I loved reading this. Two women communicating during a time when being queer was frowned upon. This is such an intimate look at history. Very queer and very good.

It's very difficult to "rate" something that amounts to two people's personal correspondence, but I found the experience of reading Love Letters to be enveloping and moving. I can't recall reading any letter collections previously, let alone one I was so engrossed in. I was also surprised by how often this book made me laugh aloud - there's some wonderful humour in here. The rhythm of both Woolf and Sackville-West's writing is, as expected, utterly gorgeous. I was completely absorbed by this collection. My heart wrenched both at the change of tone in 1939, and the sudden ending after. As my own knowledge of the pair is quite low, I appreciated both Alison Bechdel's introduction and the footnotes throughout - though there were some points I would have liked further expansion on.

How do you know an author is a good one? Read their letters.

I have so many of Virginia Woolf's books at home and haven't read them yet. They are on the 'TBR' of one day, when I have time. But, since reading this book, her books have whipped their way to the top of the list, simply because if her books are as good as her letters, I'm in for a treat!

This wonderful book tracks the friendship and relationship of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf over the years. Two women that, if they had lived in modern day society, might have led very different lives.

There is romance, whimsy, and beautifully depicted surroundings (especially from Vita in her travels) that make this an utterly wonderful read.

Love, love, LOVED this book and have already purchased as a physical to keep forever.

Wonderful read, a deliciously tactile volume of love letters; I've been carrying them around the house, dipping in and out, and finding new things each time. highly recommend

It's hard to rate this book because letters are so personal and sometimes it feel like spying into someone private life.
I love this two authors and discovered something new about their personality.
The foreword was interesting.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

This was an interesting read as I've just read a few of Woolf's books and visited Sissinghurst.
I think that I would have liked a little more context around the letters, and possibly some other correspondence from their respective pens but that would be beyond the scope of the book.

I'm not sure I'd have liked to have met either of these women in real life.

A brilliant insight into the personal lives of two remarkable women. This collection is beautifully put together and easy to follow, making it a perfect book to read if you're looking for something you can dip in and out of. I liked to read this book in small chunks, alongside other novels, giving me time to properly focus on the letters. As someone who is greatly interested in these two authors, having the essential letters put together in a collection such as this was amazing. It's something I would definitely recommend to anyone who has read and loved the writing of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Thank you so much for granting me access to this title.

I loved this book.Going into the book, I wasn't particularly sure what I was going into other than what I had seen on my timeline where people gushed over it, but it surely wasn't this. I have personally never read anything by Vita before, but Virginia happens to be one of my most favorite authors of all times, and this little representation and peek into her mind satisfies something inside me. I definitely recommend it.

Loved this, its a wonderful collection of letters and diary entries that outline the relationship between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. There is a wonderful introduction from Alison Bechdel highlighting the cultural importance of this relationship especially for her as a young lesbian. She talks about the importance of bringing the LGBT community into the light and this book does that wonderfully. Apparently the print version has lovely pull out covers with photos of both of them. It is great to have everything in the one book but having read Virginia Woolf's letters, I am aware of how much of her wit and personality is being missed in this book. She was fiercely intellectual and plagued with illness that is true but she was also very funny and occasionally acerbic. I would recommend this as an introduction and then explore and read further, both women were prolific writers.

With thanks to Net galley for an ARC in exchange for a review.

A revealing and intimate portrait of a relationship which the early 20th century rendered taboo. These love letters are as poignant as any between Rimbaud and Verlaine, revealing a beauty and depth of knowledge akin to the poet Brownings. Essential reading.

This was a genuinely moving and beautiful read. I've read Woolf's diaries before so I knew about her experiences with Vita before I read the letters, but it is so interesting to see the relationship as it evolved in time and also between them, rather than Virginia's one sided musings. What was the most lovely thing to see, rather than any titillating details of a love affair, which they are most discreet about anyway, was the gradual building of a genuinely deep friendship, which ebbed and flowed over the years but which clearly enriched both their lives. From the diaries it is easy to see that Virginia is not comfortable in much of society and spends much of her time at dis-ease in social settings. She always comes across as quite a lonely person, despite her glamorous life. It was lovely to see that with Vita she had someone who, for the most part understood her and vice versa and that they shared jokes and memories that bound them deeper as the years went by. I am sad it was not longer.

