Trained to silence

John Mepham

  • The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. V, 1932-1935 edited by Nigel Nicolson
    Hogarth, 476 pp, £12.50, September 1979, ISBN 0 7012 0469 9
  • Leave the Letters till we’re dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. VI, 1936-41 edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman
    Hogarth, 556 pp, £15.00, September 1980, ISBN 0 7012 0470 2
  • The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. III, 1925-1930 edited by Anne Olivier Bell
    Hogarth, 384 pp, £10.50, March 1980, ISBN 0 7012 0466 4
  • Virginia Woolf by Michael Rosenthal
    Routledge, 270 pp, £7.95, September 1979, ISBN 0 7100 0189 4
  • Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon by Maria DiBattista
    Yale, 252 pp, £11.00, April 1980, ISBN 0 300 02402 9

Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy. ‘I want more – now what is it? – just saying things as they come into one’s head. I cant catch him off his guard. But thats, it may be, because he writes so well.’

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[*] The first two volumes, The Flight of the Mind and The Question of Things Happening, have been published in paperback by Chatto at £3.95 each.

[†] Hogarth Press, 1976.