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Queer Trivia
She was an English author.
She was born on 9 March 1892 at Knole, the ancestral estate in Kent granted to her family by Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. Although deeply connected to the house and its legacy, she was barred from inheriting it due to the traditions of English aristocratic succession, which favored male heirs, a lifelong source of sorrow and resentment for her.
She was first educated at home by governesses before attending Helen Wolff's exclusive girls' day school in Mayfair, where she formed early romantic attachments with Violet Keppel and Rosamund Grosvenor. Her limited formal education left her feeling intellectually inadequate among her peers, such as those in the Bloomsbury Group. This sense of deficiency fostered a lasting shyness, and she never felt fully at the intellectual center of her social circle.
She shared a deeply intimate and formative relationship with Violet Keppel, daughter of the Hon. George Keppel and Alice Keppel. Their romantic and sexual connection began in their teenage years and remained a powerful influence on both of their lives for many years to come.
Her relationship with the renowned writer Virginia Woolf began in 1925 and lasted until 1935, with its most intense period between 1925 and 1928. According to American scholar Louise DeSalvo, those ten years marked the artistic high point of both women's careers, largely due to the creative inspiration they drew from one another. As DeSalvo observed, "neither had ever written so much so well, and neither would ever again reach this peak of accomplishment."
Over the course of her life, she published more than a dozen poetry collections and 13 novels. She received the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature twice. First in 1927 for her pastoral epic The Land, and again in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She also served as the inspiration for the title character in Orlando: A Biography, written by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf.
She died at Sissinghurst in June 1962 at the age of 70, following a battle with abdominal cancer. After her cremation, her ashes were interred in the family crypt at the church in Withyham, East Sussex.
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