`When I finished your book, I cried aloud "Phew!" And Phew meant that I wish I had written it. It seems to me remarkable that someone who never knew Vita and Virginia can understand them so much better than me, who knew both well. And I think of you spending all those years writing,researching, contemplating, finding so much that I have never read, never imagined, and coming up with a book that is a marvel of condensation and commitment.' Nigel NicolsonWhen Virginia Woolf first met Vita Sackville-West at Clive Bell's house in 1922, she wrote that Vita made her feel `virgin, shy, and schoolgirlish'. But over the next three years Vita charmed away her shyness, and at the end of 1925 made Virginia her lover.Vita and Virginia examines the creative intimacy between the two, interpreting their relationship in the light of their experience as married lesbians. The contradictions and conflicts of their situation are worked out through the construction of different narratives of femininity, in letters,novels, diaries, and other texts. The book discusses the two women's continual renegotiation of what it means to be female, and suggests that the mutual exchange of different versions of `womenhood' is crucial to the development of their friendship. Vita and Virginia offers innovative readings ofboth women's fiction, their autobiographical texts, and a long-overdue study of Sackville-West's work as a biographer and a novelist.Emphasizing also wider contexts, Suzanne Raitt assesses the links between homosexual desire and literary innovation, public politics and private lives. Her work provides an invaluable new perspective on the relations between sexuality and feminism in modernism.