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To the Postbox

Zoe Guttenplan: To the Postbox - The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf by Stephen Barkway & Stuart N Clarke (edd)

‘My feeling is that when people are alive, so much personality is bound to creep in, that it is better for the critic to keep aloof as far as possible.’ By the time Holtby’s Virginia Woolf was published in October 1932 it had been pipped to the post by two books, one in German and one in French. But this late in the game – when her 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. Margaret Llewelyn Davies throws parties ‘with semi deaf but wholly obedient ugly women, men with damp hands’; the ‘bug [Cecil] Beaton is scarcely worth squashing’.

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