Catalogue Number: 03619

RRP: AU$19.00         Weight in grams:890 See Ordering Information.

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf

Edited by Louise De Salvo & Mitchell A. Leaska

First Edition London: Hutchinson, 1984 Cloth Very Good/Very Good 8vo 

Shortly after their first meeting in 1922, Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West began an intense and emotional friendship (affair). Woolf wrote "Orlando", described by Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson as "the longest and most charming love-letter in literature", as a result of this affair. Unusually, the moment of the conception of Orlando was documented: Woolf writes in her diary on 5 October 1927: "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 the other" (posthumous excerpt from her diary by husband Leonard Woolf).

In 1946 Sackville-West was made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. The following year she began a weekly column in The Observer called "In your Garden". In 1948 she became a founder member of the National Trust's garden committee. She is less well known as a biographer, and the most famous of those works is her biography of Saint Joan of Arc in the work of the same name. Additionally, she composed a dual biography of Saint Teresa of Ávila and Therese of Lisieux entitled The Eagle and the Dove, a biography of the author Aphra Behn, and a biography of her own grandmother, entitled Pepita.

Some minor shelfwear, not price clipped, interior is clean and fresh.

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