Violet Trefusis was an English author and socialite. Trefusis is remembered primarly for her long lasting affair with Vita Sackville-West. Both Sackville-West and Trefusis wrote ficitional accounts about their affair, Challenge by Sackville-West, and Broderie Anglaise, a roman à clef wirrten in French by Trefusis. In addition to these works, the two women frequently wrote each other affectionate letters despite their marriages to men. According to Kirstie Blair's article “Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf" the affair between Sackville-West and Trefusis came to an abrupt end when Trefusis was supposedly unfaithful to Sackville-West as Sackville-West had demanded that Trefusis not be intimate with her soon-to-be husband but Trefusis broke her promise. This love affair is memorialized in Virgina Woolf's Orlando as Trefusis was the inspiration for the fictional character of the Russian princess, Sasha. Sasha is the first character in the novel that leaves Orlando with a feeling of loss and despair. Sasha's mysterious nature awakens Orlando's sexual desire and pushes him to change his complacent way of viewing life. This woman with mysterious and some what devious nature is reflected in Woolf's own life in her experince with Vita Sackville-West who is recorded as asking Woolf to run away with her "Sackville-West's letter provides one instance of the tantalizing presence of the gypsy as the antithesis of the 'familiar and entrapping'" (Blair).

Blair, Kirstie. “Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis, and Virginia Woolf.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 50, no. 2, 2004, pp. 141–166. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4149276. Accessed 4 June 2021.