SearchMy accountHelpBasket0 items

The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

Edited by Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke

Format

£49.99

Pre-order

Published 31 March 2027

About this book

Gathers over 1,400 uncollected and newly discovered letters from Virginia Woolf
  • Includes several substantial series of letters with previously unrecorded correspondents
  • Provides fascinating insights into Woolf’s public and private lives
  • Includes letters to Stella Benson, Rebecca West, Lyn Lloyd Irvine, Berta Ruck and May Sarton, T. S. Eliot and many more
Many previously undiscovered letters from Virginia Woolf have come to light since the original six-volume Collected Letters was published between 1975 and 1980. Over 1,400 are included in this vital new book, illuminating facets of Woolf’s life that have previously been hidden or only glimpsed. Important letters to contemporary writers, such as Stella Benson, Rebecca West, Lyn Lloyd Irvine and Berta Ruck, have been unearthed from archives, as well as fifty letters to T. S. Eliot. This book also features substantial collections of letters to Lady Colefax, Winifred Holtby, Mary Hutchinson, Christabel McLaren (Lady Aberconway) and Raymond Mortimer, as well as previously unrecorded correspondents. Through these letters we see Woolf encouraging would-be authors and negotiating with editors, literary agents and foreign translators in her role as a professional writer. The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf provides extraordinary insight into the variety of acquaintance of one of the most fascinating literary figures of the twentieth century.

Reviews

The extraordinary erudition, care, detail and thoroughness of [the editors'] work is characteristic of much editorial work on Woolf. [...] The Uncollected Letters surpasses almost all of them in the range of people who march through its pages, each of whom is introduced with a detailed biography, substantial contextual material and multiple cross-references. Often the footnotes are more interesting than the letters, especially when those are simply invitations to tea. And, like Woolf’s invitations, these footnotes have personality – something almost unheard of in scholarly editions.

[...] In their painstaking and devoted labours, Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke have rendered Woolf accessible and legible to all of us in letters, notes and postcards that, like the Ramsays’ house in To the Lighthouse, have escaped the engulfing darkness of time.

This beautifully designed, sturdy volume... is a colossal work of breathtaking dedication and remarkable scholarship. [...] In this meticulously curated volume, the letters, and our delight in them, will—with their laughter, intrigues and crackling fires—run on and on.

...this late in the game – when [Woolf's] essays and letters have been collected, diaries published (then republished in spiffy new editions) and fiction prefaced, annotated and afterworded ad nauseam – it is rare to get a scholarship-altering book. Stephen Barkway and the late Stuart N Clarke have produced just such a volume.

[...] This meticulously edited book, full of Woolf’s writing at its glistening best, will surely help critics in their attempts to grasp the author.

The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf is the most significant contribution to Woolf Studies and the Humanities for decades. This is an immaculate critical work, which is also a major social history, edited by two pre-eminent, expert scholars. The Uncollected Letters sets a gold standard for all such editions in the future.
Table of contents

Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Virginia Woolf’s Homes
Editorial Note

Introduction

The Uncollected Letters

Appendix I. Uncollected Letters Listed in Number Order
Appendix II. Additions and Corrections to The Letters Vols 1-6
Appendix III. Additional Letters
Selected Bibliography
Index

About the contributors

Stephen Barkway

Stephen Barkway is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was its Chair from 1998 to 2018. He co-edits, and regularly contributes to, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and in 2018 he gave the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture ‘This Sheet is a Glass’: Virginia Woolf, Woman of Letters.

Stuart N. Clarke

Stuart N. Clarke is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin from 1999 to 2022. As well as contributing almost 300 items to the Bulletin, he edited volumes 5 and 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (2009 and 2011) and transcribed Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993).