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Pokrewne dusze Wybór listów
W dorobku pisarskim Virginii Woolf listy stanowią szczególną pozycję. Podobnie jak dziennik, pisała je przez całe życie, często kilka dziennie. Do najbliższych, rodziny, przyjaciół, znajomych. Zachowało się ich ponad cztery tysiące, zarówno w zbiorach publicznych w Anglii i w Stanach Zjednoczonych, jak u osób prywatnych. Po obu stronach Atlantyku zostały wydane w sześciu tomach.
„Pokrewne dusze” to wybór z tego sześciotomowego wydania. Otwiera go dziecinny list do ojca, pisany drukowanymi literami przez sześcioletnią dziewczynkę. Zamyka ostatni, pożegnalny list do męża. Pomiędzy nimi możemy prześledzić całe życie Virginii Woolf, od dzieciństwa, przez lata panieńskie, pierwsze próby pisarskie, małżeństwo, załamanie, pierwszą wojnę, po sukcesy zawodowe i wydawnicze. Możemy przyjrzeć jej się z bliska, może nawet lepiej niż w Dzienniku, bo przecież dziennik pisała dla siebie, a tu spotykamy ją w rozmowie z innymi i widzimy wiele stron jej osobowości, bo inaczej pisze do siostry, inaczej do przyjaciółki z młodości, a jeszcze inaczej do osób, które dopiero poznaje.
„Pokrewne dusze” to wybór z tego sześciotomowego wydania. Otwiera go dziecinny list do ojca, pisany drukowanymi literami przez sześcioletnią dziewczynkę. Zamyka ostatni, pożegnalny list do męża. Pomiędzy nimi możemy prześledzić całe życie Virginii Woolf, od dzieciństwa, przez lata panieńskie, pierwsze próby pisarskie, małżeństwo, załamanie, pierwszą wojnę, po sukcesy zawodowe i wydawnicze. Możemy przyjrzeć jej się z bliska, może nawet lepiej niż w Dzienniku, bo przecież dziennik pisała dla siebie, a tu spotykamy ją w rozmowie z innymi i widzimy wiele stron jej osobowości, bo inaczej pisze do siostry, inaczej do przyjaciółki z młodości, a jeszcze inaczej do osób, które dopiero poznaje.
592 pages, Hardcover
First published March 14, 1990
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1076 people want to read
About the author
Virginia Woolf
1,838 books28.8k followers(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
October 25, 2023
A selection of letters written by Virginia Woolf over her lifetime starting with letters home as a small child interested in chocolate, butterflies and macabre tales of railway accidents. In her letters Woolf displays different aspects of her personality to her various friends and acquaintances. She’s intimate and confiding with her sister Vanessa Bell, flirtatious and demanding with her lover Vita Sackville-West. When talking to her nephew Julian she’s a slightly nervous aunt who’s keen not to appear too out of touch, but firm in her views about writing to authors and editors.
There’s so much insight provided here into Woolf’s everyday life: her surroundings; her routines; her beloved dogs; her continual squabbles with servants; her headaches over building work or unwelcome guests who stay for hours. She could be incredibly demanding and sometimes very cruel about the people she considers not quite her sort: the friend who married someone Woolf finds deathly dull; the hostess whose sanitary napkin was discovered under the dinner table! She talks quite candidly about sex, about women’s bodies, and her own physical and mental state, making it clear just how much couldn’t be openly talked about in the novels of her era – including her own. Her style varies but it’s often witty with piercing phrases and striking imagery.
But I did find it painful to witness the gradual shift in Woolf’s circumstances as time passes: friends and family die or, like Vita, fade away and then in the mid-1930s the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War and fascism in Britain start to take their toll. After recent years with Covid and the many, many bitter conflicts breaking out across the globe, it was much less difficult to understand just how hard the political climate and the outbreak of WW2 was for someone as fragile as Woolf to withstand but even so the final entries including her suicide note were incredibly unsettling to read. This edition comes with a preface by biographer Hermione Lee and a helpful, fairly comprehensive introduction by editor Joanne Trautmann Banks. The letters are broken down into periods of time with brief overviews of events that shaped them. In the middle part of her life Woolf was intensely sociable, and I did have to refresh my memory about some of her lesser-known contacts.
