The aristocratic English author and poet Vita Sackville-West embarked on a passionate, highly reckless love affair with her childhood friend, the writer Violet Trefusis. Both women were married to men, but they repeatedly fled to France together, with Vita frequently dressing in male attire as her alter-ego 'Julian' to pass as Violet's husband. Their furious husbands and families eventually intercepted them in a dramatic confrontation involving a private plane, forcing a painful separation to prevent an international public scandal.

This dramatic, uninhibited affair inspired Sackville-West's intense novel 'Challenge' and directly informed her close friend and subsequent lover Virginia Woolf's landmark gender-bending modernist novel, 'Orlando'. The affair challenged the rigid sexual hypocrisies of post-WWI British high society, leaving an enduring mark on modern queer literature.