Word: virginia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...TRUE LETTER...should be as a film of wax pressed close to the graving of the mind." So, in 1907, 25-year-old Virginia Stephen--soon to become Virginia Woolf--began her first long letter to Clive Bell, her new brother-in-law. Yet what follows is one of the most awkward, befuddled, pretentious things she ever wrote. Rather than simply telling him she has gotten a telegram, she writes...
...letter, from the newly published first volume of Woolf's massive correspondence (over 3800 letters exist) is a good example of the extent to which Virginia was secure in her literary abilities and insecure in her dealing with people. In these letters one might expect that she would use her skill to express herself more clearly, but, invariably, it is precisely herself that she chooses not to express. She circles all about it, speaking of what she's done, whom she's seen, where she's been; but as to how all this affects her, what she feels--at that...
...went and had tea with Henry James today...[He] fixed me with his staring blank eye--it is like a childs [sic] marble--and said "My dear Virginia, they tell me--they tell me--they tell me--that you--as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild--the descendent I may say of a century--of a century--of quill pens and ink--ink--ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me--ahm m m--that you, that you write in short." This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait...
Clearly these letters do convey a feeling of Virginia's personality, but it is conveyed only indirectly. In the early letter to Clive Bell, for instance, it appears that she has communicated more of herself--her shyness, her insecurity, her distrust of men--than, doubtless, she intends. To see the Virginia Woolf in them, these letters must be read between the lines. What she does not say is often more interesting than what she does...
...PRESENT COLLECTION of letters--edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann--covers the years up to Virginia's marriage to Leonard Woolf. The editors inform us that five more volumes will be published annually from 1975 to reproduce the rest of her correspondence. This first volume is of interest because it covers the years before the Bloomsbury group's heyday and Woolf's major fiction, years which generally receive little attention. It shows that Virginia Woolf was a writer long before Bloomsbury ever came into existence...