light? a symbolic fact which would, I feel, have had more influence on you or on me, had either of us
chanced to live there, than it has had on the relatively unimaginative natures of Ethel and Nan.411) Well, a sort
of cross-light, as I say, played across them, projected half from the rather tentative illumination of the past and
half from the fuller illumination of the present. I couldn’t stop to wonder which illumination I preferred,
because I saw a once that in their union they created a very lovely limpid light in which I was bathed and in
which I felt extremely happy. However, no more of this, or you will think me sentimental (which I swear I am
not,) and I am still sufficiently respectful of you not to wish to be despised by you.
This letter is principally to say that Potto is not very happy; he mopes; and I am not sure he has not got
the mange; so he will probably insist on being brought back to Mrs Woof [sic] on Wednesday, but I have
explained to him that if Valerie 412 is here I shall scarcely be able to go to London. No word of Valerie so far,
but I suppose she is liable to walk in any day now, and God knows how long she will expect to stay I shall
lock her into her bedroom until luncheon-time.

411 Vita and Virginia had dined with Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson (her American painter friends) at Auppegard, their house near Dieppe, on 30
September before returning home after their Burgundy trip.
412 Valerie Taylor.
 Pinker, on the other hand, has taken kindly to her old home—and poos bark as though they were the
official watch-dogs of the establishment. Oh yes—and I’ve sold one of them—the dog—to Dottie—for 6
guineas. She had wanted one of Pippin’s— so will have one of Pinker’s instead.
Burgundy seems a dream. ‘Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.413 I was very happy. Were you? I
read Walter Pater on Vezelay.414 1 say, that narthex that I kept worrying about is one of the glories of France,
it seems. And we never saw it. But I feel as though I had seen enough to make up for a dozen narthexes.
Anyhow, I’ve returned home a changed being. All this summer I was as nervous as a cat,—starting, dreaming,
brooding,—now I’m all vigorous and sturdy again, and ravenous for life once more. And all thanks to you, I
believe. So you see that this letter is a Collins.415
It is a 1/4 to one,—nearly 2 hours after Virginia’s bedtime. My dearest, I do love you. All the Sibyls
and Tom Eliots in the world don’t love you as much as I do. I do bless you for all you’ve been to me. This is
not a joke, but very sober truth.

Your
V.

I dine with you on Tuesday 16th, don’t I? if our friendship has survived?

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Sunday [7 October]

Dearest Creature,

It was a very very nice letter you wrote by the light of the stars at midnight. Always write then, for your heart
requires moonlight to deliquesce it. And mine is fried in gaslight, as it is only nine o’clock and I must go to
bed at eleven. And so I shant say anything: not a word of the balm to my anguish—for I am always anguished—
that you were to me. How I watched you! How I felt—now what was it like? Well, somewhere I have seen a
little ball kept bubbling up and down on the spray of a fountain: the fountain is you; the ball me. It is a sensation
I get only from you. It is physically stimulating, restful at the same time....

413 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129.

414 In his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873).
415 A thank-you letter named after Mr Collins in Jane Austen s Pride and Prejudice.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [9 October]

My dearest

I think I won’t come up tomorrow, because (a) my uncle416 is at Knole and (b) Valerie is here. Besides I am
sure you are foil of people and busynesses, and don’t want Vita—or Potto—who seems to be settling down.
(Pinker was suffering from constipation—It wasn’t that she missed Leonard. She has now had a pill, and is
quite happy again—as indeed we all are when we have had pills.)
But you will send me Orlando? before 4. o’clock? I need hardly say that I can hardly exist till I get it.
Valerie is very sweet—and tells me stories of her early life, which you would enjoy.
It is dreadful to think that this is the last friendly letter I shall ever write to you.417

Your
Vita

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
11 October

My darling

I am in no fit state to write to you—and as for cold and considered opinions, (as you said on the telephone)
such things do not exist in such a connection.418 At least, not yet. Perhaps they will come later. For the moment,
I can’t say anything except that I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell. It seems to me
the loveliest, wisest, richest book that I have ever read,—excelling even your own Lighthouse. Virginia, I
really don’t know what to say,—am I right? am I wrong? am I prejudiced? am I in my senses or not? It seems
to me that you have really shut up that ‘hard and rare thing’ in a book; that you have had a complete vision;
and yet when you came down to the sober labour of working it out, have never lost sight of it nor faltered in
the execution. Ideas come to me so fast that they trip over each other and I lose them before I can put salt on
their tails; there is so much I want to say, yet I can only go back to my first cry that I am bewitched. You will
get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I cannot write you that sort of letter now, I can
only tell you that I am really shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater
tribute than pages of calm appreciation,—and then after all it does touch me so personally, and I don’t know
what to say about that either, only that I feel like one of those wax figures in a shop window, on which you
have hung a robe stitched with jewels. It is like being alone in a dark room with a treasure chest full of rubies

416 Charles Sackville.

417 Orlando was to be published on Thursday 11 October.
418 Virginia had sent Vita a specially bound copy of Orlando on its publication day. On receiving this letter, Virginia sent Vita a telegram: ‘Your
biographer is infinitely relieved and happy.’
and nuggets and brocades. Darling, I don’t know and scarcely even like to write, so overwhelmed am I, how
you could have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg. Really this isn’t false humility; really it isn’t. I
can’t write about that part of it, though, much less ever tell you verbally.
By now you must be thinking me too confused and illiterate for anything, so I’ll just slip in that the
book (in texture) seems to me to have in it all the best of Sir Thomas Browne and Swift,—the richness of the
one, and the directness of the other.
There are a dozen details I should like to go into,—Queen Elizabeth’s visit, Greene’s visit, phrases
scattered about, (particularly one on p. 160 beginning ‘High battlements of thought, etc.’ which is just what
you did for me,) Johnson on the blind, and so on and so on,—but it is too late today; I have been reading
steadily all day, and it is now 5 o’clock, and I must catch the post, but I will try and write more sensibly
tomorrow. It is your fault, for having moved me so and dazzled me completely, so that ah my faculties have
dropped from me and left me stark.
One awful thought struck me this morning: you didn’t, did you, think for a second that it was out of
indifference I didn’t come to London yesterday? You couldn’t have thought that? I had got it so firmly fixed
in my head that Oct. 11th was the day I was to have it, that I was resigned (after ah these months) to wait till
then. But when I saw it in its lovely binding, with my initials, the idea rushed into my head and utterly appalled
me. But on second thoughts I reflected that you could not possibly so have misunderstood.
Yes, I will write again tomorrow, in a calmer frame of mind I hope—now I am really writing against
time—and, as I tell you, shaken quite out of my wits.
Also, you have invented a new form of Narcissism,—I confess,—I am in love with Orlando—this is a
complication I had not foreseen.
Virginia, my dearest, I can only thank you for pouring out such riches.

V.

You made me cry with your passages about Knole, you wretch.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Friday [12 October]

What an immense relief!.... It struck me suddenly with horror that you’d be hurt or angry, and I didn’t dare
open the post: Now let who will bark or bite; Angel that you are—But I’m rather rushed: and wont write,
except this line. Sales much better. Enthusiasm in the Birmingham Post. Knole is discovered. They hint at you.
To Virginia Woolf
[Long Barn]
Monday 15 October

This is only to send you extracts from three letters I had this evening:
(1) ‘As a work of beauty and genius it is magnificent—it leaves one breathless with admiration. The
descriptions of Knole are too beautiful—they must surely equal in beauty anything that has ever been written
or said about Knole. I feel you will be happy with those descriptions.... ’
(2) ‘How lovely your pseudobiography is. It is one of the most exquisite pleasures that one could want,
to read it. I must think that the form is peculiarly adapted to her genius and that this is the greatest of her
imaginative works. The language is so lovely.’
(3) from Harold. ‘What a wonderful book! The whole thing has a beauty which makes one catch one’s
breath—like that sunset before Dilijan. (the reference is to Persia.) It is so far more than brilliance. I simply
cannot believe that such a book will not survive. The whole world of life has been poured into it, flashing with
molten flames.’
My darling. I am reading it all through again from the beginning. I’ll come at 6.45 tomorrow, or a little
before perhaps.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
[Long Barn]
Wednesday night [17 October]

Rabbit Ears herewith. (But there are no flower spikes this rime of year.)
And my mother’s letter returned.
And one from Hugh Walpole. I have said I could lunch on Oct. 30th. Will my ‘new creator’ PLEASE
come too? Yes? No?
Yes. She will.
A letter from Clive too. Will Harold (oh genius of tact that Clive is!) dine to meet Bertie Russell on
Oct. 26th? An invitation Harold would never dream of resisting— even were it not for the night I want to go
to Cambridge419 with Virginia on. (You see, I am no stylist, though you are.)
‘Salt is what makes potatoes nasty if you don’t eat them with.’
Pippin was pleased to see me. I kissed her nose.
Darling, I love you.

Clive adds a brief postscript: ‘Orlando is a masterpiece.’

Harold says: ‘Lots to say about Orlando but shall keep it till Friday. It is lovely and glittering and
profound.’

419 Girton College, for women, where Virginia delivered a lecture on which she later based A Room of One's Own.
To Virginia Woolf
[Long Barn]
Sunday [21 October]

I shall never never speak to Squire again420 I never read anything like it for sheer idiocy. I go back on the first
sentence: I should like to speak to him just once more, to tell him what I think, and then nevermore.

V.
very angry

To Virginia Woolf
London
Saturday [3 November]

My gentle genius

This is just to tell you that I rather lost my heart to Mrs Richmond yesterday.421 She must have been lovely. In
a way, she reminds me of you a little. Mr R. did not come, as he had had to go to Scotland.
I have been asked by Clive to dine on the 13th for your opening night.422 Do you not want me to come,
for any reason? If so, will you say so? Otherwise I will come. But as you did not say anything about it yourself,
perhaps you did not want me to know.
You missed Bernard Shaw the other evening, who came after you had left and made a long,
paradoxical, witty, and entirely destructive discourse.423 I was sorry you went away. The company grew bolder
and more outspoken as time went on, and the little waitress from Harrods sitting behind the buffet nearly
exploded with excitement. ‘There,’ I thought, ‘is another young life gone wrong.’ Not very much conclusion
was arrived at, I’m bound to say.
Thank you so much for the poster!424 it amused me—and I like the advertisement

Orlando is
Orlando is
Orlando is
“
“
“
“
“425
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
[4 November]

420 J. C. Squire called Orlando ‘a pleasant trifle’ in his review in the Observer, 21 October 1928.
421 Elena Richmond, wife of Bruce Richmond, editor of the Times Literary Supplement.
422 Of her ‘Tuesday Evenings’, Bloomsbury after-dinner parties at Vanessa’s house in Gordon Square.
423 On 1 November Vita and Virginia attended a meeting in the studio of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, to discuss giving evidence on behalf of
The Well of Loneliness. The evidence they offered was disallowed, and the book was finally declared obscene on 16 November.
424 For Orlando.
425 This advertisement by the Hogarth Press appeared in several newspapers: “Orlando is another masterpiece’, says Hugh Walpole; ‘Orlando is....”,
followed by other complimentary quotes, and ending, ‘Orlando is by Virginia Woolf.’
Harold’s father is still alive—and we don’t know what will happen. H. is putting off his return to Berlin. That
infernal Foreign Office charges him £2 a day for every day he outstays his leave! but he dare not go, as he
would probably be sent for again at once.426
I’ve finished writing about Virginia’s Tom Eliot.427 1 think I’ll submit it to you—shall I?
Did you see your Lord David?428 Did he sit at your feet? literally? metaphorically?

Your loving
Orlando

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Wednesday [7 November]

Boski was rather baffled by Desmond:429 he went so fast, and people came in and disturbed her at her
hieroglyphics, but I enclose as much as she was able to get. There was more; all very complimentary.
I found a nice, nice letter here from you—at least, it was so nice in parts that I think my ally Potto must
have held your hand. If you are all right, I will come tomorrow Thursday at any time you like, and we will
dine together. I must be at Savoy Hill430 by 9.15. Would you ring up Mount Street (Grosvenor 184) tomorrow
morning before 10—(because at 10 I must go to Lord Carnock’s funeral) and say if you are all right, and if I
am to come? I am going up to Mount Street tonight after dinner.
I see Rose Macaulay431 has the sense to like Orlando.
I do hope you are better. I had such a longing to see you one Monday night, and nearly cried when
Nellie said you were out. But the fireworks were lovely, through the fog. Did you see them?

Your very very loving

V.

426 Harold’s father, Lord Carnock, died on 5 November, and Harold returned to Berlin on the fifteenth.
427 Vita had been giving a series of broadcast talks on modern poets. Her talk on T. S. Eliot was printed in Radio Times on 30 November 1928.
428 Lord David Cecil.
429 Desmond MacCarthy had been dictating to Audrey le Bosquet,Vita s secretary, his review of Orlando which appeared in the Sunday Times.
430 The BBC.
431 (1881-1958,) Novelist and essayist, her review of Orlando appeared in T.P’s Weekly, 10 November.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [20 November]

Damn Eddy. I refrain from writing to you because I think you already have more than enough to do—and then
the brat goes and bothers you.432
Yes, of course I mentioned the pictures to Uncle Charlie. I didn’t tell him the exact purpose for which
they were wanted, because Orlando was then a secret. I just said ‘for her new book.’ He said ‘Of course—
naturally—delighted,’ and all those things. Your letter to him is quite all right. You can say if you like that I
told you I had asked him to confirm the permission Dada had given, and that he was agreeable to do so. What
idiots people are. Dada would NEVER have thought of this.
As for Eddy’s own private grievance, it just shows what his egoism is, to think that everybody would
immediately associate the initials S.W. with him. One’s own initials are familiar to oneself, but not to anybody
else. I should tell him this, if indeed you answer his letter at all.
I went off into fireworks with temper with Eddy. Puppy. Squealer. Imp.
I am coming up next Tuesday. Have been summoned by Molly to go and see her. 433 Shall I look in on
you after the BBC? or shall I come more at leisure any time on Wednesday (28th)? Clive asked me to dine
again on Tuesday but I can’t: I’m dining with Ethel. He murmured something about a farewell party to
Raymond on Tuesday night, and suggested that I should come on from Ethel’s. If you are going to be there I
will come, but I don’t know where it is,—at Vanessa’s house perhaps? Clive sent me two pheasants; nice of
him.
Shall I bring up the remaining puppy on Tuesday? The one that is sold? It is so attractive, and it seems
a pity that its owners should miss its youthful charm. I could bring it to you any time before 3.30 on Tuesday,
especially if I lunch with Raymond as I thought of doing. Unless you would come and lunch with me
somewhere alone RSVP. Postcard would do.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Thursday night [29 November]

I am feeling something like (I imagine) a fisherman must feel between a gale and a gale. On a calm day he can
go out and catch lots of little silver fishes. But there is this difference: in a gale, he can sit at home and smoke
his pipe, (unless he is also a member of the lifeboat crew,) whereas a gale to me represents London, Eton,
Oxford,—-just a being blown out to sea, the little fishes all scattered. In other words, I managed to get myself
home this morning, only to start off again tomorrow, early; and what sort of fife is that, I ask you?
Anyway, there was a HUGE dinner,434 and I made a speech, in great alarm; but after dinner was

432 Edward Sackville-West complained that Mr S.W. in Orlando might be mistaken for him. (Virginia explained that the initials stood for Sydney
Waterlow, the diplomatist.) His father, the new Lord Sackville, complained that pictures from Knole had been used in the book without his permission.
433 Molly MacCarthy.
434 Given by and for the National Trust.
somewhat consoled by a vision of pink and silver bearing down on me; rather moved, I was.4351 didn’t much
take to Mr B.R.—rather soapy I thought? and a bit too plausible? but I was most cordially pressed to come to
Robertsbridge etc. etc.—so that’s all right. Such a lot of people—at least 300—and flashlight photographs—
and a microphone—and Mr Winston Churchill with whom I would gladly elope if asked—and me rather
miserable in the midst of it all—and wondering why I was there —and then suddenly a speech about Knole—
and Jack Squire very drunk with a cold in his head. Dear me, I don’t like public life. I like toasting buns over
the gas-fire in Virginia’s bedroom.
I tried to read Read436 on poetry—Words words words,—and all polysyllabic. That isn’t poetry; not
even the explanation of it. I dreamt that I understood space-time, which came much nearer to the truth than all
the redes of Read.

I saw eternity the other night

Like a great Ring of pure and endless light
All calm, as it was bright...
Yet digged the Mole, and lest his ways be found,
Worked underground....437

In Oxford I shall dine with John Sparrow438—and Sunday I shall come back here— and Thursday
Virginia will come and we shall all the pleasures prove. Would it be better to be dead than all confused? as I
am? and life never synthetic? But I do enjoy life.
What an egotistic letter—as bad as Eddy—only not about my initials.
Darling, you’re my anchor. An anchor entangled in gold nuggets at the bottom of the sea.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Sunday [2 December]

So you are just back439 1 suppose, it being after dinner, and I had mine alone. What a good letter you wrote
me! Do you know I think about your writing with interest? All your feet seem to be coming down on it now,
not only the foreleg. Very few people interest me as writers; but I think I shall read your next poem with care.
And I like the way you stand up resolute in the full flood of Tom’s440 and Reads, a British Grenadier.
I forget what I was going to say now—something frightfully exciting, something that hit me between forehead
and hair this afternoon....
Coming down with all her feet at once—thats what I like in a writer. Desmond441 shuffles, and I’m a

435 Elena Richmond. ‘Mr B.R.’ was her husband, Bruce Richmond.
436 Herbert Read (1893-1968), the poet and critic of literature and art.
437 Henry Vaughan, Silex Scintillans (The World), 1650.
438 John Sparrow, to become Warden of All Souls’ College, Oxford from 1952 to 1977, was then a brilliant undergraduate, aged twenty-two. With
Maurice Bowra he had visited the Nicolsons in Potsdam earlier that year.
439 From Oxford.
440 T.S. Eliot.
441 Desmond MacCarthy.
jumper: never mind, I’ll think it over and tell you.
Lord! what a pleasure you are to me.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Monday [3 December]

How maddening. There was I sitting alone at Charing X. from 7 to 8.30 last night, having missed my
connection; and there were you dining alone the other side of London. I could have come so easily, and taken
an even later train. Damn, damn, damn. But you were reading Chaucer.
Harold writes this morning: ‘He (a friend) took me to a bar442 which he said was quite respectable, but
the proprietor showed me pornographic photographs, which are things I absolutely loathe and abhor. So I went
away in a dudgeon and read a chapter of Orlando to cleanse my mind. That book is the cleanest thing I know,—
like very clear and deep crystal. ’Yes. It is. It is. Harold’s quite right.
Are you really coming to Berlin in January? Really and truly? And you won’t let Eddy absorb you? I
hope your quarrel with him deepens, so that by Jan 15th you will not be on speaking terms. I am always, you
know, a little jealous of Eddy’s friendship with you. Spiteful....
Oxford was littered with Orlando. I nosed into all the bookshops. Such a time I had; and am slightly
in love with an undergraduate, which is a sure sign of middle-age.
Darling, I’m no poet, I think. I am a lump of dough, so far as poetry is concerned.
But I’d like to talk to you about it. I am rather sad about it; and think of going into mourning for my dead
Muse. She died in youth, poor thing, before she had learned to talk. Or do you think she has merely been
spending a few years in retreat, and will emerge again someday, grey haired but wise? I read The Land for five
minutes and thought it damned bad. Not a spark in it anywhere. Respectable, but stodgy.
Boski says she would be DELIGHTED to do any letters for you; so if you have any which could be met
by just a typewritten acknowledgment, bring them,—the more the better,—and you can sign them on Friday
morning. It would save you a power of time and trouble. Please.
I enclose a list of trains. How 1 am looking forward to Thursday to be sure, light of my eyes and delight
of my soul that you are.443
There was an awful muddle over Vanessa’s sketch: it was by Duncan. I am feeling rather badly about
it. I’ll tell you on Thursday. But Dottie has bought 3 of Duncan’s pictures for 200 guineas. I envy her. They
are lovely.
I wish it was Thursday. Yes,—what a pity you cannot work magic on time in real life as you can in
books. Then we could make Thursday last for 300 years. Marvell seems to have had much the same idea. I
now realise fully and for the first time exactly what he meant.444

442 In Berlin.
443 Virginia stayed that night at Long Barn, bringing with her the bound manuscript of Orlando as a present to its subject. Vita bequeathed it to Knole,
where it is now on display as the property of the National Trust.
444 Vita was beginning to read for her book on Andrew Marvell, published in 1929 by Faber & Faber. By ‘exactly what he meant’, she is referring to
Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’.
 Bring Potto. He shall have a smelt all to himself.

Your Orlando

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Friday night [14 December]

Dearest Creature,

I was very much upset to think you had been angry (as you said) that I didn’t go to the bloody womans trial—
(and yet I rather like you to be angry)....
And now Leonard has cut up rough about my having Elena445 to tea on Tuesday if I lunch out and dine
with people. So I won’t ask Elena; and then again you’ll be angry. But the truth is I’ve been rather headachy....

To Virginia Woolf
Sunday [16 December]

My dear Potto

I wasn’t angry—I was only disappointed not to see Mrs Woolf. You know how much I like seeing her. She
doesn’t know it, but you and I know.
Could you give her a message from me? that I will come on Tuesday at 1.5. and I don’t a bit want to
see Elena. Tell her this and she will understand. Or would she rather I came to dinner instead, and let her have
lunch alone in peace? as we are both going to the same party after dinner. Will she send me a postcard? I could
come to either—or both—
Tell her I had a nice talk with Mrs Hutchinson, who would like to come and stay here one day with
Mrs Woolf.
Dear Potto, you will explain to her that I wasn’t angry? only sad?

445 Elena Richmond.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
26 December

I would have written to you days ago, but for the first few days I was too splenetic to be fit for human society,
whether on paper or in the flesh, and then I got laid up with a sort of influenza from which I have just recovered,
retaining only wobbly knees and a still rather gloomy outlook on life. Partings are very odd and unpleasant: I
still have a sense of having torn myself suddenly from your side and gone away into the night with scarcely a
word to anybody. Now, however, I begin to look forward instead of back, and to reflect that in very little more
than a fortnight you will be here. That will be nice, and I promise to be as tactful as my delight at having you
will allow. Could we once, do you think, (here the promised tact breaks down) go out alone together of an
evening? But I leave that entirely to you.
Eddy plays a large part in my life; he is very happy and in his nicest mood; he has acquired a large
black ring and a thin gold bracelet, and his conversation consists almost entirely of the most idiomatic German
exclamations and interjections; but we are getting on very nicely together.
Did Boski remember to send you the amber beads?446 and will you wear them? and not scold me? and
look on each of them as a kiss from Orlando? and I will think of you as a fox, a melon, or an emerald, or
anything else you can devise?
And you are at Rodmell today, inventing your new room? very happy, with Pinker rushing about the
garden?
And shall I write again? My malady has left me quite witless—so I’ll say no more today except that I
love you.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Lewes
29 Dec

That wretched Potto is all slung with yellow beads. He rolled himself round in them, and can’t be dislodged—
short of cutting off his front paws, which I know you wouldn’t like. But may I say, once and for all, presents
are not allowed: its written all over the cage. It spoils their tempers—They suffer for it in the long run—This
once will be forgiven: but never never again—The night you were snared, that winter, at Long Barn,447 you
slipped out Lord Steyne’s paper knife, and I had then to make the terms plain: with this knife you will gash
our hearts I said and the same applies to beads....

446 Vita had sent Virginia the beads as a Christmas present.

447 18 December 1925
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
31 December

Please be an angel and let me have one line on receipt of this to say how you are....
If I dont hear, I shant sleep; then I shall get a headache; then I shant be able to come to Berlin:
So you see Love, love: and its the last day of the year by the way.
January -July 1929
In January 1929 Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa, Duncan Grant and Quentin Bell visited Vita in Berlin.
Edward Sackville-West also joined them. It was too large a party to be a success, for they got on each
other's nerves. Virginia contrived to spend a few hours alone with Vita, and seems again to have
declared her love, to which Vita responded cautiously. Virginia fell ill on her return to England, and
Vita was almost her only correspondent. The paradox was that Vita's love, but not her affection, had
been altered by Orlando and there was little she could do about it. Virginia was obliged to recognize
this. She was now beginning the first draft of The Waves. Vita had embarked, much more rapidly, on
her best-known novel, The Edwardians, and after a short visit to Italy with Harold continued working
on it when she returned to Long Barn in early March. They made some funny little expeditions'
together, to Keats's house in Hampstead and to Richmond. They met at Long Barn, Rodmell and
Bloomsbury parties. In June Virginia and Leonard paid a short visit to Vanessa at her villa in the
South of France.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
2 January

I was just beginning to wonder if you were cross with poor Towser,—whether the amber beads had been so
many cannon balls fired against your heart, or what,—and then this morning I got a nice nice loving solicitous
letter—and Towser’s tail began to wag again.
I have recovered, if that is recovery in which cigarettes taste like chipped sandstone and one’s limbs
feel like picked oakum,—all gritty and stringy. But everyone is ill here; no sooner do I get up, than Harold
goes down; but he was sick, and I wasn’t. It is unpleasant but not serious.
I send you this in an envelope which Nigel had begun to type for my mother, as I thought the
Dogware448 Mrs Woolf was a nice title for you. I am glad the Times says Orlando was the most important
piece of fiction of the year.
I am now going to sit down in patience and wait for the long letter. (But, my angel, British Embassy
Berlin is quite an easy address to remember! and you remembered with an efficiency that never failed to
impress Harold’s much more complicated ones in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.) Oh dear how funny that you will
see Brücken-allee. I am getting rooms for you all,—is that right?—8 marks a night, I think—but tell me if it’s
on the 15th or 16th that you arrive—and mind you tell me at what time (i.e. by what route you are coming—)
so that I can meet you, and what station (Friederich-strasse [sic] is best). If you come Harwich—the Hook you
have to get up at 4.45 in the morning, and don’t let them book your seats in a nonsmoking compartment which
they will do unless told to the contrary. I got caught over this once.

448 For Dowager.

 How nice of you to have sent Boski the Common Reader—she is delighted.
I went to tea with a lady lying on a divan playing with a parakeet. I went to tea with another lady,—an
old one this time,—who lives with a nephew who is expected to commit a crime at any moment. She consoles
herself with 3 Aberdeen terriers. A real Balzac household—plus a sister-in-law with a broken leg. When not
in Berlin they all live in a XIIth century castle near Hanover, all at sixes and sevens, and no money, so that the
roof is falling in. Another sister in law has just died of a broken heart, and a son-in-law of appendicitis.
I will write again when I have had the long letter. This is really to say that I am all right, and that you
must tell me exactly when you come—because of the rooms. Five single rooms449_is that what you will want?
Perhaps all this is in the long letter.
I am still full of spleen, but it will diminish as the 15th draws near. I shall cry, quite frankly, when you
leave, with sorrow, envy, and despite.
But really it is marvellous that you should actually be coming in a fortnight. I only wish you were
going to stay at Brücken-allee. Will you come to Long Barn in March?

Your faithful Towser

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Sunday 6 January

But you see, that there Potto (when you weren’t looking—you know what a sly little beast he is—though I
don’t like to sneak on him behind his back) that there Potto, I say, stole a copy of Orlando and had it bound
for me in Niger leather—and not content with that, he also stole the MS of Orlando and had that bound too—
so I thought I really might give him some yellow beads this Xmas without getting into a row— because I like
giving Potto things —and am ordinarily so severely controlled that I never dare to. Am I forgiven? and is Potto
forgiven? for having rolled himself in them?
I am taking a special housemaid’s cupboard for Potto, plus your five rooms, at the Prinz Albrecht.
Another ten days, and you will be here. Shall I see lots of you? every day? Wagenseil,—yes, I’d
queered Wagenseil’s pitch before I ever got your letter.4501 told Eddy firmly that you didn’t wish to meet
anyone, least of all Wagenseil. Then I met Wagenseil myself. He is a beautiful, brown, lean, young man like
a Spanish captain, with melancholy eyes and a twisted mouth; very attractive. But still I was obdurate. A wall
has been built between Wagenseil and you. You are safe.
I had to read your letter several times over before I extracted all the meaning from it. What is all that
about the 3rd and 4th rib and one’s loves? Whose loves? Yours?451 but you are said to have none. Mine? but
everybody knows I am Virginia’s Towser. So what’s all that? But there was one remark at the end of your
letter which encouraged me a lot: did I love you, you asked, particularly and not reasonably? So you do know

449 For Virginia, Leonard, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Quentin Bell.
450 Kurt Wagenseil was a friend of Harold s, who also translated some of his books.
451 Virginia had written (VW 1976):‘The image of one’s loves forever changes; and gradually., .from being a sight, becomes a sense—a heaviness
betwixt the third and fourth rib; a physical oppression.’
(at any rate in theory) that there is a distinction. A la bonne heure! How Clive would chuckle. Anyway, I shan’t
give you the answer till you come to Berlin,—except that you know it already.
I say: it’s awfully cold here. I recommend gaiters. Colder than anything we ever get in England. But
of course it may have changed by the time you come.
Do you know, I am looking forward to the 15th(or is it 16th?) as the faithful look forward to Paradise.
Only I can’t bear the thought of your going away again. Silly to think of that before you have even arrived; but
it weighs on me. I met a nice man at dinner two nights ago; a German. He stared at me when I was introduced;
stared hard. ‘Orlando!’ he cried then. Then he said it was the most wonderful book ever written.
Is it true,—can it be true?—that you are coming to Berlin? Heavens, I wish you were coming alone.
But Virginia in Berlin...Very odd. It almost reconciles me to Berlin, that Berlin should be going to contain
Virginia. The red tongue creeps across my calendar, eating up the days: only ten days more. Don’t oh don’t
get ill and be prevented from coming. As pants the hart for cooling streams452.... Because, really, you have no
idea how miserable I am here. I almost cease to exist. I shall revive when you come, like a watered flower.
I shall meet you at the station.
I’d better stop now, or I should write you too wild a letter of love and longing.

