Virginia Woolf on Vita Sackville-West
← Back to Virginia Woolf ProfileIn her journal, Virginia Woolf excitedly envisioned *Orlando* as a biography of Vita Sackville-West, playfully imagining a protagonist who shifts between genders across centuries.
“Instantly the usual exciting devices enter my mind: a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.”
“Suppose Orlando turns out to be about Vita; and its all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind (heart you have none, who go gallivanting down the lanes with Campbell) — suppose there's the kind of shimmer of reality which sometimes attaches to my people, as the lustre on an oyster shell (and that recalls another Mary) suppose, I say, that Sibyl next October says "There's Virginia gone and written a book about Vita" … Shall you mind?”