Vita & Virginia by Sarah Gristwood

Author:Sarah Gristwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pavilion Books

Virginia saw Vita as ‘pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. That is the secret of her glamour, I suppose … her being so much in full sail on the high tides’.

Yet for all that she preferred her own room, with ‘more effort & life in it’. She saw the Nicolsons’ future as ripe and golden in a night of ‘indigo blue, with a soft golden moon. They lack only what we have – some cutting edge; some invaluable idiosyncrasy, intensity, for which I would not have all the sons & all the moons in the world.’

A few years before, Virginia had written to Vita: ‘In all London, you and I alone like being married.’ As she told her diary once: ‘I snuggled in to the core of my life, which is this complete comfort with L., & there found everything so satisfactory & calm that I revived myself, & got a fresh start; feeling entirely immune.’ ‘L. may be severe; but he stimulates’, she wrote on another occasion. ‘Anything is possible with him.’

Many years later – and just one of their many avowals to each other – Vita would write to Harold of how they had from the conventional point of view been as unfaithful to each other as could be, yet no two people could love each more after all. The two women could even appreciate each other’s husbands, up to a point. Vita would write that Leonard was tiresome but ‘irresistibly young and attractive’, Virginia that Harold was ‘not Vita’s match; but honest and cordial … flimsy compared with Leonard’. (He had, she memorably said on another occasion, a mind that bounces when he drops it.) They would be less tolerant of each other’s relations with other women.

When it came to other affairs, Vita was no more constrained by her love for Virginia than by her marriage to Harold. Even as Virginia watched her accept the Hawthornden Prize for The Land, Vita was falling in love with Mary Campbell, wife to the poet Roy, to whom the Nicolsons had lent the gardeners’ cottage attached to Long Barn. (He later wrote a bitter poem, The Georgiad, about ‘intellectuals without intellect/And sexless folk whose sexes intersect’.)

The rules of the game they made for themselves suggested that this was one that two could play. When Vita admitted that she liked making Virginia jealous, Virginia warned her to ‘be a careful dolphin in your gambolling, or you’ll find Virginia’s soft crevices lined with hooks.’ They both described how they would make the other jealous with letters from other admirers. When Vita declared ‘I won’t be trifled with. I really mean this’, Virginia was equally uncompromising: ‘I wont belong to the two of you … if Dotty [Dorothy Wellesley]’s yours, I’m not.’ In reality the sexual freedom was inevitably all on Vita’s side. But Virginia had a new weapon in her hands – one which might give her a measure of control over Vita, even as it celebrated and soothed her.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.