V.

I am so glad Julian453 likes The Land—so glad he thinks me a poet. I wish I thought so too. But I do like the
young to like The Land—and I like to be told it is a good thing not to resemble Tom Eliot.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Tuesday 8 January

What station it will be I will tell you later. Vita will say Hullo Virginia! Leonard will stoop and pat the dog.
He will compare her with Pinker, and if you are tactful you will say “But Pinker’s a much better colour,
Leonard” and then we shall all feel happy.
...Orlando has now sold 13000 copies in America: thats the last time I mention him. The station will
be Friederichstrasse.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
12 January

Henry454 and I will meet you at 5.9 p.m. on Thursday the 17th at the Friederichstrasse. We shall be very pleased
to see you. Your address in Berlin is:

452 Quoted from Nahum Tate (1652-1715) and Nicholas Brady (1659-1726), New Version of the Psalms (1696).
453 Julian Bell.
454 Harold’s spaniel.
 Hotel Prinz Albrecht
Prinz Albrechtstrasse 9.
Telephone Zentrum 88-74. Telegraphic address,
Hustersäle, Berlin. Price, 9 marks a day per room.
H. and c. Lift. Two rooms reserved
for the 17th; three more for the 18th.
Amen.
Meanwhile I count the days, for you don’t know the full pathos of how I devise little schemes for
making January and February go; and with your advent a whole block of time resolves itself, from the bright
17th to the black 24th. But after the 24th there is only a week to February; and once February is here I shall
begin to prick my ears once more. Also I’ve been pulling strings, which has resulted in a charming letter from
Lady Lindsay today, saying that she has told Sir Ronald that Harold would like to come back to the Foreign
Office as soon as a vacancy presents itself, and he has promised....
I have confessed to Harold, practically alienating his affection thereby, (‘I won’t have my career
arranged by women,’) but what do I care, if I can only get him back to London? Meanwhile he is pretending
to be cross.
We went to the sodomites’ ball. A lot of them were dressed as women, but I fancy I was the only
genuine article in the room.455 A very odd sight. We also went to a bicycle race which lasts for 6 days and 6
nights, round and round a banked-up track under arclights. There are certainly very queer things to be seen in
Berlin, and I think Potto will enjoy himself.
Now I won’t say any more, except that there are 482000 seconds between now and your arrival, and
that that is the moment I am living for.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Monday [14 January]

If you could bring me a copy of Seducers.... You won’t be leaving London till Wednesday night, so this ought
to reach you in time. And it won’t take much room. I am terribly excited. Yes, there is a lot of influenza, but a
very mild variety. Bring plenty of warm clothes. It is warmer today, but has been incredibly cold hitherto. I
recommend gaiters.
Does Leonard skate? if so, bring skates.
Your coming is quite the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me in Berlin. Do you speak
German? i.e. will you want to go to the theatre?
Oh God, I don’t believe, I can’t believe, that you’ll ever arrive. That I shall ever see you get out of the
train at Friederichstrasse. Will you and Leonard like to dine with us that night, or will you be too tired? Anyway
I will meet you.
Your coming is simply saving my life and my reason. I do hope you won’t get the influenza. I do long

455 It was called the Ball der Jugend. They were accompanied by Mario Panza, Victor Cazalet and Edward James, all long-standing friends of Harold.
for Thursday, I do, I do, I do.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Friday [25 January]

My darling lovely Virginia

It is so empty here without you. I went to lunch today to meet Pirandello;456 a little elderly man with a goatee
beard. He was three-quarters of an hour late for lunch; and why? Because, having come to Berlin for a law
suit, he had been suddenly visited in his hotel by two enormous German policemen, who had taken his watch
from his pocket and his rings from his fingers,—which, his knuckles being rather swollen by gout, had hurt
him considerably. A regular scene. He was very calm about it on the whole, but his hitherto admiration for the
Germans had turned within the space of half an hour to hatred.
You won’t get this, thanks to the English non-Sunday post, till after you have been to Long Barn,
which I hope will have reminded you of me a little and perhaps revived in you something of those feelings to
which you gave such startling and disturbing expression in the Funkturm?4571 say, you don’t know what a
difference your week here has made to me. It just shows how little the actual duration of time really counts.
Formerly, the whole of Berlin was pure loathesomeness to me; now, there are just a few places which are
invested with romance. Prinz Albrecht-strasse, Potsdam, the Funkturm; even Brücken-allee holds something
of your flavour. So your transporting of four people to Berlin has not been wasted—and I settle down with
comparative philosophy to my remaining month. THEN, comes Long Barn and the spring, and the nightingales
and your big bedroom, and all the rest of it. But will you be in a different frame of mind by then? or unfaithful
to me? Mary458 Christabel459? God, I’d never forgive you—No—save yourself for your own

Orlando

456 Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), the Italian dramatist and novelist.

457 The Berlin radio tower where Vita and Virginia had dined.
458 Mary Hutchinson.
459 Christabel McLaren, whose husband succeeded as 2nd Lord Aberconway in 1934.
To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Sunday [27 January]

Well, here I am in bed. I had to be hauled out of my berth at Harwich—2 mixture of the somnifeine,460 flu, and
headache—apparently. Quite drugged. But I’m better. Only of course the dr. makes me stay in bed and do
nothing. I wish it had happened in Berlin. I wish I could see you. Do write. I’m much better today. Berlin was
quite worth it anyhow.

To Virginia Woolf
[24 Brücken Allee]
Tuesday evening [29 January]

My poor, poor Virginia

I am so dreadfully sorry—and so angry that IF you had to catch ’flu at all, you didn’t do so in Berlin. We
would have carried you here, and looked after you so beautifully—and you could have stayed on for at least a
week—banked up with hot bottles— and your Towser trotting in and out—sorry about the ’flu—but happy to
have you to look after. Are you all right again? and no headache left as a legacy? Did you feel very miserable?
oh dear oh dear, what it is, to be far away, and to hear of things days after they have happened—What a
wretched journey you must have had—and Harwich at six o’clock in the morning—with the ’flu—it just
doesn’t bear thinking about. I hate you to be ill; it matters more for you than for other people. I say, look here:
if you’d like to escape to the country, (and there is only Mrs Bartholomew461 at Rodmell,) you know that all
the servants are at Long Barn twiddling their thumbs, and you could go there and be comfortable, (the comforts
of a first class hotel etc.) and nothing in this world would make me more happy than to think you were
benefitting by my empty idle little house—except to be there with you myself: so if you feel inclined, will you
ring up and say you and Leonard and Pinker are coming. I really would love you to— but I needn’t say that:
you know that I mean it, and Louise would spoil you—and they would all be delighted to have something to
do.
When I wrote to you, did I tell you we were going to Rapallo for a week on the 9th? No, I don’t think
we had thought of it then. Harold says he shall die if he doesn’t escape from Berlin—so we are going. You
may imagine if I am delighted. After that it will be a very short time till I come home—so my time-plotting
scheme is working beautifully. You will never know what you did for me by coming to Berlin, and so I feel it
is somehow my fault that you caught the ‘flu and were hauled out of your bunk.
I heard a lot more about Kessler:462 he is very rich, owns a copper-mine in Mexico, and is a bugger. I
thought as much. I had such a lot to say to you, but it has all been driven out of my head by the idea of your
being ill. I shan’t be happy till I know you have recovered, and if I thought you would go to Long Barn I would
be truly happy. Just think of that nice room—and huge bed, and get into the Umbrella463 and drive off. Darling,

460 For somnifère, drug.

461 The daily help at Monk’s House.
462 Count Harry Kessler, who supervised the printing ofVita s translation of Rilke.
463 Leonard’s car.
do. And miss me a little.
Think what I owe you! I got a great sheaf of white lilac suddenly, with a card: ‘For Orlando.’ I felt I
ought to pack it all up and send it to you.
Darling I do feel so worried about you; are you all aches and miseries? have you recovered?
Your very very loving and concerned

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Tuesday [29 January]

Dearest Creature,

Here is another selfish invalids bulletin, but I like to write to you, and you won’t mind it all being about myself.
I am really better today, only still kept in bed. It is merely the usual headache which is now making me rather
achy and shivery but passing off.... Its odd how I want you when I’m ill. I think everything would be warm
and happy if Vita came in.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Friday [31 January]

Your little shaky pencil letters simply wring my heart—oh, how damnable space and time are—you see, all
my pictures of you are at two days’ remove. I know you were in bed still when you wrote, but what I don’t
know is whether you’re still in bed now—or whether you’ve been promoted to the sofa—anyhow I gather that
you have been rather bad—you always understate your ills—and that is quite disturbing enough for me. Berlin
did that to you—the fiend—The coffin of Berlin is becoming absolutely studded with nails—nails with big
brass heads—like the Lord Treasurer’s464 chest at Knole—and the biggest nail of all, so far, is that it made
Virginia (who is more precious to me than a whole Lord Treasurer’s chest full of pearls and rubies) ill. Yes, I
wish I could open your door suddenly—instead of your painted Mary465 and talking of Mary I saw the most
marvellous photographs of her... but I’ll go back to the beginning because I had a funny day yesterday—the
sort of day that amuses Virginia— beginning with low life and ending with high—beginning with a rakish
little ghost from Teheran 466 and ending with a Papal Nuncio467—and a red headed Lesbian468 in the middle.
The ghost from Teheran suddenly appeared, having come to Berlin to see me— not from Teheran but

464 Thomas Sackville, Vita’s sixteenth-century forebear.

465 Mary Hutchinson.
466 Baronne Frachon, who had lived for a short time in Teheran and was self-appointed leader of diplomatic society there.
467 Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII.
468 Her name was Frau Riess. (See Victoria Glendinning, Vita (1983), p. 212.)
from Sweden—a squalid rather amusing Montmartre sort of person—always full of fantastic stories which
may be true and on the other hand may not.
had been bored with her in Teheran but was pleased to see her here—and she wanted to see the Aquarium so
we went—heavily haunted by memories of Virginia it was— and then I took her along to tea with the red
headed Lesbian—where we found Pirandello and his two little tarts that he travels about with—and several
other very shady-looking people.
Red-head is a photographer—and there on the walls amongst the photographs of every conceivable
European celebrity from Hindenburg to Andre Gide was our Mary469 marvellously portrayed. Redhead
manoeuvred me into a dark little room where she showed me photographs of Josephine Baker stripped to the
waist,—very beautiful,—and other photographs of an indecency which I won’t describe; leered at me; made
me take my hat off; and finally pestered me into saying I would sit to her tomorrow morning. She fair gives
me the creeps. I came home and had a bath. Then finished up the day by despatching my Teheran friend off to
Paris, and going to a great huge dinner at the Embassy—footmen in knee breeches; a sort of Suisse holding a
silver topped pole which he banged on the floor every time the door opened; stars and ribbons; a lady who has
had five husbands, including a Persian prince, and a final husband who is the nephew of the first one,—she
changes her wig, too, according to her mood, so that it is sometimes grey, sometimes black, sometimes red—
; gold plate in rivers down the table; and the Papal Nuncio in rose-red silk with a great gold cross on his breast.
(He’ll probably be the next Pope.)
Potto would have wagged his tail.
And all the time I thought of Virginia lying upstairs in Tavistock Square, and wished I were there.
And Frau Stresemann6 got hold of Harold and said ‘I know you think I’m a fool, because whenever
you see me you ask me if I have been dancing much lately, but I’m not a fool, and I can tell you that you are
wasting yourself and your wife on this idiotic profession. ’Which improved my opinion of the lecherous
Katie.470
Did I tell you we were going to Rapallo for a week on the 9th? Yes, I surely did.
Oh my darling do be good and look after yourself—Leonard sees to that,
I know—but I simply can’t bear you to be ill. I wish I were there—

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Thursday [31 January]

I shall now have my little treat of writing to Vita, I say to myself.

I wish I’d heard from you, but perhaps I shall. No I am not to see anybody—not Mary471 even. Dr
Rendel can’t imagine why I want to see Mary, (her cousin).There is such a thing as womanly charm I reply.

469 Mary Hutchinson.

470 Katie, the wife of Gustav Stresemann, German Foreign Minister, 1923-29. Harold described her as ‘a vulgar, eager woman, haggard, ill-dressed,
bony and pretending to be young’ (see James Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson, Vol. I, p. 333).
471 Mary Hutchinson.
Anyhow it aint allowed. I console myself by thinking that they wouldnt allow you either. I have been rather
giddy, and have to keep lying down. It is something to do with the spirit level in my ears. There is a kind of
mouse which turns for ever, because its ears have no spirit level. Would you like to see Potto turning for ever?
everything is put down to Berlin. I am never to walk round a gallery or sit up drinking again. All my adventures
are to be lying down—which will suit, in some ways. Really I am rather better, and make up a book to be
called The Moths472 hour after hour.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
2 February

How is my poor dear invalid? Does Potto sit under the sofa,—the Knole sofa,—feeling miserable just out of
sympathy? So would Vita, if she were there.
Potto has a stary coat and a hot nose. His tail doesn’t wag. It just moves, but only just, when he sees
the toe of a shoe he knows, under the flounce of the sofa. If he saw the toe of Mrs Hutchinson’s shoe, he would
growl.
Truly I am very unhappy about you. Being strictly kept for rather a long time has a sinister ring. It is
only from these chance phrases that I can deduce how bad you must have been, since you never complain.
Shall you go to Long Barn? I told Boski to ring Leonard up and urge the case. You see it is so silly and so
exasperating for all those servants to be there doing nothing, and they don’t like it themselves. However, it’s
boring for you to have me maundering on about how much, how very much, I would like to think of you at
Long Barn, and I do trust you to know how passionately I mean it, and to act on it the very minute you felt
inclined.473
We went for a really lovely walk with Eddy through a pine wood; the snow was bright blue in the
shadows, and bright pink in the sun; deer bounded across our path, and there were people on skis; at the end
of the walk we came down on a lake. Now that January has turned into February I am able to find comfort
once more in the beauties of Nature. But I am menaced by a growing danger: the wall-paper in my bedroom is
becoming detached from the walls owing to the heat and dryness; I hear a loud report like a pistol-shot, and
lo! a fresh section has broken away and hangs loosely bellying. One night the last piece will give; the whole
will come down, like a rose suddenly falling to pieces; and I shall be buried under the pheasants and the
peonies.
Grand Hotel and Europa, Rapallo, Italy, should you still feel disposed to tell me how you are, will be
my address from next Saturday the 9th to Saturday the 16th—and I know you’ve written to me because you
promised—angel that you are—ill or not ill —it is appreciated. But you mustn’t get tired. Heavens, what a
comfort it is to think of Leonard and his beefsteaks. But I wish you were at Long Barn. No parties, no
romances—poor, poor Virginia. Although I am all for the kennel (with a little wire run)474 1 don’t like it to be
for that reason; would rather have Virginia well and naughty, than Virginia ill and good. Much, much rather.

472 The Waves.

473 Virginia did not accept this invitation.
474 ‘You want Potto and Virginia kept in their kennel’, Virginia had written.
 What about the photographs?475 1 long to see them. I had a good tease for my redheaded photographer,
who mentioned you, by telling her you had just been here. She nearly died of it. As a matter of fact I am rather
sorry, because she might have made some lovely photographs of you, and had I seen them I might have taken
you there. But Lenare! Lenare!
I say, would it be any help to you to use Boski for your letters? If so, telephone to her to come up—
and in any case make use of her if you go to Long Barn. Oh damn, it is so tantalising to be such miles away,
and not able to do anything for you, except make suggestions which I greatly fear you will scorn. But
everything which is mine is yours, as you very well know—even to my heart.

Your V.

A wretched letter from Raymond476 who is hating New York!

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Monday [4 February]

In bed for another week! my precious Virginia, what horrors are happening to you? It’s all very well saying
there’s nothing wrong with you,—and I don’t believe it was Berlin really, I think it was the ’flu that started it,
which you might have got anywhere. Did you feel very tired here? If so, you concealed it marvellously. I have
seldom wished so much that I was in England; only, as you say, you wouldn’t be allowed to see me. But I
could sit on the doorstep. The only thing that consoles me is your saying you will go to Long Barn if you want
to, and anyhow perhaps you’ll come for a little spoiling in March, to convalesce? you know I’m a good nurse
and very severe. Yes—by the way, talking of nurses, I laughed a good deal over Mrs Clive’s ‘sombre nurse’
in my review of novels in the Nation this week477—when it should have been ‘sombre muse’—but still perhaps
I’m lucky that they didn’t print ‘sombre mouse’! There’s a terrible packet of misprints in that wretched review
(and one sentence which doesn’t make sense at all, because a ‘not’ has been omitted)—tell Leonard I love him,
but that he’s a bad man.478 Well, if you come to Long Barn I’ll be a sombre nurse or mouse or muse or anything
you like—and give you soup—not coffee—in the middle of the morning. Truly, my darling, I am wretched
that you should be ill, and have pains, and a headache, and I wish for nothing in the world so much as that I
might look after you—short of being able to work a miracle to make you instantly better. Instead of that, we
have to go to The British Colony Ball! But there are compensations: a chemist came to lunch479 and told us
that within two years war would have become impossible, thanks to the absolute deadliness of the new gases,
and he has also invented a device for getting your motor out of difficult parking places—so the world seems
to be progressing towards civilisation after all. Then there was a party at the Embassy, which we attended, and

475 Taken by Lenare.

476 Raymond Morrimer.
477 The review (2 February) was of Mrs Archer Clive’s Paul Ferroli, originally published in 1855.
478 Leonard Woolf was Literary Editor of the Nation until early 1930.
479 Frederick Lindemann (1886-1957), later Lord Cherwell, and scientific adviser to Winston Churchill in the Second World War. Since 1919 he had
been Professor of Physics at Oxford University.
we went to The Squeaker480 in German—and what else? we had 41 degrees below zero, Reaumur—and all the
windows of the motors are cracking with the cold which has returned with all the fury of a horde of Tartary.
But mostly I think of Virginia, lying in lovely silks making up stories about moths481—but not, not happy or
well as I would have her. ‘Variable and therefore miserable condition of Man this minute I was well, and am
ill this minute; I am surpriz’d with a sodaine change and can impute it to no cause.’ That’s Donne; not me. In
this cold, I find one must proceed with caution: a sudden touch on metal, fur, or water produces an electric
shock; I feel one could light a gas-jet by snapping one’s fingers. And at Rapallo I expect we shall get sheets of
rain and a raging grey sea. But we shall work very hard, and Max Beerbohm will draw a picture of Harold.
I’m told Edith and Osbert482 are at Rapallo! but I don’t believe it. I still haven’t got over Francis Birrell483
thinking my handsome tribute to the Sitwell genius, bitter. It doesn’t seem to me to make sense.
Do my rambling letters bore you? but they’re written with so much concern about you and so much
desire to hear that you really are better—which in spite of all your assurances I don’t believe. Not so long as
you are kept in bed and given bromide which clamps your head to the pillow, and allowed to see no one. Those
facts speak for themselves. Only when I hear that you have had Sibyl to tea shall I regain any confidence.
Meanwhile I am your very worried and infinitely loving

V.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Tuesday [5 February]

I came in just now, having been to Wertheim’s to buy a pair of gloves for 4 marks, and meant to go on with
my story of the bank clerk who loses his memory, but having stopped at the book shop on the way and bought
Orlando in Tauchnitz I began to read, and so lost myself that the evening is already nearly gone. Do you know,
I never read Orlando without tears pricking in my eyes? You may believe this or you may not, but it is true.
Sometimes they even spill over. Whether it is the mere beauty of the book, or whether it is because it is you,
or because it is Knole, or because it is all three, I don’t know; anyhow you like facts, and there is a fact for
you. There never was a book that so bewitched and moved me. All this, in spite of my being forbidden to
mention O—o. Perhaps today the effect was heightened by the damnable fact of your being ill. When I am old
and dying I shall cause Orlando to be read aloud to me.
Meanwhile are you better? which seems to be the only thing that matters. I had a note from Leonard
but there was not as much information about you in it as I should have liked. He said ‘You will have heard
from Virginia,’ but surely he knows by now that Virginia is an arrant liar who always says she is better whether
it is true or not? Even Potto and I know that. Potto cautioned me long ago to disbelieve simply every word that

480 By Edgar Wallace.

481 The Waves.
482 Edith and Osbert Sitwell.
483 Son of Augustine Birrell and a friend of the Bloomsbury set, especially of Raymond Mortimer. He owned a Bloomsbury bookshop and edited the
series in which Vita’s Aphra Behri appeared. Vita’s ‘handsome tribute to the Sitwell genius’ was included in her lecture to the Royal Society of Literature
in November 1928.
Virginia uttered in that connection. I thanked him, and said I knew it already. So I should have welcomed a
little enlightenment from Leonard whom I take to be a truthful (although prejudiced) man. But he did say you
were improving, though it was a slow process, and I was glad of that crumb.
A dinner party tonight, Lord have mercy upon us. But on Saturday the cage opens and the birds take
flight.

Your loving loving V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Monday [4 February]

Dearest—What a time your letters take to come! One posted Thursday comes this morning—to my great
delight. You can’t think what a difference it makes when they bring in a blue envelope. I’m still in bed.... And
no pain for two days and no sleeping draughts, only Bromide. I’ve had this sort of thing before, especially after
flue [sic], slight though that was and it always takes some time to go off—Also the sea sick draught, which
was veronal, made me more susceptible. But of course the dr and Leonard says its all the Berlin racketing (I
daresay it was) on the top of the others.
...A woman writes that she has to stop and kiss the page when she reads O:— Your race I imagine.
The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Wednesday evening [6 February]

Harold is writing the Life of Lord Carnock, 484 and I have been reading a German warnovel 485 which is creating
a great commotion here,—70,000 copies sold in three weeks, so they say,—ha ha,—but this Teutonic language
tramples like an elephant on my brain, so I prefer to write to Virginia—not that I have anything to say except
that I love her and wish she were not ill. I can’t believe it’s the ‘racketing’ of Berlin; really, you might have
spent every night for a week till 5 in the morning indulging in orgies—to hear you talk—or Leonard talk,
rather, and the doctor. No, no; it was the ’flu, but whatever it was it’s very distressing. Now look how well you
were when I brought you back from France; all round and rosy, and Potto’s coat a treat to see. Do you know
what I believe it was, apart from ’flu? it was SUPPRESSED RANDINESS. So there—You remember your
admissions as the searchlight went round and round?486
No, darling, I didn’t succumb to the red headed lady487—nor to anybody else. I am as good as a
snowdrop—and just about as cold. Industrious, too: I’ve finished Rilke, But oh! the trials that you expose me

484 His father.

485 All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) by Erich Maria Remarque.
486 On the Funkturm on 19 January.
487 See Vita’s letter of 31 January.
to! We dined last night with the Sibyl of Berlin488—but you must multiply Sibyl’s489 crudity by 1000, and then
remove all her brains. She bore down on me after dinner. ‘Oh, won’t you come and sit in the next room? We’re
all dying to talk to Orlando.’ That’s what I have to suffer for your sake. But Orlando wouldn’t play. Was sulky
and disobliging.
I wish my letters didn’t take so long. I’ve written every day—a mouse in the mouse-trap, and the
necessary spirit-level in its ears. No, indeed, I shouldn’t like to see Potto turning for ever. Would ear stoppers
help?

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee
Berlin NW23
Thursday [7 February]

Do you know what? In tramped Marta490 with a parcel—a big fat parcel—registered— ‘aus England. ’ Would
I sign the receipt? Torn from sleep, I scrawled my name—burnt the string with a match—and there was my
Virginia looking mischievous.491
Oh Virginia, darling, they are good. I have stuck them up all round the room. I don’t know which I
like best. May I keep them till tomorrow? absurd question, since you can’t say either yes or no—and by then
perhaps I’ll have decided. (Of course there’s nothing to prevent my ordering them all from Lenare myself if I
want to!) Do you like them yourself? does Leonard? You will find that they are a source of perpetual
expenditure to you, as people will ask you for them. You are an angel to have sent them—I was longing for
them. Very tidy you were, that day, and I’m glad you had no hat on. What with your letters and now the
photographs I have been spoilt—hullo, here’s the second post, and a note from Leonard—and a postscript from
you—‘rather tired’—oh dear—but Leonard says you are really better thank the Lord—and you say will I bring
the photographs back with me and not send them—of course I’d much rather do that. Tell Leonard yes I will
do the novels—but on no account let him send me one called ‘Belated Adventure’492—as it’s partly about me
and so I couldn’t possibly do it. Grand Hotel et Europa, Rapallo, but he mustn’t let the printer make me create
purely imaginary characters such as Mrs Clive’s sombre nurse this time!
Now I have to go and lunch with a man like a Borzoi—but am all excited and happy.

V.

To Virginia Woolf
24 Brücken Allee

488 Mrs Thelwall.

489 Sibyl Colefax.
490 Her German maid.
491 The parcel contained Lenare s photographs.
492 By Margaret Goldsmith-Voigt. Vita appears in it as ‘Hester Drummond’. (See Victoria Glendinning, Vita, p.212.)
 Berlin NW23
Saturday 9 [February]

This is a farewell letter, to be stamped with my last German stamp, before we leave for Rapallo. Harold has
treated himself to a new despatch case and at least three guidebooks (with maps.) We are very much excited.
We get to our destination at 7 tomorrow evening. On Monday we go for a long walk, in the sun? snow? among
the aloes. And shall I get a letter from Virginia? It is foggy in London isn’t it? yellow, thick. Lord!
Will you and I ever go to Cassis, do you think?
Can I come and eat my bun loaf with you on March 4th? I shall get back on the 2nd, but Ben arrives
simultaneously for the weekend so I’ll have to go straight to Long Barn. The 4th is Monday. I don’t know what
time he has to go back to Eton. I could come to dinner perhaps? but it ah depends on how you are. It would be
dreadful if I made you ill, by recalling the racket of Berlin.
How exciting to think of crossing the Alps—Hannibal and Napoleon—and of descending on Liguria—
and seeing the sea—and saying to the concierge Are there any letters? My standards have rushed so
contemptibly down the scale, in Berlin, that it seems just as exciting as setting off for Baghdad. Thus is one’s
spirit broken, or at any rate diminished.
Have you been taken for a little drive yet? and have you thought about moths? Darling, I send you all
my love, you know. I think about you all the time, and with huge concern. Leonard’s note was reassuring.
But I don’t like you to be ill.

Your
V.
To Virginia Woolf
Rapallo
Monday [11 February]

What a lovely Italianate address you invented for me. Yes, I found your letter here last night, when, after a
triumphal progress across Germany and Switzerland, during which our dining car burst into flames and had to
be abandoned, we arrived. And it was warm. We went out after dinner without any coats on, and strolled under
the orange trees and the mimosa, while the Mediterranean sighed upon the beach. The Alps had really been
very beautiful; all the cascades were frozen, and hung like iridescent beards down the face of the cliffs; sunlit
peaks pushed themselves through the mist, and in the valleys the willows were all golden. The truants were
exuberantly happy. It is a great thing, Virginia, to be mobile; to take advantage of trains, and not to say that a
week’s truancy is not worth a 30-hour journey. It is.—Lord, if I say that, you’ll be dashing off to Spain with
Leonard.
I was pleased to know exactly what had happened to you. I don’t think it was really the fault of Berlin.
I don’t want to think it was, because then I feel I must bear a part of the guilt; otherwise, I should be only too
glad to fasten any crime on to Berlin. I expect it was the seasick cure. I’ve known people as strong as horses
be made ill for weeks by those things.
Later. We have been for a lovely walk, and discovered a little green and white house which said
Pensione493 We are going to move into it tomorrow, and I telegraphed to Boski and told her to let you know,
but I shall come to this hotel to fetch my letters for the next three days. It is a beastly hotel, and the Pensione
is so nice: its toes are practically in the sea, and there are big plain wooden rooms with big windows looking
right down the coast almost to Spezia. It appeared to be completely empty, as we were shown room after room
to choose from.
Then we walked on, and everything was blue and gold and dusty. This part of the coast is much less
sophisticated than the French part. The effect of coming down on this blue sea and sunny headlands, after the
snow and hideiousness of the German plain, is simply extraordinary.
About Lady Bessborough: Harold says he can’t remember for certain, but he knows the
correspondence you mean and he thinks you will find it referred to in the Life of Lord Granville.494 He is very
cross at not being able to remember exactly. Anyhow he says he thinks Lord Granville would at any rate
provide you with the necessary reference.
Oh how I wish you were here, it would be so good for you, (no racket,) and there are olive-terraces
and all the rest of it. Why does one five in England? Why does one five anywhere but in the South?

Your
V.

