In the interests of consistency, references to the novels are to the Oxford World’s Classics editions. Letters are cited from the Hogarth Press six-volume edition, diaries are cited from the Penguin paperback five-volume edition, and essays from the Hogarth Press six-volume edition, except where otherwise stated. For full bibliographic information please see ‘Suggestions for Further Reading’.
Foreword
1.VW to Violet Dickinson, 7 July 1907.
2.VW to Vanessa Bell [8? June 1911].
3.Ibid.
4.‘Modern Fiction’ (1925) in The Common Reader, 146–54 (150), repr. in Essays IV, 157–65.
5.Diary, 23 February 1926.
1: Victorians 1882–1895
1.‘Old Bloomsbury’ (c. 1922) in Moments of Being, 44.
2.Ibid., 45.
3.‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ (1921) in Moments of Being, 31.
4.As VW remembered the family friend Kitty Lushington having to do. ‘22 Hyde Park Gate’, 32.
5.Between the Acts, 85: ‘Just as she had brewed emotion; she spilt it.’
6.The Waves, 5.
7.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 94.
8.Woolf later wrote an introduction to a collection of Cameron’s photographs: Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women (1926; London: Chatto & Windus, 1996); Edward Burne-Jones, The Annunciation, 1876–9, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool.
9.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 94.
10.Ibid., 118.
11.The Hyde Park Gate News, ed. Gill Lowe (London: Hesperus, 2005).
12.Diane F. Gillespie in The Sisters’ Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1988) gives a fascinating account of their early certainty about this, and the evolving relationship between their work.
13.Jacob’s Room, 75.
14.Leslie Stephen to Mrs Clifford, 25 July 1884, in Frederic William Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906), 384, and quoted in Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 29.
15.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 78.
16.Jacob’s Room, 7.
17.The Waves, 12.
18.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 134.
19.To the Lighthouse, 105.
20.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 103.
21.The Years, 45.
22.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 102.
23.Ibid., 105.
2: Getting Through 1896–1904
1.Notes for ‘Sketch of the Past’, unpublished, quoted Lee, Virginia Woolf, 178.
2.Ibid.
3.Any retrospective diagnosis must be offered with extreme caution. On manic depression, see Thomas C. Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1992). Lee, Virginia Woolf, 175–200, comprehensively lays out the evidence for Woolf’s medical history and weighs alternative interpretations, concluding that we cannot be sure what caused VW’s mental illness: ‘We can only look at what it did to her, and what she did with it’ (199).
4.1897 Journal in Passionate Apprentice, 26.
5.Ibid., 90.
6.Ibid., 114.
7.Ibid., 134.
8.Ibid., 132.
9.Diary, 15 February 1937.
10.Ibid., 1 May 1934.
11.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 82.
12.Louise DeSalvo claims in Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (London: The Women’s Press, 1989) that ‘virtually every male member’ of the ‘pathologically dysfunctional’ Stephen/Duckworth family was involved in child abuse (2). Such a reading depends on wilful exaggeration and guesswork, as does DeSalvo’s assertion of a ‘causal connection’ (109) between this childhood abuse and Woolf’s illness. Caramagno, in Flight of the Mind, responded by emphasizing the biochemical causes and effects of manic depression.
13.‘Reminiscences’ (1908) in Moments of Being, 29.
14.‘22 Hyde Park Gate’ (1921), ibid., 42.
15.E.g. ‘Thoughts on Social Success’ (1903) in Passionate Apprentice, 167.
16.Ibid., 168.
17.Mrs Dalloway, 145.
18.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 140.
19.Warboys Journal (1899) in Passionate Apprentice, 145.
20.VW to Thoby Stephen, 5 November [1901].
21.See, e.g. ‘Rambling round Evelyn’, in The Common Reader, 78–85; repr. in Essays IV, 91–8.
22.‘Retrospect’ (1903) in Passionate Apprentice, 187.
23.VW to Violet Dickinson [September 1902].
