Letter from Leonard Woolf (1880–1969) to Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962)

Vita Sackville-West inspired Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, an exploration of gender and identity modeled on the two women’s intense romantic relationship. They remained so close that Sackville-West was one of the first people that Woolf’s husband, Leonard, notified of his wife’s probable suicide in 1941. He wrote, “[Virginia] has been really very ill these last weeks & was terrified that she was going mad again. It was I suppose the strain of the war & finishing her book [Between the Acts] ... I think she has drowned herself as I found her stick floating in the river, but we have not yet found the body.”