493 Villa Cuba.

494 By Lord E. Fitzmaurice (1905). Harold was correct about Lady Bessborough s correspondence.
To Virginia Woolf
Villa Cuba San Michele di Pagano
Rapallo
Wednesday [13 February]

I should like to go on telling you of blue skies, but having a great respect for truth I am bound to confess that
it has snowed. It is, in fact, bitterly cold. Everybody says to us ‘E proprio straordinario,’ and tells us how up
to last Sunday they were sitting out basking in the sun,—which I believe, for we did get one day of it,—and
this irritates us to such an extent that Harold will I am sure commit murder if anybody says it to him again.
With coats wrapped round our knees we sit and shiver, a truly pitiable sight. Personally I don’t mind so much,
as anything is Paradise after Berlin, but I’m so sorry for Harold, whose days of escape and holiday are counted.
Leonard’s novels arrived yesterday, not a very exciting lot. Why is it that novels are all so ghastly
competent nowadays, with just about as much life in them as an expiring fish? It depresses me to the extent of
quite preventing me from trying to write one myself. The ordinary novel has been reduced to a mere formula;
they’re like those beastly illustrated papers, Vogue and so forth,—yes, I know what’s happened to novels:
they’ve become to literature what good taste is to art. (I shall put this in my review!) Everybody has it, so that
one now welcomes a blue china kitten and antimacassars, as a change from grey pile carpets and Coromandel
screens. But I did read one that I liked: Sergeant Grisha.495 Moreover this feeling that the novel has become a
formula, drives people to go straining after something different, and. you get either the deliberate artlessness
of people like Bunny Garnett and Dorothy Edwards,496 or else the fireworks of Ronald Firbank. However, I
daresay you’ll clear up the whole matter when you are allowed back to write about fiction, much as you may
dislike it.
We haven’t done anything about Max Beerbohm yet, but we shall.497 Now there’s a man who can
write, don’t you think? When I come home, will you make me out a synopsis of solid reading? I have recently
been appalled by my own ignorance. You see, you know all about people like Sterne, and I don’t. I go worrying
on, without having enough background of good standards to use for purposes of comparison. There’s no doubt
about it, I’m lamentably ignorant. But I do love literature, and I do hate the secondrate.
Presently we shall walk into Rapallo, our heads held down against the blizzard, to fetch such letters as
may be at the hotel. It was such a beastly hotel. We found this tiny villa on Monday when we were out for a
walk; it would be delicious in warm weather, for it is practically in the sea, and from the windows you can see
right down the coast as far as Spezia. Did I tell you this? I forget. But now the sea lashes the rock on which it
is built, and the oranges look simply silly. Southern countries look much sillier in wintry weather, than northern
ones do in summery. I don’t quite know what I mean by that, but I know I mean something.
My darling are you better?

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]

495 The Case of Sergeant Grischa, by Arnold Zweig.

496 Rhapsody (1927).
497 Virginia had asked Vita to ‘give my humble duty to Max B. if you see him’. He lived at Rapallo.
 Tuesday 12 February

You have been an angel—letters every day and today a letter from Le Boski with your new address....
I have been out. I have twice walked round the square leaning on L’s arm—very cold and ugly it is,
and a cat had chosen to die on the path. Then I undress and lie on the sofa.
Today I have lain on the sofa—not dressed, and feel now much brighter and dearer and less inclined
to curse God for having made such a crazy apparatus as my nervous system. Is it worth it?... L. wrapped me
up warm; and I am very cheerful again. Its awfully difficult to say how long its going to take though. I agree
it was the flu; but I think I was foolish also in Berlin—you dont realise what a valetudinarian life mine is,
usually, so that what’s nothing to anybody else is rackety to poor Potto. Never mind. I shall be in robust health
by the 4th. But can’t you look in for a bite on the 2nd? And I’m awfully tempted by the notion of a few days
at Long Barn—as Le Boski insists.

To Virginia Woolf
Villa Cuba
San Michele di Pagano,
Rapallo
Saturday [16 February]

(I enclose a photograph which I think may bring you some comfort.)

Every morning while I still lie in delicious sleep in an enormous letto matrimoniale, (but alone,) I am
aroused by a clash of opening shutters next door, and then a figure dressed in canary-yellow pyjamas bursts
into my room and, saying ‘You simply must look,’ opens my shutters with an equal clash. I turn a sleepy and
reluctant eye upon the dawn. I see a dark, purple sea; dark, purple promontories; and above them a primrose
sky. There are a few little clouds in the sky. They are pink. They turn from pink to gold. A scarlet rim appears
above the promontories. It changes into a scarlet disc with the suddenness of an ejaculation. The sun is up. The
whole coast floods with light; the sea turns blue. Another day has begun.
Now this is true, while your Thames freezes and your pipes burst. Why does one not live on the
Riviera? Harold, at all events, is determined to; ‘a little pink house,’ he murmurs, ‘among the olives.’ So, if
Leonard in one of his dramatic moments smashes the Press, murders Mrs Cartwright, sacks Nellie, and, putting
Pinker into a basket and Virginia on to a lead, removes his camp to the south of France, there is quite a good
chance of your finding Harold and Vita encamped a little way down the coast. Indeed it seems insane not to
live here, at any rate for the winter. I admit, that for two days while the Italian Press burst into headlines about
‘Il tragico governo invernale,’ we had a snowstorm. But almost immediately the climate recovered itself. The
Ligurians ceased to pelt one another with snowballs, and resumed their normal occupation of drinking
vermouth at round tin tables on the pavement, examining and criticising meanwhile the ankles of the strolling
women.
Max Beerbohm is not here; he is in England. We walked to his villa; a horrid little house, as closely
sandwiched in between his neighbours as the ham between the bread.
What’s this about ‘a few days at Long Barn’? Before I return? or after? Consider: I return the week
after next, which is not so very long to wait, and you know I’d look after you like the most expensive of Scotch
nannies with a new baby to powder. Seriously I would. You see, I have just had your letter addressed here, and
oh dear I fear you aren’t as well as you should be—a long business—but do say that it wasn’t I who tired you
in Berlin? No,—it was all those galleries, to which I didn’t come. Sans Souci perhaps? but you would have
gone there, me or no me. My poor darling—I mind more than you know. I mean, I keep feeling I haven’t the
right to be weft and in the sun, when you are lying on the sofa with a headache. I would exchange with you, if
only an archangel would appear and give me the chance.
We share this little house with five other people. A young Italian, whom I took to be a poet (at least,)
when I saw him tearing his hair over sheets of foolscap. But it turned out that he was only trying to write a
letter to his mother. An elderly Italian couple, she rather beautiful, he very absent-minded, continually
murmuring to himself ‘Ah, bello! bello!’ about nothing at all,—unless his own thoughts. An English couple,
mother and daughter, name of Smith, with the best British accent in Italian I ever heard. Harold and I study
the English virgins in this place with great interest. They have the most pronounced family look. A tight,
disapproving mouth,—ah, the joys we have missed!—let us make up for it by condemning them. And so they
knit, since they may not love.
We go for long walks, either along the coast or else up the hills into the olives. We leave here on
Tuesday, not very much encouraged by the newspaper accounts of what happens to trains in Central Europe,—
to be snowed up is nothing, but what about the wolves? And do you see what the temperature has been in
Berlin? For once, I think, the whole of Europe has talked about the weather as unanimously as do, habitually,
the English.
I say: would you tell Leonard, I had already sent my review of his novels to Boski to type, when two
more arrived this morning. What am I to do? Re-write my review? cut out two books, and substitute the two
new arrivals? Return the two new arrivals to him, to be put into his next batch? I await his orders.
Lord! I wish I could see you. But I shall soon. On the 4th. I shall have to go straight from Dover to
Long Barn on the 2nd on account of Ben, I think. I’ll let you know if I change my plans. I hope Potto is nice
to you?

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Berlin
Thursday [21 February]

I wish I could tell you that we had got stuck in a snowdrift and been set upon by wolves, but it just merely
wouldn’t be true; our train was, indeed, draped in curtains of ice, but apart from being two hours late our return
journey was without incident. We left San Michele in a blaze of sunshine, and almost immediately after turning
our backs on Genoa were swallowed up by the snow. Yes of course it was true about the mimosa and being
warm. Do I ever tell anything but the truth? If I didn’t, I might be a better writer,—less plodding, humdrum,
pedestrian. But never mind: I’ve thought of a novel, and I’m going to write it this summer and make my
fortune.498 Such a joke it will be, and I hope everybody will be seriously annoyed.
Everybody in Berlin looks mediaeval: they have evolved every sort of extraordinary garment against
the cold,—which is pretty fierce. Old women with their heads tied up in dishclouts, men in Rembrandresque
fur caps, great felt boots, sheepskins, ear-caps, huge gloves. For two days, apparently, hardly anybody went
out, and no motor could be made to start, so the streets were empty and Berlin a city of the dead. Of course it
is all your fault; I thought of that long ago; so will you please now write a description of how the Gulf Stream

498 The Edwardians.

boiled and the English climate became torrid? (TORRID, not HORRID.) I hear your disastrous passages on
the Great Frost 499 were read on the wireless, so I suppose there’ll now be a fresh boom in your sales,—book-
stall novelist that you now are!
This letter is only really to say we’ve got back,—and that I found your letter here, and that I am coming
back next week and shall I be allowed to see you on Monday? and are you really and truly better? and still
fond of me?
By the way, Tauchnitz has come out strong with your works: Mrs Dalloway and Orlando rub elbows
with The Squeaker500 in all countries,—Germany, Switzerland and Italy Truly At all the stations along the line
I saw them, and waved a friendly hand. But they cut me, no doubt ashamed of the low company they were
keeping, as an English gentleman (so I understood) pretends not to see a respectable woman he knows when
he’s dining with a whore.
My darling I shall see you so soon,—horray.

Your V.

To Virginia Woolf
British Embassy
Berlin
Saturday [23 February]

My darling Virginia I have been feeling so grim about Berlin that I have not had the heart to write any letters.
If I wanted to describe what I felt about it, I should have to enlarge my vocabulary. And the cold! Thick snow,
and the thermometer fallen to nothing. I feel completely atrophied. Now, as I write this, I shall probably be in
England by the time you get it, and next morning I shall see you,—shan’t I?—so that’s a nice thought—but
my poor Harold.... However, he doesn’t hate it as much as I do.
True, there are the museums, and the Planetarium. I’ll tell you about the Planetarium. I wanted to have
one at Long Barn, but on enquiry I discovered that they cost ,£20,000.1 am therefore going to devote all my
energies to getting one put up in London. It is another aspect of Virginia’s World. I shall try to write an article
about it, but it is a subject for you, not for me. There is also a lovely aquarium, and they play ice-hockey by
artificial fight,—have you ever seen ice-hockey?—and the pictures are intoxicating—so you see I am trying
to make the best of Berlin—also I have discovered a bookstall which deals entirely in homosexual literature,
which sounds even funnier in German than it does in English. These are my compensations—but the rest is
just black misery, and I shall have to be petted and coaxed back into equanimity. As for the idea of three years
interlarded with large slabs of Berlin, it doesn’t bear contemplation. You will have to come and stay with us
here. I feel as though the top of my head were coming off,—a wild, helpless feeling.
I met an admirer of yours, one Mr Cohen-Portheim,501 a gentleman lacking in charm but of some
discrimination in literature. He knows Leonard, he says. When he let drop your name, the room (for me)
became suddenly irradiated. I have met thousands of people, and scarcely had a moment to myself.

499 From Orlando.

500 By Edgar Wallace.
501 Paul Cohen-Portheim, a German Anglophile writer, whose best-known book was England the Unknown Isle (1930).
 Oh, I must bring this letter abruptly to a close, as my old friend Kuhlmann502 has called. Damn him.
Bless you, my lovely Virginia—Wednesday morning!

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Berlin
Monday [25 February]

It snows and snows,—Berlin has now been under snow since the beginning of December. One’s brain, or at
any rate mine, becomes completely atrophied; but what really horrifies me is the prospect of leaving Harold
here while I come frisking home to England. You wouldn’t like to leave Leonard in similar circumstances?
no, of course you wouldn’t.
An echo of Virginia: Dottie went to see you. I heard about that. If she thinks everyone hates her, it is
my fault. I scolded. I orated. Now you, as I have reason to know, like scolding people and making them cry,
whether beside gas-fires or among currant bushes; but I don’t, and am sorry about Dottie. One cannot unsay
what one has said, least of all if it happens to be the truth. Things said in a temper can be unsaid; not the cold
things, the meant things. Besides, your scoldings and corrections (though not said in temper) are deserved;
they are opportune; they are salutary. Mine, to Dottie, may be deserved, and richly; but opportune they are
never—and salutary seldom. Therefore I had better keep them to myself. Whereas your scoldings of me have
the effect of inducing 12-months’ chastity on me, both physical and moral. Very good both for my soul and
my nerves.
Do you know what we are doing? Harold is reading about Harmann, The Butcher of Hanover,—an
unbelievably horrible book which I recommend by the way to the Hogarth Press, in translation,—and I am
writing to you, and over us both hangs the immediate prospect of putting on our pretty evening clothes and
sallying out to a party. Not a diplomatic party; but a party at which Yvette Guilbert will perform; Yvette
Guilbert503 whom I have not heard since I was 17, and went to a party I had been forbidden to go to, in London.
Little by little our determination is ebbing. We have come to the stage of saying, ‘If we don’t go, we shall be
sorry afterwards,—Yvette Guilbert will die,—and it will be like Duse, 504 when we were too lazy to go up to
London to see her.’ So I write to you, expecting at every moment to hear Harold saying from the next room,—
tearing himself from the Butcher of Hanover,—‘We must go and dress;’ or else to hear myself saying severely
‘Harold, go and dress.’ She wore long green gloves when I saw her, and I had, very acutely and humiliatingly,
the impression of not understanding one-third of what she sang. But tonight, if I go, I shall understand it all.
So one grows up, and I suppose one is the better for it? or not?—Yes,—of course.
Meanwhile how is my Virginia? I say, may I ring you up on Saturday evening? On principle, I never
ring you up; but I think I’ll make an exception? Between 7 and 8? You will be on the sofa, perhaps, not yet
gone to bed. Because you see I do want to know how you are, and I don’t think I can wait till Monday. So shall

502 Baron Richard von Kuhlmann (1873-1948). He was German Foreign Minister, 1917-18, and thereafter employed by the Weimar Republic as a
roving diplomat.
503 She sang some ‘faded songs’ (Harolds description) at the Goldschmidt-Rothschild reception. Born in 1869, she was a French diseuse who in her
youth had been famous for her songs of the Quartier Latin in Paris.
504 The actress Eleonora Duse (1859-1924).
I?—Oh, I am so torn. Long Barn, Virginia, my own room, Pippin, England,—and my Harold left behind in
Berlin, hating it. Ugh. You’d hate it too. I should be so happy to come back, wholeheartedly, if only he were
coming too.

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Tuesday [12 March]

‘You might write,’ you said; and the days have drifted, and I haven’t. Like the happy nation, I have no history.
But do I dine with you on Friday? Clive asked me to dinner that night, and I refused. Will you send a postcard
on receipt of this to say where and when I am to come?
It has been warm, and I have wished you were here—It would have done you so much good. My only
companion has been Andrew Marvell; and not such a bad companion either; but I should have preferred
Virginia. In the intervals I have gone out and watched the irises growing. On Saturday I adventured out into
the World,—went to Penn’s, in fact, where I found Christabel! 505...lunched there, stayed to dinner, and came
home to find Pippin wagging ah over, thinking I had gone back to Berlin. Dottie has lost Vanessa, who answers
neither telegrams nor letters—What has happened to her? She was by way of going there to see about the
painting. 506
I feel as though a thick curtain had come down between me and the rest of the world: I’ve seen nothing,
heard nothing; I know Major Segrave507 won the world’s speed record, and that’s about the nearest approach I
have made to humanity. I go for long walks over fields the colour of hayricks; everything is the same colour
just now; it is very beautiful. I enjoy it immensely, and am ceasing to be a person and am turning into some
natural object such as a scratching-post for sheep.
I do hope it’s all right for Friday evening, and that you are well enough? and fond enough of your

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Wednesday [3 April]

You know, or, rather, you don’t know, how dilatory I am, except when writing books for the Hogarth Press,
and that’s because I am frightened of Leonard. You know, for example, that it took me 15 years to get my ears
pierced, not wholly due to cowardice; and things lie about the house for five and seven years before anything
is done about them. But when I get two photographs of Virginia they go straight to Sevenoaks to be framed,
which is where they now are. Now I consider that I am free to give you 2 guineas worth of presents, even

505 Christabel Maclaren (later Aberconway).

506 Dorothy Wellesley had commissioned Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant to decorate her dining-room at Penn-in-the-Rocks, Sussex.
507 Sir Henry Segrave, in his car Golden Arrow, set a world land-speed record of 233 mph at Daytona, Florida, on 11 March 1919.
unbirthday presents, since not only did I ask for the photographs but made you go to have them done, which
you will find to be a permanent item of expenditure in your future years. Darling, I love them. I wish Potto had
been sitting on your knee, that’s all.
We have all been suffering from a mysterious complaint here, a mixture of neuralgia and rheumatism
it feels like. I have recovered, and now watch the members of my household going down one after the other.
When am I going to see you? I shall be in London on Tuesday next,—is that any good? Should we perhaps go
to Kew if it was a fine day? or you once said you would take me to Keats’ house at Hampstead, or are you
busy? I am lunching with Francis Birrell; otherwise free, and would like to see Virginia, whom I have been
missing rather badly lately. But the photographs helped to keep me happy.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
5 April

In God’s name: yes: I have several sentences addressed to you with that beginning:
I.G.N. Come on Tuesday; to the basement, not a wink later than 3:
I.G.N. Do NOT bring Francis—a dear old rattle headed bore.
IGN. Do NOT bring Dottie. This I feel strongly about. Twice lately she has utterly ruined my serenity
with you; and I wont have it. Choose between us. Dottie if your taste inclines that way by all means; but not
the two of us in one cocktail.
...I told Nessa the story of our passion in a chemists shop the other day. But do you really like going
to bed with women she said—taking her change. “And how d’you do it?” and so she bought her pills to take
abroad, talking as loud as a parrot.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [6 May]

And am I ever going to see Virginia again? A despair has settled down upon me about it. My own fault, no
doubt;, but I have had Harold, who went back to Berlin last night though I urged him to play truant. I am now
here solitary, and oh so busy, writing a novel, writing about Marvell, writing a little poetry in between whiles;
and with a new piece of furniture508 at my elbow which ought to be part of every writer’s equipment. It has
solved half the problems of life.
But seriously, shall I come up one day not Friday or Saturday and we’ll go to Keats and dine together—
or must I wait till Thursday 16th when I shall be released from the dentist at 3.30 and free till 7 when I
broadcast? It depends on how busy you are.
I had a letter from Leonard this morning; will you tell him I have no wish to let Doran509 deal with
Canada? He will understand.
I say, the novel is about the Edwardians,—a fascinating subject, if only I can do it justice. It is
absolutely packed with the aristocracy. Shall you like that? I feel that for snobbish reasons alone it ought to be
highly popular! I hope so, because Leonard’s offer was very handsome, and I should hate to ruin the Press,
towards which I feel avuncular as you know.
How is the pump?5101 am still worried about it, and you.
Pippin so full of puppies. Jane less mangy. The aviary full of nests. The woods full of nightingales.
But where’s Virginia? On every hoarding, but not here.

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
[15 May]

[In pencil]

This is too tantalizing! I would rather you had come to tea, which would have been hopeless, but to miss you
by an hour is dreadful.
I’ll come tomorrow at five.

V.

508 A book trough.

509 Her American publisher.
510 A machine in Tavistock Square, used in the building of a vast new hotel, which caused the residents of the Square much annoyance.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [10 June]

Virginia, my angel, is Potto very busy just now? Because a young man called Kenneth Rae, who is in Cobden
Sanderson is terribly anxious to get you to write 300 to 400 words for a ‘Forget-me-not Calendar’, illustrated
by one Rex Whistler, and I thought Potto might do it for you.511 They have got your admirer Max (Beerbohm),
your friend Hugh Walpole, your friend Blunden,512 your brother-in-law Clive, Siegfried Sassoon, your poor
shaggy sheep-dog,513 and your friend Maurice Baring, amongst other distinguished contributors—any subject,
they say, provided it would fit into Autumn or Winter, and suggest ‘Influenza’ or ‘Weekends’. I said I did not
think there was any chance of your consenting, but I would ask you. They can only pay £5. The only thing is,
they must know at once—so could you like an angel send a telegram? to them direct would be best,
KNOXYNOX, Westcent, London is their telegraphic address.
You said I was to write an intimate letter, and this is the result: I have been working like a black.
Finished and despatched Marvell, and done various oddments, so that now I turn with a sigh of relief towards
my novel. Oh yes—and Pinker. We’ve given her two doses for worms, once in a powder and once in a pill—
and each time she has sicked it up again before it could work. Will you tell Leonard? She had a fine fight with
Pippin, in which Pippin got the worst of it, and the puppies had diarrhoea in consequence. Otherwise she is
charming, though a little wistful,—I think she misses you both. Four little budgerigars, quite naked, but with
parroty noses: two little doves hatch out. Harold comes on Saturday.
I forgot to say, the Cobden Sanderson people would have to have your words by the middle of next
week. They have been longing to ask you, but did not dare, and then I happened to meet this young man who
is bursting with keenness about his calendar,—his first venture on his own since he joined the firm—So I can’t
help hoping that you will, though I scarcely expect it.
I shall feel forlorn in London with no Virginia when I go up to broadcast on Thursday. Shan’t go up
till the evening in consequence. No nice expedition or anything. No bunloaf—no affection—no Potto to stroke.
Damn. Shall you go to Sibyl’s on Monday night? Harold and I are going— We’re going to no, I shan’t tell you
that: you’d laugh.514 You’ll find out for yourself fast enough. I could bring Pinker up on Monday, unless you
would like to come and fetch her before then?
Did you give all my messages to Vanessa? Do please come back soon, because I miss you.

Your
V.

511 Virginia did not contribute to this miscellany.

512 The poet Edmund Blunden.
513 Vita.
514 On 17 June Vita and Harold broadcast a discussion on marriage. Part of it was printed in The Listener of 26 June.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Thursday [4 July]

Ha, ha! there’s a surprise: you didn’t know that envelope was going to contain a letter from me, did you? This
is to ask: do I see Virginia next Thursday? or is she so surrounded by a cloud of moths515 as to be quite
inaccessible? If so, I might take Potto for a walk on a string instead. I dine with the Keyneses on the Wednesday
night; shall sleep at Mount St and be in London all Thursday.
Are you writing and very happy? I am very, very miserable, because Pippin has disappeared. All efforts
to trace her have failed. I am left with Jane516 and the five little orphans, and a gnawing anxiety at my heart to
know what can have happened to her. Is she lying hurt in some trap in a soaking wood? Is she poisoned? Do
you think the BBC (which I look on as my pocket borough) would broadcast an SOS?517A friend of mine has
discovered two unknown and exceedingly obscene poems by Byron, all about his relations with his wife. He
found them in his father’s safe. He has been put into touch with Desmond.518 Desmond had never heard of the
poems. Have you? They are called ‘Don Leon’, and ‘Leon to Annabella’, and are quite unpublishable, but
throw a good deal of light on the bed-life of the Byron ménage.
Did Clive remember to bring you my flowers?
Will you let me know about Thursday? I wish you were dining with the Keyneses too: I shall be shy.
What am I to wear? please, I want to know. A smock? a tiara? Some hint, please. Shall I come and see you
just for a minute before dinner, as it is so close, or will you be having a party?
And what about that visit to Long Barn?

Your
very much
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
London
WC1
[9 July]

Darling, we are so unhappy about Pippin. We both send our best love—Leonard is very sad.

Nigel Nicolson (copy)

515 Referring to The Waves.

516 Vita’s other spaniel.
517 Pippin was found dead on 7 July.
518 Desmond MacCarthy.
July - December 1929
In the second half of 1929 two events coincided to effect another slight adjustment in their
relationship. Vita's walking tour in Savoy alone with Hilda Matheson caused Virginia a spasm of
jealousy which she could not hide, and it was sharpened by Vita submitting to the Hogarth Press
several poems of a Lesbian nature, which Virginia knew were not intended for her, but had been
written for Mary Campbell. Secondly, Harold decided to leave the diplomatic service and work for a
higher salary for Lord Beaverbrook's newspapers. He would live permanently in England with Vita,
to whom their constant separations for long periods had caused acute distress. His new job would
also free them from financial dependence on Lady Sackville, who was becoming increasingly difficult
in her relations with her daughter.

To Virginia Woolf
Col de l’lseran
[Savoy, France]
24 July

I am writing to you in an Alpine hut with a thunderstorm imminent outside. We are at the quite respectable
height of 9300 feet, surrounded by a ring of white peaks. Up here grow gentians and other lovely little creatures,
which seem to become brighter and more fragile the higher one climbs. And there are butterflies and beetles
which would rejoice your entomological heart.
By this time I have a good many miles of Savoy in my legs. One meets funny people in these huts,
who would amuse you. And Val d’Isère,—which is our headquarters,—is full of ‘characters’. We live in the
curé's house, which we share with the curé, Theodorine his servant, and Marquise his cow. Every morning at
6 Marquise goes out to pasture with a bell round her neck; every evening Marquise returns, and enters the
house by the front door. It is all very familiar, friendly, and slightly smelly. A nice smell of stable.
Hilda519 is an admirable companion; is content to read for hours together; can make a pudding out of
apricot jam and snow, and a waste-paper basket out of the Times. Also she can read maps, so we do not get
lost as we cross the hills.
But how does one write a novel?5201 have come to the conclusion that I am a good walker but a bad
novelist. One writes and writes, and at the end of the time one rereads and decides that it might all just as well
have remained unwritten. I take my foolscap out in my pocket, and, propping my back against a rock from
which I can survey Savoy, try to remember exactly the smell of the ’bus that used to meet one at the station in
1908. The rumble of its rubberless tyres. The impression of waste and extravagance which assailed one the
moment one entered the doors of the house. The crowds of servants; people’s names in little slits on their
bedroom doors; sleepy maids waiting about after dinner in the passages. I find that these things are a great deal
more vivid to me than many things which have occurred since, but will they convey anything whatever to

519 Hilda Matheson.

520 The Edwardians.
anyone else? Still I peg on, and hope one day to see it all under the imprint of the Hogarth Press, in stacks in
the bookshops.
This is perhaps not what you call an intimate letter? but I disagree. The book that one is writing at the
moment is really the most intimate part of one, and the part about which one preserves the strictest secrecy.
What is love or sex, compared with the intensity of the life one leads in one’s book? A trifle; a thing to be
shouted from the hilltops. Therefore if I write to you about my book, I am writing intimately, though it may
not be very interestingly QED? But you would rather I told you I missed Potto and Virginia, those silky
creatures with a barb under their fur—and so I do, and wonder very much whether they will come and stay
with me when I get back? Potto would like the puppies, Virginia would like her nice big bed and coffee at
eleven,—and all the affection that would be shown her at hours licit and illicit. I get back on the 4th, I think.
A letter addressed to me British Embassy Berlin would be brought to me in Harold’s pocket, for I join him
somewhere in south Germany in a few days’ time.521 That would be very nice,—a letter, I mean. I’ve had no
letters forwarded, which will mean a tidy pile when I do return!
I watch the beetles,—winged, black splotched with red,—at their amours on hot slopes here, and would
like to enclose one of them. But it would get squashed in the post. So I just send you my love, unsquashable.

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf
Val d’Isère
[Savoy, France]
30 July

What does Potto think about Lord Beaverbrook? I gather that Harold has been writing to you and Leonard on
the subject and receiving encouraging replies which have helped him to make up his mind. When I last wrote
to you, I had heard nothing of it, so it has burst on me as a happy bombshell during the last few days. I am
terribly excited and can hardly contain myself till I see Harold tomorrow. So now Harold becomes a journalist.
Well, well! life is very exciting to be sure. Plus the mountain air, it has all gone fairly to my head. If you are
at Rodmell I must come and see you, though I don’t forget a phrase in one of your letters about coming to
Long Barn for a night. I expect to be home on Monday—shall I find a note from Potto waiting for me, do you
think?
I have done a lot of my novel since I have been here; it is a very honest little book, quite straightforward with
no fal-lals, and I fear you will find it devoid of all interest save for a few details about the servants’ etiquette,
which is of a nature to please you. What with one thing and another, I feel like a boat in a maelstrom—only
not in any unpleasant sense—and looking forward terribly to seeing Virginia again.

Your
V.
To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald

521 In Karlsruhe on 1 August.The purpose of this sudden meeting was for Harold to discuss with Vita the offer which he had just received from Lord
Beaverbrook to leave the diplomatic service and join the staff of the Evening Standard. He accepted.
 Sevenoaks
Friday [9 August]

Oh dear I posted my letter in the blotting book, where I have just found it, and now it is all out of date,
containing as it does messages about trains. So I don’t send it. I am however sending my proofs,522 which will
you glance at? I’m very doubtful about the poem called ‘Nocturne’ on p. 56 and 57; shall I cut it out? It seems
to me meaningless now, though pregnant enough when I wrote it!
And look here you will put me off if you feel any worse? Otherwise I’ll come (by car) in time for
luncheon Sunday. I promise not to get in the way, but only to look after you and to eclipse myself if you get
tired. I am longing to be with you, but shall understand if you say you would rather be alone, or if Leonard
thinks you ought to be.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
Monday [12 August]

Dearest Creature,

I dont think I shall be able to come this week—I’ve had to retire to bed with the usual old pain, not very bad
and the price of the value I set on your honesty. Lord!...
Meanwhile will you send at least a line to say what happened about Hilda—I particularly want to know
the situation with respect to Janet,523 as I have anyhow to write to her. And please make Hilda see that it was
all your donkeyism....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Tuesday [13 August]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I feel so miserably responsible, you can’t think. Poor, poor Virginia,—and that
means you can’t write—can do nothing in fact except stroke Potto’s ears. But I love you enormously,—more,
if possible, since this incident.
No harm was done by my impulsiveness. HM524 had the sense not to write to Janet Vaughan, so there
is no need for you to make any allusion to it unless you wish to. I have told her it was mostly due to a
misunderstanding on my part, and she says she will not say anything either, when she dines with the Vorn.525
So although a donkey I have not been a mischievous donkey, and there is no need for you to take any action.