24.Published as Sir Leslie Stephen’s Mausoleum Book, ed. Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
25.Diary, 28 November 1928.
26.Frederic William Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London: Duckworth, 1906), 474–7; VW’s contribution repr. in Essays I, 127–30.
27.VW to Madge Vaughan [mid-December 1904].
28.VW to Lady Robert Cecil, 22 December 1904.
29.1904–5 Journal in Passionate Apprentice, 216.
30.VW to Violet Dickinson [early January 1905]. The payment was for two reviews and an essay, ‘Literary Geography’, about a visit to the Brontë parsonage at Haworth.
31.Leslie Stephen to Charles Eliot Norton, 11 March 1883, Maitland, Life and Letters, 337.
32.1905 Journal in Passionate Apprentice, 219.
3: Setting Up 1905–1915
1.‘Old Bloomsbury’ in Moments of Being, 46.
2.VW to Violet Dickinson, 1 October 1905.
3.VW to Violet Dickinson, 16 January 1906.
4.Cornwall Journal (1905) in Passionate Apprentice, 290.
5.Cornwall Journal (1905), ibid., 294.
6.1904–5 Journal, ibid., 276–7.
7.‘Greece 1906’, ibid., 333.
8.VW to Violet Dickinson, 23 December 1906.
9.VW to Violet Dickinson, 22 September 1907.
10.VW to Vanessa Bell [October? 1907].
11.VW to Vanessa Bell, 29 August 1908.
12.VW to Clive Bell, 28 August 1908.
13.VW to Vanessa Bell, 25 December 1909.
14.‘Lady Hester Stanhope’ (1910) in Essays I, 325.
15.VW to Clive Bell, 26 December 1909.
16.VW to Vanessa Bell, 24 June 1910.
17.VW to Vanessa Bell, 28 July 1910.
18.Vanessa Bell, ‘Notes on Bloomsbury’ (1951) in The Bloomsbury Group: A Collection of Memoirs, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (London: Taylor & Francis, 1975), 81.
19.VW to Violet Dickinson, 27 November 1910.
20.VW to Molly MacCarthy [March 1911].
21.The Waves, 44, 171.
22.VW to Violet Dickinson [June? 1906].
23.VW to Vanessa Bell, 10 August 1908.
24.VW to Ottoline Morrell, 9 November 1911.
25.VW to Leonard Woolf, 2 December 1911.
26.VW to Violet Dickinson, 4 June 1912.
27.Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911–1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 57.
28.VW to Leonard Woolf, 1 May 1912.
29.VW to Janet Case, June 1912.
30.VW to Lady Robert Cecil, June 1912.
31.VW to Violet Dickinson, 1 January 1911. An earlier version of the novel has been pieced together from drafts and published as Melymbrosia, ed. Louise DeSalvo (1982; Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press, 2002).
32.The Voyage Out, 245.
33.Ibid., 161.
34.Ibid., 337.
35.Ibid., 341.
36.VW to Leonard Woolf, 4 December 1913.
4: Making a Mark 1916–1922
1.VW to Katherine Cox, 12 February 1916.
2.VW to Ethel Smyth, 16 October 1930.
3.Night and Day, 149.
4.Ibid., 530.
5.Diary, 2 January 1923.
6.VW to Violet Dickinson, 10 April 1917; VW to Lady Robert Cecil, 14 April 1917.
7.‘A Mark on the Wall’ (1917) was published with Leonard’s story ‘Three Jews’ as Two Stories, the first publication by the Hogarth Press. Reprinted in The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001), 3–10.
8.‘An Unwritten Novel’ (1920), repr. ibid., 18–29.
9.Diary, 25 October 1920.
10.Ibid., 20 January 1919.
11.Ibid., 15 February 1919.
12.Ibid., 22 August 1922.
13.VW to Katherine Arnold-Forster, 12 August 1919.
14.Diary, 15 September 1921.
15.VW to Vanessa Bell, 28 June 1916.
16.Diary, 22 November 1917.
