LGBT History Month 2022: Letters from Vita

We know that the histories of LGBTQ+ people are under-represented in our collections, and the stories that are there can be difficult to find. So it’s always a delight to find unexpected evidence of LGBTQ+ lives, and a research enquiry last year led me to read this letter for the first time.

It is one of a small series of letters written by Vita Sackville-West to Irene Lawley, later Forbes Adam, within the papers of the Forbes Adam family. Vita is probably best remembered now for her relationship with Virginia Woolf, who immortalised her in the novel Orlando, and for the garden she created at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. Vita was born in 1892 into an aristocratic English family, and she married the diplomat, politician and diarist Harold Nicolson in 1913. She also had relationships with women throughout her life.

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This letter is only dated March 22nd, but was probably written a year or two before her marriage. In it she tells Irene how she is going to Spain for a month “with a strange woman with Titian-red hair, who knows every artist and every poet and every musician.”

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She also asks Irene to report to her what “my little friend Violet Keppel” has been doing – “tell me what she is up to, what she does, who she talks to most, what she says about Rome. And above all deny, if asked, that you are momentarily one of the International European System of Surveillance.”

This is a fascinating reference to Vita’s relationship with Violet, which was passionate but destructive. It finally ended in 1920 after an episode when the two women ran away to France together, with their husbands in pursuit in a two-seater plane.

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The final page of the letter ends "Rosamund, alas, remains in London." This was probably Rosamund Grosvenor, a close friend and sometime lover of Vita's.

We can identify this letter as illustrating an aspect of LGBTQ+ history because we already know so much about Vita and her life. However, we don’t know how many more similar histories remain unknown in similar letters and collections. Hopefully more will be discovered and brought to light.