Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

DeSalvo, Louise A.

doi:10.1086/493959

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Cited by 11 publications

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“…Woolf also engages us in a literary tour de force, in what I believe is an effort to hold Vita (and the reader) with her fantastic creativity. She knew that Vita cherished her for her literary achievement, mastery of language, and intellectual prowess (DeSalvo 1982). Woolf is out to use words "so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth .…”

Section: Oscillating Mergermentioning

confidence: 99%

Seduction and Revenge in Virginia Woolf’sOrlando

Namara¹

2011

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

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Virginia Woolf's Orlando was characterized by Nigel Nicolson as a "charming love letter" to his mother, Vita Sackville-West. The fictional biography was actually an attempt by Woolf to organize herself after the unbearable humiliation of Vita's abandoning her for another woman. In imagining, writing, and publishing Orlando, Woolf turns her despair about Vita's betrayal into a monument of revenge, defending against disorganizing feelings of humiliation, powerlessness, rage, and loss by creating her own scathing portrait of Vita. In the novel, Woolf also intermittently merges herself with Orlando/Vita to create a permanent tie to the woman who--like her mother and sister--excited and rejected her.

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Section: Oscillating Mergermentioning

confidence: 99%