Collected letters
4 total works
In the early 1930s, Virginia Woolf was writing "The Years", as well as "Flush", the second volume of "The Common Reader", and her only play, "Freshwater", while leading an active social and business life in Bloomsbury, and accompanying Leonard on holidays abroad. She made an important new friend in Elizabeth Bowen, and lost two, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, whose deaths affected her deeply. Her growing feminism and concern about the rise of fascism emerge in letters to Vanessa Bell, Ethel Smyth, Vita Sackville-West, and some of the other 70-plus correspondents in this volume, such as Stephen Spender, Ottoline Morrell, Hugh Walpole, and her nephews Julian and Quentin Bell, to whom she wrote many of her merriest letters.
The second volume of Virginia Woolf's "Collected Letters" covers the decade of her thirties, during which she married, published three novels, lived through World War I and two periods of mental illness, and co-founded the Hogarth Press. Joining old friends such as Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes, a new Bloomsbury generation makes its appearance in Virginia's life and letters - T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Duncan Grant - but the two people who share centre stage with Virginia are her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa. Her devotion to Leonard is one of the most touching aspects of this volume, and her closeness to Vanessa reaffirmed by their almost daily correspondence.
Opening soon after Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West and culminating with the publication of "Orlando", this volume of letters covers Bloomsbury's most triumphant period. This was the time when Woolf wrote five of her best-known books, including "Mrs Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse", and whilst she became one of the most famous writers of her generation, many of her friends - Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster - had become equally eminent. The slow evolution of Virginia's affair with Vita is traced through some of her wittiest letters, while her correspondence with her sister Vanessa and other friends reveals a strong sympathy with people beneath her ironic view of life.
Virginia Woolf is 47 at the beginning of this volume, and struggling to complete her masterpiece, "The Waves" - rewriting it three times, interrupted by illness and unwanted visitors. But she continued to meet and correspond with old friends such as Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West and Ottoline Morrell, and made several new ones. The most important of these was the composer Ethel Smyth - over 70, explosively energetic, and openly in love with Virginia - who gradually replaced Vita as her most intimate friend. Virginia's letters to Ethel, in which she discussed frankly her madness, sex, her literary aspirations and even her thoughts of suicide, are among the strongest and most personal she ever wrote.