LESBIAN PORTRETS (3) The three Vs

Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf
They all wrote fiction but none of them could have come up with storylines that matched the events of their real lives for complexity, intensity and unconventionality.  ''They' were the three Vs:  Vita Sackville-West, novelist, poet gardener (!), traveller, and wife of the British diplomat and writer, Harold Nicolson; Violet Trefusis, socialite and writer, daughter of Alice Keppel, the mistress of King Edward VII; and Virginia Woolf, the novelist, essayist, and diarist, whose frail mental health eventually led to her suicide.

Violet Trefusis

Vita and Violet had first met as children.  Their love affair blossomed in 1919 after Vita had been married to Nicolson for six years and had had two sons.  Violet herself was married to Denys Trefusis.  Much to the horror of both their families, the two women decided to elope to France.  They spent severalmonths together in Paris and Monte Carlo, where Vita sometimes passed herself off as a male character, ''Julian''.  Eventually, after scenes of high emotion and melodrama, Nicolson persuaded his wife to leave Violet.  But the passion between the two women was never truly resolved.  After she returned to England, Vita kept her distance from Violet, knowing full well that their love was not so much an ember but an eternal flame, constantly flickering away.  Instead, she poured her passion into her writing and into creating the world-garden at Sissinghurst.

Sissinghurst 

There was, however, a third passion in her life:  Virginia Woolf.  Like Vita, the troubled writer enjoyed a marriage with her husband that was based on deep bonds of affection and loyalty, but without sexual passion.  The two women first met in 1922 and their relationship - less stormy than Vita's affair with Violet - continued until Virginia's suicide in 1941.  In 1927, Virginia began work on Orlando, her novel featuring an androgynous character who changes sex halfway through, which was written as the ultimate gift of love  to Vita.  Her youngest son called it ''the longest and most charming love-letter in literature''.

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sacksville-West