Before The L Word dared loudly speak its name, and before Ms. Lohan took to public shows of affection with her girlfriend, then so-called Sapphists fell in love and lived their lives.

One of the most famous couples of the 1920s' literary world was Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville West.

Their relationship has been embraced by some contemporary gay activists as an example of a same-sex couple who flouted conventions to find love. Testament to this is that Woolf wrote the historical novella Orlando in loving honor of her friend, and that Sackville-West willingly posed in male costume to evince the noble hero of the book.

We may want something to be the way we see it, but that does not necessarily make it so. Put in historical context, the women were generally conventional except in their sexuality, and even then they were not declaring their forbidden love from the rafters.

Both were married: Woolf to the publisher Leonard Woolf, Sackville-West to the diplomat Harold Nicolson, with whom she had two sons. In England's class-conscious society, they both came from the genteel ranks, with Woolf the daughter of an intellectual and writer and Sackville-West an almost true-blue aristocrat (her dark looks and aquiline nose were from her grandmother, a Spanish dancer who had five illegitimate children with her noble English grandfather) who grew up in a vast stately home.

In the daunting shadow of Woolf's literary greatness, Sackville-West was not overshadowed, content to be the passive muse. She was an award-winning poet and novelist; her long poem, The Land, published in 1926, had sold hundreds of thousands of copies in Britain alone by the 1970s, her biographer Victoria Glendinning writes.

Their relationship has been treated honestly and sensitively in Vita, the definitive biography of Sackville-West by Glendinning (Knopf, 1983) and Portrait of a Marriage, written by Nigel Nicolson, Sackville-West's younger son. Both agree that the sexual part of the relationship - which occurred in 1925 - was fleeting and insignificant compared to the friendship and intellectual stimulation they derived. They were not lovers consumed by an unending physical passion - Nicolson states it would be a "travesty" to call their relationship an affair - but two women with an abiding and genuine love for each other. Woolf was sexually naive (Nicolson terms her frigid) even in her early 40s. "She had no sexual contact with Leonard," Glendinning writes. "She was clever, critical, ironic, mischievious even - and yet so nervous, fantastical, childlike, that even a kiss or a caressing hand might seem sensational to her."

Sackville -West, in contrast, was sexually adventurous - she was involved in passionate relationships with one, and perhaps two, other women when she became intimate with Virginia. They were on the fringes of the Bloomsbury artistic and literary group, where sexual dalliances of all kinds were common. Vita and Harold's marriage would be called an open relationship today; she with men and women, her husband with other men. They had followed convention by marrying and having children, and were then free to pursue other relationships while their love remained unthreatened.

"Their love ... was actually enhanced by the complete freedom they allowed each other," writes Nigel Nicolson. "Both were completely frank about it, in speech and letters. It no longer required argument: simply a statement of fact and current emotion. Harold would refer to Vita's affairs as *your muddles'; she to his as *your fun'. No jealousy ever arose because of them."

Their union passed its only full-fledged crisis, Nicolson writes, in 1920, a few years before Sackville-West met Woolf, when she had fallen wildly in love with a childhood friend, Violet Trefusis, and contemplated leaving her husband (that episode, which Sackville-West referred to as "madness", makes up the bulk of Portrait of a Marriage). Sackville-West made sure to reassure her husband, in a letter in 1925, about her budding relationship with Woolf: "I love her, but couldn't fall *in love' with her, so don't be nervous!"

Confidants and carers, the dynamic, adventurous Vita and reticent, fragile Virginia were their own mutual admiration and fascination society. Woolf praised Sackville-West's ability to keep her life in order, to run a household and raise her sons, "... in short, (what I have never been) a real woman", Glendinning writes.

Sackville-West, in turn, called Woolf "*V*ery sweet, and I feel extraordinarily protective toward her. The combination of that brilliant brain and fragile body is very lovable."

Their bond was cemented with Orlando, the disguised tale of Vita's relationship with Violet Trefusis. Sackville-West said she was "thrilled and terrified ... at the prospect of being projected into the shape of Orlando." The book was dedicated to her, at her request. "The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando," Nicolson writes, "the longest and most charming love-letter in history."

Intense friendships, of course, are always tinged with jealousies and disagreements, when masks are lifted and guards let down to reveal vulnerabilities. At times, Woolf resented her friend's commercial literary success, as well as her various lovers. Glendinning notes that Woolf considered herself to be the superior intellect, something readily acknowledged by Sackville-West, who said she felt "dejected" when she read her works, "because I shall never be able to write like that".

But Sackville-West, writing to her husband in 1927, had an awful foreboding about her friend. "Darling, I know Virginia will die, and it will be too awful (I don't mean here over the weekend; but die young)."

And so it happened. When a despondent Woolf disappeared on a spring day in 1941, her husband Leonard and sister Vanessa Bell alerted Sackville-West.

Sackville-West blamed herself for not being there for her friend, believing that Woolf would have told her of her emotional troubles (she had drowned herself in a river; her body was not found until almost three weeks later). But Glendinning contends that Woolf's death helped Sackville-West, who would become a passionate gardener at her estate in Sissinghurst, Kent, until her death in 1962, put her life in perspective.

"I suppose Hadji *her pet name for her husband* and I have been about as unfaithful to one another as one well could be from the conventional point of view, even worse than unfaithful if you add in homosexuality, and yet I swear no two people could love one another more than we do after all these years."

It was apt for her relationship with her husband and, in its way, for her very special friendship with Virginia Woolf.

Popular

To my horror, it’s just a movie!

RI, Australia strengthen partnership on taxing crypto assets

Pentagon chief congratulates Prabowo on being elected President