"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."
In 1922, the relatively unknown writer Virginia Woolf met the popular author, aristocrat—and notorious Sapphist—Vita Sackville-West. Virginia didn’t think much of Vita’s conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. In her diary she wrote: "But could I ever know her?" It was to...