There’s so much insight provided here into Woolf’s everyday life: her surroundings; her routines; her beloved dogs; her continual squabbles with servants; her headaches over building work or unwelcome guests who stay for hours. She could be incredibly demanding and sometimes very cruel about the people she considers not quite her sort: the friend who married someone Woolf finds deathly dull; the hostess whose sanitary napkin was discovered under the dinner table! She talks quite candidly about sex, about women’s bodies, and her own physical and mental state, making it clear just how much couldn’t be openly talked about in the novels of her era – including her own. Her style varies but it’s often witty with piercing phrases and striking imagery.
But I did find it painful to witness the gradual shift in Woolf’s circumstances as time passes: friends and family die or, like Vita, fade away and then in the mid-1930s the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War and fascism in Britain start to take their toll. After recent years with Covid and the many, many bitter conflicts breaking out across the globe, it was much less difficult to understand just how hard the political climate and the outbreak of WW2 was for someone as fragile as Woolf to withstand but even so the final entries including her suicide note were incredibly unsettling to read. This edition comes with a preface by biographer Hermione Lee and a helpful, fairly comprehensive introduction by editor Joanne Trautmann Banks. The letters are broken down into periods of time with brief overviews of events that shaped them. In the middle part of her life Woolf was intensely sociable, and I did have to refresh my memory about some of her lesser-known contacts.
August 15, 2025
I think a great deal of my future, and settle what book I am to write - how I shall -re-form the novel and capture multitudes of things at present fugitive, enclose the whole, and shape infinite strange shapes.
Reading this selection of VW's letters really highlights what a fantastically lively and penetrating writer she was - not just in the ambitious experimentation of her novels and stories but in her everyday expression. This is a relatively short selection but gives a feel for Woolf's life from her earliest scribbles to her parents to her final suicide notes, one sent to Vanessa and one left on her writing desk for Leonard to find.
In some ways, this collection serves as an adjunct to the fragmented pieces of autobiography we have but I think my biggest takeaway is the various sides of Woolf which she shared with different people through her letters - a bit like her The Waves where she suggests the six voices could comprise multiple facets of a single being. So here we have her expressing anxiety as she emerges from her first breakdown, the joy of early life in Bloomsbury and the opening up of her intellectual and emotional horizons. We have bitchy Woolf as she makes snide comments about her friends and acquaintances; we have enraged Woolf as she snootily and sarcastically shoots off letters to the papers or magazines; and we have Woolf the gossip as she shares tittle-tattle and scandal.
But we also have insights into the love she had for her sister, her niece and nephews who become correspondents in their own right as Woolf gets older, her husband and various women friends, not least Vita Sackville-West who moves from friend to lover back to friend with fluid ease. And we get some sense of what her work meant to her: the intellectual tussling that she never really comes to the end of; her vulnerability and humility as she waits eagerly for feedback from friends and public reviews. There's not as much technical talk about her writing as there is in the diaries but the importance of Woolf's engagement with literature is clear.
There are surprises here too: there's almost a glee in the way Woolf writes of taboo subjects, mentioning sanitary towels to male correspondents, for example. And some moments where she writes of her early sexual abuse by her step-brother (though these extracts have been well mined by biographers) and her own sexuality.
There is something hybrid about letters: they're not quite public, not quite private and there's a sense of an audience, possibly beyond the implied reader that makes them differ from, say, diary entries. On finishing this collection - and after having a little weep over the poignancy of the two suicide notes - I'm left thinking of that final luminous line of Mrs Dalloway: 'It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was' - and here, if maybe not fully, if maybe not wholly uncontaminated by performativity and self-consciousness, but still meaningful: here is Virginia.
July 6, 2025
《جان های همدل/نشر خوب》
چه پایان وحشتناکی برای نامههایی که درمورد زندگی روزمره و آثار و هنر و عشق نوشته شدن: دو صفحهی آخر، نامههای خودکشیش بود.
