Word: woolfe
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...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...
...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...
Readers who examine these letters for evidence of Woolf's fits of insanity will be disappointed. There are only the slightest variations in style and tone. Generally the onset of her breakdowns (she had two during the years this volume of her letters covers) was marked by a particular bitchiness in Virginia. As she recovers, her letters are extraordinary for their clarity and maturity. She emerges from each breakdown refreshed, with a new power of vision. After one summer-long madness she writes to Violet...
...present volume of letters ends with her engagement to Leonard Woolf, a name she was at first unable to spell. (In letters to friends announcing her engagement, she calls him Leonard "Wolf.") According to Virginia, Leonard found her writing the best part of her. She repeated gleefully his promise that "if I cease to write when married, I shall be divorced...