Green is to play Woolf and Arterton is cast as Vita Sackville-West in Vita & Virginia, a film about the writers’ years-long relationship

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.

Directed by Chanya Button and adapted from Eileen Atkins’ play, the production was announced last July. Now it has been revealed that Green (last seen in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), will play Woolf and Arterton (due to appear in the wartime romcom Their Finest) will play Sackville-West.

Woolf and Sackville-West first met in 1922; their relationship continued for for more than a decade, and Sackville-West directly inspired Woolf’s celebrated 1928 novel Orlando. 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.”