راستش من با سطح توقع بیشتری سمت این کتاب رفتم که شاید یک دلیلش شرکت در نشست ادبی بینظیرش بود که با حضور مترجم خانم قوجلوی عزیز تو اسفند ماه بعد از انتشار کتاب در باغ نگارستان برگزار شد و من خیلی از صحبتهایی که اون روز درمورد ویرجینیا و زندگیش شد لذت بردم، اما راستش نامهها اونقدر هم هیجانانگیز یا مهم نبودن به غیر از مثلا سی چهل تاش که واقعا تفکرات جالب و خوندنیای درش بیان شده بود -در کل بنظرم یادداشتها و خاطرات ویرجینیا باید خیلیی جالب تر باشه(که نمیدونم چرا ترجمه نمیکنننن)- اما اینکه اینها حرفهای روزمرهی "ویرجینیا وولف" بود، احساساتش درمورد خودش و کارهاش و شوخ طبعیش...ایناش بود که شیرین و خوندنیش میکردو نمیذاشت دست از خوندنش بردارم-
و کار دیگهای که میتونستم بکنم اینه که این کتاب رو بذارم یه گوشه و هرچند وقت یکبار یکی از نامههاشو بخونم تا احساس نزدیکیمو به ویرجینیا تمدید کنم اما از اونجایی که اعصابم نمیکشید که کتاب نصفه و طولانی مدت بشه بلعیدمش؛ اما این روش هم پیشنهاد میشه!
هرچند که خیلی وسطش فاصله انداختم اما الان بیشتر از قبل مشتاق مطالعهی آثارش تو تابستونم...خیلی مشتاق!✉️🌾✨️
پن: من ازش فقط رمان سالها -از آخرین و پختهترینرمانهاش- و "اتاقی از آن خود" که تا ابد حق ترین و برجستهترین جستار فمنیسم-ادبی دنیا میمونه رو خوندم تا اینجا.
🔖تیر ۱۴۰۴
چه پایان وحشتناکی برای نامههایی که درمورد زندگی روزمره و آثار و هنر و عشق نوشته شدن: دو صفحهی آخر، نامههای خودکشیش بود.
راستش من با سطح توقع بیشتری سمت این کتاب رفتم که شاید یک دلیلش شرکت در نشست ادبی بینظیرش بود که با حضور مترجم خانم قوجلوی عزیز تو اسفند ماه بعد از انتشار کتاب در باغ نگارستان برگزار شد و من خیلی از صحبتهایی که اون روز درمورد ویرجینیا و زندگیش شد لذت بردم، اما راستش نامهها اونقدر هم هیجانانگیز یا مهم نبودن به غیر از مثلا سی چهل تاش که واقعا تفکرات جالب و خوندنیای درش بیان شده بود -در کل بنظرم یادداشتها و خاطرات ویرجینیا باید خیلیی جالب تر باشه(که نمیدونم چرا ترجمه نمیکنننن)- اما اینکه اینها حرفهای روزمرهی "ویرجینیا وولف" بود، احساساتش درمورد خودش و کارهاش و شوخ طبعیش...ایناش بود که شیرین و خوندنیش میکردو نمیذاشت دست از خوندنش بردارم-
و کار دیگهای که میتونستم بکنم اینه که این کتاب رو بذارم یه گوشه و هرچند وقت یکبار یکی از نامههاشو بخونم تا احساس نزدیکیمو به ویرجینیا تمدید کنم اما از اونجایی که اعصابم نمیکشید که کتاب نصفه و طولانی مدت بشه بلعیدمش؛ اما این روش هم پیشنهاد میشه!
هرچند که خیلی وسطش فاصله انداختم اما الان بیشتر از قبل مشتاق مطالعهی آثارش تو تابستونم...خیلی مشتاق!✉️🌾✨️
پن: من ازش فقط رمان سالها -از آخرین و پختهترینرمانهاش- و "اتاقی از آن خود" که تا ابد حق ترین و برجستهترین جستار فمنیسم-ادبی دنیا میمونه رو خوندم تا اینجا.
🔖تیر ۱۴۰۴
October 6, 2019
«(…) does it strike you that one's friendships are long conversations, perpetually broken off, but always about the same thing with the same person? With Lytton I talk about reading; with Clive about love; with Nessa about people (...) with Vita – well, what do I talk about with Vita? Sometimes we snore–».
