Virginia Woolf, famed early-20th century novelist who penned works such as the feminist "A Room of One's Own" (1929) and the witty "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925) has released a new book, more than 80 years after her death.
Three interwoven short stories by Woolf that had previously gone mostly unnoticed have been edited and published by Urmila Seshagiri, a professor of English at the University of Tennessee.
The stories, collectively published under the title, "The Life of Violet," are a fictionalized biography written by Woolf about the life of one of her closest friends – Violet Dickinson – eight years before her first published novel.
"We see the origin of so much that we know so well from two decades later," Seshagiri said. "We can really mark a starting point that we weren't able to see as clearly before."
A rough draft of these writings under the working-title, "Friendships Gallery" has long been held at the New York Public Library. For decades, they were dismissed as crude, however.
"It seemed like something she just wrote very quickly and sent to her friend, and that was the end of it," Seshagiri said.
The professor said she stumbled upon this new edition almost entirely by accident, while looking for a different document. She reached out to a private collection in southern England – Longleat House – in 2018.
"And I wrote to them, and I said, 'do you have this document by Violet Dickinson?' And they said, 'yes, we do, and we assume you're also interested in Friendships' Gallery by Virginia Woolf.' And I said, 'well, I'm assuming you are talking about a copy of the Friendships' Gallery in the New York Public Library.' And they said, 'no, we don't know anything about an item in the New York Public Library. We have a friendships gallery by Virginia Woolf, and it's an original piece of work by her with her handwriting on it.'"
Intrigued, Seshagiri began making plans to visit England and inspect the writings herself. These were interrupted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, however. It wasn't until 2022 that she managed to make the trip. She didn't regret it.
"When I reached the last page of the last story, then I knew, yes, I have found something whose existence is unknown to readers of Woolf to wolf scholars," Seshagiri said. "And this matters, and I want people to read these stories."
The pages at Longleat House were heavily revised and professionally typed, with handwritten notes left by Woolf in the margins. The narratives were clearer and more coherent. Perhaps most importantly, they gave scholars such as Anne Fernald, a professor of English at Fordham University, a new glimpse into the world of Woolf's early life.
"The way that they reshape our understanding of Woolf's career is pretty tectonic," Fernald said. "I mean, I think it's pretty massive."
Fernald has been a Woolf scholar for decades, most recently serving as the editor of the "Oxford Handbook of Virginia Woolf" in 2021. She says she's ashamed to admit she overlooked the significance of "Friendships Gallery" for so long.
"I'd never looked it up," Fernald said. "Because I assumed that these are minor juvenilia, and I'm working on other stuff, and they're not going to be relevant to me."
Now that the stories have been unearthed by Seshagiri and given new life in "The Life of Violet," Fernald says they change the way readers and researchers think of Woolf's early life. For decades, it was assumed she didn't begin writing with intention to publish until several years later, when she began work on her first published novel "The Voyage Out" (1915).
"It's not just that Woolf was writing fiction in 1907, it's that she revised it, she had it professionally typed, she sent it to her friend," Fernald said. "She was taking herself seriously much earlier than we thought."
The three stories of the collection each deal in themes that Woolf would explore in her later works. They examine the unique life of Violet Dickinson, and what it means to be an aristocratic woman living alone in Victorian England. One passage in the second story plants the seeds for what would become one of Woolf's most famous works.
"She's talking to a friend, and she says, '…it would be very nice to have a cottage of one's own,'" Fernald reads. "And there you have 'A Room of One's Own,' right there in 1907."
And the stories are funny. Seshagiri says readers of Woolf's later work – known for its darker, depressive themes – might be surprised to find this one imaginative, lighthearted and absurd.
"There are no villains," Seshagiri said. "There are no conventional divisions between good and bad or right and wrong. There are no punishments. It's just a wonderful playground for imagining what might happen if women were allowed to do whatever they wanted to do."
Seshagiri adds she hopes these stories can be a gateway for readers – old and new – to understanding who Virginia Woolf and her dear friend, Violet Dickinson, truly were.
"I hope that readers enjoy them and take their own opinions away from them and decide what these small, well formed early stories teach us about what Woolf was doing in writing the life of violet," she said.
"The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories," written in 1907 by Virginia Woolf and edited today by Urmila Seshagiri, is available now from the Princeton University Press.
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