{"id":34080,"date":"2025-09-21T00:34:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-21T00:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/34080\/"},"modified":"2025-09-21T00:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T00:34:07","slug":"the-story-behind-virginia-woolfs-lost-book-it-was-magical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/34080\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind Virginia Woolf\u2019s lost book: \u2018It was magical\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 80 years after her death, a new book by Virginia Woolf will be published next month after the manuscript was discovered in a stately home.<\/p>\n

Scholars say the book, a collection of three comic stories about a giantess named Violet, is the first significant literary experiment that Woolf completed, at the age of 25, eight years before the publication for her first novel, The Voyage Out.<\/p>\n

The Life of Violet, a tribute to her friend and mentor Violet Mary Dickinson, was written in 1907 from the perspective of an inept male biographer and anticipates the feminist themes of her later masterpieces. <\/p>\n

Professor Urmila Seshagiri stumbled across the manuscript in Longleat House in Wiltshire while researching Woolf\u2019s memoir, A Sketch of the Past. \u201cI followed the archivist up this magnificent wooden staircase, hung with ancestral portraits, into a reading room,\u201d she said. \u201cShe handed me a cream-coloured box and when I lifted the lid, there was this typescript, in a saffron binding, by Virginia Woolf.\u201d<\/p>\n

As she read, the room seemed to \u201cdissolve\u201d around her: \u201cIt was magical.\u201d Dickinson\u2019s papers are at Longleat, the seat of the 7th Marquess of Bath<\/a>, because both his great-aunts were lifelong friends of Woolf\u2019s.<\/p>\n

The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain described the discovery of the \u201chighly significant\u201d manuscript as a potential goldmine for scholars of the author of Mrs Dalloway and A Room of One\u2019s Own. <\/p>\n

The interconnected stories in The Life of Violet blend comedy, satire and fantasy, celebrating a heroine who triumphs over sea monsters and stifling social traditions alike with powers \u201cas marvellous as her height\u201d. Dickinson was 6ft 2in.<\/p>\n

In one scene, Woolf\u2019s acquaintance Kitty Maxse, the likely inspiration for the character of Clarissa Dalloway, makes a thinly disguised appearance, complaining about feeling wretched, useless and forgotten by her friends. <\/p>\n

Elsewhere, Violet and a friend talk about how \u201cit would be very nice \u2026 to have a cottage of one\u2019s own\u201d, foreshadowing Woolf\u2019s seminal essay A Room of One\u2019s Own.<\/p>\n

Seshagiri thinks the book will help to counter \u201cstubborn misconceptions\u201d of Woolf, who died by suicide in 1941, as a \u201cgloomy, suicidal and dark\u201d writer. \u201cShe was a vibrant, brilliant, social person whose sense of humour radiates through these stories, and who wrote in her novels all the way through to her death with an awareness of the absurdity of life,\u201d she said. <\/p>\n

Previously, Woolf scholars knew only of a \u201cquite messy\u201d draft of the Violet stories in the New York Public Library, which were dismissed as a \u201cperipheral\u201d work that Woolf had dashed off, \u201cscribbled over\u201d and abandoned, Seshagiri said.<\/p>\n

The Longleat typescript shows that Woolf edited, polished and finished this version, which will be published by Princeton University Press on October 7.<\/p>\n

\"Illustration<\/p>\n

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS<\/p>\n

Its discovery reveals Woolf \u201ctook the trio of stories seriously as a work of art, a piece of literature, and devoted time and creative focus to perfecting it\u201d, said Seshagiri, who teaches English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. \u201cSeeing the evidence of that labour, which was immediately apparent from the first page, was absolutely stunning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Life of Violet is the longest work of fiction, with multiple chapters, that Woolf attempted at this point in her life, when she was mainly writing essays and reviews. \u201cIt jumps out as a more complex, more polished work than any other attempt at fiction,\u201d Seshagiri said.<\/p>\n

She added that the book showed how young Woolf was when she realised that in order to break new boundaries in fiction she would have to reimagine the terms of women\u2019s lives. \u201cDickinson\u2019s life didn\u2019t fit into existing stories that were available for women,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Dickinson, who was 17 years older than Woolf, had been a friend of her older half-sister Stella, who died when Woolf was 15. Their mother, Julia, had died two years previously, in 1895. <\/p>\n

When her father, Leslie, died in 1904, and Woolf attempted suicide shortly afterwards, Dickinson invited her to recuperate in her cottage in Welwyn, Hertfordshire, the setting for one of the stories in the new book. Dickinson also introduced Woolf to her first editor. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt was Dickinson who is responsible for the beginning of Woolf\u2019s career as a published writer,\u201d Seshagiri said. \u201cShe received all these letters from Woolf and she saw her talent, her capacious intelligence, her vast knowledge, her comic genius. She praised Virginia to other people and was a supportive reader and mentor for this young woman who wasn\u2019t sure, in her early twenties, she was going to be a professional writer.\u201d<\/p>\n

She said the book heralded Woolf\u2019s ambitions to revolutionise fiction by upending the marriage plot, rejecting the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrating women\u2019s friendships and the subversive power of laughter. <\/p>\n

Professor Maggie Humm, vice-chair of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, said the book would change how we think about Woolf\u2019s stories. \u201cIt shows Woolf becoming a fiction writer much earlier than perhaps other people might have realised,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Humm hopes Dickinson will receive more attention from scholars after the book is published, adding: \u201cThe stories are highly significant because they show the relationship with Violet Dickinson to have been very important to Woolf creatively, stimulating her writing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 80 years after her death, a new book by Virginia Woolf will be published next month…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34081,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-34080","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}