[Vwoolf] Copy of email to the National Portrait Gallery

[Sarah M. Hall]

 This is the most common Woolf misquotation, it seems. Googling just now gave 51,600 results for the fake and 5,190 for the real one. It looks as though truth is a casualty not just of war*, but of the soundbite.




*Which itself is a contested quotation; see https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-21510,00.html. Some think the original of this is Samuel Johnson's 'Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.' But you may prefer to believe that Aeschylus had already come up with a snappier version.





    On Tuesday, 26 June 2018, 07:44:42 BST, Stuart N. Clarke via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:  
 
 ‘I note that you are selling a fridge magnet in your shop with a madey-uppy quotation from Virginia Woolf: "For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."  The closest quotation to this unequivocal statement is "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." ("A Room of One's Own", Hogarth Press 1929, p. 74).’ Stuart_______________________________________________
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