17.Ibid., 2 November 1917.
18.VW to Violet Dickinson, 27 November 1919.
19.Diary, 22 March 1921, quoting Psalm 126.
20.Ibid., 18 May 1919.
21.VW to Lytton Strachey, 12 October 1918.
22.Diary, 13 February 1920.
23.Ibid., 8 April 1921.
24.Katherine Mansfield to Virginia Woolf, 24? June 1917, Katherine Mansfield: Selected Letters, ed. Vincent O’Sullivan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 56.
25.Diary, 25 August 1920. Angela Smith in Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), writes of an ‘uncanny doubling’ in their writing. Hermione Lee in Virginia Woolf, 386–401, reads the relationship with Mansfield as one of the most important, complicated and haunting of Woolf’s life.
26.Ibid., 13 March 1921.
27.Ibid., 22 March 1921.
28.Ibid., 23 June 1922.
29.VW to Roger Fry, 6 May 1922.
30.Diary, 16 August 1922.
31.Ibid., 26 September 1920.
32.In response to Arnold Bennett’s Our Women. Diary, 26 September 1920.
33.VW to E. M. Forster, 21 January 1922.
34.Jacob’s Room, 4.
35.Ibid., 36.
36.Ibid., 48.
37.Ibid., 149.
38.Ibid., 245.
39.Diary, 13 November 1922.
5: ‘Drawn on and on’ 1923–1925
1.VW to Gerald Brenan, 25 December 1922.
2.Diary, 29 October 1922.
3.Mrs Dalloway, 4.
4.Diary, 8 October 1922.
5.Ibid., 15 October 1923.
6.Ibid., 15 October 1923.
7.VW to Gerald Brenan, 13 May 1923.
8.VW to Marjorie Joad, 15 February 1925.
9.VW to Gwen Raverat, 1 May 1925.
10.VW to Vanessa Bell, 27 April 1924.
11.Mrs Dalloway, 3.
12.Diary, 5 September 1925; Diary, 17 February 1926.
13.Ibid., 15 September 1924.
14.VW to Vita Sackville-West, 15 September 1924.
15.VW to Jacques Raverat, 26 December 1924.
16.VW to Jacques Raverat, 24 January 1925.
17.Diary, 15 September 1924.
18.The Common Reader, 106–33 and repr. in Essays IV, 118–45: ‘Taylors and Edgeworths’, ‘Laetitia Pilkington’, ‘Miss Ormerod’. Thanks to Woolf and much subsequent scholarship on nineteenth-century women’s lives, Woolf’s subjects are much less obscure today.
19.To the Lighthouse, 42.
20.Diary, 7 January 1923.
21.Ibid., 16 January 1923.
22.Ibid., 5 May 1924.
23.Ibid., 21 June 1924.
24.Ibid., 15 October 1923.
25.Mrs Dalloway, 165.
26.VW to Gwen Raverat, 8 April 1925.
6: ‘This is it’ 1925–1927
1.Manuscript notebook quoted in Lee, Virginia Woolf, 475.
2.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 93.
3.Diary, 28 November 1928.
4.Vanessa Bell to VW, 11 May 1927 in Letters 3, 572 (appendix).
5.VW to Vita Sackville-West, 21 February 1927.
6.Diary, 2 August 1926.
7.Ibid., 14 June 1925.
8.To the Lighthouse, 170.
9.Ibid., 165.
10.Mrs Dalloway, 165.
11.To the Lighthouse, 170.
12.Diary, 27 February 1926.
13.Ibid.
14.To the Lighthouse, 169.
15.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being 85.
7: A Writer’s Holiday 1927–1928
1.In her 1960 preface to Orlando, repr. in The Mulberry Tree, ed. Hermione Lee (1986; London: Vintage, 1999), 131–2.
2.Diary, 14 March 1927.
3.Ibid., 20 September 1927.
4.Ibid., 18 March 1928.
5.To the Lighthouse, 10.
6.Diary, 14 March 1927.
