“Someday I’ll write and tell you all the things you mean to me in my mind. Shall I?” ( )

Lovely compilation of letters between Virginia and Vita. ( )

I was really excited to read this book of letters and diary entries by Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Wonderfully sapphic, painfully bittersweet, and just a really lovely read, with an introduction by Alison Bechdel who explains much more succintly than I ever could why this collection is so important.

Reading real letters and diary entries is the best way to really get inside someone's head. They are from a different time, and yet so much of what is expressed is still relatable all of these years later. This is an incredibly intimate read, at times even feeling voyeuristic, but always humanising. Through their letters, Sackville-West and Woolf feel so wonderfully human, rather than just names in the literary canon. This book shows a picture of their relationship, and all of the flirtation, longing, desire, friendship and jealousy that it contained.

I also found the parts where the two of them discussed their writing very interesting. I enjoyed getting to see some of the thoughts behind the literature, and I found the background to Woolf's book Orlando particularly interesting to read. ( )