Virginia Woolf: A lesbian?

Yes, it is true. According to her letters, she had a sexual relationship with Vita Sackville-West. In fact, one of Woolf's work, Orlando was based on Vita. A play, Vita and Virginia is largely based on the correspondence between the two.

http://www.frugalfun.com/vita.html In FrugalFun. com, a review of the play, Vita and Virginia is provided. Here are some excerpts from the review:

Shortly after she and Vita Sackville-West began their lesbian affair, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, “She shines with a candle-lit radiance, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung.”

Those delicious images marked a sensual awakening for the author, a kind of feeling rarely shared by Edwardian husbands and wives. “These Sapphists,” Woolf marveled, “love women. Friendship is never untinged with amorosity.”

So began the on-again, off-again physical relationship that laced the two women’s nearly 20-year friendship, from the early 1920s until 1941, when Woolf committed suicide. They wrote to each other frequently, because they saw each other comparatively rarely. They traveled in different social circles, lived much of the time in different countries (Sackville-West’s husband was a diplomat in the British Foreign Service), and both were married—happily married—to men who were more or less willing to overlook their wives’ extramarital adventures.

Their letters, with some diary entries and other writings, were compiled into a compelling play by the English actress Eileen Atkins. The cleverly arranged excerpts form a conversation that covers not only Vita and Virginia’s personal interactions but much of their literary biography too. Indeed, much of the relationship is revealed in the women’s responses to reading each other’s books. They were both well-known writers—Sackville-West, not Woolf, the more commercially successful of the two.

Vita uses the same terms—”dazzled and bewitched”—to express her admiration for Woolf’s novels To the Lighthouse and Orlando. The latter, which has been called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” is a pseudo-biography whose title character—a man who doesn’t age but instead morphs into a woman—is a fantasy of Vita. (When Vita reads it she tells Virginia, “You have invented a new form of narcissism ... I confess, I am in love with Orlando.)

Looks like lesbo love happens among English novelists.. well, it was pretty rad and common among the Bloombury group to which Virginia and Vita belonged. So the term "open marriage" started way back... Sapphists... lesbos... in literature... xoxo