Damn you, spoilt creature I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this-But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary phrase as that perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. Their correspondence is collected in The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. Original spelling and punctuation have been retained. These letters came after their first separation their affair ended in 1929. The two began an affair in the midtwenties that inspired Woolf’s novel Orlando. Vita Sackville-West, born on this day in 1892, and Virginia Woolf exchanged the letters below in January 1926. William Strang, Lady with a Red Hat (A portrait of Vita Sackville-West), 1918, oil on canvas.
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