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.

Better and longer than I expected. Alison Bechdel's foreword was great, and I think it will attract the right kinds of readers to this important archive for romance between women in literature.

This book is important because it most clearly shows the discourse between Virginia and Vita, and their respective diary entries, and shows how this relationship heavily inspired Virginia Woolf's writing. The same may be true for the writing of Vita Sackville-West, who I've yet to read.

I do wonder whether these were intended by the authors as 'love' letters, as suggested by the cover. Love is not always present here. It surely emerges, but it's debatable for whom and for how long! Virginia was afraid to use the word love in her letters, and Vita perhaps was too unafraid to use it. This one-sidedness creates a great tension in their letters that makes it worthy of being an epistolary novel. Both women were married to men who they loved, but in their letters it wasn't clear how much their romance was against these mononormative or heteronormative conventions. It seems like they were very intimate companions, and their love seemed at times sometimes sisterly or motherly, sometimes of the intellectual or social admiration of how one might love a teacher, but at other times very much like romantic intimacy. I don't think social norms were censoring their expression of love in their letters, they are both very expressive and candid writers which makes them a joy to read.

Not to cast a shadow, but was there not a conflict of interest here in Virginia being Vita's prospective publisher? Might Vita not be wooing Virginia with some small professional interest, given that, when Vita stops writing poetry she also stops writing letters to Virginia? That Vita may have ingratiated herself with Hogarth Press by continually flattering Virginia's writing, and fishing for compliments for her own? I'm not here to make any big accusations, I just find it interesting to see how their relationship morphs with their impression of each other's writing, it seems more than chance. But this whole written correspondence is so deep and long that there are surely things that could be seen more clearly now about the method of how these authors write now than ever before.

There's definitely many complex dynamics between these writers that each reader will experience and interpret in their own way.

That Virginia, like many other classic female authors, was in continually bad health and died before their time is sad. I think the correspondence adds a new glimpse to that too. Having not read Virginia Woolf's diaries or letters before, I was surprised at how poor her health was for most of her writing life.

As a straight man something I should clarify, if only to myself for myself, is why I was particularly interested in reading romantic letters between two women from almost 100 years ago. The notion might be absurd to some people, and my reasons might be relevant justifications for other readers who do not identify as themselves as LGBT. Simply, Virginia Woolf's writing is marvelously distinct and expressive even today and in comparison to all, and so, seeing how she would write private letters to someone she is passionate about is interesting to me. I read to get a better understanding of people, and the tender intimacy of love letters between female writers is strangely touching in an era where heteronormative relationship dynamics are so brash and unsociable that quite rarely out of a fairly established relationship do we see a slow and innocent courtship, the 'little steps toward someone', that these letters resemble.

I have always been fascinated by the romance between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville- West and am so grateful to have this comprehensive collection of their letters to one another. Even to a modern reader you can see their wit and humour over everyday things but the way in which their tones brighten after they spend time together or have inspiration for their novels and poetry.
The two women are so strong willed in the way they write and live their lives so unapologetically free in the early 20th century but their private notes to one another reveal their softer, romantic sides with in-jokes and jealousies of having to attend to social engagements, rather than simply be together undisturbed. I am sure that there are contextual and social footnotes that I missed but then again these letters and diary extracts were never meant for publication.
I feel lucky to have seen an insight into their beautiful connection to one another and as Woolf is one of my favourite authors, I am appreciative as to a first hand account into her battle with illness, and what we now believe to be bipolar, throughout her life.
A truly gorgeous collection.