522 ’Of King’s Daughter, Vita’s new volume of poems. In her diary of 10 August she expressed her anxiety about the ‘Lesbian poems’ in the book.
(See Victoria Glendinning, Vita, p. 219.)
523 Virginia’s friend Janet Vaughan, from whom she had heard about Vita and Hilda’s walking tour in Savoy, which aroused Virginia’s jealousy.
524 Hilda Matheson.
525 Janet Vaughan.
 Darling,—how I hate you to be ill. Have you put off all your visitors? I wish I could come and look
after you. I am a cripple myself, as my back gave way again, and I can only hobble from room to room on two
sticks, or else drag myself along the floor like Porgy, but I don’t expect it will last long. I wasn’t doing anything
violent,— just walking upstairs. Silly Vita.
Oh you will never know what miseries I went through before seeing you. I couldn’t bear to see your
manuscript on its shelf or your photographs in my room. They were ah like so many daggers. What should I
have done...but my imagination revolts. All having ended well, I must admit that the incident was very
illuminating. Only I cannot feel it has ended well if your headache is really due to it; if that is true, then it has
ended disastrously. Will you let me know if you are better? I fret about you more than you know but not more
than you might expect if you thought about it at all.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
15 August

And now I see Geoffrey Scott526 is dead, at my age—no a year younger. Do you mind? Does it bring back the
hot afternoon when the Salvation Army called, and the mews where he almost strangled you when you were
late, and the scene on the downs? I didn’t like him; at least I didn’t trust him for some obscure reason.... But I
took up my pen to say that I hope, if you see Hilda, you will make her understand, not merely superficially,
that Janet Vaughan was as blameless as anybody could be—mere joking and affectionate at that,—I mean I
shouldn’t have minded to hear what she said of me; and to show how casual and lightly meant it was, she never
even gave me a hint that Hilda could seriously entertain those passions. It was merely Oh how amusing it
would be if Hilda could fall in love—and then nothing more, but what I took seriously—that the plan had been
made many weeks or months.

To Virginia Woolf
Friday [16 August]

Eddy rang up to say he was back from Charleston and had heard you were better, though he had not seen you.
I hope that he and his informant both speak the truth.
I have been in bed for the last three days.527 It would be incorrect to say I was better, but I am getting
more ingenious: i.e. I have learnt what positions are to be avoided, and I have got a rope slung round a beam,
by the aid of which I can raise myself at least two inches. Jane has now slept solidly on my bed for 72 hours.
I have read a great number of books, as it is difficult to write and I cannot remain on my elbow propped for
more than five or ten minutes at a time—so you see that even had you been able to come today.. .it would have
been dull for you—let us say.

526 Geoffrey Scott had been in love with Vita in 1923-24, and his wife divorced him because of her. The author of The Architecture of Humanism and
The Portrait of Zelide, he was forty-six at the time of his death.
527 Vita had lumbago.
 Geoffrey (Scott) has died of pneumonia in New York, which has upset me a good deal. How horrible
to die alone in a foreign hospital away from all one’s friends—Poor Geoffrey—what a disastrous life—
It is rather interesting, being physically incapacitated, provided one knows it will not last for ever.
Having all one’s normal activity taken from one—liven turning over in bed becomes an adventure—and takes
a damned long time—Normally I could walk half the way to Sevenoaks in the time it takes.
I wish I knew REALLY how you were—at least I have my head left free, whereas yours aches—or
ached—
Here is Louise for the post.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Sunday [18 August]

I am very much distressed about your back. I wish you would answer, if only in pencil on a card, these
questions. 1. Have you seen a doctor? 2. What does he say? 3. Are you better? Surely it has never been anything
like as bad as this. Have you got rheumatism in it? Is it very painful?
Anyhow, my dear Creature, let me know truthfully and exactly how you are. Potto kisses you and says
he could rub your back and cure it by licking.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Thursday [22 August]

Miss V. Sackville-West is announced as broadcasting on New Novels at 7 tonight, but Miss V. Sackville-West
is a poor lame thing what can just crawl on two sticks, and will be unable to appear at the microphone.
Therefore her paper will be read for her, and she will lie on the sofa in the big room and listen and curse the
reader for missing all the points. 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,—one could have little nets everywhere, like in a wagon-lit, to keep things in and prevent
them from being lost, for at present everything either seems to fall on the floor or else to become submerged
under blankets and sheets. Also litter—what does one do about litter? My room is like Hampstead Heath after
a Bank Holiday. And the worst of bed is that it is not really comfortable, except to sleep in. Trying to prop
oneself up in bed is misery, isn’t it—What do you do about it, you who must have spent so many months of
your life in this situation? On the other hand the sense of retirement is pleasant, one has a sense of Buddhistic
gravity, and feels oneself superior to the active people who irrupt into one’s room from a strenuous world—
Then there is the question of sleeping badly,—familiar to you but a new experience to me,—and rather an
interesting one. One’s mind seems to extend itself into different directions when one Res awake and everybody
else is asleep—not unhappy exactly, but speculative and enlightened in a calm way. One thinks about dying. I
find also that one thinks (with some distress) about the falsity and difficulty of one’s relations with people;
how there is probably nobody in the world who knows all round one; how one shows separate sections to
different people, not on purpose, but willy-nilly, and the best one can hope for is that they will guess the rest.
Besides one would probably not like it if anybody did see all round and all through. And what does it matter
anyhow—which brings one back to dying again, and to the extinction of one’s own absorbing microcosm,
which then becomes easier to believe in than not to believe in,—its extinction I mean. The reverse is the case,
when one is normal and well.
But about knowing people, I have read the two volumes of Miss Mayne’s life of Byron528—and that’s
illuminating: being presented with first one letter and then another, both written the same day and flatly
contradicting each other, to two different people. That shows you up more than anything. To Tom Moore, for
instance, and to the Guicciolli; or to Augusta and to Lady Byron. Instead of seeing just one flat section of his
mind at a time, you see right through (so to speak) down into the next section, in a way that his contemporaries
couldn’t do. Now you write to me, and how do I know that next minute you won’t snatch up your pen and
write something completely different to Vanessa? And even you yourself don’t know which you really mean.
There is nothing to prevent me from writing to Harold in an hour’s time, and swearing at the horrors of illness,
whereas to you I have written of its charms. But that’s a thing you would never know unless you had second
sight.
Anyway I should be very glad if I could write letters like Byron’s....
Emily Bronte too I have been thinking a good deal about,—Leonard’s fault because he sent me a book
on them.529
When will you come, I wonder? for I really am recovering and ought to be restored by the beginning
of the week, if not before. Any day but Monday, when I have an aunt,—Aunt Cecilie,530 of whom Eddy has
told you,—the one who always says, ‘Oh, but that’s classics.’
Have you been persecuted by an American woman friend of Vernon Lee’s, who caught Clive and
wants to draw you? Beware of her: she is the most voluble talker in creation, and will tire you. I discouraged
her by saying you were ill.
Look at my sticky fingers all over the paper. I have been eating peaches. 'Le jus des pêches que tu
coupes,’ etc.—Oh I do so want to see you—

Your
V.

528 Ethel Colburn Maynes Byron, 2. vols (1910, reprinted 1924).

529 A Short History of the Brontes by K.A.R. Sugden, reviewed by Vita in Nation, 4 September 1929.
530 Vitas father’s sister, Lady Cunliffe.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Saturday [24 August]

Might I come on Wednesday for the night?—could you let me know?

...And how are you? The best sleeping draught is audit ale at bedtime: any fellow of a college will get
it, and if you don’t like it, I will drink it.
A thousand different varieties of love are rained upon you, like the showers from a gigantic watering
pot by Virginia and Bosman.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [26 August]

Wednesday is perfect,—unless, indeed, you would prefer to wait till next week when I can drive the motor? I
am very much better, but I can’t quite drive it yet. If you would rather put it off, let me know. Thursday of next
week I have to go to London, and Friday Harold comes: otherwise all clear.
My unfortunate children have just gone off to Streatham to see my mother....
Of course I may be so much better by Wednesday that I may be able to drive again; in which case we
might go somewhere on Thursday? and I’d take you home.
In any case, crippled or not, you shall have a warm welcome. There, wasn’t that nicely put?

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
[27 August]

Well then, I think I had better come next Tuesday, instead of tomorrow, for the simple reason that if I come
tomorrow you will certainly drive the car and risk your back again. Admit that my psychology is correct.... All
this is very well reasoned; but I admit I am rather disappointed....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Friday [30 August]

I, too, was disappointed, but I expect it is a better arrangement really, as by next Tuesday I shall be as lively
as a flea. At present, rather like a lame jackdaw. So come on Tuesday, my blessing, and on Wednesday we’ll
go somewhere nice, and I’ll take you home.
I don’t know what Dottie means531 I may have said you said something or other in a letter,—I don’t
remember,—anyhow it wouldn’t be that she oughtn’t to have 4 gardeners!

531 Virginia suspected Vita of showing her letters to Dorothy Wellesley.

 I’ve had an awful blow: Harold says he doesn’t think these poems of mine are good enough to publish
—So I am holding up the proofs till Friday next, when he comes home, in the hope that I can talk him
532

round—Wil! you tell Leonard? I can’t make up my mind if he’s right or not—and would like your advice
please—or Potto’s. Potto’s would perhaps be better—
It will be nice, Tuesday—Very nice—Your impatient

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Sunday [1 September]

Damn Harold. And why should you attach any importance to the criticism of a diplomat?
Have you got your proofs? I will read them....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
13 September

I have several things of the highest importance to tell you:

(1) Harold has resigned from diplomacy.
(2) He has engaged himself to Lord Beaverbrook from Jan 1st 1930.
(3) We have written to my mother telling her we will be dependent upon her no longer after the end of
this year.
(4) Harold has withdrawn his objections to ‘King’s Daughter’ so that’s all right.
Now there is a fine packet of news for one letter.
Harold will be here till Nov. 1st and will then probably have to return to Berlin for a month.
And did you sign your name 500 times? And has Hugh sent you his new book in which you figure under
the name Jane Rose?533
We have got 12 goldfish in the pond.
We are feeling very proud and free.
I suppose there is no chance of your being in London next Thursday when I am coming up? No, I suppose
not. But I have a longing to see you.

Your
V.

532 King’s Daughter.

533 Hugh Walpole’s Hans Frost. Of Jane Rose, Walpole wrote: ‘She had in her last novel spoken of the beam from a lighthouse “stroking the floor of
a lodging-house bedroom”—so her art illumined, gently and tenderly, the world that he knew. The debt that he owed her could never be paid.’
To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
Sunday [15 September]

A thousand congratulations from us both.

I daresay these are the happiest days of your life. No, alas, I go to London on Friday not Thursday. Yes, very
pleased about Kings Daughter.
Thank Goodness, no more dealing with Lady S. Yes I’ve signed my name 600 times.
Yes, I’ve read Hugh.
Why need he say all his characters are dead, when its true?
How business like this letter is!
And looks like a sonnet.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Monday [16 September]

I dreamed last night that you and Leonard had never been really married, and that you decided it was high time
to hold the ceremony. So you had a fashionable wedding. You were dressed in a robe of mediaeval cut, made
of cloth-of-gold, and you wore a long veil, and had an escort of bridesmaids and pages. You did not invite me
to the wedding. So I stood in the crowd, and saw you pass on Leonard’s arm.
For some reason or reasons (not far to seek) this dream made me extremely miserable, and I woke in
tears, and have not yet thrown off the effect of it.
Will you tell your bridegroom that I sent back the proofs of King’s Daughter to Mrs Cartwright last
week? I am sending him a flea-comb, enclosed, which is better than Keatings.534
We are going up to London this evening to dine with Lord Beaverbrook.
I wish you had said something illuminating about Hugh’s novel,—except that there is nothing
illuminating to say,—because I must talk about it I suppose on Thursday on the wireless.535 1 say, has Rebecca
West’s book come your way? It is unreadable. It is a brew of Meredith, Orlando and Amanda Ross. Here is a
phrase from it:

So hastily had the old house been converted to feed the house-hunger that raged after
the Great War, so far faster than any fast bowler had the contractor hurled in
staircases and partitions of wood that had he left them alone and become matchboxes,
that some problems of architecture had inevitably gone unsolved.

Am I prejudiced, or have some problems of style here gone unsolved.

My brother-in-law536 thinks he can get us a flat in the Temple.
Will I ever see you again? I have a great and urgent craving to. But you seem very remote. ‘There was

534 Flea powder for dogs.

535 On 19 September (see The Listener, 25 September 1929).Vita was broadcasting on new novels every other week. In the same talk she reviewed
Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume, not favourably
536 Frederick Nicolson, now 2nd Lord Carnock. The flat was at 4 King’s Bench Walk, Inner Temple, London EC4, and Harold lived there from 1930
till 1945.
something terrifying in her gentle remoteness.’ No, it isn’t that,— not your gentle remoteness,—that terrifies
me, but merely geographical remoteness— just that you are at Rodmell and I at the Weald. Anyhow I may be
living at the Temple this winter—That would be nice. Anything may happen now that we have kicked over
the traces. It is like being twenty (years old) again. Are you going to Cassis? I think of going to Barcelona for
a week in November to see the exhibition, if I can prevail upon Dome to motor me there. Or if you were still
at Cassis I might come and see you there, on the way from Barcelona? Is it on the way? More or less? But you
want to be alone there. And the exhibition may be over by then, for all I know. At any rate, all sorts of different
landscapes seem to open, whichever way I look, not just the vista of a dinner table with gentlemen in gold-
braided uniform and ladies in low dresses. Oh Christ, how much I always want to see you when life becomes
exciting.

Your Orlando

The fact that I don’t see you prevents these from being (some of) the happiest days of my life.

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
Tuesday [17 September]

And when shall we meet? I’m a little dismal. Another of these cursed headaches. How I get them I can’t
imagine—Whether its writing, reading, walking, or seeing people. Anyhow its not been bad at all—only it
makes Leonard gloomy, and tightens my ropes—I mustn’t walk, or do anything but sit and drink milk—you
know the old story.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Saturday [21 September]

I am so miserable to think you had a headache again, poor poor Virginia—and Potto laying his snout along his
paws. I wish I could come over on Oct. 5th but I don’t quite see how I can, do you, with Harold here—as he
will be away again in Berlin for two months. If he were permanently at home in his new job it would be
different. He doesn’t take it up till Jan. 1st, and it is on the livening Standard; it is not quite settled yet what he
is to do exactly, as they will try him on several different things first to see what he is best at,— the Londoner’s
Diary, for instance, and leading articles. He is to get £3000 a year, but Lord Beaverbrook wants this kept dark.
It sounds an awful lot; but as a matter of fact, after we have paid income and super tax, and £800 a year for the
boys, and £100 to Lady Carnock, it will leave us with only £1500 between us, to keep Long Barn on and
Harold’s rooms in London (perhaps in the Temple,) so we shall have to supplement it by a lot of writing—
Long Barn costs so much. (This sounds like a 3 a.m. conversation ‘and how much do you pay the cook?’)
Anyhow I am very pleased, but the situation is being complicated by my mother refusing to accept any of our
arrangements.
Harold would like very much to see you—If you are better, i.e. quite recovered,— would you stop
here for dinner one night on your way back from London? or will Leonard not allow you to go to London any
more? If Harold is away in London for the night towards Oct. 5th could I perhaps come and stay with you? by
your hot sea or elsewhere? I don’t know where Lyme Regis is—is it the same as King’s Lynn?537 My poor
Virginia I do hate your having these headaches—and the moths will all fly away for the moment—
I’ve got your collected works538—and very pretty they are too, in their green covers.539
Have you seen the Punch joke:

Mrs Harold Nicolson is the Orlando of Miss Rebecca West’s remarkable book of that name. Weekly
Paper
But if she sees this, Mrs Virginia Woolf will probably become an Orlando Furiosa.540

Tell Leonard I have resumed my novel541—as a publisher he will be interested to hear this perhaps.
Will I see you? shall Harold and I come over one day? But not to tire you and not till you’re better. I
wish I knew that you were. I can’t tell you how I mind your being ill. This time it wasn’t my fault.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Thursday [26 September]

No, I didn’t mean I was ill—only an ordinary headache, and I’m perfectly all right
I’m reading an Oxford undergraduate ms novel, and his hero says “Do you know these lines from The
Land, the finest poem, by far the finest of our living poets—” but for all that, we shan’t publish him.
I have only one passion in life—cooking. I have just bought a superb oil stove. I can cook anything. I
am free for ever of cooks. I cooked veal cutlets and cake today. I assure you it is better than writing these more
than idiotic books.
...Well, God knows when we shall meet. You’ll be off to Barcelona....

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn Saturday
[28 September]

Did I, or did I not, detect a note of annoyance in your letter? a quick scratch?542 Anyway you are quite wrong:
if I go to Barcelona at all, it will not be with Hilda Matheson but with Dottie, in her motor, and in any case I
don’t think the scheme will mature. I am so glad you are all right again, and a cook. If I can find a receipt book
I will send it to you! Meanwhile I have made the acquaintance of an old man you would like, and have

537 Virginia cancelled plans to go to Lyme Regis in Dorset.

538 The Waves.
539 The Hogarth Press was reissuing Virginia’s novels in a uniform edition.
540 A pun on the sixteenth-century Italian poem Orlando Furioso.
541 The Edwardians.
542 Vita heavily scored out five lines at the end of Virginia’s letter of 26 September. They may have hinted at Hilda Matheson.
persuaded him (I think) to write his autobiography. He furnished me with some notes on his career. He is a
professional life-saver,—in the intervals of life-saving, a rag-and- bone merchant,—he has been saving life
and performing other philanthropic actions for 49 years and 9 months, so he has a further 3 months to run
before he has completed fifty years, and then he is going to stop. Here are a few items from his autobiographical
notes:

Taking poor girl off spiked fence in the Park.

Falling over a boding well by myself.
Assisting a dear lady being drowned, near Tonbridge. Assisting first-aid to dear man killed by an apple-
tree.
A lady’s pony that could not walk for years,—I made it walk.
Taking expectant mothers to hop fields free of charge.
Eventually found walking-sticks for the Blind.
Also I have given mothers a pram.
Catching my son from a very high ladder.
Taking a dear sheep’s head hung on some staples.
A blacksmith masterman got kicked, he died, he lent me his apron. Looking for an old lady to have a
Christmas, and succeeded.
Caught squirrel in lady’s bedroom.
Caught 86 rats with my own hand.
Also other items not mentioned, all worked by the Dear Spirit.
Can be illustrated at any time by request.

Who is the Oxford undergraduate, and what is his novel? By the way, Harold and I both like Clifford Kitchin’s
murder book,543 and I shall recommend it on Thursday, so tell Leonard to notice if it affects sales. Will you
ask Leonard if I may have a few days’ grace for reviewing his poets?544 His blue slip said Oct. 1st, but we have
had so many people—and I have had several novels to read, I have had no time—Also I have to go to London
on Monday—but I will hurry up, tell him.
I think I could come Friday or Saturday—may I let you know? Tell Potto I would like to come, if I can
provide company here for Nigel Nicolson.
How good your Beau Brummell545 was: and I like the artful way it linked on to Cowper.
My novel is so commonplace, so thin—
The fields are lovely, we go for walks with the puppies, for the sake of our health. They run after
pheasants. How tame pheasants are, before the 1st of October. Impossible to alarm them.
We have 12 goldfish, and four little new naked budgerigars. Rodmell seems a long way from the
Weald, but I expect you are very happy.
We had Sir Victor Sassoon546 to dinner—he has 14 millions, and a wrist-watch that winds itself up
every time you move your arm.

Your

543 Death of my Aunt by C. H. B. Kitchin (Hogarth Press) was reviewed by Vita in her broadcast of 3 October.
544 ‘New Poetry’, Nation, 2 November 1929.
545 ‘Beau Brummell’, Nation, 28 September 1929.
546 Chairman of the Sassoon merchant bank. He was then forty-eight and unmarried.
 V.

Dottie says her dining-room is a vision of loveliness.547

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
[30 September]

No, no, no, I meant Dottie, not H. M. (about going to Barcelona) and the reference was to your late travels and
it was only a joke and Potto made it and said hah hah to show it was a joke and only Donkeys bray....

To Virginia Woolf
Long Barn
Weald
Sevenoaks
Saturday [5 October]

Darling, it was so difficult yesterday—Yes you were quite right, I had said I might be able to come, as I thought
Harold might be in London; then he asked somebody here548 whom he wanted me to meet, and there were other
things (all very dull, also b. flux) which in the aggregate made me have to decide I couldn’t. It is always
complicated when he comes home. But look here, I shall be in London on Tuesday—can I come and see you?
We come up late on Monday evening and dine with Sibyl—(yes! That’s Harold’s fault again,) and on Tuesday
we look at a flat we have been offered in King’s Bench Walk—very nice—but not so near you as one which
we saw in Taviton Street— or another in Tavistock Place. But that had been let already when we got there.
King’s Bench Walk is very romantic though,—panelled,—and absurdly cheap—with planetrees and pigeons
outside. I shall spend all January and February in London at any rate—perhaps longer—with weekends here.
Will that be nice, do you think? Will I see you? will we go on more London expeditions?
We are rather excited, and I remained impervious to 24 pages of abuse which I had from my mother
last night.
I did think ‘Beau Brummell’ and ‘Mary Woll’—(can’t spell that)549 so good. God I wish I could write
like that.

Your
V.

547 Decorated by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

548 Maurice Bowra, the Oxford classics don and prolific author.
549 ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, Nation, 5 October 1929.
1930 - 1931
For the years 1930 and 1931 no letters from Vita to Virginia survive, although in the same period
Vita kept over seventy of Virginia’s. The affectionate tone of Virginia’s replies removes any suspicion
that she no longer thought Vita’s friendship worth cherishing or her letters worth preserving. They
were lost at some later stage of Virginia’s life, or after her death. But Vita’s changing lifestyle was
gradually widening a gap between them. Early in 1930 she had discovered, purchased and begun to
restore the near-ruinous Sissinghurst Castle, twenty miles from Long Barn, and the Nicolsons left
Long Barn to live there permanently from 1932 onwards. Vita became increasingly withdrawn from
social life. At Long Barn there had been five guest rooms. At Sissinghurst there were none. Virginia
spent only a single night there—in Harold’s bedroom, while he was away. But this distancing between
the two women must not be exaggerated. Their diaries show that between September and the end of
1930 they met eight times, and in the first four months of 1931 nine times, in London, at Rodmell and
at Sissinghurst. In these same years Vita published her two best-selling novels, The Edwardians and
All Passion Spent, both with the Hogarth Press, and she and Harold began to create at Sissinghurst
a garden which, fifty years later, is still among the most famous in England. Virginia published The
Waves, and made a new friend, Ethel Smyth, the composer, who never replaced Vita in her deepest
affections, but came to be her most frequent visitor and correspondent.
1932
In the spring of 1932 Virginia and Leonard went to Greece with Roger Fry and his sister Margery.
On her return Virginia led a far more sociable life than did Vita at Sissinghurst. Vita wrote for the
Hogarth Press another popular novel, Family History, and Harold, having I ft Beaverbrook's
employment and made a disastrous start in politics by joining Oswald Mosley's New Party, settled
down at Sissinghurst to write a novel, Public Faces, and a trilogy of books on diplomatic history.
Virginia was now fifty, Vita forty.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Sunday 25 April [24 April]

My dear, remote, romantic Virginia—yes, indeed, I see the moon in English muddy puddles, and I wonder
where you are: sliding past the Dalmatian coast (I think at one moment,) passing Corfu and Ithaca, 550 (and oh
God! what associations they all have for me!) and then the Piraeus and Athens—(more associations,) and then
what happens to you? for I simply don’t know,—the hinterland of Greece, I suppose, which is a closed country
to me so far—and is likely to remain closed unless I go there with Ethel,551 which God forbid. Why didn’t you
ask me to come with you? I would have thrown everything to the winds, and would have come. But you didn’t.
In the meantime I cultivate my garden and April cheats me of all its advertised joys: the wind is
howling at all hours, and the rain is raining at most of them. A bloodier April England never saw So be glad
that you are in the sun (I hope) of Greece.
I am glad for your sake, but England is empty without you.
Will you come here when you come back? Shall you be dazed by all the things you have seen? You
have been to Greece before, and your recollections will be strong, I know It is rather appalling, to think what
things people live through,—people one loves,—when one isn’t there with them. Yes, I do wish I were with
you.
The book of stamps was mine,—at least, I had lost one out of my cigarette case, so I suppose it was
the one you found under the chair. Thank you.
You will be seeing those lavender and tawny slopes, I suppose, and all the wild spring flowers which
I have never seen,—for I was in Greece in October.552 How I envy you. How I envy the people who are with
you.
Life is too complicated,—I sometimes feel that I can’t manage it at all.

550 On 15 April Virginia and Leonard went on a month’s holiday to Greece with Roger Fry and his sister Margery. In the letter which follows, Virginia
recalled her first trip to Greece in 1906, the holiday from which her brother Thoby returned to England with typhoid fever and died.
551 Ethel Smyth, the composer.
552 In 1923.
 Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[Hotel Majestic]
Athens
8 May

Well I have just got your letter, and it was very nice to get your letter though I cant help feeling, being as you
know a very polyp for emotion, that you’re somehow rather saddened worried, bothered—why? Why is life
so complicated at the moment? Money? Dotty?553 Writing? God knows....
Yet it was so strange coming back here again I hardly knew where I was; or when it was. There was
my own ghost coming down from the Acropolis, aged 23; and how I pitied her!...

To Virginia Woolf
[Sissinghurst Castle]
Tuesday [17 May]

We’ve had no posts here since Saturday! The consequence was that I only got your letter this morning. DAMN.
I was in London yesterday and could perfectly well have come, but I never thought you’d be in London on
Bank Holiday. I got a lovely lovely letter from you from Greece,—two, in fact,—yes, it sounds ravishing and
I wish you’d taken me with you in your pocket.
When shall I see you now? I shan’t be in London till the 30th, unless I come up for the flower-show. I
am tempted to come up, but I ought to stick to my book. What would be really nice, would be if you and
Leonard motored down here on a fine day. Telephone and say you are coming, Sissinghurst 250—but our
number is a deep dark secret, so tell it to no one. Sissinghurst really is looking nice just now,—but of course
you are spoilt for our simple English beauty. Still, the bluebell wood is really a dream.
No, I’m not depressed and I certainly didn’t mean to write a depressed letter. I may have been feeling
rather harassed, and you always know when my coat is at all ruffled. I do long to see you.

V.

553 Dorothy Wellesley.

To Vita Sackville-West

[52 Tavistock Square]

Wednesday [25 May]

Dearest Creature,

…Theres only one person I want to see, and she has no burning wish for anything but a rose red tower and a
view of hop gardens and oasts. Who can it be? Its said she has written a poem and has a mother, a cow, and a
moat I’m so illiterate—I’ve seen so many people—life offers so many problems and there’s a hair in my pen.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Friday [9 September]

I meant to ask—and forgot—if you would lend me the phogh554 which I gave you (of myself).... Could you
bring it—but doubtless now, with your other attachment, its down the coal hole. Oh alas.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Wednesday [12 October]

I’ve just bought the 6,000th copy of Family History555—6000 sold before publication— my God! And my
fingers are red and whealed with doing up parcels for 3 days incessantly. Miss Belsher ill—orders pouring
in—we all working till 7 30—thought we were just finished—then a last batch of orders discovered hidden in
a drawer another hours work—clerks panting—telephones ringing carriers arriving—parcels just finished in
time to catch the vans—Oh Lord what it is to publish a best seller....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Sunday [16 October]

Oh dear, not content with making you tie up six thousand family histories I made you tie up the common reader
too.556 An extra parcel. I won’t apologise, though. If you knew what pleasure it gave me, you wouldn’t want
me to apologise.... 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.

554 Photograph by Lenare.

555 See note 1 to next letter.
556 Vita’s Family History was published on the same day, 13 October, as Virginia’s The Common Reader: Second Series.
 I’ve got an extra broadcast talk to do tomorrow, and am scrapping three books in order to put yours
into it.
That is why this letter is not longer: because I’ve got to write my talk.

Your
V.

Yes, do please come to Sissinghurst soon. Remember, I’ll be in America for nearly four months (January-April
1933).

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
Tuesday 18 [October]

Oh I was in such a rage of jealousy the other night, thinking you had been in love with Hilda that summer you
went to the Alps together! Because you said you werent. Now were you? Did you do the act under the
Dolomites? Why I should mind this, when its all over—that tour—I dont know. But I do. D’you remember
coming to confession, or rather justification, in my lodge? And you weren’t guilty then were you? You swore
you werent. Anyhow my Elizabeth557 comes to see me, alone, tomorrow....

557 Elizabeth Bowen.

1933
In the first four months of 1933 Vita and Harold went on a lecture tour of the United States, the only
occasion on which Vita visited America. Her letters to Virginia show that she enjoyed herself greatly
and was amused by the curious incidents to which her celebrity exposed her, but they concealed her
capacity, in spite of her reserve, to charm a crowd of strangers, to which the press cuttings pay
unanimous tribute. It was her last sustained public performance. She withdrew to Sissinghurst,
published her Collected Poems and cultivated her garden. Although they wrote that they missed each
other ‘very much indeed’, she and Virginia met only half a dozen times in the year. Virginia published
Flush, and was writing The Years.

