Vita & Virginia

A double biography of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, their friendship and love affair. 

A double biography of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, their friendship and love affair.

Virginia Woolf is one of the world’s most famous writers – a leading light of literary modernism and feminism – and a British icon. During the 1920s she had a passionate affair with a fellow author, Vita Sackville-West, and they remained friends until Virginia’s death in 1941. The hero of Virginia’s novel Orlando was modeled on Vita and the book has been described as ‘one of the longest and most charming love letters in history’. That’s on top of the more than 500 letters they wrote to each other.

Vita & Virginia is the extraordinary account of the work, friendship and love affair of two prolific novelists, who came to redefine conventions of femininity, sexuality, art and politics for the modern world. The cultural legacies of these formidable women, enduring icons of sexual equality and female emancipation, proliferate around us today – in fashion and television, film and literature. In this scrupulously researched examination of the pair's long friendship, the National Trust draws on their poetry and treasured correspondence to tell the story of this thoroughly modern affair.

Both novelists have become closely associated with the National Trust. Vita is most famous today as the co-creator of Sissinghurst, one of the most influential and visited gardens in the world, while Monk’s House, Virginia’s retreat and inspiration, was a celebrated haunt of the Bloomsbury Group, that influential set of artists, thinkers and writers who lived in squares and loved in triangles.

About the author

Sarah Gristwood is a best-selling Tudor biographer, former film journalist, and commentator on royal affairs. She has appeared in most of the UK’s leading newspapers and magazines.She wrote two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth-century story Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic which was selected as a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. A regular media commentator on royal and historical affairs, Sarah was one of the team providing BBC Radio 4’s live coverage of the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Princess Catherine. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an Honororary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces.