The affair and intimate relationship between literary icon Virginia Woolf and novelist Vita Sackville-West is finally getting the gorgeous Hollywood treatment it deserves with Eva Green and Gemma Arterton playing the lovers.
The Hollywood Reporter announced that Chanya Button (Burn Burn Burn) will direct Vita & Virginia, a film based on a script from Eileen Atkins who wrote the play of the same name. They gave this short summary:
Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and then met socialite and author Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson, in 1922. They began a sexual relationship that lasted nearly a decade, as shown in their various letters and diary entries. After their affair ended, they remained friends until Woolf’s death in 1941. Green will play Woolf while Arterton will play Sackville-West.
The relationship between Woolf and Sackville-West was a famous one–Woolf was part of the Bloomsbury Group which welcomed an open approach to sexuality and Sackville-West had an open relationship with her husband. Both were successful writers, and their affair inspired Woolf’s novel Orlando–a novel Sackville-West’s son called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
If you want to learn more about the relationship between Woolf and Sackville-West, they wrote over 500 letters to each other that are collected in this book, though just this one from 1926 where the two write about missing one another will show you how intensely they felt about one another. Are you looking forward to seeing these two in Vita & Virginia?
(via Women and Hollywood, Image via Showtime)
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