"I began to feel the quality of the evening – how it was spring coming; a silver light; mixing with the early lamps; the cabs all rushing through the streets; I had a tremendous sense of life beginning; and all the doors opening: and this is I believe the moth shaking its wings in me". I'd been itching for some more Woolf to read, but had none stockpiled, so this popping up on Netgalley was perfect. All the more so for being letters where you can get that beautiful, light-filled prose in bite-size chunks, without the tendency to float altogether free which sometimes afflicts Woolf. Or say affects rather than afflicts, because it's not a failing as such, just something which limits the moods in which I can read her. Here, though, she has also Vita to anchor her, the body to her mind – "If I were she, I would merely stride, with 11 Elk hounds behind me, through my ancestral woods". Indeed, at times Virginia on Vita is barely a whisker from the 'she breasted boobily' school of writing: "There is her maturity and full breastedness"! Though for the sake of the story, it can't quite be love at first sight; at their initial meeting, Virginia finds Vita "inclined to double chin", while Vita thinks Woolf "dresses quite atrociously" and "she is quite old". Still, both are intrigued, and soon enough more, despite denials along the way: "I do love her,but not b.s.ly.", 'b.s.' being 'back stairs', which is to say gay – who knew that even the Bloomsburies had their own 'no homo'? There are frustrations, often to do with Woolf's health; there's comedy, with Virginia's hairpins or indeed hair forever falling in her food. There's a supporting cast, albeit few of them very well-developed, especially Clive Bell, a thoroughly two-dimensional example of a messy bitch who lives for the drama. Indeed, the only other player who comes entirely to life is Knole, Vita's ancestral home, which Virginia at first finds faintly ridiculous ("His Lordship lives in the kernel of a vast nut.") but which, like its mistress, soon seduces her. As Vita shows Virginia letters from Dryden she has about the place, or locks of hair from 17th century lords, the modern reader can see what's building – that sense of loving England itself through a representative of one of its great families, as Harriet Vane felt with Peter Wimsey, which would germinate, and immortalise the pair, in the form of Orlando. A book, and a character, which Vita loved, as well she might, even while acknowledging it as a new form of narcissism. Of course, real life can't be so neat as to end there, and the letters continue, albeit more seldom, as they grow apart, reminding the reader that even when lovers part as friends, or never wholly part, there remains an unavoidable tragedy to the simple, ghastly human fact that we can't have all the things we love, all at once, forever. And the other tragedy too, of course, as 1941 and the river replace Orlando as the looming telos of whose backwards causality we detect ripples.

If other people seldom intrude as much more than phantoms (the husbands, while certainly loved and never belittled, are on roughly the same level as the pets), there's still a sense of both participants in the round, even while they discuss how nobody else can ever know the whole of you. We get Vita on Virginia's writing, as when Mrs Dalloway has "made it unnecessary ever to go to London again, for the whole of London in June is in your first score of pages" (maybe this is why I've been craving Woolf, now even those of us who live in London can't go there anymore in any meaningful sense?). There's Woolf on Woolf's writing: "Style is a very simple matter, it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words." There's even a certain amount on Vita's writing, though despite that, and the degree to which she holds her own, I can't see myself seeking out The Edwardians or The Land even once book acquisition resumes. Sometimes it's all terribly relatable, as when learning other languages: "Why do grammars only teach one such phrases as 'Simply through the courage of the champion's sword', when what one wants to say is 'Bring another lamp'?" Suddenly Duolingo's sentences seem positively useful in comparison. There's the spaniel and the kitten mingling their brood absent-mindedly at Knole, like a parody of what the outraged Right would expect in a household where homosexuality has taken root. There's even the lovely, almost plaintive line "But then, in all London, you and I alone like being married."

