This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 3/27/2026
Virginia Woolf typed letter signed, spanning over three pages with her handwritten edits throughout and concluding with a lengthy autograph note in her trademark purple ink. Dated 11 May 1929, Woolf here mentions "the last page of my most hated book", likely referring to "Phases of Fiction" which she was writing at the time; she writes in this letter that it's "dry" and welcomes "this succulent sheet" of letter writing in contrast.
Woolf writes to her nephew, Quentin Claudian Stephen Bell, with more interesting content including the sexual mores of the time. Errors uncorrected, letter reads in part,
''...How you have seduced me by the charm of your language! I have thrown on to the floor the last page of my most hated book--it is dry as a captains biscuti--there is no food even for the weevil in it--and turned to this suuculent sheet. For now thank God I need not say [t]hat I think of fiction and Proust and the future and the new orientation of the human soul...now I can throw myself on to the back of life and grasping hard to the mane fly away and away. Where?...You have a very elementa[r]y notion of the principles which should guide epistolary correspondence; though letter-writing on a typewriter is a mongrel, a mule; a sterile thing, compared with the handwritten letter. I say only what the type writer liks to say. But I might have said things even so that I should not wish the whole population of Cassis to read...''
She continues, ''You admit your trousers have holes in them. Why, at Lewes station you had to be covered with a potato sack in order to save the blushes of a the young women who sell violets. But what was I going to say that is in discreet? Only that I wish Clive would progress beyond love where he has been stationed these ma[n]y years to the next point in the human pilgrimage. One cant kick ones heels there too long. One becomes an impediment. At your age a little talk and hubble-bubble of the kind does very well. One would not wish to cut you off from the society of your sex and mine. But take warning; dont outstay your welcome there. - I mean dont let people say Oh he thinks of nothing but love; oh hes off on that old subject again...Miss Jenkins who is the size and shape of a mouse, piped up in the best tStrachey voice--Lord how that persists!--its echoes will be heard when Pauls Cathedral is tumbling stone from stone: she piped up (forgive this typewritten incogerency) 'But what I am to do if a young man asks me to go to France without saying if he includes copulation?' She said, what seemed odd, that it is now the convention that no young woman can demand a statement of intentions beforehand. She said that Bloomsbury had muddied the pure pool of convention and the young know not one hand from another. nor which is land nor whoch water...''
Woolf writes more of mutual friends, ending with, ''And Monks House is able to be rebuilt. so that you will have a room to sit in and will have to come and stay. An ecclesiastical ornamtment in stone has been found in my field which rpoves......'' Then, in her own hand, she writes, ''here I was interrupted by lunch & am now away from my typewriter & so must stop. Leonard is probably going to drive Julian in the sunshade half way to Cassis: / Mauron & Roger last night [?] Leonard & Oliver & proved beyond a doubt the non-existence of everything but an idea. / So there. / Write, at once. / Yr loving / Virginia''.
Composed on two sheets measuring 8.25'' x 10.625''. Folds, creasing, some chipping and wear. Good plus condition. With receipt from David Schulson Autographs in New York, where it was sold in 1989.