To Virginia Woolf
Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad
En Route Through the Rockies
16 March

This writing paper appeals to me so much that I must write you a letter on it. This is a Thursday; I left New
York on Monday and have been travelling ever since through unending prairies until this morning when I woke
to find a semi-circle of snow mountains edging the horizon, their peaks just turning pink as the sun rose over
the opposite rim of the plain. Then we got to Denver, at the foot of the Rockies, and by breakfast time we were
climbing right up into the mountains and are now some 7000 feet up. It is very beautiful, very desolate, the
sun is hot, and I’ve seen a cowboy. So I’m very happy. It is all, quite suddenly, un-American and subtly
Spanish.
We don’t reach San Francisco for another three days and two nights. I never realised the size of this
darn country till I came here. I hope California will have stopped quaking by the time we get there,558 and that
I shan’t again have to live up to the reputation you ascribe to me, for producing convulsions of nature or
whatever it is.
Later. I find I can post this right up at the top of the mountains—so you must look at the postmark,
which apparently is a special one. The scenery is altogether too scenic for my taste,—terrific gorges and roaring
rivers—it gives me claustrophobia and I am scarcely consoled by knowing it is the old Covered Wagon Trail.
I preferred the open uplands and distant ranges which reminded me of Persia—
Salt Lake City—March 17th—It was so shaky I couldn’t write any more—so instead of posting this
on the Great Divide I must post it in the home of the Mormons. The Great Divide worked perfectly, and all the
streams suddenly started running the other way—and made us feel like stout Cortes—
The time keeps on changing, which is very disconcerting; from ‘Mountain Time’ we have now got to
‘Pacific Time’, and there is 6 [sic] hours’ difference between us and you. Do you realise that California is more

558 The recent earthquake in Los Angeles had been minor, but the inhabitants were very frightened. Vita and Harold saw no sign of damage on arriving
there.
than twice as far from England than Persia? Harold wants to go for a walk now, as we have an hour here.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
18 March 1933

Well, do you remember me? I wrote you a very long and passionate letter the other day, but stuck it in my
case, forgot it, left it, and found it so out of date it was all about earthquakes and banks failing—that I can’t
send it....
I saw Sibyl the other day; and she had seen Harold, and Harold had said you are a roaring raging
success; which, I said, don’t matter a straw with Vita. She’ll shake her coat, and the grease and the oil will run
down her. A great compliment to you. Shall you net anything after all—with the dollar collapsed?—There’ll
be the experience, as they call it—all those virgins you’ve ravished—teas you’ve eaten, shrines you’ve visited,
fat old women you’ve intoxicated....
Please Vita darling come back soon. We shall be off in the car to Italy if you dont559—we want to try
the fluid fly wheel on the Alps. Please come snuffing up my stairs soon, just the same, in your red jersey.
Please wear your pearls. Please bring Sarah 560. And then ask me to Sissingt. Lord, how you’ll love your first
night there and sun rise seen from the pink Tower! Write to me.

To Virginia Woolf
Smoke Tree Ranch
South California
28 March

I have been trying to write to you for days and days, but life has been too thickly populated with movie stars
and so forth. I am now in a three-roomed cottage in the middle of the desert (I send you a photograph of it,)
with nothing but a few cowboys and a stray coyote to interrupt. Magnificent stars overhead, and mountains all
round. The desert itself is carpeted with rosy verbena. It is exactly like Persia, and we are as happy as larks.
I have several things of importance to tell you. (1) That I went to see the Huntington Library- in
Pasadena, and, observing that their collection of manuscripts had been brought so up to date as to include
George Moore, asked them if they wouldn’t like A room of one’s own. They were much excited, and I think
that if you were to write to

Captain Hazelton
Manuscript Dept
The Huntington Library
Pasadena, Los Angeles, California

there might be a quite good chance of their buying it. Don’t be too optimistic though, for as you know the

559 Virginia and Leonard were driving to Italy in their new car at the beginning of May.
560 A dog
Americans are very- hard-hit just now. 2) The second thing is that I met your friend Brett561 and gave her your
love.! She blushed all over. I met her in a crazy household at a place called Carmel, where she is living with
Mabel Dodge Luhan. Mabel D. Luhan is the woman who gave the ranch in New Mexico to D. H. Lawrence.
She wrote a book about it all, called Lorenzo in Taos.562 She is married to a Red Indian, but is now in love with
Robinson Jeffers,563 who was also there. A handsome man: you know him. Mabel Luhan sat and gazed at him,
while he pretended not to notice, and while I shouted into the sort of Kodak which Brett holds on her knees
and which is connected by wires with the telephone arrangement she wears over her ears. livery now and then
she stops one from talking while she changes the battery, like putting a new dim into a Kodak. She is very
pathetic; avid for news of England and her friends. She is getting herself naturalised as an American, but has
to pass an exam on the American Constitution first, which alarms her. (I have a sudden feeling that I have
already written to you about all this.)
I can’t remember if I wrote to you from a place called Pasatrimpo, Santa Cruz, which I was carried off
to by a golf champion.564—to this day I don’t know why. After that I went back to San Francisco and then
down to Los Angeles. Mr William Randolph Hearst asked us to stay at his ranch 250.000 acres, plus a Spanish
Casde565 which he removed bodily from a hill-top in Andalusia) and offered to send an aeroplane for us, but
we were proud and refused, partly because it was 300 miles away and partly because Shaw was going to be
there, and we thought we couldn't stand that. So after having been conducted round Chinatown m San Francisco
and taken over the prison, we departed for Los Angeles. We just missed the earthquake; there was a little one
while we were there, but we were both asleep and didn’t notice it. Nature seems to have been pursuing us with
vengeance ever since we left England: hurricanes in the Atlantic, blizzards in Chicago, earthquakes in
California, a sand-storm here, and a meteor which lit up five states for half an hour and came to rest in Arizona.
In spite of all this the climate of California is divine; an average temperature here of 80 in the shade, perpetual
sunshine, and incredible wild flowers. I enclose a photograph of them just to annoy Leonard. It really is a
photograph, although coloured. I mean, it really is like that.
Los Angeles is hell. Take Peacehaven, multiply it by 400 square miles, sprinkle it all along the French
Riviera, and then empty the Chelsea Flower Show over it, adding a number of Spanish exhibition buildings,
and you have the Los Angeles coast. The Americans have an unequalled genius for making everything hideous.
Hollywood however is fun. It is pure fantasy,—you never know what you will come on round the corner,
whether half an ocean finer, or Trafalgar Square, or the facade of Grand Hotel, or a street in Stratford-on-Avon
with Malayan houris walking down it. We were taken round by Mr Gary Cooper. And then we went to a party
at Clemence Dane’s,566—but it’s all too long to tell. Anyhow there was the loveliest creature there, called
Diana Wynyard. If Cavalcade comes to London you must go and see her in it.
A young lady rushed up to me in Pasadena and said she was writing a book about you and me. Isn’t
that nice for us? Would I give her an interview to tell her our (yours and mine) views on Imagery? Fortunately
I was able to say I had only just time to catch my train.

561 The painter Dorothy Brett, a daughter of Lord Esher. She had been an intirnate friend of Katherine Mansfield and D. H. Lawrence. and followed
Lawrence to Taos, New Mexico, where she remained until her death, in 1977, at the age of ninety-three.
562 Published in 1933.
563 The .American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962) owned the house in Carmel, California, where he lived in semi-seclusion. Harold recorded in
his diary that when they arrived they found a notice saving ‘Not at Home’ hung across the door, which Jeffers then opened from inside. Mabel Luhan
lived in another house 200 yards away
564 Miss Hollins
565 San Simeon
566 Pen-name of Winifred Ashton (1888-1965), English novelist and dramatist, who was then living at Santa Monica.
 Then I saw Elsa Maxwell,567 and the loveliest fish in an aquarium. The aquarium in London can’t hold
a candle to that one. They are all the Pacific fish. And there were seals on the beaches, and humming-birds,
and mocking-birds, and trees 5000 years old, and acres of cactus, like phallic symbols or else like prehistoric
reptiles, and miles upon miles of orange groves,—Sunkist,—and such queer reversals of nature as plants that
have to be taken up in November and put into cold storage because the winter is too hot for them. I doubt
whether I shall ever recover from all this. At any rate I shall never be quite the same again. That’s certain.
We get back on April 21—shall you be in London? for I MUST come and see you. You can’t answer
this question of course, for you won’t get this letter very much before we sail. But you might perhaps send me
word to Sissinghurst. I haven’t had any English mail for ages, so there may be a letter from you wandering
somewhere about America. It will reach me eventually.
From here we go to Arizona and then to New Mexico, and then to Milwaukee, and then to South
Carolina, and then to New York, and then to that blessed Bremen568 which will bring us home. Battered but
enriched,—not only by dollars.
Lord, but I am dying to see you.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
1 April 1933 (fools day)

I had a very nice letter from you the other morning, written from top of a mountain, where all the streams run
backwards. I deserved it, because while you were seeing the streams, I was seeing Mr Scaife. 569 No I dont
think I altogether like Mr Scaife. He’s a blotchy looking toad like man, who tells stories about his dog’s tricks.
However he seemed consumed with admiration for you and Harold, and didn’t stay long. He seemed to have
an idea that I should write a life of my father. Good God!
...Now I must put our dinner to cook; oh why dont you swoop down the road, and draw up at the gate,
with a great washing basket full of figs, as you once did, when your mother loved me, and sent me a bottle of
vermouth!

567 The American journalist.

568 A German liner.
569 Managing Director of Houghton Muffin, Harold Nicolson s American publishers.
To Virginia Woolf
Charleston
South Carolina
9 April

In spite of the picture at the top of this paper,570 I am really writing from South Carolina, quite a considerable
distance away. We have been amusing ourselves by reckoning up the distance we shall have travelled by the
time we get home, and find that it comes to over 33,000 miles—We’ve been to 72 different cities, and have
spent 63 nights in the train. I hope you are impressed by these statistics.
I am now waiting for Mr Dubose Heyward571 (did you ever see ‘Porgy’?) who is going to take us to
supper with Cornelia Otis Skinner. 572 So you see that Charleston, SC, has its celebrities no less than Charleston,
Sussex, Eng.
I found a lovely letter from you waiting for me in Chicago, and I am in hopes that this one may reach
England two days before I do, since I shall send it by the Empress of Britain in company of Mr and Mrs
Bernard Shaw. We ourselves sail on the 15th, and are nearly sick with excitement.
Yes, I have known Ivy Davison all my life. 573 She is very nice indeed, and I believe has sub-edited the
week-end Review very efficiently. However her fate so far as the Hogarth Press is concerned will have been
settled long ago. She is a young woman of some enterprise and independence, having been born into a perfectly
conventional English family and having shaken herself free of ready-made traditions, to the dismay of her
parents, in order to earn her own living on the Saturday Review. She had an unfortunate love-affair lasting
some ten years with a married man, I don’t know who it was. Her people are decent to the last degree; her
father was a great friend of mine. Very handsome they both are—and so is Ivy, I think. She has no money
except what she makes. I shall be amused if I return to find her installed in Miss Scott Johnston’s place.
Oh, the things we’ve seen and the people we’ve met! I don’t think I wrote to you from the Grand
Canyon which is the most astonishing thing in the world. We are going to come back to America in order to
motor all through Texas, Arizona, California and Mexico, taking tents with us in order to camp in the desert.
You can’t imagine, Virginia, what the Painted Desert is like. It is every colour of the rainbow, broken by great
pink cliffs the colour of the rocks in Devonshire. And the sun blazes every day, and the air makes you want to
leap over the moor. Why don’t you and Leonard come with us? January, February and March would be the
time to go, and the first bit of April. Nor can you imagine the desert flowers, although I think I sent you a
picture of them. You would escape then from Sibyl and from Mr Scaife,—for whom I apologise more than I
can say. There would be nothing but a few Indians. We propose to take ship to Panama, land there, buy a car,
and drive straight off, taking ship again at New Orleans. Doesn’t it appeal to you? If you liked, you could give
a couple of lectures which would practically pay for your expenses.
Yes, I think that is a good plan.
Charleston is the home of azaleas. They grow wild in all the woods; bushes about 20 feet high in the
gardens.574 They are all out now, in fact some of them are already over. It is the home of magnolias and
camellias too, and giant ilexes. It is utterly unlike the rest of America.

570 Of Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona.

571 American novelist (1885-1940). His first novel. Porgy, about the Deep South, was published in 1925 and was an instant success.
572 Born 1901. Began her career as an actress and wrote a number of very popular books of humorous essays.
573 A journalist who had applied for a job with the Hogarth Press. She became Editor of The Geographical Magazine in the 1940s.
574 Among other gardens, Vita visited Middleton Place, about which she wrote the poem ‘Stand I in England? Do I dream’, published later in 1933 in
her Collected Poems, p. 214.
 Lord, I must stop. But think, next week—next week,—we shall be home.

Your
V.
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Wednesday [19 April]

I say this is exciting!

You’re back—Thank the Lord my porpoise is in the fishmonger’s again! But when shall I see her? We
are here (Lewes 385) till Sunday afternoon. Then London for 10 days: then Italy. Could you ring up—dont tell
me you’ve changed your voice too— and suggest any time, which I’ll keep even if it means murder....
Now you must attend to your world. Lord how I envy you the pink tower after all America

To Virginia Woolf
V. Sackville-West
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Monday [24 April]

Yes your porpoise is back on the marble slab.575 But with four months accumulation of stuff to deal with,—a
real nightmare. I don’t feel I shall ever get straight. 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.
I sit on the floor mostly, and Sarah wriggles onto my lap, upsetting everything.
Yes it’s very nice—but I’ve only had one day—Saturday—at home so far. Yesterday I went to see my
mother—taking Harold with me. He started by losing his temper and told her he would shoot her—they ended
up by Harold sitting at her feet while she fingered his curls into Little Lord Fauntleroy ringlets. A great success.
She recognised a kindred spirit, and was amused. I sat by, as a mere spectator, quite left out in the cold.
—Interrupted here by Eddy, who is going to have his appendix out tomorrow.
So you’re going to Italy. Well, well, Damn. I shall come up to London to see you before you go. I
enclose a postcard for you to tell me when you go. (American business methods.) Observe the address. I have
become so much attached to my own name, that I now use it always. Note for future reference.
I can’t come on Thursday, as the income-tax man is coming then. Otherwise free.
Your bewildered, happy, home-unsick,

V.

575 Vita and Harold arrived home from America on 20 April 1933.
P. S. You are the one and only person I want to see. Where is the promised Flush? 576

Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
52T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Tuesday [25 April]

Well, Victoria West, here’s your horrid little post card.

What I say is come and dine then next Friday? Can you? Only I should like to see you alone also—
Could you come early? Would another time suit better?
....Ring me up, dearest Porpoise West, and say when.
Lord how nice to see the shops pink again!

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
17 May

Well, you have disappeared,—vanished from my ken,—lost in Italy,—staying, I daresay, at this moment with
Iris Origo577 among the chestnut woods of Montepulciano or wherever it is she lives. And I expect it is so
lovely,—Italy in May,—that I won’t even tell you about the bluebell woods here, which are better than
anything in the Middle West, I promise you. Nor will I tell you about our charcoal-burner, 578—a new denizen
of Sissinghurst,—nor about the two swans which have miraculously appeared on the lake, swimming about in
white majesty throwing lovely long-necked reflections into the water. No, you have abandoned me, and I am
left with nothing but Pinka for consolation—and do you know what? she won’t take any notice of me. Pinka
who can sniff me even while I’m still on the doorstep in Tavistock Square, and makes a piss, you’ll admit,
when I come in, won’t have a thing to do with me when my guest. All her love is for Louise, whom she never
leaves for an instant. I feel very crushed indeed.
She’s been having copious doses for worms, tell Leonard. Louise calls her Mrs Pinka, I don’t know
why.
Are you very very happy? I am sending Ben to Italy for two months—wouldn’t you like to be eighteen
and going off to Italy alone for two months? I would. He is very nice, is Ben. How I love the young. I should
like you to see him again now. You know his admiration for you; that ought to dispose you kindlily towards
him, or are you sick of admiration?
And Cimmie Mosley is dead.579 So beautiful, so young. I am sorry. Darling, it does seem a bit hard
that you should have vanished like this just when I have travelled 33,000 miles in order to see you again. But

576 Virginia finished the typescript of Flush in January and it was published in October 1933.
577 The Marchesa Iris Origo, daughter of Lady Sybil Scott by her first marriage, to Bayard Cutting. She lived in Val d’Orcia, south of Siena.
578 A heating system.
579 Cynthia, second daughter of Lord Curzon and Mary Leiter, had married Sir Oswald Mosley in 1920. She died on 16 May, aged thirty-four, of acute
appendicitis.
of course I can’t hope to rival the attraction of a fluid fly-wheel.580 You’d better come back soon though, or I
shall begin exploring London for a divertissement. I have to go there tomorrow, and just fancy, I’m lunching
with Sibyl.
Ethel wants me to go to Guildford to hear The Bosun’s Mate581.... I think not.
Sorry my ink is going wrong. It is called Higgins’ Eternal Ink, and was given me on Shakespeare’s
birthday the other day by a friend. It is nicely black, but I haven’t quite learned how to manage it yet.
Would it surprise you to learn that I miss you very very much indeed? In order to console myself I am
thinking of taking up with Marlene Dietrich. So don’t linger too long at Montepulciano if you value the rather
touching fidelity of your old sheep dog.

To Vita Sackville-West
Spotorno
Italy
20 May

This is a strictly business like (only I happen to be tipsy, having drunk more than my half bottle tonight)
Yes, I am half dazed with travelling, so many cities have I seen, and smelt: now its the waves breaking,
and the scent of stocks in the garden.... We’re so brown cheeked red nosed and altogether dusty shaggy
shabby—what a state my clothes are in—even I rather hesitate to wear them—for we lunch in the fields, under
olives off ham, and its my duty to wash up, which affects my clothes....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Whit Monday [5 June]

Virginia, darling, you are an angel,—an angel, I mean, to understand so unfailingly when one really minds
about something as I minded my mother telling Ben about my morals and Harold’s.582 Not that I am in any
way ashamed of my morals or H’s. Only Ben might have had a horrid imprint sealed on his mind. Luckily he
didn’t—a tribute, I think, to our bringing up of him? (That’s a boast. But you, also, even you, boast sometimes.
Your boasts mostly concern Princess Patricia583 or some American publisher; mine, merely the way in which
I have brought up my sons, so that they should accept without wincing the revelation that their father and
mother are both to be numbered among the outcasts of the human race.) Anyway you are a darling to have
realised that I minded.
I am slightly and unseasonably tipsy, for I went to a party at my tenants here, to celebrate their golden

580 In February (VW 2703), Virginia had boasted of owning a new car—‘silver and green, fluid fly wheel. Tickford hood—Lanchester’.
581 Ethel Smyths opera The Boatswain’s Mate, which was first performed in 1916.
582 Virginia and Leonard lunched at Sissinghurst on 28 May, and Ben Nicolson told her that Lady Sackville had spoken to him ‘about M. [Vita] getting
hold of women and D. [Harold] of men—about Violet Keppel, Virginia Woolf etc.’ While Ben told the story, Virginia ‘listened... with her head bowed.
Then she said: “The old woman ought to he shot.” For Ben Nicolson’s description of the incident, see Portrait of a Marriage (1973).
583 Lady Patricia Ramsay, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, who abandoned her title of Princess on her marriage to Admiral Ramsay in 1919.
Virginia had been seeing her occasionally in 1933.
wedding, and had to drink their health at lunch. It was the sort of party you would have liked; the old lady,
who is just on 80, had tied a yellow ribbon round her neck, with the most coquettish little bow just behind her
ear, and kept assuring me how happy her husband had looked on this day fifty years ago. The whole house was
draped in Union Jacks. Why is it that patriotism must play a part in the most intimate family gathering? Their
son had returned from Australia for the occasion,— they hadn’t seen him since the war.
I enjoyed it more than any parry I’ve been to for years. They were all more like characters in a novel
than any character in any novel I’ve ever read. The old lady said to me, rather grimly, when I congratulated
her, ‘Well it’s better than divorce, anyhow.’
And oh my God, Lady Northampton584 is coming to tea. How much I prefer my tenants the Gosdens of Sattins
Hill, to Lady Northampton of Castle Ashby or whatever it is.
And how much I prefer Virginia to either.
When am I going to see Virginia?
I haven’t been to Brighton over Whitsun, or I would have come to Monk’s House with a basketful of
figs.
I’m writing poetry—but Mr Housman’s theories have upset me. Have you read Mr Housman? If one
adopts his theories, what becomes of the ‘Prelude’,585 or the ‘Testament of Beauty’ ?586

Your
V.
Sussex

584 Lady Emma Thynne, daughter of the Marquess of Bath, whom Lord Northampton married in 1921 but divorced in 1942. Castle Ashby was their
splendid house in Northamptonshire.
585 Wordsworth.
586 Robert Bridges.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square WC1
Thursday [8 June]

Would you dine with me alone upon my honour, on Monday next MONDAY 12th— anytime you like. It is
only that I shall be alone. Otherwise, I dont think its worth anyone’s while to come to London. Could you
angelically ring the telephone?...
Forgive scrawl
Potto is the writer

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
[11 June]

Isn’t it enraging that of all people in the world your own particular Ethel 587 should be the one to prevent me
dining with you tomorrow? But there it is,—the engagement has been arranged for weeks past,—I get letters
fairly trumpeting with excitement from Ethel by every post—supplemented by post cards and telegrams,—and
so I felt I simply couldn’t put her off—much as I longed to. Anyone else,—any herring griller,—could have
gone to hell. But Ethel, I reflected, is 75 and one cannot play fast and loose with the old.
She’s coming for the night.... Says she wants to hear all about America. My God.
You haven’t got another evening available, have you? I won’t tell you how much I want to see you,
because you wouldn’t believe me—cynical woman that you are— not knowing the meaning of love. I’ve been
so lazy. I’ve pulled up millions of groundsel, and written a line of poetry (no, verse,) now and then, but serious
literature such as a novel for the Hogarth Press, devil a bit—as a matter of fact I started one today. Didn’t start
it, so much as returned to a bit of vomit I spewed in America—the novel you said I was to write—all about
deserts and hurricanes.588 1 don’t know if I can make anything of it.
Now this letter will reach you in the evening, and either you’ll be alone or else having someone to dine
with you instead of me—and I shall be shouting at Ethel about the Middle West,—Harold shouting into one
ear and me into the other,— whereas I might be sitting on the floor at your feet,—physically instead of
metaphorically. I really do feel bitter about this.
I mustn’t forget to provide a po for Ethel.
Alex589 (our new secretary) has just come in to say may she borrow a novel? What sort of novel do
you want, I say? Well, she says, shyly, might I have Orlando? So she has gone off with Orlando, and I wonder
what she will make of it, being only twenty-four and never having been allowed hitherto to read any modern
novels at all with the sole exception of Mr Galsworthy, whom, to do her justice, she can’t abide.
I can see the light in her bedroom window across the courtyard, and so suppose that she has taken
Orlando to bed with her.
She has got a kettle which whistles like a nightingale, when it boils. It is audible all over our
encampment.

587 Ethel Smyth.

588 Perhaps Grand Canyon, which was not published until 1942.
589 Alex de Froissard.
 Our encampment has been very lovely lately, with a peculiarly big moon and two planets. I wrote a
poem about the two planets, which I think of calling ‘Stellar Sodomy’. I’ll send it to you if on further
consideration I decide that it’s proper enough for Alex to type.
Tell Leonard to read Harold’s new book.590 It is more in his line than yours, being political, but I think
you would be amused by some passages in his diary, which is the second half of the book. I have a great
admiration for Harold,—quite unprejudiced. I like his lucid mind, and his ease of expression. He is like a
person who knows how to use a scythe,—rhythmic, sharp, and sure.
Oh damn Ethel! I really am cross. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. She doesn’t
know that she has defrauded me of an evening with you.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
[23? June]

Potto’s love and 10/- to buy him shoes with: and a peasant womans hat. (But not not not if theres a pressure or
a rush or a difficulty) Lord how happy I was to see you!...

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Saturday [24 June]

Really, Mrs Woolf, I think you must have brought Potto up very badly, to let him send 10/- to an old friend for
a pair of shoes. To mark my disapproval, I’ve cashed it and shall give the proceeds to the local cricket club.
But I won’t forget the shoes for Pott. So Valerie591 is back, is she? Last time I heard of her,—in Hollywood it
was,—she was just about to have her hips HIPS, not LIPS) removed, 592 also the enamel from her teeth. That
is the kind of thing that is done to people in Hollywood. I think of spending a winter there myself.
Yes it was nice to see you, but I feel rather like a starving man given one solitary crust. Oh I’ve got so
much to say to you—but it takes hours—I mean, the sort of things I want to say to you require prolonged
intimacy before they can squeeze themselves out. (That sounds horribly like Ethel.) Do you remember a night
in Burgundy.—Do you remember an inn. Miranda?’593—when I came along the dark passage to your room in
a thunderstorm and we lay talking about whether we were frightened of death or not? That is the son of occasion
on which the things I want to say to you.—and to you only;—get said.
Well, I go off to Italy on Monday, and if you felt inclined to write and say you still had some affection
for me, a letter would reach me at

590 Peacemaking, about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

591 Valerie Taylor.
592 ’Rolled' was Harold's phrase, in his diary.
593 Hilaire Belloc. ’Tarantella’.
 Hotel Brufani
Perugia

on Monday’ July 3rd. That is about the only address I know of.
I have now got to go and see The Land performed at Chilham.
Tell Leonard I’ve been looking over my poems, and making indexes of them, and have achieved over
300 pages already;—quite enough for Vol I,—and that if he really wants a collected edition of all that tripe for
the autumn, he can have it.594 I daresay he is right in saving that it would prepare the ground for any longish
poem I might write later. Still. I can’t rid myself of the idea that it is all a little pretentious,—much worse than
becoming a Litt. Doc. of Manchester. However....595

Your
V.

To Virginia Woolf

4 King’s Bench Walk

Temple
London EC4
Friday [14 July]

Darling. I’ve just rung up the press, but hear you’re away nil Monday; We got back from Italy yesterday and
were immediately sent for to go to Eton as Nigel was suspected of having appendicitis. We brought him straight
up to London and he was operated on within the hour,—a frightfully bad case, very urgent, with the
complication of an abscess, last night. He is dangerously ill, and they won’t be able to tell till tomorrow how
it will turn out. Harold and I are terribly worried as you may imagine. IF all goes well, can I come and see you
both early next week? say Monday or Tuesday? Would you send me a line here (King’s Bench Walk) to say
when you will be back?

V.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Friday night [21 July]

Virginia, I’ve come down here—going back to London on Wednesday morning.

You leave London on Thursday, don’t you? for good? So would there be anything doing on Wednesday
or not? Lunch? dinner? Would you come out to either of those functions with me? Come and lunch with me at
the Cafe Royal on Wednesday? Or will you be too busy?
Still, you must lunch somewhere.
Will you tell your husband, please, that I return his announcement herein with two suggestions—and

594 Collected Poems, Hogarth Press, 1933

595 An honorary degree which Virginia had just refused.
tell him please that I shall be a terrible bore to him about this edition,1 because it is the only book of mine I
shall ever have minded about—Le. I don’t give a damn for my novels, but I do give X a damn for my poems,—
which is not saying much.
Normally I don’t think I’m much of a bore as an author, vis a vis my publisher. But on this occasion I
may become one.
HELL—I’ve just remembered: I’m lunching with Sibyl on Wednesday. Can you make it dinner or
not? If not, I shall understand, as you are leaving London the next day.
Lunch Thursday if you like.
A postcard here—to Sissinghurst—
Main point: I do want to see you—but don’t want to be an incubus.

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Wednesday [16 August]

Poor Virginia has been in bed; and thought how nice it would be to see Vita! and is now up and says How nice
it would be to see Vita! And L says (this is a terrific complement [sic]) “I should like to see Vita.” What about
coming one day next week for the night? Could it be?
And who’s Lady Roehampton in the Edwardians? Please tell me....
But can you come?
If so, I’ll write a long long letter. This is only Potto’s scrawl

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst
Friday [18 August]

Dear Mrs Woolf

(That appears to be the suitable formula.)

