Virginia Woolf left in her wake a trove of correspondence – words full of generosity and friendship, maliciousness and enmity. Imbued with the finest intelligence, an insatiable curiosity and a gift of observation; her letters are long and short and distant and near. They are self-deprecating and scattered with her conceits, and her prejudices; they sparkle with her (sometimes scathing) wit and (often wicked) good cheer; and lurking always, a sadness and despair rarely explicitly divulged in her correspondence, and when, only to her near and dear. (Now, her diary; that is another story! There she gets down and dirty, or just goes to darker places deep in the recesses of her inner-self.) Written to Woolf’s fabulous coterie of family and friends, to the famous and not so and about the famous and not so. Words that fill in gaps, explain context, display her gift for friendship, add another dimension to the diary, to the legends that surround her, to her extraordinary literary legacy.
Virginia Woolf’s letters were collected (about two-thirds from the Berg Collection in New York and the University of Sussex library – now a public archive – and the remainder from individuals or other institutions) and edited by Nigel Nicolson (the son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West) by invitation of the then copyright holders, and published in six volumes between 1975 and 1980.
It is worth noting that because Volume One and earlier portions of Volume Two predate the years covered in her diary, they can be read and savored as being amongst the rare first person accounts from Woolf’s youthful years. And what years they were!
Following are bibliographic details and links to editions held in the Internet Archive; some available to be borrowed for 14 days others only available for periods of one hour but irrespective provide for a very worthwhile browsing experiences that I often return to. With the exception of Volume Four (for which only the UK edition appears available as I write), I have provided links to both the US editions from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and underneath in italics those from The Hogarth Press series, and these latter with their published titles – a nice marketing touch in my opinion.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-1980.
The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson, Assistant Editor Joanne Trautmann Banks. 6 volumes. London: The Hogarth Press, 1975-1980.
- The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume One 1888-1912
- The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume Two 1912-1922
- The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume Three 1923-1928
- The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume Four 1929-1931
- The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume Five 1932-1935
- The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume Six 1936-1941
These collected letters provide yet another testimony to this writer’s life; to that of a woman born in 1882 into a privileged intellectual milieu and seemingly destined to be corseted by the rigid social structures demanded of her sex. But, inspired by the new modernity that came with the new century, she dared flaunt convention and expectation, and armed with her fierce intelligence and creative talent, and despite physical and mental duress, bravely carved out for herself a most brilliant niche in British literary history – a place of her own that was to make Virginia Woolf famous in her own time, and legendary in ours.
Eudora Welty on The Letters: Volume 2
In 1976, The New York Times published a review (archived – NYT subscription required) by the great Eudora Welty; writing about Volume Two of the letters in particular, but, by extension and more generally, very well encapsulating the spirit of the letter writer Virginia Woolf.