There was a serious scandal when Vita embarked on an affair with her friend, the socialite Violet Trefusis, who'd had a crush on her since they were teenagers. Vita wore boys' clothes from an early age and had known she was gay from the age of 12.
But it was an unhappy childhood, with her father a philanderer. The only child of a baron and his cousin, Vita had been raised in the splendid surroundings of 400-year-old Knole House in Kent, her family's ancestral home. After their two sons were born, their relationship settled into a deep friendship while Harold pursued affairs with men, including composer Ivor Novello, and Vita with both sexes. They wed in October 1913 when she was 21 and already in a relationship with one of her bridesmaids. Vita and Harold, who later became an MP, had long enjoyed an open marriage. The film, Vita & Virginia, charts the passionate liaison of two women whose conduct would shock even today.įor several years their passion burned fiercely and inspired Virginia's (pictured) novel Orlando, about a sex-changing aristocrat who travels through time, enjoying relationships with men and women The sensational affair between the sexually-voracious Vita - she had more than 50 female lovers - and the equally liberated, but more discreet and emotionally fragile, Virginia is the subject of a new film starring Elizabeth Debicki (The Night Manager) as Woolf, and Gemma Arterton (former Bond girl Strawberry Fields) as Sackville-West. and to lay the trail for the explosion which happened on the sofa in my room here when you behaved so disgracefully and acquired me for ever,' Vita wrote.įor several years their passion burned fiercely and inspired Virginia's novel Orlando, about a sex-changing aristocrat who travels through time, enjoying relationships with men and women. 'How right I was to force myself upon you.
The attraction was reciprocated and it was Vita, married to diplomat and author Harold Nicolson, who eventually made the first move after three years of flirtation, consummating their passion at the home in Richmond, South-West London, that Virginia shared with her husband, the Left-wing writer Leonard Woolf. The film, Vita & Virginia, charts the passionate liaison of two women whose conduct would shock even today The sensational affair between the sexually-voracious Vita - she had more than 50 female lovers - and the equally liberated, but more discreet and emotionally fragile, Virginia is the subject of a new film starring Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf (left), and Gemma Arterton (right) as Sackville-West.
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