Beschreibung:

Typed letter signed "Virginia" to "Dearest Quentin" on her recent social engagements and her impressions of those she met. Monks House: 3 December, [1933]. 2pp on a single leaf of blue typing paper (230 x180 mm). With manuscript corrections. Condition: few light fold lines. Matted and framed.
woolf’s famous first impressions on meeting the “portugese jew” isaiah berlin and tea with a drunk eliot. Regarding a visit to Oxford University: “…I like getting these rounded views of contemporary life. I’ve seen a good deal of life, so called, since I wrote… There was the great Isaiah Berlin, a Portugese Jew by the look of him, Oxford’s leading light; a communist, I think, a fire eater…” The above quote, often reproduced is especially telling in light of Leonard Woolf’s Jewish heritage and reflects the often casual snobbery of some in Woolf’s circle and herself. Interestingly, Berlin and Leonard Woolf became quite close. On those in the Bloomsbury circle: “Then we had old Tom Eliot to tea, and sat over the fire and gossiped. He was primed with Clive’s brandy, for he had been lunching till tea time with old brandy with Clive, Rebecca West and Lady Colefax… he was bemused and mellow; and only wanted the W.C… he had been drinking since one thirty… Tom is writing a pageant to be acted at Sadler Wells. The “pageant” Woolf mentions is no doubt The Rock , which was produced the next year at Sadler Wells. Elsewhere Woolf relates a dinner with Roger Fry and his wife and gives general impressions of the undergraduates at Oxford and the conservative views of the warden of New College (“He thinks Winston Churchill a very good painter.”) a woolf letter of great content.