[Vwoolf] Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

[Stuart N. Clarke]

Apropos of the message below, it is particularly humiliating that we are not able to track down the Archives of Harcourt, Brace.  Can anybody help?  What with the takeovers and the dividings up, where the Archives now are is a mystery to us.  (B. J. Kirkpatrick said that she used to correspond with a very helpful woman in NYC in the 1950s to the 1980s.  I corresponded with a less-helpful woman in Orlando, FL, in the 1990s.)

At present we have about sixteen (some not complete) letters, most of them taken from the intros. to the Shakespeare Head edns of “To the Lighthouse” and “Night and Day”, and from Edward L. Bishop, ‘Mind the Gap: The Spaces in Jacob’s Room’, WSA 10 (2004).

Joanne Trautmann wrote:


“About 20 letters from VW to her American publishers, Harcourt, Brace (mostly addressed to Donald Brace) are preserved in the offices of Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, New York. They are of no special interest[!], but reached the Editors too late for inclusion in the published volumes.”


Stuart

From: sbarkway at btinternet.com 
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2023 10:24 PM
To: vwoolf at lists.osu.edu 
Cc: Stuart.N.Clarke at btinternet.com 
Subject: Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

As some of you will know, Stuart Clarke and Stephen Barkway are searching for letters from Virginia Woolf that did not make it into the six-volume collection of her letters (Hogarth Press/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975-80).  These additional letters will be published by Edinburgh University Press.  We’re hoping to have almost finished by the end of the year, and to submit the ‘manuscript’ next summer.  We have been allowed to include the ‘new’ letters in ‘Congenial Spirits’.  The book will be a substantial tome.

 

If any of you have any such letters, or copies of them, or know where they are, then we should love to hear from you.

 

Many of the letters have been published in whole or in part, in auction catalogues, books and articles (e.g. ‘Some [Nineteen] New Woolf Letters’, ed. Joanne Trautmann Banks, Modern Fiction Studies 30:2 (Summer 1984): 175–202; in the Virginia Woolf Miscellany (43 & 55); Woolf Studies Annual (1, 7 & 8) and almost every issue of the ‘Virginia Woolf Bulletin’), but of course we are hunting for copies of the originals.

 

We have checked all the institutions with substantial Woolf holdings, those who are mentioned as owners in the six volumes, and those listed in the annual ‘Woolf Studies Annual’ under ‘Guide to Library Special Collections.  There may be obscure (from a Woolfian point of view) institutions that have the odd letter and that we are not aware of.  For example, if it had not been for Beth Rigel Daugherty, we probably would not have known that Penn State University holds a letter.

 

We are frustrated that we have by no means managed to track down all the letters on the two lists of ‘too lates’ (1980; available on the VW CD-ROM, Berg M43 (search for "Nigel")) and ‘too too lates’ (1984), compiled by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.  For example, what happened to the letters owned by Roger Fry’s daughter, Pamela Diamand?

 

We realise that the minute the book goes to press, another letter or letters will pop up, but we are seeking help from you, in the hope that there will not be too many.

 

Stephen and Stuart

 

stuart.n.clarke at btinternet.com

sbarkway at btinternet.com

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/vwoolf/attachments/20230917/ddca7af2/attachment-0001.html>