Beschreibung:

WOOLF, VIRGINIA. Typed letter signed ("Virginia") to her nephew Quentin Bell 52 Tavistock Square, London, 21 December 1933. 2 pages, 4to, about 400 words on both sides of the same sheet, double-spaced, a blank corner slightly wrinkled, with light autograph corrections. "SPENDER...WILL PAN OUT IN YEARS TO COME A PRODIGIOUS BORE" A fine Bloomsbury letter with acerbic comments on the homosexuality of some of London's leading literary lights. "This is a black foggy Christmas week; and the human race is distracted and unlovable...Stephen Spender and Miss [Sylvia] Lynd...dined here last night. She is dusky, twilit, silent, secretive. He on the other hand talks incessantly and will pan out in years to come a prodigious bore. But he's a nice poetic youth; big nosed, bright eyed, like a giant thrush. The worst of being a poet is one must be a genius; and so he cant talk long without bringing in the abilities and disabilities of great poets; Yeats has praised him...He is writing about Henry James and has tea alone with [Lady] Ottoline [Morrell] and is married to a Sergeant in the Guards. They [Spender and the guardsman] have set up a new quarter in Maida Vale; I propose to call them the Lilies of the Valley. Theres William Plomer, with his policeman; then Stephen; the [W.H.] Auden and Joe Ackerley, all lodged in Maida Vale, and wearing different coloured Lilies. Their great sorrow at the moment is Siegfreid Sasson's defection; he's gone and married a woman, and says -- Rosamond [Lehmann] showed me his letter -- that he has never till now known what love meant. It is the saving of life he says; and this greatly worries the Lilies of the Valley among whom is Morgan [E.M. Forster] of course, who loves a crippled bootmaker; why this passion for the porter, the policemand and the bootmaker..." Woolf ends by describing her first meeting with the painter Walter Sickert -- about whose work she was soon to write a critical appreciation -- at a party given by Clive Bell. Letters , vol. 5, no. 2837.