If I have a complaint, it's that I don't entirely understand some of the editorial decisions. Some of the missives (and those to other people, and diary entries, which are also included as relevant) have been edited, and that's fair enough. But equally, there's material left in, and sometimes whole notes, which are purely making and then revising social arrangements, say, and which make one wonder – well, if they kept this in, what on Earth must the stuff they cut have been like? Similarly, the footnoting of Bloomsbury types is constant, though surely not all necessary to the likely reader of a book such as this – but when Vita says the two people talking in the room where she wrote were Bulldog Drummond and Benjamin Constant, nothing, so the casual reader might assume those were simply the names of two neighbours of hers unworthy of further comment. Then too, those inconsequential notes with arrangements, or complaining about a vomiting dog? They make rather a mockery of the section in Alison Bechdel's introduction where she rehearses the obligatory grumbles about how nobody writes letters anymore and can you imagine the modern equivalent of this. Well, yes, I can – I've been in email and even messenger conversations which, if I wouldn't compare our prose to V&V's, were just as substantial, just as often, as this. Not to mention the incessant wobbles here about not knowing what the other is doing right now, wondering if the other still feels as they did when they wrote in the past, missing the post...all upset which would be eliminated if they'd had smartphones. Never mind the complaints about not having enough photos of each other! And while Bechdel tries to get vaguely modern by musing on what emojis they would have sent, surely Bosman's potto would have done better as GIFs, and heart-eyes would be more likely than scissors?

Still, beneath the apparatus, and before the end, there's the love, and the writing, and the reminder of how full of light life could be when we were allowed to live it. "For the rest, Charleston, Tilton, To The Lighthouse, Vita, expeditions: the summer dominated by a feeling of washing in boundless warm fresh air – such an August not come my way for years." Here's hoping, eh?

I really enjoyed reading these letters, they were a nice mix of the mundanity of everyday life and a blossoming and then (relatively) steady romance and friendship between two great writers. I've always loved Virginia Woolf's wit that comes across in her non-fiction especially, and there are some very entertaining passages in here, as well as some cute inside jokes. I found particularly interesting how they navigated their relationship in regards to their continuing relationships with their husbands and other women, I think historical non-monogamy especially in the context of queerness is super interesting to learn more about.

I would have liked some more context from a historian or something around the rest of their relationship in terms of visits and more diary snippets, but I'd still recommend reading this.

I've been familiar with this correspondence but never read it in entirety. Amazing how familiar so many passages have become even to modern readers. While I appreciated the more robust timeline that the author offers by way of notes and diary entries I did at times feel that I was bogged down in the minutiae of daily life- who would visit who, and when, who dropped by and when and so on. By the same token I was very taken by feeling the curtain drawn back on the relationships not just between Vita and Virginia but the rest of the Bloomsbury set. Vita's constant coded language to her own husband is brilliant, as is watching now famous literary works unfold in real time.

Recommended.

This is a curated selection from the letters and journals of Woolf and Sackville-West, packaged for a general readership and without any scholarly apparatus. Letters and extracts are truncated invisibly which is a bit misleading, and ellipses only indicate cuts from within sections. That's fine for a popular edition, but just something to be aware of.

The title of 'love letters' should also be taken in its widest sense, encompassing as it does deep friendship, gentle flirtation, physical attraction. VW and VS-W did love each other, but they also both loved their husbands and Vita has other affairs with women, some more passionate than what she shared with VW. In any case, their relationship is most usefully liberated from labels and categories: the important thing is the connection which developed, wavered, waned and was revived throughout the time they knew each other.

Both women are vivid, entertaining writers and that's the real value of this focused selection.

A fascinating collection of correspondence between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Laid out chronologically, it is interspersed with enlightening, timely extracts from Woolf’s diaries along with letters from Sackville-West to her husband Harold Nicolson. Many of the letters were intimate and highly personal to the point I felt I was intruding on their privacy which made me slightly uncomfortable about their publication. However the revelations about their writings and the cogitations and work behind the masterpieces has motivated me to read more of their works. It will be a must-read for anyone interested in the lives or works of either author. It is also a fine example of the art of letter writing and written dated proof of an exemplary postal service in the Thirties.

A fascinating collection of the endlessly engaging letters sent between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, who was the inspiration for Woolf’s Orlando, possibly my favourite of her novels. There are quite a few diary snippets too, which work well to ‘plug’ the gaps in between their correspondence. I also enjoyed the introduction from Alison Bechdel, author of the excellent Fun Home. Quite simply, this was a joy to read.