7.VW to Vita Sackville-West, 15 March 1927.
8.Diary, 20 December 1927.
9.Orlando, 82–91.
10.Diary, 21 December 1925; Diary, 23 February 1926.
11.VW to Vita Sackville-West, 5 February 1927.
12.Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicolson, 17 August 1926, in Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, ed. Nigel Nicolson (East Rutherford, NJ: Putnam, 1992), 159.
13.VW to Vita Sackville-West, 23 March 1927.
14.Orlando, 114.
15.See Vita Sackville-West’s family history Pepita (London: Hogarth Press, 1937).
16.VW to Gerald Brenan, 1 December 1923.
17.A Room of One’s Own, 104.
18.Diary, 20 September 1927.
8: Voices 1929–1932
1.The Waves, 234.
2.Vanessa Bell to VW, 3 May 1927 in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (London: Bloomsbury, 1993).
3.Diary, 23 June 1929.
4.VW to G. L. Dickinson, 27 October 1931.
5.The Waves, 176; see. Diary 16 February 1932, ‘by way of proving my credentials’.
6.Mrs Dalloway, 7.
7.VW to Ethel Smyth, 28 August 1930.
8.Nigel Nicolson in Recollections of Virginia Woolf, ed. Joan Russell Noble (1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 156.
9.Diary, 26 December 1929.
10.Ibid., 25 September 1929.
11.Ibid., 26 January 1930.
12.Ibid., 7 November 1928.
13.Ibid., 28 March 1930.
14.Ibid., 9 April 1930.
15.VW to Violet Dickinson, 7 July 1907.
16.Diary, 7 January 1931.
17.Ibid., 16 September 1929.
18.Ibid., 16 February 1930; ibid., 8 September 1930.
19.Ibid., 7 February 1931.
20.Ibid., 21 February 1930.
21.VW to Ethel Smyth, 27 February 1930.
22.Diary, 21 February 1930.
23.VW to Ethel Smyth, 18 June 1932.
24.VW to Vita Sackville-West, 4 August 1931.
25.Diary, 20 August 1930.
26.VW to Vita Sackville-West, 6 November 1930.
27.VW to Ethel Smyth, 15 August 1930.
28.‘The Novels of Thomas Hardy’, in The Common Reader II, 245–57 (246), repr. in Essays IV, 561–71.
29.Ibid., 250.
30.VW to Ethel Smyth, 29 December 1931.
31.VW to Hugh Walpole, 16 July 1930.
32.VW to Ethel Smyth, 2 August 1930.
33.VW to the editor of the New Statesman, 28 October 1933.
9: The Argument of Art 1932–1938
1.Diary, 25 April 1933.
2.Ibid.
3.Ibid., 13 September 1935: ‘The difficulty is always at the beginning of chapters or sections where a whole new mood has to be caught plumb in the centre.’
4.Ibid., 31 May 1933. Woolf’s draft of this ‘novel-essay’ has been published and offers a glimpse of Woolf at work in the 1930s. See The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York, NY: New York Public Library, 1977).
5.See Diary, 16 August 1933 and her essay ‘The Novels of Turgenev’ (1933), repr. in Essays VI, 8–17: ‘few combine the fact and the vision, and the rare quality that we find in Turgenev is the result of this double process’ (11).
6.Diary, 19 December 1932.
7.Ibid., 2 November 1932.
8.For a helpful and nuanced discussion, see Maren Linett, ‘The Jew in the Bath’, Modern Fiction Studies 48:2 (2002), 341–61. On prejudice and offensiveness more generally, see Hermione Lee, ‘Virginia Woolf and Offence’, in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. John Batchelor (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994).
9.For a detailed account, see Alison Light, Mrs Woolf and the Servants (London: Fig Tree, 2007).
10.Diary, 2 September 1934.
11.Ibid., 12 September 1934.
12.VW to Ethel Smyth, 11 September 1934.
13.Diary, 19 January 1935.
14.Ibid., 29 October 1933.
