“As I get older, I find I get more and more disagreeably solitary, in fact I foresee the day when I shall have gone so far into myself that there will no longer be anything to be seen of me at all. Will you, please, remember to pull away the coverings from time to time? or I shall get quite lost.”

— Vita Sackville-West, in a letter to Virginia Woolf, dated 8 April 1926.