Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

On 23 September 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita ‘if you’ll make me up, I’ll make you.’ In Desiring Women , Karyn Sproles argues that the two writers in fact ‘made’ each other. Woolf and Sackville-West produced some of the most vibrant and acclaimed work of their respective careers during their passionate affair, and Sproles demonstrates how this body of work was a collaborative project – a partnership – in which they promised to reinvent one another. Sproles argues that in all they wrote during their affair – essays, criticism, novels, poems, biographies, and personal etters – Woolf and Sackville-West struggled to represent their desire for one another and to resist the social pressures that would deny their passion. At the centre of this literary conversation is Orlando , Woolf’s biography of Sackville-West. Sproles restores Orlando to the context of Woolf and Sackville-West’s discussion of gender and sexuality and demonstrates its importance in Woolf’s oeuvre. Sexy and provocative, Desiring Women re-imagines Woolf and Sackville-West as daring, funny, beautiful, and bent on resisting the repression of women’s desires.