I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. 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. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. 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. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. 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. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don’t really resent it.

Writings


Poetry
Chatterton (1909)
A Dancing Elf (1912)
Constantinople: Eight Poems (1915)
Poems of West and East (1917)
Orchard and Vineyard (1921)
The Land (1926)
King's Daughter (1929)
Sissinghurst (1931)
Invitation to Cast out Care (1931)
Collected Poems: Volume 1 (1933)
Solitude (1938)
The Garden (1946)


Novels
Heritage (1919)
The Dragon in Shallow Waters (1921)
The Heir (1922)
Challenge (1923)
Grey Waters (1923)
Seducers in Ecuador (1924)
Passenger to Teheran (1926)
The Edwardians (1930)
All Passion Spent (1931)
The Death of Noble Godavary and Gottfried Künstler (1932)
Thirty Clocks Strike the Hour (1932)
Family History (1932)
The Dark Island (1934)
Grand Canyon (1942)
Devil at Westease (1947)
The Easter Party (1953)
No Signposts in the Sea (1961)


Translations
Duineser Elegien: Elegies from the Castle of Duino by Rainer Maria Rilke trns. Despite the rift the two women were devoted to one another and deeply in love and continued to have occasional liaisons for a number of years afterwards but never rekindled the affair. George Keppel and his wife Alice Keppel a mistress of King Edward VII.

She was known for her exuberant aristocratic life her passionate affair with the novelist Virginia Woolf and Sissinghurst Castle Garden which Vita Sackville-West and her husband Sir Harold Nicolson created at their estate. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933.