my dear virginia

[ivressesdhier]

“Darling, I know Virginia will die, and it will be too awful. (I don’t mean here, over the weekend; but die young.) I went to Tavistock Square yesterday, and she sat in the dusk in the light of the fire, and I sat on the floor as I always do, and she rumpled my hair as she always does…”

— Vita Sackville-West, in a letter to Harold Nicolson (1926). (via tonguesbattledfordominance)

[sontagspdf]

“Yes, that’ll be nice–to sit out of doors and drink, in some French town, away from all this.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. April 1937 featured in “The Diary of Virginia Woolf,” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[sontagspdf]

“Do you realize how devoted I am to you, all the same?”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West written c. October 1929 (via violentwavesofemotion)

[dreamgrl1998-deactivated2022072]

soft morning

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West wr. c. February 1926

[ithrowmyviolets]

Of course we're always writing about women – abusing them, or jeering at them, or worshipping them; but it's never come from women themselves. I believe we still don't know in the least how they live, or what they feel, or what they do precisely. [...] Doesn't it make your blood boil? If I were a woman I'd blow some one's brains out.

Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“As it is, what clothes do you expect me to take? None, I hope.”

— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Vita Sackville-West wr. c. September 1928

[ithrowmyviolets]

Blue and Green

first row: Vita and Virginia by @jeanmilburn​ // Virginia Woolf by @lesbianfrannyglass​ (Instagram @elizadrewlittle)

2nd row: painting by Anne Mensinga, inspired by her reading of Orlando // Virginia Woolf | Through the Looking Glass #1, Christiaan Tonnis

3rd row: Virginia Woolf by Eleni Kalorkoti // Vita Sackville-West over Virginia Woolf, Melora Khun

Thank you to the artists, do not delete credits!

[hearts4u]

blue lily, lily blue by maggie stiefvater (2014) // letter to vita sackville-west from virginia woolf (march 1928) //  mad girl’s love song by sylvia plath (1953)

[kara-luthors]

All those sparkling minds you surround yourself with … none of them love you as much as I love you.

Vita and Virginia (2018) dir. Chanya Button.

[blaekswan-deactivated20210428]

you read all these pieces by virginia woolf, anne sexton, anne carson, anaïs nin and margaret atwood, then you put all the feelings they give you together and that’s literally what womanhood is all about

[velvet-orchid2-deactivated20231]

Vita Sackville-West

[dearestvita-deactivated20221122]

which one of you is the spoilt creature and which one the longeared owl and ass

[madame-nyx]

booty shorts with “damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this” on the ass

[waller-bridge]

Carol (2015) || Vita & Virginia (2018)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry written c. May 1928 featured in “Selected Diaries of V. W,”

[julienbakerfavormp3-deactivated]

“There’s a particular sentence of Woolf’s that haunts me; I’ve written about it before, without managing to exorcise it. It appears in her novel Jacob’s Room: ‘It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.’

…In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf writes with pain and some bewilderment about the way in which complete strangers would react to his wife: ‘ … to the crowd in the street there was something in her appearance which struck them as strange and laughable … people would stare or stop and stare at Virginia. And not only in foreign towns; they would stop and stare and nudge one another – “look at her” – even in England, in Piccadilly or Lewes …’

Leonard makes the observation that these incidents tended to happen at moments when Virginia was lost in thought – when she had, in a sense, forgotten herself. There was something in her expression or comportment in those moments, which, taken with her unusual mode of dress, made her appear anomalous to people. Like her clothes, her manner marked her out as a woman who went out into the world without apparently caring how she appeared in it. And, as I would find out when I walked back from Canons Park station without giving my appearance a conscious thought, that is a risky way for a woman to proceed. A woman should never forget that whatever else she is, she is also an object.”

—Joanne Limburg, “What was Virginia Woolf afraid of?”