1929 / Kent

To Harold Nicolson

You are dearer to me than anybody ever has been or ever could be. If you died suddenly, I should kill myself as soon as I had made provision for the boys. I really mean this. I could not live if I lost you. I do not think one could conceive of a love more exclusive, more tender, or more pure than I have for you. I think it is immortal, a thing which happens seldom.

Darling, there are not many people who would write such a letter after sixteen years of marriage, yet who would be saying therein only one fiftieth of what they were feeling as they wrote it. I sometimes try to tell you the truth, and then I find that I have no words at my command which could possibly convey it to you.

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Published In

Eros

About the Text

Vita Sackville-West, from a letter. A poet and a novelist, Sackville-West delighted in writing about the English countryside and tending its gardens. She married the diplomat Harold Nicolson in 1913, with whom she openly shared an affinity for extramarital homosexual affairs. Virginia Woolf in 1928 posed her as the model for her heroine in Orlando.

To the moralist prostitution does not consist so much in the fact that the woman sells her body, but rather that she sells it out of wedlock.