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 the time Holtby’s Virginia Woolf was published in October 1932 it had been pipped to the post by two books, one in German and one in French. But still, hers has the slightly bruised honour of being the first English-language monograph about Woolf.
It was certainly not the last. Woolf studies are, at this point, a cottage industry. As well as the monographs, you will find thousands of articles devoted to her life and work in the biannual Virginia Woolf Miscellany, the triannual Virginia Woolf Bulletin and numerous other journals and anthologies. There is, of course, always more to say; the possibilities for interpretation are endless. But this late in the game – when her essays and letters have been collected, diaries published (then republished in spiffy new editions) and fiction prefaced, annotated and afterworded ad nauseam – it is rare to get a scholarship-altering book. Stephen Barkway and the late Stuart N Clarke have produced just such a volume.
It is in The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf that readers will encounter Woolf’s exchanges with Holtby. These, along with letters to over 350 others, were missing from the six-volume collected letters (1975–80) because the editors of those volumes weren’t aware of their existence, discovered them too late or thought them uninteresting. The dedicated Woolfian may cry, ‘but every scribble on a worn scrap of paper adds to our image!’ Perhaps true, though even devotees might feel a small pang of tedium reading each letter asking someone to tea, negotiating when that tea might happen or apologising later for cancelling the tea (one letter – if you can call it that – reads, in its entirety, ‘Dinner 7–45 Tomorrow V.W.’). Even so, when all of these notes are bound in a single volume, as they are here, a new image of Woolf begins to emerge, one that counters her unfortunate reputation as a depressed recluse. We see Woolf as a consistently sociable woman who loved to sit around the table with friends and preferred intimate dinners to parties thrown by the likes of Sibyl Colefax.
Collecting these letters was undoubtedly a mammoth task – they come from archives around the world, private collections, museums, auction catalogues, out-of-print books. I don’t wish to give the impression that all of the 1,400-plus letters presented here are minor. Far from it. There are fifty unpublished letters to T S Eliot, substantial letters to familiar correspondents and a number of letters to people almost entirely absent from the six-volume collection. One such person is the cultural socialite Christabel McLaren; across more than forty letters, we watch a friendship begin and bloom. Here, Woolf writes about ‘the hideousness of Berlin’ and James Joyce’s Anna Livia Plurabelle (‘perhaps under morphia his meaning would swim to the surface. But its [sic] a bloated drowned dog as likely as not when you get it’). Of another socialite, Stephen Tennant, she says he puts her ‘so on edge for some reason that I turn into a compound of hedgehog & viper’. Her acid venom makes itself known elsewhere too. Margaret Llewelyn Davies throws parties ‘with semi deaf but wholly obedient ugly women, men with damp hands’; the ‘bug [Cecil] Beaton is scarcely worth squashing’. I could go on.
She is often funniest when she is cruel, or perhaps she is cruellest when making a joke, positioning someone as an outsider and laughing at them. ‘What a snob I am!’ she remarks in a 1936 letter to her nephew Julian Bell. But she was a complicated snob. A previously unpublished pencil draft of a reply to one H G Vincent, private secretary to the prime minister, shows Woolf stumbling to refuse nomination to become a Companion of Honour. Her snobbishness seems slightly sidelined in her tireless work on the case of Robert and Mela Spira, two Jewish-Austrian refugees who escaped to London just before the Anschluss. We see Woolf enlisting the help of both Margot Asquith and the then president of English PEN in petitioning the Home Office to grant the couple the necessary permits to teach German.
It is in letters to her inner circle in particular where we see that familiar slippery writing full of images never quite expected. To Eliot, she compares the sight of Jupiter to ‘a drop of water under a magnifying glass – all writhing worms’ and describes prose (as opposed to poetry) as a ‘mere frivolity one laps up in a second with one’s tongue’. Eliot forwarded some of the letters to his confidante Emily Hale; to one he appended a note about Woolf’s ‘slightly ironic highflown style in writing to her friends’. Roger Fry is also very present in this volume, less as a recipient and more as a subject of letters Woolf sent to his family and friends while working on her biography of him. In one of two new letters to Fry himself, she explains that she generally feels ‘that the tortures of youth are over – as they well may be, at my age. I am interested to watch the young frizzling in that frying pan – poor John Lehmann in the glooms for days because some young man in a black felt hat who looks to me precisely like another wont [sic] go to bed with him.’ The image of youth ‘frizzling in that frying pan’ is surely more than a mere frivolity.
Woolf’s friendships with other writers of her age, including Stella Benson, Lyn Lloyd Irvine and Raymond Mortimer, come to light too. The first letter to Mortimer dates from February 1923, when she asks him to dine with her and her husband, Leonard, or else (you guessed it) come to tea. In the same letter, she offers to send ‘a story (of a kind)’ in case it might be suitable for publication in the New York-based magazine The Dial, to which Mortimer was a contributor. As we can see from one of the letters to Eliot collected here, Woolf had tried to place the story in The Criterion first. In June 1922, she wrote:
Dear Tom,
I should like to write a story called,
‘Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street’
(the title, I suppose, could be changed if necessary.)
The title was not changed, and The Criterion never took it. The story appeared instead in the July 1923 issue of The Dial alongside a review of Jacob’s Room. As Mark Hussey points out in his affectionate and illuminating new book, Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel (Manchester University Press 232pp £18.99), ‘many elements that would reappear in Mrs Dalloway are already in place in the short story.’ Hussey’s book, published last month to coincide with the novel’s centenary, is full of delightful details. The literary hostess Ottoline Morrell had a ‘sealing wax green’ dress which Woolf admired, noting how she ‘did control the room on account of it’. Readers of Mrs Dalloway will remember Clarissa’s own ‘silver-green mermaid’s dress’, which she mends before wearing to her party.
Mortimer and Eliot are in good company in this collection, which includes letters to editors at periodicals and publishing houses, as well as to translators and to authors who might write for her own venture, the Hogarth Press. We see Woolf the businesswoman, Woolf the social butterfly, Woolf the caring friend. Barkway and Clarke have organised their immense haul alphabetically by recipient and, as a result, a narrative of two people growing closer often emerges. For those interested in a particular year, an appendix lists all the letters in chronological order. Each person is introduced with biographical notes that manage to be both thorough and concise. These notes betray the experience of two seasoned researchers; at every moment when it could be useful, the editors offer a reference to a text the interested reader might consult for further information.
At the end of November 1930, Woolf sat down at her typewriter to reply to a request for help from a literary scholar and publisher who was working on a bibliography of Jane Austen’s writings. ‘I am afraid that I am almost entirely ignorant,’ Woolf wrote, recommending E M Forster and some others instead. ‘I suppose that the amount of writing about her, either in introductions or separate articles, is vast, but I feel that she generally slips out of the critics [sic] hands.’ Like Austen, Woolf has been the subject of an unfathomably large pile of criticism, with Winifred Holtby’s study somewhere near the bottom. This meticulously edited book, full of Woolf’s writing at its glistening best, will surely help critics in their attempts to grasp the author.