🌙 Virginia Woolf & Vita Sackville-West's Twenty Years of Letters | LGBTQ+ History Sleep Story

In December 1922, two married women met at a London dinner party. They wrote to each other until one of them died, nineteen years later. Drift off to sleep learning about Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: the dinner party at Clive Bell's on 14 December 1922, the three nights at Long Barn in Kent in December 1925, the sleepless letter from Milan in January 1926 that begins "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia," and the novel it all produced. Woolf began Orlando in October 1927 and the Hogarth Press published it on 11 October 1928, dedicated to V. Sackville-West, illustrated with photographs of Vita costumed as its centuries-spanning, sex-changing hero. Vita's son Nigel Nicolson later called it the longest and most charming love letter in literature. The same year, Vita lost Knole, the vast Elizabethan house in Kent where she was born, because the estate followed the male line and she was a daughter. In 1930 she and her husband Harold Nicolson bought the ruins of Sissinghurst Castle and spent thirty years making the garden that made her famous, including the White Garden that still glows at dusk. Woolf's last letter to her, six days before her death in March 1941, ends in gratitude. Tonight's story is told twice: once at a natural, comfortable pace, and then again more slowly with longer pauses, so you can drift off whenever it happens. The imagery is winter lamplight in Kent, hand-set type in a basement press, deer under old trees at Knole, a tower staircase, and pale roses holding the last of the light. 🌙 Perfect for: LGBTQ+ history sleep stories · Virginia Woolf biography · Vita Sackville-West and Sissinghurst · Orlando 1928 · Bloomsbury Group history · sapphic love letters · bedtime stories for adults 💜 If this one kept you company, subscribe and tell me in the comments which queer historical figure you'd like to fall asleep to next. 🎧 Also available on your favorite podcast app. Search "Restful Rainbow." 💛 Support the show: https://restful-rainbow.captivate.fm/... — and if not, no need at all sleep well either way. Related episodes: Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas Radclyffe Hall Colette and Missy Emily Dickinson and Susan Gilbert's World of Words "I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia." — Vita Sackville-West, January 1926 #LGBTQhistory #SleepStory #VirginiaWoolf #VitaSackvilleWest #Orlando #Bloomsbury #QueerHistory #Sissinghurst #Knole #SapphicHistory #BedtimeStory #SleepMeditation #LGBTQ #LesbianHistory #LiteraryHistory #CalmNarration #SleepStoriesForAdults #RestfulRainbow #HogarthPress #HistoryForSleep