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Sproles, Karyn Z. Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. xii + 242 pp. £42.00/$65.00 (hardback); £20.00/$29.95 (paperback). ISBN 0–8020–3883–2/9402–3, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 100, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm112
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In Desiring Women, Sproles argues that Woolf and Sackville-West influenced each other's writing in “reciprocal and profound” ways; in fact, in the second half of the 1920s, she contends, they were effectively “engaged in a collaborative project – a partnership”. Approximately half of the book concentrates on the most famous text in this “partnership”, Woolf's Orlando (1928). This is an understandable approach, and the chapters on Orlando are indeed insightful and useful, but it does mean that some of Woolf and Sackville-West's other texts are given rather short shrift, or overlooked entirely. On the other hand, in the later chapters, there are some very good readings of Sackville-West's Aphra Behn (1927), Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929), and Woolf and Sackville-West's letters to each other (probably the most “collaborative” of all their “projects”). On the whole, this is a welcome addition to the crowded field of Woolf studies, particularly for the serious critical attention it gives to the writing of Vita Sackville-West.