I regret that you have been in bed, though not with me—(a less suitable formula.)
About next week. I am more flattered than I can say by your suggestion that I should come to Rodmell,
knowing how much you dislike invasion. I am all the more flattered by Leonard’s support,—yes, I really do
take that as a compliment. But next week is rather difficult, though not impossible. The point is, that I’ve got
my sister-in-law staying here,596 and she’s been ill, and I am supposed to provide the cure. Country rustication
and all that. And Harold is writing a book about Lord Curzon,597 whereas I’m not writing any book at all, so I
am free to look after his sister,—which I like doing, because [five words omitted] she is editing a book,598 at
the moment, on advice to Parents, which I find fascinating,—I mean, I like seeing a really expert mind at work

596 Gwen St Aubyn, Harold’s younger sister. In 1940 her husband, Francis (Sam) St Aubyn, succeeded his uncle as Lord St Levan.
597 Curzon, the Last Phase, about Curzons period as Foreign Secretary, 1922-24.
598 The Family Book (1934)
technically on such difficult matters. We sit on the steps of the tower discussing why some women get their
physical satisfaction interiorally or exteriorally, and what connection there may or may not be between the
inner part of the nerve and the outer— and what connection there may be between perversion and normality—
and so on.
A very interesting question.
I might tell you more about it at 3 in the morning—but not in cold blood. Anyhow, it’s a better subject
for 3 in the morning than the butler’s wages.
Well,—anyhow,—net result: can I come to Rodmell on Tuesday August 29th? for the night?
The Edwardians,—oh, that bloody book! I blush to think you read it. Lady Roehampton is Lady
Westmoreland,—a lovely sumptuous creature who came to Knole when I was eight, and who first set my feet
along the wrong path, I fancy, but who died, herself, relatively young, of drugs and a plethora of lovers. (No,
it wasn’t Lady Westmoreland who set my feet along the wrong path, now I come to think of it, but the Queen
of Roumania who appeared in my schoolroom one day.)
Here is the post going.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
Wednesday [30 August]

Just to say that I’ve been talking to Raymond,599 and I’m glad to say things aren’t nearly as bad as it seemed.
Francis 600 has been to an expert who says the growth is small, and he thinks on the outside of the brain. He is
going to have the operation next week, but they think he ought to recover completely, though it is of course
serious. He’s up and about at present only with two paralysed fingers. This I write in haste, thinking you’d like
to hear.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
1 September

They are shooting all round the place—partridges of course,—first of September,— and I said ‘Rabbits’
dutifully this morning when I woke up,—so now we can eat partridges and oysters,—and so another season
opens—‘oh sweet monotony of the year.’ I forget who summed it up so neatly but suspect myself—My
memory, however, is so bad that I mistrust my own quotations.
(I am really getting rather worried about my memory: it is bad beyond all reason.)
It was nice of you to write to me about Francis—I really minded, thinking of that twinkly face in
danger of complete extinction. Raymond writes this morning that they have reason to believe that the growth

599 Raymond Mortimer.

600 Francis Birrell. He died on 2 January 1935.
is on the outside of the skull—and that the operation itself would not be fatal. How horrible the body is, when
it goes wrong. I wish I didn’t mind so much about my friends,—not that Francis was ever an intimate friend
of mine. He was just a person I liked, and God knows there are few enough of those.
Interruption: there is a man waiting to ask me about ancient pack-ways,—and there is one in my wood,
which I must go and show him—he also makes bricks and pottery.
When are you coming here on the way to Ellen Terry’s house?601 any day next week, except Thursday
and Friday—RSVP
Tell Leonard a rival publisher is trying to bribe me away with £1000—but I won’t be bribed, and have
said so.
A faithful sheep dog? nicely trained to heel?

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
15 September

Dearest Creature,

I am a wretch never to have written—not that you care. But there has been such a rain of visitors on my head
that I couldn’t escape. Next week is hopeless...but after the 23rd Heaven be praised, there’ll be no one that I
know of....
My word, what a nice woman you are! Thats the very words I said, on reading your letter to Leonard.
Moreover, they confirmed my own saying. He was rather in a stew, and thought we were making demands on
your honour, integrity, friendship, magnanimity and so on. I said, Oh but Vita is like that. Then your letter
comes to confirm it. It was a noble act though, tossing 1000 guineas into the duckpond, or cesspool, for to tell
the truth, I dont like Hart Davies602 in the flesh, nor Cape603 in the spirit.

601 Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, ten miles from Sissinghurst, was a cottage which had belonged to the famous actress from 1899 to 1928, and which
she had bequeathed to her daughter Edith Craig. It now belongs to the National Trust.
602 Rupert Hart Davies, publisher.
603 Jonathan Cape, publisher.
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Saturday [16 September]

I had begun to wonder if you were X with me—though I didn’t know why, and had a clear conscience. ‘After
the 23rd’ fits in beautifully, because it appears that they are producing ‘All passion spent’ at the Croydon
Theatre on that date, (with Jean Cadell as Lady Slane,) and I suppose I’ll have to go and see a rehearsal one
day next week, in order to prevent them from committing too many howlers. You might tell Leonard, would
you, about this, if he doesn’t know? because he would probably like to arrange with the theatre to have the
book on sale there,
Croydon Repertory Theatre
Wellesley Road
Croydon
is the address—as he did for the Edwardians.
Any day after the 23rd will do for you to come here,—I mean, I’ve no engagements, thank God. Try
to come before Oct 4th when Ben goes to Oxford, because Ben likes you. Isn’t that odd?
No, it wasn’t Cape who offered me the 1000 guineas. It was Cassell. Cape was quite a separate bribe.
We had [name omitted] here, and I decided I couldn’t bear him,—hairdresser’s block that he is,—smug snob,—
sparrow brain,—and too amiable by half. Anyhow, you can tell Leonard that no temptation to desert the
Hogarth Press is any temptation at all. No, I won’t say that. It was going to have been a spiteful remark,—no,
not spiteful exactly, but resentful on your behalf.
You will send me Flush, won’t you? I shamelessly keep you to that promise.
I say: my poems are so thin. It really appals me, re-reading them all in a bunch, and thinking ‘Is that
all I’ve got to show for half a fife’s experience?’ I can hardly hope that you won’t even glance at them, in your
capacity as X my publisher, so I shall send you a copy in which I shall mark the only specimens I could bear
you to read, and shall trust to your honour not to eavesdrop on the others.
My mother refuses to let me dedicate the book to her, so I think of dedicating it to Edith Sitwell
604
instead.
Lord, I must go and plant fritillaries.
When will you come?

V.

604 But it was in the end dedicated to Lady Sackville.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monks House
Saturday [30 September]

.. .we dined with Mary,605 and her Jeremy wants to meet your Ben, so I said I would hand on the message.
Mary makes love to me—yes: other people dont. I daresay at this very minute you’re couched with
some herring griller in the straw God damn you....

To Vita Sackville-West
52.T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Wednesday 1 November

“I saw Vita lunching at the Cafe Royal today” said Jack Hutchinson last night.
Oh such a pang of rage shot through me! All through dinner, and the supper.... And it burnt a hole in
my mind, that you should have been lunching at the Cafe Royal and not come to see me.
How pleased you’ll be! You did it on purpose I daresay. But who were you with? You knew I should
get wind of it—yes and it was a woman you were lunching with, and there was I, sitting alone and and and....
...Dearest Creature, do write and tell me who you were lunching with at the Cafe Royal—and I sitting
alone over the fire!.... Oh the Cafe Royal! When Jack said that—not to me, but to the company, you could have
seen my hand tremble; and then we all went on talking...and the candles were lit, and I chose mine, a green
one, and it was the first to die, which means they say that out of the 8 or 9 people there, I shall be the first to
wear a winding sheet. But you’ll be lunching at the Cafe Royal!

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle Kent
Friday [3 November]

My lunch at the Cafe Royal! Well, I was taking Gwen [St Aubyn]606 to a nursing-home, and took her to have
some luncheon there first. We didn’t then know if she had to have her head cut open or not. Thank goodness,
it turns out to be not. But they say she won’t be well for a year; perhaps not for two. She’s having treatment
for it,—a red-hot rabbit-hutch that they put over her head twice a day, and which makes her faint. They seem
to think that this will dispel the injury to her brain.
I go to Wales on Monday and shan’t be back till Saturday because I am going to stop at Oxford on the
way back to see Ben, and Gwen is coming with me (if they will let her out of her hot hutch) to see her little
boy607 who is now at Summerfields608 where Ben and Nigel were. I shall be in London on Monday Nov. 13th
when I MAY have to lunch with your own Ethel—and have to give a lecture at 5 somewhere—but shall we
dine together that night? Write to me here, and say.
I couldn’t stay up in London yesterday, (Thursday) when I had suggested your telephoning to me; but

605 Mary Hutchinson.

606 Harold’s sister, who had been in a car accident.
607 Giles St Aubyn.
608 Prep, school.
I left a message for you with Gwen in case you rang me up.
I can’t tell you how gratified I was by your annoyance (as you predicted) on discovering me in
unknown company at the Cafe Royal—but if I hadn’t been on so grim a mission you may be sure I should
have let you know. As it was, I was with doctors and specialists all day—and didn’t dare make any other
appointments because of them and their erratic movements.
I’ve been worried—but am now slightly relieved.
I say! it’s a shame for you to have my book609 in your hands, and me not.
I’m so sorry about Quentin—I am afraid that means he is ill—and if he is ill
Vanessa will mind—and if Vanessa minds you will mind—and if you mind I mind.610
Damn—you won’t get this letter till Monday if you’re at Rodmell.
How lovely the woods are—brown, green, red, and gold.
Poor Francis—how sorry I am about him.611
Tell me about dinner on the 13th—if you still have any affection left for a rather shabby sheep dog
that gnaws its bone at the Cafe Royal.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]
22 November

Oh faithless—why has everybody got a book and not I? Didnt I give you Flush and Orlando? Arent I a critic
too—arent I a woman? Dont you care what I say? Am I nothing to you, physically morally or intellectually?...
Look here, Vita, you may be putting off humanity and rising, like the day star, a dog—but do let your last act,
in the guise of humanity, be to pack a book, called V. Sackville West Collected Poems and sign it for me....
Do you know a woman called Phyllis Bottome?
And another called Jean Cadell?

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
23 November

I have, as you may observe,612 been printing, and send you this my first effort. It started by being Sissingchurst
Gastle, Xent, but I have improved on that. But my God! what a complicated game! And does one ever get
clean?
Do you know, it was my native modesty which prevented me from sending you my book.613 1 couldn’t
believe you really wanted it. However, here it is. I wish somebody would review it, as at present it seems to

609 Collected Poems.

610 Quentin Bell had a persistent form of pleurisy, and was going to spend three months in Switzerland.
611 Francis Birrell.
612 An arrow is drawn in, pointing to a smudged imprint of ‘Sissinghurst Casde, Kent’ where Vita and Harold had been attempting to print on the old
Hogarth Press which Virginia had given her in 1930.
613 Collected Poems.
be completely still-born.
No, I don’t know Phyllis Bottome,614 except by name as a writer of (I think) magazine stories. I do
know Jean Cadell.615 She took the part of Lady Slane in All passion spent at Croydon the other day. She’s a
very good actress—and I rather like her. She’s Scotch. Why do you want to know about her? Sandy-haired;
plain.
What about Dec. 15th? Shall you be in London? and shall I see you? Not dinner, because I am dining
with Charles Siepmann616 and going to Poil de Carotte617—but how about tea-time?
Such a lot of gardening going on here—we are planting the loveliest shrubs—and Sissinghurst is going
to be a riot.
Is it true that Berners618 is going to marry Violet? I suspect the rumour of being a joke either on his
part or on hers. Lord, to think how angry I should have been once!
Tell Leonard that never has a man been pined for as I pined for him yesterday when trying to print. He
would have been flattered.
Have you read Michael Sadleir’s book about Lady Blessington?619 you would like it.
Ethel has sent me her book620.... I lunched with her the other day—you weren’t in London.
Now I must go on printing to make a cleaner job of it. I never realised that ink could be so ubiquitous.

Your V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Sunday [26 November]

And the book came. And I’ve read one or two of the new ones. And I liked them yes— I liked the one to Enid
Bagnold; and I think I see how you may develop differently. You’re an odd mixture as a poet. I like you for
being ‘out-moded’ and not caring a damn: thats why you’re free to change; free and lusty....
Oh dear me, I wish I could read behind some of the poems!

614 Phyllis Bottome (1882-1963), the novelist, who in 1917 married A. E. Forbes-Dennis .Vita had met her in Berlin.
615 All Passion Spent, Vita’s novel, was dramatized by Beatrice Kelston under the title Indian Summer, and first performed at Croydon, with Jean
Cadell as Lady Slane, on 23 September 1933.
616 Charles Siepmann succeeded Hilda Matheson as Director ofTalks at the BBC, 1932-35.
617 A French film.
618 Lord (Gerald) Berners, a lifelong bachelor, had no intention of marrying Violet Trefusis, nor she him.
619 Blessington-D’Orsay. A Masquerade (1933).
620 Female Pipings in Eden, Ethel Smyth’s latest volume of autobiography.
1934 - 1936
Only three of Vita’s letters to Virginia survive from these years, but, as an indication of how far they
maintained their friendship, Vita preserved twelve of Virginia’s replies in 1934, eleven in 1935, and
nine in 1936. She wrote two books, The Dark Island and the life of Joan of Arc; Virginia produced
one, The Years. In 1935 Harold entered Parliament. The death of Vita’s mother early the next year
eased not only their financial situation—for Lady Sackville was a wealthy woman—but personal
tensions too, for she had become increasingly eccentric. Yet Vita loved her. For Virginia, Ethel Smyth
was still the most intimate of her friends; for Vita this role was filled now by her sister-in-law, Gwen
St Aubyn.

To Virginia Woolf
Castello
Portofino
6 February

I am writing to you on the terrace of a tiny old castle perched above the sea.621 Two great stone-pines shield
me from the sun, which is almost too hot. There is a rustle of lizards among the aloes. The sea sparkles three
hundred foot below. In the distance are snow-mountains. A Franciscan monk with a rope round his waist and
a vast grey beard has just been to call on me. A large bottle of golden wine stands at my elbow. I write and
write and write,—which reminds me, would you please tell Leonard that I can probably give him my book by
May or June.622 I want to serialise it if possible, before publication, so that (if he wants it at all?) he had better
regard it as an autumn feature. It is, at present, called The dark island, and I would be more than grateful if he
could ascertain in any way if any book of that name already exists. Perhaps there is some catalogue of fiction
available to him as a publisher. I don’t know. But it sounds to me suspiciously like a title which has already
been taken?
So much for business.
You see, I couldn’t resist the castle. I started in a little hotel down in the village, and every evening I
used to watch the castle turning pink in the sunset. So I made enquiries; found it was empty and to let; rang up
the agent in Genoa, and in five minutes had arranged with him for immediate occupation. There is only one
path up to it, so half the population turned out to carry our luggage up on their backs. And we were greeted at
the door by the gardener with a large bunch of irises and narcissus, and by two perfect Italian servants called
Teresa and Angela, who are ‘characters’, and, as all ‘characters’ are apt to be bores.
No doubt about it, this is the way to five.
You might write to me, I think. But not here, for we leave alas on Sunday. Write to Hotel Majestic,

621 Vita, with Harold and Gwen, had taken a short lease of the Castello at Portofino in northern Italy, featured by Elizabeth Russell in The Enchanted
April (1923); they then went to Morocco for three weeks.
622 Vita’s The Dark Island was published by the Hogarth Press in October 1934.
Marrakesh, Morocco.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52T.[avistock] S.[quare]
18 February

Yes it certainly sounds very nice, your castle. But you will have left it by now. You will be at Marrakesh, with
the Princess Royal and Lord Harewood—this piece of news stares me in the face in Sundays paper....
I’ve been laid up on the sofa in my dressing gown almost ever since you left— what a bore! I hope I
didnt infect you that day in the car: the usual little chill; then the usual damned headache....And I’ve dipped
into ten thousand books. That reminds me—I told L, who shouted for joy, to find out about the dark island,
and he says he’s written to you. We both shouted for joy. Our list was looking very lean and dry—now nature’s
plenty has descended on it. What a blessing!

To Virginia Woolf
Palais Jamai
Fez
[Morocco]
27 February

Darling, I am miserable to hear you have been ill; I learnt it from your letter which I got here yesterday,
forwarded from Marrakesh, and also from Ethel623 sandwiched in between remarks about wishing men
wouldn’t force one to think them all rotters. I do, oh I do, hope you’re better. You always seem to do this at
this time of year, like when you returned from Berlin.624 Do send me even a postcard to the British Consulate
General, Tangier, to say how you are; but say it truthfully.
We didn’t really like Marrakesh as much as we expected to, so we came here, and are delighted to
have done so, for Fez is one of the most enchanting places I have ever seen. We are lodged in an old Moorish
palace, all blue and green tiles, fountains, terraces, weeping willows, and running water. It opens straight on
to the old city, a secret and mysterious labyrinth of narrow streets where no wheeled traffic can ever come, and
where majestic Moors ride by on scarlet saddles on tall mules or Arab horses. At dawn one is woken by the
muezzins calling from a dozen minarets; and then somebody takes up with a snatch of song, and innumerable
birds begin, and the storks clap their beaks like castanets on the housetops. Incidentally we have shaken the
royal party625 off our tracks, and so far as I know there is no threat here in the way of acquaintances except
Evelyn Waugh who is here for the purpose of writing a book.626 My own book627 hasn’t got on as well as I

623 Ethel Smyth.

624 In 1929.
625 Princess Mary, daughter of King George V, and her husband Lord Harewood (previously Lord Lascelles when he had been in love with Vita in
1911-12), whom they had spotted and avoided in Marrakesh.
626 A Handful of Dust.
627 The Dark Island.
intended it to, for there is something in the air of Morocco which makes one stupid; Harold the ever-energetic
complains of the same thing, which rather reassures me, as I had begun to think I should never be able to write
a line again. liven large doses of Carter’s Little Liver Pills don’t seem to help, usually an infallible remedy. It
is maddening, because one can’t go sight-seeing all day, and so one has a good deal of time left over. But how
disgusting of me to grumble, when you have to stop writing in order to lie on a sofa and feel hurt and wretched.
I see your books everywhere in Morocco, both in French and English—the latter in Tauchnitz. It’s odd
to meet Orlando in Marrakesh and La promenade au phare628 in Rabat. I’m sure you like this!
Did I tell you I was going to motor home from Marseilles? If you and Leonard are going in the contrary
direction, perhaps we shall meet on the way,—in Avignon, say, or St Remy. I’ve sent for the motor to come
and meet us.
Well I must go and have my luncheon, but I shall toss off a large glass of Moorish wine (which is
rather good) to your recovery. My darling Virginia, my poor darling Virginia, I am really deeply unhappy to
think of you ill in the fogs of London.

Your V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
5 March

Yes, I am ever so much better. It was only the usual little temperature, which makes the headache hang about.
But I am back in my room again, writing....
However the fog is over...heaven be praised Ethel’s mass has been played—but it was a joke to see
her sitting in her triangular hat by the Queen’s side in the Royal Box, among all the court. Afterwards she gave
a tea party at Lyon’s—a more sordid 6d. affair you cant imagine; marble slabbed tables, thick bread and butter,
and the populace munching their cream buns.. .and Ethel bellowing, as red as the sun, entirely triumphant, and
self satisfied....
And I’m flirting with a rather charming—oh dear me, this wont make you jealous, sipping roses at
Fez....

628 To the Lighthouse.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square.
Friday [15 February 1935]

...I’m longing for an adventure, dearest Creature. But would like to stipulate for at least 48 1/2 minutes alone
with you. Not to say or do anything in particular. Mere affection— to the memory of the porpoise in the pink
window.
I’ve been so buried under with dust and rubbish. But now here’s the spring....
My mind is filled with dreams of romantic meetings. D’you remember once sitting at Kew in a purple
storm?...
So let me know, and love me better and better, and put another rung on the ladder and let me climb up.
Did I tell you about my new love?

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
28 March

Darling Virginia

I hate to bother you, but Ethel has taken to writing me such extraordinary letters (and also to Gwen,) that I
thought I would warn you and also ask you if you can throw any light on her attitude? As you know, she dined
at Gwen’s house a short time ago,—to be exact, on the 8th of this month,—and was then perfectly friendly and
her usual self. I was alone with her for a short time, and she made no critical remarks whatsoever. Next day
Gwen sent her a present of oysters and I sent her a case of wine, because we had both felt so sorry for her in
her troubles. She wrote to thank for these in her usual friendly way. Then, absolutely out of the blue, we both
got letters from her in a very different strain, accusing Gwen of ‘ruining’ me; saying that we were leading ‘a
rotten life’; and were not fit to write the life of Joan of Arc629 (I had told her that Gwen was helping me with
the actual research work.) We both answered her letters as patiently as we could, but today I get another one,
which begins ‘I tried to answer your letters— but I had such terrible things to say that I felt it is no good. We
live in such totally different worlds of ethics, have such different ideas on the subject of sanity, truth, honesty,
clean living, duty, religion, kindness...that there is no common language between us,’ and so on.
Now what does all this mean? and what has happened between that dinner and now to have put her
into that mood?
Of course I know she is an outspoken person who always says, and says brutally, what she thinks; I
know also that she has written you letters which have made you very angry, telling you what she conceives to
be home-truths. I should not take so much notice if I thought she would confine her remarks to me, but it does
worry me to think she may be chattering and discussing me and my affairs with all and sundry. I shouldn’t
mind her talking to you, because you know me and you know Ethel—and I am quite happy to leave the
judgment to you—but to other people who don’t know either me or Gwen she may be giving a very dangerous
impression. Have any echoes of anything of the sort reached you? If so, I know you will tell me, and I know
also that if you do see Ethel and she starts on the subject, you will tell her firmly that gossip of that sort is a

629 Vita’s Saint Joan of Arc was published in 1936 by Cobden-Sanderson.

very poor form of friendship,—for she still professes to have a genuine affection for me. I must say, it’s an
odd way of showing it!
The only thing which I have always known her to hold against me, is that old story of Christopher St
John —but that subject has long been closed—Ethel never could see my point of view, so we agreed to drop
630

it—so I don’t think that that can have anything to do with her latest move.
I am going to Greece631 next week (Thursday,) so do be an angel and send me a line before then.
Your rather worried

V.
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T[avistock] S.[quare]
Friday [29 March]

Lord what a nuisance about old Ethel!

I’m afraid I can’t throw much light on it because I dont understand it myself.
...Certainly, I’ve heard no echoes; if any should reach me, I will let fly at her. Or would you like me
to write to her? I dont expect to see her until after Easter. But to do her justice, I dont think she would ever
abuse one to enemies or acquaintances, only to old friends, whom one hopes can be trusted to discount it. But
its always worrying I know....

630 Christopher St John, Ethel’s friend and future biographer, had fallen in love with Vita, her neighbour in Kent. Vita reciprocated her affection, but
not her love. The Ethel-Vita friendship was soon mended.
631 A Mediterranean cruise with Harold, Gwen, Hugh Walpole and Nigel.
1937
Although, in November, Vita began a letter, ‘My (once) Virginia', and told her not to answer, Virginia
did, reassuringly, ‘saying, in effect, that she would always be there for Vita. Life and meaning
returned to their letters and meetings', (Victoria Glendinning, Vita, p. 291). One event had brought
them together again. In July Virginia's nephew, Julian Bell, was killed in the Spanish Civil War.
Vanessa Bell sent through Vita a message to her sister that nobody but Virginia had consoled her
more. At the same time Vita paid tribute to her own mother in Pepita, a dual biography which was
instantly acclaimed. Vita was now a major writer, in popular, if not critical, esteem. She was forty-
five.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
15 January

Oh you wretch! first you tell Ethel I’m going to London—and then you tell her I’ve been to London—and I’ve
thereby hurt her feelings without meaning to—but not irremediably I hope, as she has found a new puppy
which I am to give her. It has either two mothers or two brothers, I can’t read which—Anyhow she seems
happy again, which is all I wish for, for I do believe she has made herself truly miserable over PanV.632
As for my London season, it was entirely wrecked by
(a) your brother-in-law633
(b) the telegraph clerk at Lewes,
and
(c) yourself, by being away from Tavistock Square.
Still, I gave a very nice cocktail party which was attended by several of your friends, and you were much
missed—
I will appear punctually at one on January 22nd and we will do anything you like until Mrs ex-J.
Chamberlain claims me at five. I’ll tell you then why I am going to tea with your ex-love.634 (Why have you
so many ex-loves, by the way?) It’s something to do with you, indirectly.
I saw your portrait in the floor at the National Gallery.635 Do I much like the idea of the feet of London’s
and America’s millions trampling over you? No, not much. Sheep dogs growl when they see such things.

632 All Ethel Smyth’s sheepdogs were named Pan. This was the fifth.
633 Clive Bell.
634 Mary Chamberlain was the widow of the statesman Joseph Chamberlain. After his death she married in 1916 William Carnegie, sub-Dean of
Westminster Abbey. Virginia had known them when her half-brother, George Duckworth, was secretary to Joseph s son, Austen, but the idea that
Virginia and Mary were ever lovers was pure fantasy on Virginia s side.
635 A mosaic by Boris Anrep, completed in 1933, which represented several prominent women as classical figures, including Virginia as Clio and
Greta Garbo as the Muse of Tragedy.
 V.

I have run out of envelopes—

Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
In the Grand Erg
Sahara
2 March

I write to you sitting at the door of my tent. All around us are the sand-dunes. But what can that convey to you?
or how can I convey it to you? It is like nothing else. Just a strange geography of valleys, hill ranges, ridges,
peaks, slopes pure as snow, all formed of golden sand. Golden, yes, in the sun; but in the shadows it turns pink
or violet, and all the time it changes both its shape and its colour. We have seven Arabs (nomads) with us, two
camels, a mule, a sheep (to eat), and a sloughi636 which is used for hunting gazelle. livery now and then one of
the Arabs plays his flute, or sings a brief snatch of melancholy song.
We had meant to start on this expedition yesterday, and had indeed set out, but a sudden sand-storm
arose and instantly the landscape was obliterated in clouds of sand, thick as a white fog. So we had to turn
back. It lasted all day and most of the night. Our tents and provisions had been sent ahead, and during the night
one of the tents blew away, and so did the live chicken, which has never been seen again. It was last seen
sailing away across the Sahara.
We have been hunting little pink salamanders with one of the Arabs. They bury themselves in the sand,
and you trail them by their tracks; then you dig suddenly, and pounce. Leonard would like that game. I am
bringing back a tin-ful, to try and keep in a greenhouse at home. Unfortunately the Arab knows only about six
words of French, so we had to communicate by smiles and gestures.
Tonight we have a feast of the sheep roasted whole. Our drinks are kept as cool as in your frigidaire by being
buried deep in the sand; our bread is baked in the sand, so you see it serves all purposes.
From here we move on to a curious region ever further out into the desert, which is inhabited by people
who are said to be the descendants of the ancient Carthaginians.
Back in England on the 13th.
I don’t feel like a person who can write letters at all. I do however feel very much more like a person
than I ever do in England; I mean, I am just a thing that eats, sleeps, lies in the sun, and forgets time and
everything else.
Next day. The whole sheep was dumped on the dinner table (a rickety affair at best) last night, wrapped
in a sheet of brown paper. We had to unwrap it, and there it was, head, horns, genitals and all, exposed before
us. Then we had to tear it to pieces with our fingers and eat. After dinner the Arabs made a fire in the sand,
and we sat round while they danced and sang to the flute. The desert stars blazed above us, and after a while
the moon came up.
I’ve also given a dervish party. They stuck daggers and hammered nails into their naked stomachs. It
was a fine party. They danced holding flaring torches to their chests and faces. Then I spent a week in a ruined

636 Saluki.
Roman camp.637 Oh, it’s fun, being abroad! How smug it makes our island seem. It hasn’t rained here for three
years. I shall be back by the middle of March.
You are lavishly represented in the Tauchnitz edition everywhere. I brought The Waves with me, and
re-read it with emotion. I like the 2nd half the best,—lovely, lovely pages.
By the way, Ben (I say ‘by the way’ because he so likes The Waves,) is living in London, 72 Gloucester
Place. If ever you had people in after dinner, would you let him come? He would love it. He is writing a book
on Seurat!638—rather ambitious, I think, but I’m all for the young biting off more than they can chew. Will I
see you when I come back?

Your
V.
Sussex

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
14 June

Shall you be in London on July 1st? a Thursday. And if so, should I come to lunch with you? The worst of it
is, I have to broadcast at 3.15, so would have to leave you in time for that—Still, it would be better than
nothing. May I?
Will you tell Leonard I am sending an ultimatum to Mr Curtis Brown, 639 to the effect that if he doesn’t
produce a definite offer for serialising my book within the next ten days, I shall take it that serialisation is
definitely off, in which case Leonard will receive the typescript by June 30th as per agreement, for autumn
publication.1 I am fed up with Mr Curtis Brown.
I liked getting your post card of Georges [sic] Sand.640
I have found a portrait of an ancestor of mine who is far more like me than any which we found for
Orlando! It is a frightening likeness. I will try to remember to bring it on July 1st, if I may come to you then,
as I HOPE.
Tell Leonard, too, that I’ve got eight Alsatian puppies—5 weeks old—and does he want one, or are
Sally’s puppies too imminent for him to contemplate any others?

Your loving
V.

637 Timgad, Algeria.

638 This book never progressed beyond the research stage, but Benedict Nicolson developed into a distinguished art historian as Editor of the Burlington
Magazine and author of several scholarly books covering a wide field of art history.
639 Vita’s dispute with Spencer Curtis Brown, the literary agent, concerned the serialization of Pepita, her biography of her grandmother and mother,
which the Hogarth Press published in October 1937. Lady Sackville had died in January 1936.
640 A portrait of the French writer by Charpentier, which Virginia had sent Vita from near the Chateau de Nohant, George Sand’s home. Vita always
misspelt ‘George’ as ‘Georges’.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square WC1
17 June

Yes, it would be better than nothing—lunch July 1st—one o’clock, so as to spin it out.
Ah hah! (This refers to Curtis Brown). But this business matter must be left for you and L. As for The
Alsatians—no: no: What have we spent the last days doing? Rigging up a lying in bed in L’s study;641 the event
comes off this Sunday. Thus we cant go to Rodmell. Dogs enough; if dogs there be. Some say she’s still virgin.
George (not an S) certainly wasnt. Have you read her Memoirs? Do; But no more now—

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Wednesday [21 July]

Dearest Creature

I wired to you because Julian was killed yesterday in Spain. Nessa likes to have me and so I’m round there
most of the time. It is very terrible. You will understand

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
22 July

My darling Virginia

I am so terribly sorry. You know how often one says one is sorry, and one is, but there is a difference between
being very sorry and sorry-to-matter. I am sorry-to-matter about Julian.642 He was such a charming alive
person,—do you remember when you took me to tea with him in his rooms at Cambridge?—and he might
have done so much and enjoyed life so fully, and now!... Then apart from him as a person I mind about you,
for I know you were fond of him; and about Vanessa. I mind for her own sake, and also for yours, for you must
suffer to see her suffering. And Clive too. I wish I could tell you how much I mind.
I couldn’t come to see Leonard, and anyway I didn’t feel that in the circumstances I should be anything
but in the way.
Darling Virginia—I wish I could do or even say something. You are so very dear to me, and you are
unhappy—and I can do nothing—except be your ever very loving

V.

