On 23 September 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West: 'if you'll make me up, I'll make you.' In Desiring Women, Karyn Sproles argues that the two writers in fact 'made' each other. Woolf and Sackville-West produced some of the most vibrant and acclaimed work of their respective careers during their passionate affair, and Sproles demonstrates how this body of work was a collaborative project - a partnership - in which they promised to reinvent one another.

Sproles argues that in all they wrote during their affair - essays, criticism, novels, poems, biographies, and...