Screen International have confirmed that Eva Green and Gemma Arterton have been cast in the lead roles of Vita & Virginia, film about the romantic relationship between Bloomsbury Group novelist Virginia Woolf and writer-gardener Vita Sackville-West.

The love between these two women, and their mutual admiration for each other’s work, went on to inspire Woolf to write Orlando; which documents the adventures of a poet who lives for several centuries, changing sex from man to woman.

Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson later wrote:

The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”

The film’s director by Chanya Button, commented

The prospect of collaborating with Dame Eileen Atkins, Eva Green and Gemma Arterton in bringing the mercurial passion that Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West shared to life is beyond a privilege. We so often associate women of the past with oppression, bound by the duties of marriage, propriety and domesticity; but what Vita & Virginia offers is an example of a relationship where bold, brilliant women bent these institutions to their will at great personal cost.

Focusing on the time in 1927-8 during which Woolf wrote Orlando, the novel their relationship inspired, Vita & Virginia will be a visceral love story, a vivid exploration of creativity, and an energised perspective on one of our most iconic writers”.