Virginia Woolf in love | The echoes

When Vita Sackville-West met Virginia Woolf in 1922, she was thirty years old and already had a sulphurous past. Wife of Sir Harold Nicolson, this socialite aristocrat escaped with his mistress Violet Keppel, after which the respective husbands of the two lovers set out in pursuit of them. Scandal in the “high society”. To be honest, Sir Harold fears above all that the spotlight fixed on his wife will shed light on his own homosexuality and jeopardize his diplomatic career.

Petroleum, Vita is a successful writer, sure of herself and provocative. She is not afraid of gossip, to the point that one wonders if she does not enjoy it. After her escapade with Violet, she sets her sights on Virginia Woolf, then known only to a small nerd circle. To bail out the publishing house of Leonard, the husband of Virginia, the director of Hogarth Press then in distress, she will give them the publication of her new book “Seducers in Ecuador”. As we can see, the matter is muddled. A gay husband who wants to stifle his wife’s Sapphic inclinations; a husband, a publisher at bay, who turns a blind eye to his wife’s love affairs and agrees to publish his mistress’s novel … English society, puritanical as it claims to be, nonetheless tolerates deviations. But not the excess, nuance.

At the time, Virginia Woolf was forty years old, she was rather bad about herself, if not agoraphobic. His writings are appreciated by critics and intellectuals at the Bloomsbury Group, but have not yet reached the general public. Vita makes the seat of Virginia that she wants to put in her bed. Virginia is not ready to take the plunge; it will elude a long time before yielding.

Virginia, who has already published “Mrs Dalloway”, which is not nothing, will draw from their love story one of her major works “Orlando, a biography” whose main character is inspired by Vita. Classic in its form, the film by young Chanya Button, thirty-two, traces with great fidelity and sensitivity the passion of these two artists so dissimilar. A bit classic, it lacks a touch of madness. Vita was fire, Virginia ice. “Vita and Virginia” is a bit of a victim who goes through all the states of the climate of love. That said, Gemma Arterton (Vita) and Elizabeth Debicki (Virginia) put their talent at the service of their character. And the cause of feminism.