641 For their dog Sally.

642 Julian Bell went to Spain as one of a team of ambulance drivers on the Republican side in the Civil War. He was attached to a British medical unit
based at the Escorial Palace near Madrid, and was mortally wounded by a shell on 18 July outside the village of Villanueva de la Canada. He was
twenty-nine.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
[26? July]

Dearest Creature,

I was very glad of your letter. I couldnt write, as I’ve been round with Vanessa all day. It has been an incredible
nightmare. We had both been certain he would be killed, and the strain on her is now, perhaps mercifully,
making her so exhausted she can only stay in bed....
Lord, why do these things happen? I’m not clear enough in the head to feel anything but varieties of
dull anger and despair....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
21 September

My only Virginia

First, for an intelligent woman, which every American magazine which I open assures me that you are, I must
say that you betray a singular lack of even ordinary sense in describing yourself as ‘visitors who interrupt and
bore’. Don’t you know how I love seeing you always? and what an especial joy it is to have you here? and
what a benefit you confer on me, a lasting treasure, by coming?
Second, thank you for the letter. I return it.643 I agree with Leonard that it is the effusion of a maniac,
else why should the poor man go into his wife’s past history? I hope you won’t follow his advice, but still I
have a certain secret pride in the thought that ‘your affair with V. S-W? should enable you to write with
authority. Would it? There is much to be said on that subject but perhaps it would be better said by firelight on
a winter evening when one had omitted to turn on the lights.
If you are really in Paris in October, I shall be there on the 14th, 15th, and 16th I think. I say ‘think’,
because you know how one’s dates are liable to alteration when one motors—but these dates are pretty certain.
Hotel Crillon, Place de la Concorde, will find me there then, so perhaps I shall find a note from you?.. .by the
way, Gwen 644 will be with me: I don’t suppose you mind that, but I thought I’d better tell you. It would be fun
to dine at the Exhibition? 645 Harold is in Paris till tomorrow, when he returns, so I shall have heard about all
the most amusing places from him.
I have spent a lovely day with the game-keeper from Knole, who came here to fish—and also Nigel
and I have been excavating the foundations of the old castle, out in the orchard.646

Your loving
V.

643 Virginia had received a letter from an American asking her to write an article about Vita, adding that Virginia’s ‘affair with V. Sackville-West’
should make her an authority upon the subject.
644 Gwen St Aubyn.
645 The major International Exhibition staged in Paris that year. Virginia did not join them.
646 At Sissinghurst.
This is a private postscript. I had a note from Vanessa which ends thus: ‘I cannot ever say how Virginia has
helped me.647 Perhaps, some day, not now, you will be able to tell her it’s true.’
Perhaps I ought not to quote this to you, but I don’t see why not. In any case, please keep it to yourself.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
1 October

We have been so ridden with visitors that I never had a moment to write. In fact I was so touched by your letter
that I couldnt. Isnt it odd? Nessa’s saying that to you, I mean, meant something I cant speak of. And I cant tell
anyone—but I think you guess—how terrible it is to me, watching her: if I could do anything—sometimes, I
feel hopeless. But that message gives me something to hold to....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
13 November

My (once) Virginia

You said I was a fool not to write to you when my pen wriggled to do so.
Well, it wriggles now. I write from the pink tower, which you like.
I hear echoes of you—from Eddy for instance, who says he went to tea with you. I felt envious. I felt
I could have come to tea with you on far closer terms than Eddy. Why don’t I? Just because I am not in
London—and Eddy frequently is. Isn’t it a pity that geographical distance should make such a difference?
Anyway we are going to have some jaunts of our own liking in January, aren’t we? Where shall we
go? To Kew? Do you ever think of me?
If you do, please imagine a Sissinghurst very muddy, with busynesses going on, such as gardening
(ask Leonard, who is a gardener, and he will tell you that all gardeners have an orgy of planting and
transplanting at this time of the year. You may have seen him and Percy648 busy at it.)
Such an unpleasant party of people came here, their hands shaky from drink or drugs, I don’t know
which; I hated them; they made the sort of impression one doesn’t forget.
Is this just a letter to be put up behind your paperweight on the mantelpiece, to be answered some day?
If so, I’d rather you didn’t answer it at all. Or among Ethel’s letters? What an awful thought!
No, Virginia, please don’t answer it. I shall know it has arrived and that you will recognise it as a
thought of love from your Orlando.
The servants made such a lovely bonfire here on Guy Fawkes’ day I thought of you, as the flames shot
up. They had fireworks too, and turned the whole front of Sissinghurst pink as though it blushed. They put the
fireworks into a dustbin, and blew the fid up into the sky.

647 After Julian’s death.

648 The gardener at Monk’s House.
 Behind all this nonsense, is the horror of Spain. I do mind about it so much. And all the rest of the
world too—Only, Spain is in the foreground for the moment.
A rather inconsecutive letter, I fear, (I’ve just read it over,—you know how one does, at the bottom of
the page,) but somehow I always turn to you when I feel like the dustbin with fireworks inside it.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]
25 Nov

Why ‘once’ Virginia? Why mayn’t I answer your letter? That of course is the way to make me sit down at
once and answer it. Why are you a dustbin? And why shouldn’t we go for a jaunt? Why, why, why?
Just because you choose to sit in the mud in Kent and I on the flags of London, thats no reason why
love should fade is it? Why the pearls and the porpoise should vanish....
So no more—but if your pen should again take to twisting, let it.

Because, my dear Vita, whats the use of saying ‘once Virginia’ when I’m alive here and now? So’s
Potto if it comes to that

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
[26? December]

Its not due to you that I’m alive today: I’ve eaten the whole pie practically myself!
Heaven above us, what immortal geese must have gone to make it! It was fresh as a dockleaf, pink as
mushrooms, pure as first love, (but first love conveys nothing to the hardened and battered—this I put in by
way of an aside) It was so divine, I could forgive any treachery. My word what a pie! Tom Eliot was dining
with us the night it came. Complete silence reigned. The poet ate; the novelist ate; liven Leonard, who had a
chill inside, ate. Nothing of the least importance was said. Where do they come from? Could one send a card
and have one at will? It seems incredible.... Oh did I tell you I’d been offered an Order?—I forgot—they
thought I’d come from Buckingham Palace. A kind of Order of Merit.
But Orlando, pink porpoise, isnt it against our Covenant to do this sort of thing? Dont you remember
offering me Thackerays wine cooler or ash tray or something in the days of the fishmonger and how I said:
Unhand me Sirrah?
...Ethels in ecstasies over her pate. 12,000 copies of Pepita sold. I’m thinking of buying a fur coat
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle Kent
28 December

Yes of course a postcard will produce a pate at will. You send it to

M. Robert Gerst
7 rue des Frères
Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin)
and if you wish to give a reference as to your respectability, (assuming M. Gerst not to be a man of letters,)
you mention my name. He will no doubt accept it as a guarantee, for he has known both my mother and me
for many years. M. Gerst has an enchanting catalogue, which he will send you on request, but once you get
into his clutches you are lost: your life becomes one vast truffle and your cooking is based entirely on paté de
foie gras.
What’s all this about your being offered an Order? I should like to know more, please. Could you rival
Ethel as a Dame?649 Or what? I am really intrigued, and should like a post-card if you have no time for more.
Glad Pepita is going to furnish you with a fur-coat. I continue to get the oddest and nicest letters about
her. Hugh 650 is the latest recruit among her admirers. Is it true by the way that someone threw an all-in wrestler
over the ropes at Hugh and injured him severely?651
You sized up my ex-temporary-secretary nicely,—the one who rang me up about the dogs while I was
dining with you. When I returned here next day [fifteen words omitted] I had to sack her on the spot. No fault
of mine. (N.B. this is not to be repeated, as I shall be had up for libel.)
Sibyl652 was to have come here today for luncheon, but has met with a street accident—been knocked down,
in fact. So do be careful when you go for your London walks. It is not a safe place, and I am glad I have the
wisdom not to five in it. All the same I regret not being nearer to Virginia whom I love. Lord, how lovely you
looked the other night in your black and scarlet!

Your pink porpoise

Orlando

649 She became Dame Ethel Smyth in 1922.Virginia was not offered an Order. It was known that she refused all titular honours offered to her, and here
she was joking.
650 Hugh Walpole.
651 This curious incident occurred in Los Angeles in February in 1936.
652 Sibyl Colefax.
1938
The mounting international tension received a temporary respite after the Munich agreement of
September 1938. Virginia published Three Guineas, a condemnation of male vanity and aggression
with which Vita could not wholly agree. Her accusation that Virginia had employed ‘misleading
arguments’ led to the only quarrel between them, and it was soon made up. Vita wrote to Harold after
a visit to Rodmell, ‘Oh my dear, what an enchanting person Virginia is! How she weaves magic into
life!’ The recollection of their past love irradiated their continuing but more distant friendship. In her
new poem Solitude, published by the Hogarth Press that year, Vita hinted at the contrast between her
ephemeral love affairs (‘Those cheap and easy loves’) and what Virginia still meant to her.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
1 April 1938

It is a mangy sheep dog that writes to you, Virginia, but I thought I had better write in case you got given some
garbled version of my disasters653 and thought them worse than they were. Also I feel I owe you an explanation
for never having followed up the alluring suggestion that we should go to Mourning becomes Electra together,
as I had fully intended to do.
Well.... You know I was ill in January with what was thought to be jaundice and internal inflammation?
Well, I went on getting attacks of it, and having to take to my bed with pains, and I lost 2 stone in weight, and
altogether felt wretched. So they decided it must be gallstones, and during the last attack 10 days ago they
rushed me up to London by ambulance to be X-rayed etc.—and then, having put me in a nursing home and
taken pints of blood out of my arm, they discovered it wasn’t gallstones at all, but lead-poisoning. How I got
it is not yet clear; the cider-press654 is suspected, though as that hasn’t got a particle of lead in it I can’t see how
it can have come about; anyhow, there it is: I am full of it. I daresay my aunt Amalia655 has something to do
with it, with her Borgian ancestry.
I escaped from the home yesterday and am perfectly all right, except for being a bit shaky—rather like
a newly born lamb, wobbly at the knees. Otherwise I am as well as usual, and within a short time it will all
have disappeared out of my system. In the meantime I have a lovely sylph-like figure, and have to keep my
clothes up by means of safety-pins.
I would have let you know I was in London, but (1) I didn’t want to bother you, (2) I was only there
for 5 days, (3) I scarcely had a minute to myself owing to a procession of specialists, X-rays, and so on.So
there is my little explanation, and you must forgive the total egotism of this letter, which could be excelled
neither by Eddy nor by Ethel. I am fully aware of that.

653 Illness.
654 At Sissinghurst
655 Lady Sackville's sister—they were both the illegitimate daughters of Pepita and Lionel Sackville.
 Any chance of your passing this way? The garden has gone mad,—everything out—

Your
V

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T.[avistock] S.[quare]
Tuesday [5 April]

...I am miserable to think how bad you’ve been; and going through all that torture of waiting for results. Are
they sure they’ve spotted it now? And why lead from Cider? Isnt it from painting a greenhouse?—But if you
have a moment let me have a word. We both sit up like begging dogs, with our paws up, sending our faithful
humble sympathy. And how do they de-lead you?...

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
11 May 1938

Ben has just returned from London and tells me he met you lunching with Clive and that you asked after me.
This makes me feel very guilty, as I have been meaning to write to you for some days. I am all right for the
moment, though I am told that fresh attacks may leap on me without warning. However. I think not. I think
my extraordinarily robust constitution will defeat the grim prognostications of the doctors. I shall feel I have
scored, if I do escape without further attacks.
So you are going to the Hebrides! So am I, but not until August. I am going there to lunch with Nigel
on his own island,656- a somewhat doubtfill undertaking, as the storms are frequent and the fishing-boats tiny.
So we may get held up for days, but I hope for good luck in weather.
Would there be any chance of seeing you here? No, I suppose not. That is too much to hope for. But
what a delight it would be! I suppose I must hope only for a day at Rodmell (sandwiched in between Ethel and
Sibyl) some day in September. Still, I would love to see you and Mitzi657 and Sally658 and Leonard here.
By the way. my Jacob’s sheep had twins apiece, and my dear dear Mrs Staples659 had a daughter two
days ago, who is going to be called Josephine after Pepita. Isn’t all that nice for me?
What did you think of Ben? I am so cross with him at the moment, for having missed his train, that I
can’t see straight about him. Normally, I like and even love him. I hope he doesn’t go Bloomsbury.

Your loving
V.

656 The uninhabited Shiant Islands, north of Skye, which Nigel had just bought. Vita never went there. Virginia and Leonard went to Skye in June that
year.
657 Leonard’s marmoset.
658 A dog.
659 Vita’s cook.
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
30 May 1938

I thought I must have committed some crime when I saw a typed letter from you signed ’yours faithfully
Virginia Woolf', but I quickly saw it was all right, and have sent a small donation to the library. 660 As it
happened, I got a letter from a French friend661 of mine by the same post, bothering me to ask you for your
autograph for her collection. This I should have refused to do, but as fate has delivered ‘yours faithfully
Virginia Woolf’ into my hands, do you mind if I cut it off and send it to her? I wouldn’t do so without your
permission. Although a bore, she is quite respectable,—is a princess by birth, a countess by marriage, and a
great-grand-daughter of Mme de Stael by descent. She prides herself on never having bought an autograph for
her beastly collection.
May I send it? I enclose a postcard for your reply, to save you trouble.
What about your book?662 I thought it was coming out this month, but have seen no more about it.
How very’ nice it was, coming to dinner with you. You know. I like your house better than any other
house; its atmosphere, I mean. I always come away feeling that life is more worth while. This sounds like a
phrase, but is the right truth. Will you let Ben come m after dinner one night when you have got people there
any how? I mean, if you have got people to dinner anyhow, he wouldn’t be wasting your time, and he would
so love it. Only don’t tell him I suggested it, or he would half murder me.
I went to Edy Craig’s663 barn-theatre yesterday, and she made an appeal to the audience to obtain new
members, so (knowing that you had been flirting with the idea for several years) I told them to send you the
necessary information.
For their next show they are having marionettes. You need not do anything about it unless you want
to, but I do think it would be fun if we could go there together, or meet there. You could come to luncheon at
Sissinghurst first.

Your loving
V.
Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
52 T[avistock] S.[quare]
1 June

The book664 comes out tomorrow. It’s only a piece of donkey-drudgery, and as it repeats in still soberer prose,
the theme of that very sober piece The Years, which, rightly, you didnt like, I hadn’t meant to send it. But I

660 The feminist library- in Marsham Street, Westminster, founded by the London National Society for Women's Service, of which Virginia was an
enthusiastic patron, appealing to all her friends for subscriptions.
661 Probablv Princess Anne-Marie Callimachi.
662 Three Guineas.
663 Edith Craig lived with Christopher St John in the house of her mother, Ellen Terry, at Smallhythe, Kent, where she had organized a society for the
production of plays in a converted barn.
664 Three Guineas.
will, by way of thanks, and you need neither read it nor write and say you have. Both those books are now off
my mind, thank God. Why did I feel I must write them? Lord knows.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
15 June

If I haven’t yet written to thank you for your three guineas, it is only because I knew you were going off to
Skye, not because I didn’t savour it. You are a tantalising writer, because at one moment you enchant one with
your lovely prose and next moment exasperate one with your misleading arguments. You see, so provocative
a book can’t be thanked for in a mere letter; it would need a reply as long as the book itself, and that would
mean a publication by the Hogarth Press. And far be it from me to cross swords with you publicly, for I should
always lose on points in fencing, though if it came to fisticuffs I might knock you down. So long as you play
the gentleman’s game, with the gentleman’s technique, you win.—I am not explaining myself very well, indeed
very badly and confusedly, so shall we leave it till we meet? In the meantime, let me say that I read you with
delight, even though I wanted to exclaim, ‘Oh, BUT, Virginia...’ on 50% of your pages.
What a little imp of mischief Jeremy is.665 Ben has now secured a tenement in Soho, and his address
is 47 Dean Street, Soho, W.l. He would jump at any invitation you proffered.
Did you like Skye? Did you go to Sligachan? Did you see The Old Man of Storr and the Cuillins?666

Your
V.

Thank you for the autographs, in the super plural667—I sent one to my French princess.

665 Jeremy Hutchinson, son of Jack and Mary, had been a close friend of Ben at Oxford and later became a distinguished barrister and Lord Hutchinson.
666 Sligachan: a hotel on the Isle of Skye where Virginia had expected to stay; ‘The Old Man of Storr’: a remarkable pinnacle of rock on the island;
and the Cuillins: a mountain range on Skye.
667 In response to Vita’s request, Virginia sent her a card inscribed with her autograph seven times.
To Vita Sackville-West
George Inn Challerford
Northumberland
19 June

...Of course I knew you wouldn’t like 3 gs—thats why I wouldn’t, unless you had sent a postcard with a
question, have given it you. All the same, I dont quite understand. You say you dont agree with 50% of it—
no, of course you dont. But when you say that you are exasperated by my “misleading arguments”—then I
ask, what do you mean? If I said, I dont agree with your conception of Joan of Arc’s character, thats one thing.
But if I said, your arguments about her are “misleading” shouldn’t I mean, Vita has cooked the facts in a
dishonest way in order to produce an effect which she knows to be untrue? If thats what you mean by
“misleading” then we shall have to have the matter out, whether with swords or fisticuffs. And I dont think
whichever we use, you will, as you say, knock me down. It may be a silly book, and I dont agree that its a well-
written book; but its certainly an honest book: and I took more pains to get up the facts and state them plainly
than I ever took with any thing in my life....

To Vita Sackville-West
52T.[avistock] S.[quare]
22 July

Leonard says you have sent a poem, and would like to know what I think of it. Now I would like to read it and
normally would fire off an opinion with my usual audacity. But I want to explain: constituted as I am (not as I
ought to be) I feel I cant read your poem impartially while your charges against me, as expressed in a letter I
have somewhere but won’t quote, remain unsubstantiated. I feel, I mean, that you thought me dishonest in 3
gs: you said something about its being “misleading” and suggested that if only you weren’t incurably clumsy
honest and slow witted yourself you could demolish my specious humbug. You could knock me down with
your honest old English fists and so on. And then you sickbed me over with praise of charm and wit....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
23 July

But my darling Virginia, never in my life have I ever suspected you of humbug or dishonesty! I was absolutely
appalled by your letter this morning. Obviously you have never had a letter I wrote you while you were away,
and perhaps foolishly sent to Skye. I of course cannot now remember exactly how I expressed myself in it, but
it was to the effect that I had never for a moment questioned your facts or their accuracy in 3 guineas, but only
disagreed in some places with the deductions you drew from them. And this, after ah, is a matter of opinion,
not of fact. By my unfortunate allusion to the elegance of your style I meant that you almost succeeded in
convincing one in spite of oneself, until one stopped to reflect afterwards in cold blood. To take an example, I
question very much whether any Englishwoman feels that England is not her country because she will lose her
nationality if she should happen to marry a foreigner (p. 196.) Again, on p. 194, you suggest that ‘fighting is a
sex characteristic which she cannot share,’ but is it not true that many women are extremely bellicose and urge
their men to fight? What about the white feather campaign in the last war? I am entirely in agreement with you
that they ought not to be like that, but the fact remains that they frequently are. The average woman admires
what she considers to be the virile qualities.
 However, it is boring to go on adducing examples, but I hope I have said enough to show you that your
honesty, integrity, and good faith were never for an instant under suspicion. I am truly upset to think you may
have been nourishing this idea for the last weeks, and I wish to God you had got the letter I wrote to Sligachan.
668
You know there are few people in the world whom I should hate to hurt more than you, and few people
whose integrity I respect or trust more. That you should feel you can’t read my poem because of some barrier
between us shows me that I must have hurt you, though God knows I never meant to, nor was there any cause
for offence in my mind, only I must have expressed myself clumsily. At any rate I know you will believe me.
Your very contrite and entirely devoted

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[52 Tavistock Square]
Saturday [23 July]

What on earth can I have said in my letter to call forth your telegram? God knows. I scribbled it off in five
minutes, never read it through, and can only remember that it was written in a vein of obvious humorous
extravagance and in a tearing hurry....
But, as I say, lets leave it: and I apologise, and will never write a letter so carelessly again. And I’ve
no grievance whatever; and you need say no more, because I’m quite sure, on re-reading your letter, you didn’t
mean that I was dishonest: and thats the only thing I minded. So forgive and forget

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
25 October 1938

Now what is the etiquette? Do I give a book to the publisher who publishes it? Oh, I forgot, you’re no longer
a partner in the press, so that’s all right.669
Anyway I am asking Mrs Nicholls 670 to give you a copy of Solitude from me, as she has not sent me
as many as I wanted, and I thought you would probably be back in London by now, so she could hand it straight
over. I do wonder what you will think of it,—not much, probably.
A large bundle of roses is waiting for me to go and plant them. If you are in London I am sorry for
you, as these days have been amazingly lovely.
Shall you be there on November 17th? and if so could we meet? I should like that.

Your loving
V.
To Vita Sackville-West

668 On Skye.
669 John Lehmann had bought Virginia’s half share of the Hogarth Press and had assumed equal partnership with Leonard in April 1938. Vita’s book
was Solitude, a lengthy poem.
670 Mrs Nicholls was the new manager of the Hogarth Press.
 Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
27 October

Yes, Mrs Nicholls has handed me a copy of your book: which I certainly consider my due, with an inscription.
I dont believe you care a damn what I think of it. However, I’ll tell you when I’ve read it, if you want to
know.... We plan to retire here for ever: in which case I should sink as deep in solitude as even you could
wish....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
19 December 1938

Virginia mine—This is to bring you my love—and to say I have ordered a pate for you for Christmas—and
also to say I hope you weren’t bored at luncheon671—and how much I regretted that you weren’t there when
Father d’Arcy 672 and I went to admire the lizard Freya Stark has brought back from Arabia, a magnificent
animal which spends its life in England lying on a hot water bottle under an electric light globe, surrounded
by relics of Ur dug up by Leonard Woolley. And was the Freudian dinner a success?673
I would have liked some moments alone with you after luncheon but all I got was compliments about
you from Miss Stark, who thought you very beautiful.... So did I, if I may be allowed to say so,—very beautiful
indeed in your brown fur cap and your exquisitely ethereal slenderness.
Well, well... I had better conclude with wishing you a happy Christmas, like any old housekeeper. And
to think how the ceilings of Long Barn once swayed above us!... and dolphins sported on the marble slabs.674

Your
V.

671 On 14 December Vita invited Virginia to lunch at Antoine’s, a London restaurant. The other guest was Freya Stark, the author and traveller in
Middle East countries.
672 The distinguished Jesuit priest, Master of Campion Hall, Oxford, 1932-40. Vita took him and Gwen St Aubyn (who was a Catholic convert) to
Sissinghurst that night.
673 To celebrate the publication by the Hogarth Press of Sigmund Freuds works. Virginia met Freud in London in January 1939, when he was a refugee
from Austria.
674 In 1925-26.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Xmas day 38

Well that was a princely thought—the pate, and better than a thought, it practically saved our lives; pipes
frozen; electric fires cut off; nothing to eat, or if there were, it couldnt be cooked; and then behold the parcel
from Strasbourg! So we dined and then lunched and then dined off that—I can eat it for ever—I could have
been content to freeze almost, if I could eat such gooses liver for ever. But what an extravagant Prince you are!
How tremendously in the vein of the pink, and the pearls and the fishmongers porpoise this pink cream with
the black jewels imbedded [sic] is—or was....
...and Mitzi675 died in the night of Christmas live. It was very touching—her eyes shut and her face white like
a very old womans. Leonard had taken her to sleep in his room, and she climbed onto his foot last thing.
But enough—dont die—

675 Leonard’s pet marmoset.

1939
Vita consoled herself about the approach of war by beginning her long reflective poem, The Garden,
and in writing ‘Country Notes’ weekly for the New Statesman. When war came in September the
emotion and anxiety generated by it (both Vita’s sons were in the Army) brought her closer to
Virginia, for they shared ‘grief and despair at the folly of it all’. Of the two, however, Vita was the
more exhilarated by shining patriotism. They met more frequently, though travel between Kent and
Sussex was made more difficult by petrol rationing.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
Friday [13 January]

A woman, Victoria Okampo [sic],676 who is the Sybil (Colefax) of Buenos Aires, writes to say she wants to
publish something by you in her Quarterly “Sur”. She is in Paris, has heard you are going there to lecture—I
presume wants to meet you. I’ve told her to write to you: but that I would explain. She’s immensely rich,
amorous; has been the mistress of Cocteau, Mussolini—Hitler for anything I know: came my way through
Aldous Huxley; gave me a case of butterflies,677 and descends from time to time on me, with eyes like the roe
of codfish phosphorescent: whats underneath I dont know....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
22 February

Well, it was nice to see your writing again and of course I should be delighted to oblige the Sibyl of Buenos
Aires, in other words she’s welcome to publish anything of mine so long as Leonard doesn’t mind. (I presume
she means to reprint something?) I remember you did tell me about her once before, saying she was a fan of
yours or words to that effect, and I know the case of butterflies so if I hear from her I will answer civilly as
befits a friend of yours. Perhaps she will turn up in Paris, but as I shall be there for one day only she will have
to be nippy.
I have several things to say to you—First that I was deeply distressed for Leonard on hearing of the
death of Mitzi. Please give him all my sympathy, and tell him he’d better acquire a lemur as soon as possible—
they are the most enchanting pets, and said to be more closely allied to the human race than any other animal.

676 Victoria Ocampo, the Argentinian intellectual, Editor and founder of Sur, the literary journal in which she published much of Virginia s work.
677 It is still at Monk s House.
I find this hard to believe, judging by their appearance, but biologists affirm that it is so. By the way, has
Leonard got Julian Huxley’s678 sound records of animal noises? If not, he should. You get 2 double records
and a book full of lovely photographs for 1 guinea.
Second, that I lost my heart to a friend of yours the other day, Margery Fry.679 1 want to know more
about her from you some day, please. What a lovely face and sense of humour.

Sussex

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
Sunday 19 February

It is rumoured that a large shaggy sheepdog was lately seen in Piccadilly. On being questioned, it answered to
the name of V. Sackville-West.
I dont know why it came into my head to tell you this fact; except that I think its time V. Sackville-
West answered to her name. What happened in Paris? I never heard. Did you meet Ocampo? Did you effect
any shall we say intimacy with her?...
You have a ladder: on which rung am I?

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
22 February

How funny: I had just thought to myself overnight, ‘It is a long time since I heard anything from Virginia,—I
will write to her tomorrow,’—and then your letter came.
So our thoughts clashed and clicked—
Well, it can’t be true that the shaggy sheepdog was seen recently in Piccadilly, because it hasn’t gone
near London since Feb. 2nd—when it suggested coming to have a meal of rabbit and dog-biscuit with you—
and you replied that you would be going away to Rodmell that day—so that suggested appointment was off.
The sheepdog did, however, go to Paris, and met Victoria Ocampo there, by whom it was presented
with an enormous bunch of most expensive orchids, and was driven about in a most luxurious car. I then got a
letter from her, saying how ardently she craved for the country and the wide, open spaces of the pampas etc—
Well, I thought, why doesn’t she go there? what stops her? if she really pines for it as she says, why does she
spend her time in Paris and London?
I have no patience with such humbug.
Anyhow, listen, Virginia mine: will you be in London on Friday, March 31st? And if so could I dine

678 Secretary of the London Zoo.

679 Vita had met Margery Fry, Roger Fry’s sister, on 6 January, after lunching with Freya Stark.
with you—or would you dine with me? I will stay up in London for the night if you will consent to do this.
Harold is flying to Egypt680 on April 4th—This worries me out of all proportion. I tell you this because
I know you will understand. Damn, damn, damn,—I wish flying had never been invented. I shan’t know a
restful moment until he gets back. Nor would you, if it was Leonard.
You wish somebody would write a long poem, although you won’t read any new poetry for a year.
Well, I am writing a new poem 681 —a sort of companion to The Land— but I won’t ask you to read it—only
you might tell my publisher Mr Leonard Woolf that perhaps he may be offered a new poem sometime in 1940.
And tell him also (which he will be more interested in,) that I am in the process of buying a
neighbouring farm with 200 acres.682
Lord, how rich life is, when one takes it the right way! Acres of farm-land, and a new poem in a big foolscap
book,—what more could anyone ask from life?

Now more than ever seems it rich to die...683

I would like to correct that into,

Now more than ever seems it rich to live...

But if Harold gets killed by Imperial Airways, flying to Egypt, everything will go black.

Your loving
V.

Let me know about dinner on March 31st.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
23 April 1939

This is Sissinghurst 250—is that Museum 2621?—Is that Virginia? This is Vita speaking,—yes: Vita,—a
person you once reckoned as a friend—Oh, had you forgotten? Well, dig about in your memory and perhaps
you will remember a porpoise on a marble slab.—Yes, it is pronounced Veeta, not Vaita—Now you remember,
do you? You remember a thunderstorm at Vézelay684 and the ceilings of Long Barn gently swaying round?
The purpose of this message is manifold. Its principal object is to say that I don’t like being cut off
from you and thus am making an attempt to get into touch. Will you and Leonard ever come here, on your way
down to Rodmell? I would so like Leonard to see my garden. You, I know, are no gardener, so I confine this

680 Vita must have misunderstood Harold. He had no intention of going to Egypt, by air or sea.
681 The Garden.
682 Bettenham.
683 Keats’ ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.
684 In September 1928.
interest to Leonard. I do wish you would both come.

