After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf began a passionate relationship that lasted until Woolf's death in 1941. Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons.

"Virginia Woolf is 47 at the beginning of this volume, and struggling to complete her masterpiece, The Waves - rewriting it three times, interrupted by illness and unwanted visitors. But she continued to meet and correspond with old friends such as Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West and Ottoline Morrell, and made several new ones. The most important of these was the composer Ethel Smyth - over 70, explosively energetic, and openly in love with Virginia - who gradually replaced Vita as her most intimate friend. Virginia's letters to Ethel, in which she discussed frankly her madness, sex, her literary aspirations and even her thoughts of suicide, are among the strongest and most personal she ever wrote."--Google Books.

“Nothing yet published about her so totally contradicts the legend of Virginia Woolf.... [This] is a first chance to meet the writer in her own unguarded words and to observe the root impulses of her art without the distractions of a commentary” (New York Times). Edited and with a Preface by Anne Olivier Bell; Introduction by Quentin Bell; Index.