Virginia Woolf Romance to be Portrayed in New Movie Vita and Virginia

The romance between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West is to be portrayed in a new movie about the author’s life and casting is announced for the two lead roles.

Vita and Virginia will look at the lesbian love affair between the two with casting announced this week. Eva Green of Miss Peculiar fame will play Virginia Woolf in the new movie, while Gemma Arterton will play Vita Sackville-West in the new movie.

The production was announced last year but casting has just taken place. The movie will focus on the affair between the two women rather than other aspects of Woolf’s life. Vita and Virginia was inspired by Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando, said to be the longest and most charming love letter in all of literature.

Woolf and Sackville-West first met in 1922 and shared a relationship spanning a decade and inspiring Woolf’s novel, Orlando. While both women were married, and the affair may have caused a scandal at the time, neither husband was particularly concerned, in fact Leonard Woolf described the relationship as “rather a bore… but not enough to worry him”, and both Vita and her husband were bisexual and operated an open marriage.

Orlando US
Orlando UK

It’s thought that both women had other lovers, but none inspired quite so much interested as the relationship between the pair, documented in love letters and finally immortalised in Orlando. One of the final communications between the pair came during German air bombardments. Written in 1940 Woolf wrote “there you sit with the bombs falling around you. What can one say– except that I love you and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting there alone. Dearest—let me have a line…You have given me such happiness….”

While there’s no release date for the movie yet, we’ll bring you all the news as we have it.