Signed
Sibyl Colefax

Secondly, I am being set on by various publishers as a fox by a pack of hounds—Tell Leonard I have resisted
all bribes, and until now have avoided being torn to pieces. Leonardo da Vinci is clearly out of the picture—
as a new biography of him has recently been translated into English—What about Jane Carlyle?685 I feel she’s
NOT my subject. Then I was offered another idea: a fife of my own old ancester, Thomas Sackville—It is a
very good idea, and I think I could do it—but would it be fair to adopt the idea suggested by another publisher,
and then give the resulting book to the Hogarth Press? Especially as the person who suggested it has got large
files of notes about T. Sackville, which he offers to lend me, and which would of course be invaluable for my
biography, but equally of course I couldn’t take advantage of this offer if I wasn’t going to give the resultant
book to his firm.
It is all very awkward.
You see, I think I might write quite a good life of T. Sackville—bringing in Knole, and all that—but
as I stupidly never thought of it for myself, but had to have it suggested to me by somebody else, am I
committed to the person who did suggest it, and who is associated with another publishing firm?686
What an idiot I was not to have thought of it on my own—and Leonard will also regret that he didn’t think if
it either—Of course it is a subject absolutely made for me:
(1) Family tradition
(2) Poetry
(3) Knole
(4) Elizabethan splendour
Damn—damn—that neither Leonard nor I ever invented this idea.
I am worried about this and would very much like to talk to Leonard. You see, I would really like to
do this book (which is much more in my line than Jane Carlyle) but would like the Hogarth Press to have it,
and no one else—
Well, to pass on—
Thirdly: Ben has returned from America and has got a job. He is now Deputy- Surveyor-of-the-King’s-
Pictures687—which means that he is responsible for all the pictures at Windsor, Buckingham Palace, Hampton
Court, Balmoral, Holyroodhouse, Sandringham, Osborne—He is rather appalled by this responsibility. He has
an office in St James’ Palace—High life, in fact. One of his duties is to teach the Queen something about
pictures, she knows nothing but wants to learn. I only hope Ben will prove adequate, also that he won’t fall in
love with the Queen whom he already describes as the most charming of women—

Your loving
V.

685 Vita wrote on neither subject.

686 Thomas Sackville was 1st Earl of Dorset (1536-1608), Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Treasurer and co-author of the tragedy Gorboduc. Vita never began
the book.
687 Under the Surveyor (and Director of the National Gallery) Kenneth Clark, and after the war, Anthony Blunt. Ben remained Deputy until 1946.
To Vita Sackville-West
52 Tavistock Square
WC1
Tuesday [25 April]

Well Sibyl Colefax, this is a queer go. I’m addressing the lady who has an ancestor, and wants to write a book
about him. The queer go is that the very same idea flashed into my head about 3 weeks ago—and I put it to
Leonard and John at lunch; and it also had flashed in L’s head. But he’s writing to you on the morals of the
case; so I won’t; only try, as you say, to get into touch with you—thats the other you, sheepdog Vita.
...Yes, I well remember buying rolls for breakfast at Vezelay.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
19 August

Isn’t it nice sometimes to write a letter one doesn’t have to write? So this is one. I’ve been walking on the
marsh and found a swan sitting in a Saxon grave. This made me think of you. Then I came back and read about
Leonardo—Kenneth Clark—good I think: this made me also think of you. And in a minute I must cook some
macaroni.
...Are you tackling the old ancestor—whats his name? Now I’ve enjoyed writing when I needn’t; thats
not to say you’ve enjoyed reading. And which rung are we on— my poor Potto and V?
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Friday 25 August

Virginia darling, you are very high up on the rungs—always—

Harold has gone off to join his boat again,688 and I have asked him to telegraph to me when he is likely
to get near to Newhaven. He wants me to fetch him from Newhaven—with the car—so if we aren’t at war
before then (Monday or Tuesday) I will telephone to you and ask if I may come for the night.
I find one’s war-psychology very strange,—don’t you? Up to 12 o’clock noonday I am the complete
coward, dreading air-raids, bombs, gas, etc—then after 12 noonday I become ah brave and British again—and
remain brave until the next morning—when the whole thing starts up again in its terrifying cycle of fear, dread
and shrinking cowardice.
I think you are much braver than I am; or should I call it more philosophical? I don’t know what you
feel.—What strange stages of feelings one passes through, these days! I could not write about this to anyone I
did not love as I love you. It is all too private and secret.
I have got Eddy coming here for the weekend. I fear he is very wretched for various reasons. I respect
him enormously for volunteering to drive an ambulance or a car in London during air-raids. That seems to me
really brave, for a person of his type especially—and delicate at that—He goes up in my estimation—

Your loving V.

I’ll telephone on Monday if...

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
Tuesday 29 August

But I dont think I’m philosophic—rather, numbed. Im so hot and sunny on our little island—L. gardening,
playing bowls, cooking our dinner: and outside such a waste of gloom. Of course I’m not in the least patriotic,
which may be a help, and not afraid, I mean for my own body. But thats an old body. And all the same I should
like another ten years: and I like my friends: and I like the young....
...indeed, my dearest creature, whatever rung I’m on, the ladder is a great comfort in this kind of
intolerable suspension of all reality—something real.

688A small yawl named Mar which Harold had extravagantly purchased for occasional weekend sailing trips. It was destroyed by bombs in 1940.
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
1 September 1939
Partridge-shooting begins

Virginia darling

Harold came back. So my Newhaven scheme fell through. I had meant to ring you up and ask if Nigel and I
might come to luncheon tomorrow, but my best-laid plans have gone agley and seem likely to go agley-er and
agley-er for some years to come. So what can one say? I know you must feel all that I feel, and that millions
feel. I keep thinking of Vanessa, with Quentin as a young man and Julian already gone. Perhaps she will now
not feel so bitter about Julian s lost life, because he did at least sacrifice it voluntarily for a cause he believed
in, which is nobler than being conscripted against his will into a general holocaust.
I do sympathise with you in the minor but still exasperating worry of removing from Tavistock to
Mecklenburgh Square.
Well,—there it is,—and I must now go and arrange to darken our windows. Luckily there is a certain
amount of comic relief always—and I find myself still able to laugh over ludicrous things which occur. This
is called ‘Keeping the brave British smile’ by the Daily Sketch, but I find myself keeping it at moments without
conscious effort. I wonder how much longer we shall keep it?

Your V.

I do hope Potto doesn’t mind the Second German War too much.
Shall you stay at Rodmell? It would be folly to go to London unnecessarily.

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
[2 September]

Yes, dearest Creature, come at any moment you like and share our pot. Alone today and what a mercy!
I did like your letter. And if I’m dumb and chill, it doesn’t mean I dont always keep thinking of you—one of
the very few constant presences is yours, and so—well no more. Yes, I sit in a dumb rage, being fought for by
these children whom one wants to see making love to each other.
So come: and I’ll write to you, if to no one else, when ever I’ve a moment free, dearest creature, how I go on
seeing you, tormented
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
16 September 1939

How much I liked getting your letter. Let us write to one another sometimes: I find that there are few people
these days who give me any sense of real contact, but you certainly do; I suppose one’s sorrow sifts out the
rest. You ask what I feel, and I can tell YOU: on the top I mind what you call the incessant bother of small
arrangements,— no physical solitude; people constantly about the place; questions, responsibilities, voices;
five six seven eight people to every meal; the necessity of having my mother-in-law to stay here for God knows
how long; never knowing who is coming or who is going away; the whole house upside down with people
sleeping on sofas,—all this is very trying on the surface and makes one realise how profoundly selfish one has
always been about one’s private personal fife. Perhaps it is salutary no longer to be able to indulge oneself in
one’s own idiosyncrasies?
Then, underneath this, on the second layer, come the anxieties, the young men one cares about whose
lives are upset and who are probably going to lose them in a horrible manner, Ben with an antiaircraft battery,
689
learning to fire low, at 600 feet, in case of aeroplanes swooping down with machine guns; Nigel waiting,
waiting, to be called up into the Guards; Piers 690 (aged 18) already with the HAC;691 John,692 my nephew, aged
20, waiting to be called up at any moment; Harold fretting because no job has as yet been allocated to him;
and when he does get a job it will mean his living in London more or less permanently—with air-raids and all
that.
Then on the third layer, deepest of all, comes one’s own grief and despair at the wicked folly of it all—
One is very unhappy, and very tired always, don’t you think? I have never felt so tired,—physically
and spiritually,—in all my life. I think this is the dominant impression I get, so far, from the Second German
War: complete exhaustion and weariness. Terror no doubt will come later on, within a fortnight or so, when
they have finished with Poland.
I would like to see you. May I telephone in the morning and ask if I can come to lunch? Petrol is still
available—or would you prefer to come here, in order to get away from your clerks?
Bring Potto.
‘Ou sont les neiges d’antan?’693

Your
V.

I am glad at any rate that Quentin should be safe694—I am glad of that both for Vanessa and you—

689 At Rochester.
690 Piers St Aubyn.
691 Artillery.
692 John St Aubyn.
693 Francois Villon (1431-1463)/Where are the snows of yesteryear?’
694 Quentin Bell had been excused military service on medical grounds, and was working on a farm.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Near Lewes
Sussex
3 December

That was nice of you—to send me your book.695 It really touched me. I’ve not read it (and I dont suppose you’d
care a damn to know what I thought, if I thought about it considered as a work of art—or would you?)—but I
dipped in and read about Saulieu696 and the fair and the green glass bottle.... I shall keep it by my bed, and
when I wake in the night—so, I shant use it as a soporific, but as a sedative: a dose of sanity and sheep dog in
this scratching, clawing, and colding universe....

695 Country Notes.

696 In Burgundy.
1940 - 1941
The Woolfs' London houses were made uninhabitable by German bombing, and Leonard and Virginia
retreated permanently to Monk's House; Vita visited Virginia here three times, both thinking that
each visit might be the last. Air battles were being fought over both Sissinghurst and Rodmell. A
German invasion of Britain was expected daily in the summer of 1940, and Kent and Sussex were in
the front line. Vita sent Virginia presents from her farm to supplement her food ration. Their last
meeting took place at Rodmell on 17 February.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
12 March

Oh what a pleasure to get your letter! And how odd!—I was saying to L. I felt that you felt we were out of
touch: as for myself, I never feel out of touch with Vita. Thats odd but true....
Here I am in the week of influenza—cant get normal, but hope to be up by the end of the week. A d
d sore throat.
And this is the only scrap of paper I can find.
But my dear how nice to get your letter! How its heartened me! And how I long to hear from your own
lips whats been worrying you—for you’ll never shake me off— no, not for a moment do I feel ever less
attached. Aint it odd? And so I didn’t write but waited—Yes, do, do come. What fun, what joy that’ll be.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
19 March

Dearest,

I have a horrid little fear, as you’ve not written, that I said something idiotic in my letter tother day. I dashed
it off, I was so glad to get yours, with a rising temperature, and perhaps said something that hurt you. God
knows What. Do send one line because you know how one worries in bed, and I cant remember what I wrote.
Forgive what is probably the effect of flu.... This is to show why I’m being, as I expect, foolish and
exacting. It also shows how much I depend on you, and should mind any word that annoyed or hurt you. One
line on a card—thats all I ask.

To Virginia Woolf
 24 April 1940

Thank you for letting me come to stay with you and for being so permanently loving towards me—
Your friendship means so much to me, In fact it is one of the major things in my life—Would you
please tell Leonard that I inadvertently told him wrong about the plant I brought him: it should be Lewisia
HECKNERI, not TWEEDII—
Isn’t this a nice bit of writing-paper I have found for you?697
I am so grateful to you: you sent me home feeling that I really ought to go on with my novel—Before
I came to you, I was in the dumps about it.698
Then I told you something about it, which I would never have said to anybody else, and you said just
the right thing.
So instead of despairing about it, I fished it out again this evening instead of trying to avoid it.
Did I leave a little golden box on your breakfast table?699 Don’t send it, but keep it for me against the
day we meet at Penshurst.700 1 apologise. There is nothing more tiresome than a guest who leaves something
behind. All the same I must ask you to save my little box for me, as it is rather a treasure: Irene Ravensdale701
gave it to me once in Rome on our return from Greece.
Don’t forget about Penshurst, and our picnic.

Your Orlando

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
Sunday [28 April]

Oh Potto was so glad to huddle upon the Rung again. Yes, it was a great treat having you. In fact, isn’t it a
duty, in this frozen time, to meet as often as possible? so that even in the cold night watches, when all the
skeletons clank, we may keep each other warm?
Please dearest Vita, come soon again. You’ve got a hoard702 in your tank.

697 Stationery printed with a picture of the Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona, where Vita had been in March and April 1933.
698 Grand Canyon, set in Arizona. Leonard rejected it for publication by the Hogarth Press after Virginia’s death.
699 For saccharine tablets.
700 Penshurst Place, Kent, the ancestral home of the Sidneys. Virginia, Vita and Leonard visited the house on 14 June, the day Paris fell.
701 Irene Ravensdale was the second daughter of Lord Curzon and Mary Leiter.
702 Of petrol, which was rationed.
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
1 August 1940

Virginia darling, you were an angel to send me your book which has just arrived.703 And I am forwarding a
parcel to Ben, which I take to be a copy for himself. This is really lavish of you and I needn’t tell you how
delighted he will be. It will reach him as a birthday present as it happens. I shall write to you again when I
have read it.
Everything has seemed so uncertain (I refer to the invasion)704 that I hesitated to write and suggest a
night for my visit. But if things continue to drag on as they are now doing, may I come one day this month?
I didn’t want to get caught and be unable to get back home! Think if you had been landed with me for
the duration of the war.
Would you ever come here if I gave you enough petrol coupons? You know you like a jaunt, and your
book is off your mind now. So consider it.

Your
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
6 August

...I’ve been in such a pelt that I couldn’t write before. So now merely suggest, emphatically, Friday 16th...stay
the night and its understood that means all Saturday—no evasions about lunch, or someone waiting at
Sissinghurst.
Great lorries are carrying sandbags down to the river: guns are being emplaced on the Banks. So do
come before its all ablaze....

703 Roger Fry: A Biography was published on 25 July.

704 The possibility of a German invasion of southern England. Virginia’s brother, Dr Adrian Stephen, had provided her and Leonard with a lethal dose
of morphine to be taken in the event of an invasion.
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
9 August 1940

Look, I can’t come on the 16th because I have promised to go to a demonstration of thatching (Women’s Land
Army) on the 17th, but may I come after the 26th? which seems to be my first clear run. I am short of petrol
now, as they have unexpectedly emptied my reserve tank, but will save up coupons for the pleasure of seeing
you. Isn’t that polite? but more genuinely meant than most polite remarks.
I am liking your book so much. ‘Good book,’ as Mr Forster705 remarks. Clever Potto to write such a
good book. What amuses me about it amongst other things, is Potto’s sudden straight forward sobriety, with
only a whisk of the tail now and then to remind one that it really is by Potto. And then it’s unmistakable.
I haven’t finished it yet. We had a garden-fete in the village; that’s why; partly.
Two other things I had to say. One is that I am sending Leonard a present which may amuse him. It
costs 4d, so the Woolf pride may allow him to accept it; and his penchant for gadgets will certainly be tickled.
If he has come across it already I shall be disappointed.706 The second thing is that I have a lot of my ‘Country
Notes’707 accumulated since Michael Joseph published them in an illustrated book. Would the Press like to
reprint these unpublished ones in a cheap, unillustrated little pamphlet this autumn? say 1/- thus catching the
Christmas-card sale?7081 shan’t be in the least offended if Monsieur my publisher says no thank you. The
cigarette-making outfit is not meant as a bribe.
I will now repeat my urgent invitation that you should come here—only, damn it, I am no longer in a
position to fill your tank with petrol. I was so petrol-proud last week, and now all my lovely gallons have gone.
I knew they might; but hoped for the best. Anyhow I think I could still produce a gallon for you—if only you’d
come.

Your loving
V.

Did I ever tell you that I sent my jewels and my Will away to a safer place709 some time ago, and that the only
other treasure I sent was the manuscript of Orlando?

705 E. M. Forster.
706 Leonard did, in fact, possess this gadget, a cigarette-making outfit.
707 Written as weekly articles for the New Statesman.
708 The first collection had been published in 1939. The Hogarth Press published Country Notes in Wartime in the autumn of 1940.
709 To Harold’s brother, Eric Nicolson, in his house on the edge of Dartmoor.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
12 August

1. What about Friday 30th?—same conditions: Saturday lunch.

2. Leonard must admit that he had this gadget already; but is none the less grateful.
3. Country notes idea enthusiastically accepted: good news already sent to John710 who will communicate
officially....

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
near Lewes
Sussex
Friday [30 August]

I’ve just stopped talking to you. It seems so strange. Its perfectly peaceful here—theyre playing bowls—I’d
just put flowers in your room. And there you sit with the bombs falling round you.
What can one say—except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening
thinking of you sitting there alone.
Dearest—let me have a line....
You have given me such happiness....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
1 September

Oh dear, how your letter touched me this morning. I nearly dropped a tear into my poached egg. Your rare
expressions of affection have always had the power to move me greatly, and as I suppose one is a bit strung-
up (mostly sub-consciously) they now come ping against my heart like a bullet dropping on the roof. I love
you too; you know that.
I didn’t like to go away last Friday because they had no other ambulance-driver for the village
ambulance but me—and fights were going on all day and distant sinister thuds—not so very distant. But I have
now secured the services of a lady who could drive the ambulance in my place if necessary. She has a most
romantic life-history which you would enjoy—It includes a vine-yard in Corsica which she ran for 5 years
until brigands made her life impossible. But that is nothing to her matrimonial tragedies.
Anyhow, it means that I can now get away. So may I telephone one morning and ask if it would be

710 John Lehmann.

convenient for me to come?
Would you tell Leonard that I sent my Country Notes off to the Press? also my signed copy of our
agreement.
Your loving, very and permanently loving

V.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
Near Lewes
Sussex
4 October

“Oh I’m glad”—those were the very words Leonard spoke when I said Vita says she’ll come. If you could hear
what the Wolves usually say when people say theyre coming—.
So do. Wednesday we suggest: and the compact is you stay for Thursday luncheon....
Air raids pretty constant. Two bombs as I ordered dinner, a mile away in the marsh....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
Thursday 10 October 1940

How nice it was to be with you—how much I enjoyed my visit. I like being with you more than I can say. You
know I love you, and you know I like Leonard. There is a difference between love and like. So you are my
love and Leonard is my like. I do like Leonard extremely.
Which reminds me: I return the 15/- he lent me, and please tell him again that I am writing to
Doubleday. I hope he didn’t think I was meaning to behave immorally towards the Hogarth Press.711 1 think
he knows I have never done that, at least not intentionally.
Anyhow, I am putting my mistake right at once—tell him.
Darling—thank you for my happy hours with you. You mean more to me than you will ever know.

Your
V.

711 Vita had made arrangements with Doubleday, Doran, the American publisher of Vita's Country Notes
Wartime, without consulting Leonard, publisher of the book in England.
To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
29 November

I wish I were Queen Victoria: then I could thank you—From the depths of my Broken WIDOWED heart. Never
NEVER NEVER have we had such a rapturous ASTOUNDING GLORIOUS—no, I cant get the hang of the style.
All I can say is that when we discovered the butter in the envelope box we had in the household—Louie that
is—to look. Thats a whole pound of butter I said. Saying which I broke off a lump and ate it pure. Then in the
glory of my heart I gave all our weeks ration—which is about the size of my thumb nail—to Louie—earned
undying gratitude; then sat down and ate bread and butter. It would have been desecration to add jam.
...Bombs fell near me: trifles; a plane shot down in the marsh: trifles: floods damned—no, nothing
seems to make a wreath on the pedestal fitting your butter.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Boxing day [26 December]

If my admiration for you could be increased, it would be by the fact that your divine butter arrived on Christmas
morning. Anybody else, I that is, would have sent it any other day. As it was, Leonard and I, economising with
a duck this year, had such an orgy of butter eating it was worth ten turkeys. Oh what a gift!
Oh Vita what a Cornucopia of Bounty you are!...
Two pounds of fresh butter.
And I never give you a thing—I wonder why that is. Then I have to add about X2,000 from your books,
let alone the meaning of ’em.
Have you got a life of Bess of Hardwick; a life of Lady Clifford;—well, if you have, bring them, on
loan, when you come. Another Bounty.. .and would you like me to ask Edith Jones712 to lunch? That would
save you going, which would be intolerable, and I’d slip out into the garden and leave you. Not that I want
to—Lord no....

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
2 January 1941

I thought perhaps you would like this extract from a letter I’ve just had from Ben. Perhaps you’ll like it even
better than the butter:

When people say Virginia is timeless, I agree. No attempt has yet been made to tie a neat label

712 See note 2 to next letter.

 round her neck with the words in Cyril Connolly’s handwriting, ‘Elegant 1922 abstractionist; no sense
of reality; ivory tower romanticism.’ Only the very purest* minds escape his docketting. Forster has
escaped it, Huxley has not. Hardy escaped it, Housman did not. Proust escaped it, Barres did not. For
all your bitterness against the new school of literary criticism, you must admit that the giants,—Proust,
Gide, Virginia, Forster, Yeats, Joyce,—have always received the respect they deserve.

Yes, I have a life of Lady Anne Clifford but not of Bess Hardwick.713
Yes, do ask Enid (NOT EDITH) Jones714 to luncheon. (Her address is The Elms, Rottingdean.) That
would not only save me a mort of trouble, and would save me from leaving you earlier than I want, but would
flatter Lady Jones no end. You needn’t leave us; we have no secrets. Our friendship is purely Platonic and
always has been.
She has a phaeton built in 1880 in which she drives herself about—so could drive over from
Rottingdean. The horse she drives in it is an ex-hunter and jumps all the marks in the roads.
You wouldn’t write 6 lines about Hilda,715 would you? for a little book which your friend Irene Baker716
and I are compiling? I know you never liked [remainder of letter is missing].

*This word may be ‘purest’ or ‘fiercest.’ I can’t read his writing.

To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
14 January

Business first. I’ve seen an epipsychidion717 or whatever you call it, but don’t know if my slides are suitable.
So I send you a slide. It is an extra one that got duplicated by mistake, so don’t worry if it gets broken.
Then, why did Irene Noel Baker 718 come to stay? Chiefly because she wanted to see me about Hilda
(dear me, I never realised your dislike of poor Hilda was so vigorous—I thought it was just a negative feeling—
) and as it’s impossible to ask anybody to come here for lunch only nowadays, unless they have a car, which
she hasn’t, and as I had no intention of going to London on purpose, I had no alternative but to ask her to stay.
You must tell me more about knowing her behind the scenes; she was discreet and didn’t let on, whatever it
may have been. Was it perhaps to do with your brother?

713 Lady Anne Clifford’s diary, with an introduction by Vita, was published in 1924. Bess of Hardwick was Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury a
famous contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I.
714 Enid Jones was Enid Bagnold, the novelist and playwright who lived only a few miles from Rodmell and had been a close friend of Vita’s since
their youth; Virginia knew her less well. She was married to Sir Roderick Jones, Chairman of Reuter’s.
715 Hilda Matheson died on 30 October 1940, aged fifty-two. The memorial booklet about her contained no tribute from Virginia, but was published
by the Hogarth Press.
716 Irene Noel Baker.
717 Virginia wrote that it was an ‘Epi-dia-scope’. The slides were for Vita’s lecture on Persia to the Rodmell Women’s Institute on 18 February.
718 Virginia had known her as Irene Noel since they were both young women, and visited her at her fathers estate in Euboea, Greece, in 1906. She
married Philip Noel Baker, the British politician who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1959. In reply to Vita’s question, Virginia threw no
light on what had happened ‘behind the scenes’.
 I don’t feel that any of the foregoing remarks are useful for keeping friendship in repair—if indeed it
needs repair—does it? Personally I had quite lost the drifting feeling. All the same, what can I tell you that will
evoke a sense of intimacy? So little has happened to me since the snow came and incarcerated me completely
among my ruins. Harold has been away touring England and Scotland,719 and as I’ve been without a car since
Christmas day (Ben having taken it away and left it out all night so that it got frozen and isn’t back yet) the
outside world has quite ceased to exist. But before that happened my past arose and looked me in the face in
the person of Violet (Trefusis)720 whom I hadn’t seen for about 10 years. We had a queer a la recherche du
temps perdu luncheon together on the neutral ground of a country inn. She has lost everything in France, and
now the MSS of her book has been burnt in Paternoster Row.721 Much to my relief she has taken herself off to
Somerset, after threatening to take a house near me, but we correspond. She is rather pathetic really,—so
forlorn—with her house and all her possessions gone—
Oh how I look forward to the 3rd Tuesday in February

Your
V.

Violet asked me what’s known as a leading question about you and me.

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
Rodmell
19 January

I must buy some shaded inks—lavenders, pinks violets—to shade my meaning. I see I gave you many wrong
meanings, using only black ink. It was a joke—our drifting apart. It was serious, wishing you’d write. It was
not true that I disliked Hilda. I only felt—What? Something opaque, pulverising: my fault, as much as hers.
And one pang of wild jealousy seized me, inopportunely, dining at Sibyls. No, no, I must buy my coloured
inks....
What did you say when Violet T asked you a leading question? I still remember her, like a fox cub, all
scent and seduction.... Now why did you love her? And did you love Hilda? We must go into all this. I rather
think I’ve a new lover, a doctor, a Wilberforce, a cousin—ah! does that make you twitch! Am I still on the 3rd
rung from the top?...

719 Harold was now a Minister in Churchill’s Government, at the Ministry of Information under Duff Cooper.
720 Violet had fled France after the German invasion, and visited Sissinghurst several times during the war, but there was no renewal of her passionate
intimacy with Vita.
721 A street near St Paul’s Cathedral where many publishers had offices, it was badly damaged by German bombs.
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
27 February

Shame on me, I have never written you a Collins722 nor sent you the promised fire lighter. But here they both
are, arriving together. The fire-lighter is known in America as the Little Wonder, and indeed deserves the
name. Whatever you do, don’t leave the jam-pot of paraffin in which it should live, near the fire. Sparks may
fall into the paraffin if you do. So stand it always to one side of the fireplace and never put the Little Wonder
back into the jam-pot when it is hot. Otherwise it is apt to flare up, so enthusiastically does it perform its job.
Did Enid723 send you her play, ‘Lottie Dundas’? She sent it to me, and it seems to me a play which
would make her fortune, so that Sir Jones’ [sic] resignation from Renters won’t matter in the family fortunes.
I was interrupted here by an officer wanting to climb to the top of my tower. I asked why, being
cautious. His reply was truly Elizabethan: ‘Because we are coming to guard from dawn to dusk. You will have
the Home Guard from dusk to dawn.’

Your
V

To Vita Sackville-West
Monk’s House
4 March

Oh dearest Creature—now you’ve topped the whole hill of your benefactions with a firelighter. Po: butter:
wool: books: firelighter on top. There you must stop. You cant add anything to fire. You see the poetic fitness
of ending there. What a magnificent conception of life you have—O damn the law. Leonard says we cant use
your petrol. Another gift....
I suppose you havent any Hay to sell? Octavia Wilberforces cows at Henfield, which give us butter,
are starving. So I said I’d ask.
Silence means no.

722 To thank her for her visit to Rodmell on 17-18 February.

723 Enid Bagnold.
To Virginia Woolf
Sissinghurst Castle
Kent
6 March

HAY!724 Good God, hay! Have I not been scrounging all over the Weald of Kent for hay? No hay; scarce milk:
and that’s why you haven’t had any more butter—and that’s why all the lawns of Sissinghurst are not going to
be mown this year but allowed to grow. Hay! My holy aunt!
Leonard was mistaken for once about the petrol coupon. I wouldn’t do anything illegal any more than
he would. However, if you can really bear to come by bus I can easily meet you at Hawkhurst. I’d take you to
Ellen Terry in the afternoon, and restore you to Hawkhurst later. All you have to do is to let me know. Any
day except March 19th and 20th. On the 19th I have a committee and on the 20th—guess what? a local
Women’s Institute.

Love
V.

To Vita Sackville-West
[Monk’s House]
Saturday [22 March]

Look at this letter725 sent to the New Statesman, addressed to ‘Miss Virginia Woolf’.— What a queer thought
transference! No, I’m not you. No, I dont keep budgerigars.
Louie’s survive: and she feeds them on scraps—I suppose they’re lower class, humble, birds. If we
come over 726 may I bring her a pair if any survive? Do they die all in an instant? When shall we come? Lord
knows—

724 To her house at Smallhythe.

725 Lost.
726 To Sissinghurst.
Postscript
The letter of 22 March contained the last words Virginia would write to Vita. Six days later, on the
twenty-eighth, Virginia drowned herself in the River Ouse. On 31 March Vita wrote to Harold: I’ve
just had the most awful shock: Virginia has killed herself. It is not in the papers, but I got letters from
Leonard and also from Vanessa telling me.... He says she had not been well for the last few weeks
and was terrified of going mad again.... I simply can't take it in. That lovely mind, that lovely spirit.
And she seemed so well when I last saw her....’Many years later, again in a letter to Harold, Vita
wrote: ‘...I still think that I might have saved her if only I had been there and had known the state of
mind she was getting into.' Vita was probably right.