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.