The author and explorer, Sir Richard Burton, wrote that once he had understood the appetite of the English for the erotic, his fortune was made. It was unfortunate for his descendants that his widow destroyed his diaries, for now it is equally apparent that the writer who is anxious to provide for his progeny after his death has only to lead a life of sexual depravity, and record it in detail in letters and diaries, for a whole industry to survive his demise.

Harold Nicolson and his wife Vita Sackville-West were most considerate in this respect, leaving behind enough material for several books – Harold Nicolson’s Diaries, his son Nigel’s Portrait of a Marriage, and more recently Victoria Glendinning’s Vita: The Life of V Sackville-West. Now we are presented with the letters of Vita Sackville-West to her most celebrated Lesbian paramour, the lady-of-letters Virginia Woolf – a volume to place beside the six volumes of The Letters of Virginia Woolf, the five volumes of The Diaries of Virginia Woolf and Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography.

The editors of Vita’s letters, Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A Leaska, have included in the present collection many of Virginia Woolf’s letters to Vita: ‘It became clear … that Virginia herself must be given a fair hearing if we were to convey authentically something of the changing emotional tone of their relationship over their nineteen-year-old friendship’; but even with the exchange between the two women, and succinct notes describing what was going on off-stage, only the most dedicated devotee of Bloomsbury is likely to find much of interest in this correspondence beyond that which has already been gleaned from Mrs Glendinning’s admirable biography.

Many of the letters concern practical arrangements made in an age when the post was frequent and efficient, while the telephone was thought an intrusion upon privacy. ‘My dear Vita. Would Tuesday afternoon suit you? Should I stay till Friday or Saturday? Should Leonard come and fetch me back? Should you mind if I only brought one dressing gown? Or, from Vita, ‘HELL – I’ve just remembered: I’m lunching with Sibyl on Wednesday. Can you make it dinner or not? If not, I shall understand, as you are leaving London the next day. Lunch Thursday, if you like.’

The general tone of the letters, taken as a whole, is of mutual admiration posing as passion – Vita, the literary snob, fawning on the celebrated author, while Virginia, the social snob, delights in Vita’s aristocratic hauteur. There was also sex, though little is said in the letters about just what went on in bed or on the sofa. ‘I told Nessa [Vanessa Bell],’ wrote Virginia to Vita, ‘the story of our passion in a chemist’s shop the other day. But do you really like going to bed with women she said – taking her change. “And how d’you do it?” and so she bought her pills to take abroad, talking as loud as a parrot.’

We are not told, but undoubtedly it was an important element in their liaison. ‘Do you know what I think it was, apart from ‘flu?’ wrote Vita to Virginia from Berlin, to explain Virginia’s mysterious illness after her visit there, where the company of others made it difficult for the two women to be alone. ‘It was SUPPRESSED RANDINESS. So there – You remember your admissions as the searchlight went round and round?’

Vita, as we know from Mrs Glendinning, had no need to suppress her own randiness, for she was as unfaithful to Virginia as she was to her husband Harold. Love was declared in almost every letter to Virginia, but it clearly did not imply an exclusive commitment. ‘Oh, I was in such a rage of jealousy the other night,’ wrote Virginia, ‘thinking you had been in love with Hilda that summer you went to the Alps together! Because you said you weren’t. Now were you? Did you do the act under the Dolomites?’ It was the old story of the older woman with the younger man, except in this case the younger man was a younger woman. Vita slowly disengaged herself from a passionate liaison as she moved on to other women: Virginia had either to suppress her randiness, or sublimate it in writing: but for all her commitment to ‘reality’ and to ‘the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think’ which she expressed in A Room of One’s Own, the literary love-child of her perverse passion was not a Lesbian Tropic of Cancer but the arch tale Orlando.

Neither of the two women comes out of these letters well. They both seem affected, snobbish, spoilt and above all immature. Vita appears cold towards her two sons – meeting them at Paddington upon their return from boarding-school is a bore – yet the letters are filled with tender enquiries about one another’s pet dogs. Vita complains about a woman’s servile role in marriage, but reveals through the letters that she has a cook, a butler, a gardener and a French maid. Despite their high regard for their own writing and sensibility, which justified their contempt for convention, the letters of these two middle-aged women read somewhat like those of two school-girls who have a crush on one another – Vita, the junior girl, sucking up to Virginia of the upper-sixth, while fishing for compliments for her own writing. As such they are both unfortunate models for the modern feminist. Their precious, narcissistic aestheticism at such a critical moment in European history only seems to confirm the sneers of the misogynist. To Vita what is notable about Berlin in 1929 is the Lesbian act at a night-club; and Virginia too fails to see the march of the storm troopers because she is lost in the ‘drenched violets’ of Orlando’s eyes.

The best of Vita’s letters are those written from Teheran and Berlin where she lived – briefly and reluctantly – with her husband en poste. Yet even in these there is little beyond the description of state dinners, with names dropped for the benefit of the bourgeois Virginia. Vita appeared to envy and resent the world of politics and diplomacy, and despite her protestations of undying love, she nagged at her husband until he abandoned his promising career.

Yet finally one is obliged to conclude that it was the weak Harold Nicolson who was largely responsible for his wife’s development into an egotistical virago. In the early years of their marriage, according to Mrs Glendinning, Vita was delighted by his heterosexual attentions, and it was only after he had contracted some venereal infection from his homosexual philandering, and was obliged not only to confess it to his young wife, but also to abstain from sex for six months, that she opened herself to the advances of the lascivious Violet Keppel. Miss Keppel was the daughter of the mistress of King Edward VII, and the whole cocktail of affected writing and depraved morals is better understood as the last whimper of Edwardian decadence than as the clarion call of a new age.