To the Postbox
In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work. ‘I should much prefer that the book should be, as you say written impersonally, from material in the British Museum,’ Woolf wrote. ‘My feeling is that when people are alive, so much personality is bound to creep in, that it is better for the critic to keep aloof as far as possible.’ By