Letter of the Week: Vita Sackville-West

I shall be sharing a weekly letter and first in this series is from English novelist Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Vita was married to Sir Harold Nicolson and their marriage was a happily open one with both of them enjoying extramarital affairs and relationships.  Vita’s most famous affair was with renowned author Virginia West which began during the early part of the 1920’s. They met at a dinner party and developed a working relationship when Virginia invited Vita to publish with Hogarth Press . Their working relationship grew into friendship, a friendship they had for a few years before that too blossomed.

This letter is taken from a book part published by Vita called ' The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf ’ and was written in 1926 as she travelled by train to meet her husband.  Vita would often accompany her husband abroad on long trips and the two women would exchange letters. In this letter she writes of her yearning for Virginia and is filled with so much expression and simultaneous restraint, it is a letter of great beauty.

Hx

January 21

Milan

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it. And yet I believe you'll be sensible of a little gap. But you'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this—But oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don't really resent it.

However I won't bore you with any more.
We have re-started, and the train is shaky again. I shall have to write at the stations - which are fortunately many across the Lombard plain.

Venice. The stations were many, but I didn't bargain for the Orient Express not stopping at them. And here we are at Venice for ten minutes only,—a wretched time in which to try and write. No time to buy an Italian stamp even, so this will have to go from Trieste.
The waterfalls in Switzerland were frozen into solid iridescent curtains of ice, hanging over the rock; so lovely. And Italy all blanketed in snow.
We're going to start again. I shall have to wait till Trieste tomorrow morning. Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.

V.