Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Woolf, who grew up in a literary household, always planned to be a novelist. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished author of the 19th century literati. In fact, Virginia's first letter, written at the age of six, was attached to a brief note of her father's to her godfather, James Russell Lowell. Inscribed all in capitals, it goes...
...DEAR GODPAPA HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE ADIRONDACKS? AND HAVE YOU SEEN LOTS OF WILD BEASTS AND A LOT OF BIRDS IN THEIR NESTS YOU ARE A NAUGHTY MAN NOT TO COME HERE GOOD BYE YOUR AFFECTe VIRGINIA...
...letter to Bell shows, Virginia was uncertain how to deal with men. In his biography, Quentin Bell (Clive's son) goes so far as to say she feared them, tracing this fear back to an incident in her childhood when a Ducksworth cousin abused her sexually. As Nicolson points out in his introduction, that theory seems unlikely in the light of these letters since some of the most convivial ones are addressed to this same Ducksworth. However, it is true that she preferred the company of women to that of men and that she expressed no interest in sex whatsoever...
Instead of a social life, the young Virginia had her books. When she was not reading she was writing, at a peculiar four-foot desk, at which she stood to work, like a painter at an easel. "When I see pen and ink," she wrote to Lady Robert Cecil, "I can't help taking to it, as some people do to gin." This was her exercise and her liberation...
WRITTEN in the pre-telephone age, her letters were, understandably, preoccupied with news, and when there was no news, with gossip. Virginia adored gossip. She was fascinated by the details of existence--the comings, the doings and the goings--and writes about them at length. On one occasion, though, even she finds it tedious: "This is the sort of thing I have to write to you about. There is nothing else...