Vita sackville west

50 years after her death aged 70, we celebrate the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West's life and loves.

Inspired by Woolf’s iconic novel, the artists in Aperture's "Orlando" issue explore the territories of identity, history, and consciousness.

In the early 20th century women such as Vita Sackville-West, Gwen Lally and Radclyffe Hall adopted masculine styles of dress that were subversive, exploratory and playful. Historian Alison Oram explores how such clothing choices might have expressed increasingly fluid ideas about gender identity and sexuality, as well as sometimes simply being about fashion or practicality.

Explore Photomaine's 17531 photos on Flickr!

She is the woman who inspired one of Virginia Woolf’s most popular novels, Orlando: the feminist classic, fictional biography of a timeless, gender-fluid poet who lives for centuries. In her own life she was a prolific writer — the author of 13…

by John Gay bromide fibre print 1948 © National Portrait Gallery, London

by Howard Coster half-plate film negative 1934 © National Portrait Gallery, London

We publish articles around emotional education: calm, fulfilment, perspective and self-awareness. | Virginia Woolf — Read now