15.Ibid., 17 July 1935.
16.Ibid., 15 October 1935.
17.Ibid., 29 December 1935.
18.Ibid., 3 January 1936.
19.Ibid., 5 November 1936.
20.Ibid., 30 November 1936.
21.Ibid., 29 December 1935.
22.The Years, 389, 401.
23.Ibid., 351.
24.Ibid., 413.
25.Diary, 15 May 1940.
26.VW to Julian Bell, 28 June 1936.
27.Diary, 12 October 1937.
28.Ibid., 22 October 1937.
29.Ibid., 12 October 1937.
30.The Years, 371.
10: Sussex 1938–1941
1.Diary, 13 September 1938.
2.Ibid., 14 September 1938.
3.VW to Ethel Smyth, 29 August 1938.
4.Diary, 22 June 1940.
5.Ibid., 25 July 1940.
6.Ibid., 29 June 1939, 11 December 1938, 23 June 1939.
7.Roger Fry, 150, 161.
8.Ibid., 104.
9.Ibid., 202.
10.Diary, 28 August 1939.
11.Ibid., 3 September 1922.
12.Between the Acts, 5, 62.
13.Diary, 9 June 1940.
14.Between the Acts, 107.
15.Ibid., 114–15.
16.Diary, 12 July 1940.
17.Ibid., 16 August 1940.
18.Ibid., 20 October 1940.
19.Ibid.
20.Ibid., 28 August 1940.
21.Ibid., 22 June 1940.
22.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 108.
23.Ibid., 116.
24.Ibid., 146–7.
25.Ibid., 159.
26.Ibid., 154.
27.Between the Acts, 189.
28.Diary, 14 October 1938.
29.The notes and drafts are published with extensive commentary as ‘“Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’, ed. Brenda Silver, Twentieth Century Literature, 25 (1979), 356–441 and repr. Essays VI, 580–607.
30.Diary, 24 December 1940.
31.Hermione Lee identifies ‘egotism’ as ‘one of Woolf’s most important words’: see Virginia Woolf, 5–7, 17–18, 72, and on its opposite, anonymity, 745–67.
32.‘Sketch of the Past’ in Moments of Being, 149.
33.VW to Ethel Smyth, 1 February 1941.
34.Diary, 26 January 1941.
35.VW to Leonard Woolf [28 March 1941].
36.VW to Vanessa Bell [23? March 1941].
37.These letters, many of them eloquent and moving tributes to VW, are published as Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf, ed. Sybil Oldfield (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press, 2005).
38.The Waves, 44; Mrs Dalloway, 103 (also 20, 50, 57).
Afterwards
1.VW to Leonard Woolf [28 March 1941].
2.Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters, ed. James Strachey and Leonard Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956); The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (London: Hutchinson, 1984).
3.Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches, ed. David Bradshaw (London: Hesperus, 2003). This journal dates from 1909. It seems probable that VW kept other journals in the immediate pre-war period; something more may come to light.
4.Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), 186.
5.Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987).
6.DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work.
7.Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984).
8.The story of Woolf’s posthumous reputation is told by Regina Marler in Bloomsbury Pie (London: Virago, 1998).
9.On the iconography of the Beresford photographs, see Lee, Virginia Woolf, 246, and Brenda Silver, Virginia Woolf: Icon (Chicago, IL: Chicago Univ. Press, 1999), 130.
10.Recollections of Virginia Woolf, 237.
11.Ibid., 62.
12.Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 2006).
13.See Hermione Lee, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Nose’, in Body Parts: Essays on Life Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005), 28–44.
14.Waves, dir. Katie Mitchell, premiered at the National Theatre, London, 18 November 2006.
15.‘The Art of Biography’ (1939) in Essays VI, 186.
16.Light, Virginia Woolf and the Servants; Victoria Glendinning, Leonard Woolf (London: Simon & Schuster, 2006).
17.Olivia Laing, To the River: A Journey beneath the Surface (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2011).
18.Diary, 22 September 1931.