York Museums Trust

100 Years of Vita and Virginia: Reimagining Sex with the Bloomsbury Group

14 May 2022, 11am, £15 per person

Book tickets here 

When Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West at a dinner party in December 1922, it was not love at first sight. “Not much to my severer taste,” wrote Woolf in her diary. “She is a grenadier; hard; handsome; manly; inclined to double chin.” How did these two women, ten years apart in age and both married to men, begin a love affair that would be remembered among the most passionate and progressive in LGBTQ+ history?

Join Dr Hannah Roche from the University of York as she traces the relationship’s transformative cultural and literary impact and explores the enduring attraction of Vita and Virginia.

Dr Hannah Roche is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture at the University of York. She is the author of The Outside Thing: Modernist Lesbian Romance (Columbia University Press, 2019) and co-editor of the first Oxford World’s Classics edition of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, to be published in 2023.

Ticket includes admission to the exhibition Beyond Bloomsbury: Life, Love and Legacy