Published by Virago Press, 1992, softcover, 473 pages, illustrated, condition: very good.
After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West, a British novelist married to foreign diplomat Harold Nicolson, and Virginia Woolf began a passionate relationship that lasted until Woolfs death in 1941. Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched: daily dramas, bits of gossip, the strains and pleasures of writing, and always the same joy in each others company. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons.
DeSalvo and Leaska established the chronological order of the letters and placed them in sequence, and they have also included relevant diary entries and letters Vita and Virginia wrote to other friends where they add context and illumination to the narrative. Annotations throughout the text identify peripheral characters, clarify allusions, and provide background. As the New York Times noted, "the result is a volume that reads like a book, not just a gathering of marvellous scraps."
In this introduction Mitchell A. Leaska observes, "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."
That's a long, almost daily correspondence between two women for nearly 20 years. Through these exchanges, we discover the two women's moods and lives, the frequent trips, the meetings, and the every day worries. They talk to us about themselves, their desires, and their concerns. But, above all, this love is born, which will always be present despite the pranks, as if love could not conquer these admitted and revealed infidelities. There is this presence, this message. Love exists in all its forms; it can escape to other hearts but always comes back to the main one. No doubt it needs its ramifications, these additional sources so as not to dry you, and return to the first resurgence, even bigger and stronger. By interfering in their private lives, one manages to define the characters better, understand their works, extract a new sensibility there, and let oneself guide and slide more easily into their worlds, in their words. They were narrating a story of love.
