Beschreibung:

WOOLF, VIRGINIA. Seven typed letters signed (one "V.", the rest "Virginia"), eight typed letters (all but one with name typed), eight autograph letters signed (one "V.", the rest "Virginia"), one autograph letter, fifteen autograph postcards signed ("Virginia" and initials), and one typed postcard (typed initials) to her nephew Julian Bell in Cambridge, London, China, etc.; virtually all written from 52 Tavistock Square, London, and Monk's House, Rodmell, ca. March 1927 - 14 November 1936. Together 24 letters, 51 pages, 8vo-4to, and 16 postcards, 16 pages, oblong 12mo, the typed letters (mainly 4to) nearly all single-spaced, some with holograph corrections and additions, mostly typed with blue ribbon, some creases, two closed tears in the text of two letters, the autograph letters (mainly 8vo) mostly on blue stationery, one in pencil, two letters wrinkled, a few letters and cards on imprinted stationery. "OLD BLOOMSBURY MAY HAVE MORE BLOOD IN IT THAN YOU THINK" A fine series beginning as letters to a young poet at Cambridge and burgeoning into "things not to be whispered on the typewriter," long "diary" letters (one 6 pages, 1-6 December 1935) full of comments on her own work and reading, discussions of Bell's writings, news and gossip about her family and the literary and artistic worlds and the lives of the Bloomsbury circle. Among the various writers Virginia Woolf refers to or comments on are: her husband Leonard, Empson, Byron, Roy Campbell, T.S. Eliot (a number of times), Spender, Plomer, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Roger Fry (much on her preparatory work for her biography), A.E. Housman, De Quincey, E.M. Forster, Rose Macaulay, Vita Sackville-West Dryden, W.H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Day Lewis, Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth Bowen, Wyndham Lewis Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, and Shakespeare. 17 February 1930: "...Nessa's [Vanessa Bell] show is a great success. Leonard [Woolf] is fabricating the new paper tonight. Mr. [William] Empson came to see us. A raucous youth, but I think rather impressive and as red as a turkey, which I like. I am reading Childe Harold . If Byron had lived to my age he would have been a great novelist. As it is, he is the worst poet..." 13 May [1930]: "...I rather doubt that [Roy Campbell] is much better than a Byronic rhetorician; but people so much want a poet with guts that they cling to him like men in a storm...Tom's [T.S. Eliot] hard boiled egg [ Ash Wednesday ] is hard boiled...all this damnable Mary and Mother and God. Still he can write..." 14 October 1935: "...after you left we had old Tom [Eliot] to stay the weekend; he was urbanity itself, and we had a good deal of old crones talk about people like Middleton Murry, Wyndham Lewis and so on. He's [Eliot] determined to write plays about modern life in verse, and rather crusty when reviewers say he's an old fogy. In fact I think he feels that he's only just beginning to write what he wants...We dined with the Keynses, and Maynard commissioned him [Eliot] to write a play for the new theatre..." 25 October 1935: "...The bother is he [Roger Fry] writes a dull letter for the most part, and then there's a flash of great fun. And his love letters are prolific; he must have had a love every new year; and most of them are foreigners. So I am plodding away, when the light fails, and I can no longer write my long dull novel [ The Years , published 1937]. And now the Stracheys want me to write about Lytton..." 1-6 December 1935: "...We went to Tom's [Eliot] play, the Murder [ in the Cathedral ], last week; and I had almost to carry Leonard out, shrieking. What was odd was how much better it reads than acts; the tightness, chillness, deadness and general worship of the decay and skeleton made one near sickness. The truth is when he has live bodies on the stage his words thin out, and no rhetoric will save them. There we met Stephen Spender, who also was green at the gills with dislike...Stephen is off to Portugal with Isherwood and a friend; two friends