Review in English | Reseña en español (abajo)
Selected Letters is a compilation “of the finest and most enjoyable of Virginia Woolf’s letters”, or rather a selection of the more than four thousand letters she wrote in her lifetime. J. Trautmann Banks has selected, compiled and edited the correspondence from the six-volume Hogarth Press’ full edition letters (published in 1989 - The Letters of Virginia Woolf Series), along with new additions and a few uncollected letters, to create the account of Virginia Woolf’s life. In so, this volume displays the biography of Virginia through both private and public letters, from her childhood –the first letters dated from 1888, when she was 6 years-old– to her three suicide notes –the last one to her husband, Leonard:
“I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done. Please believe that (…)”.
I’ve read this volume through the span of two months, savouring every word and reading each letter as if you were coming back to a long-dead friend’s life, recounting every detail, thought and relationships she had during her lifetime. This book is not intended to be a fast reading, neither a detailed biographic narrative or a memoir, but I think it’s an amazing way of getting to know Virginia Woolf better –I think this can be the background, alongside with her Diaries, to have in mind while reading the biographies or detailed studies about her life (whether Quentin Bell’s or others), and also to understand better her own fiction works and essays:
“I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that it’s to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish”.
The main theme she wrote on her letters is life itself: friendships, lovers, literature, religion, politics, her works, and some glimpses to her mental illness. I especially enjoyed the letters to her beloved friend Lytton Strachey, and her lover Vita Sackville-West, but I’m glad I’ve discovered other Virginias: the literary critic, the essayist, the cynical and gossip one, or the maternal one with her nephews and niece.
One of the things that stood out for me about this edition is the detailed footnotes and explanations about her correspondents, friends, and other people mentioned, and also those about the endless references she always made about poetry and English literature (especially Shakespeare) in her letters:
“(…) Did I tell you I’m reading the whole of English literature through? By the time I’ve reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. So I’ve arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade away, and quite forget…”.
To sum up, Selected Letters has been an amazing reading and one that I’m sure I’ll be back from time to time while continue reading her works or her biographies. It has also lead me to new readings and authors –I think it’s wise to complete the picture by reading Selected Diaries and probably a selected correspondence between Virginia and Vita–; and all in all, I’ve come to understand and know Virginia better, and it felt like a long last hug.
«Do we then know nobody? –only our own versions of them, which, as likely as not, are emanations from ourselves»
—————
Selected Letters es una compilación "de las mejores y más agradables cartas de Virginia Woolf", o más bien una selección entre las más de cuatro mil cartas que escribió en su vida. J. Trautmann Banks ha seleccionado, compilado y editado la correspondencia de la edición completa, de seis volúmenes, de Hogarth Press (publicadas en 1989 - The Letters of Virginia Woolf Series), junto con nuevas adiciones y algunas cartas no recogidas allí, para crear una narrativa de la vida de Virginia Woolf. Así, este volumen muestra la biografía de Virginia a través de cartas privadas y públicas, desde su infancia –las primeras cartas datan de 1888, cuando tenía 6 años–, hasta sus tres notas de suicidio, la última para su esposo, Leonard:
"Quiero decirte que me has dado la completa felicidad. Nadie podría haber hecho más que tú. Por favor créelo (…)".
He leído este volumen en el lapso de unos dos meses, saboreando cada palabra y leyendo cada carta como si volviera a la vida de una gran amiga fallecida hace mucho tiempo, contando cada detalle, pensamiento y relación que tuvo durante su vida. Este libro no pretende ser una lectura rápida, ni una narrativa biográfica detallada o una memoria, pero creo que es una forma increíble de conocer mejor a Virginia Woolf: creo que puede servir de trasfondo, junto con sus Diarios, para tener en mente al leer las biografías o los estudios detallados sobre su vida (ya sea la de Quentin Bell u otros), y también para comprender mejor sus trabajos de ficción y ensayos:
"Creo que lo principal en comenzar una novela es sentir, no que puedes escribirla, sino que existe en el otro lado del abismo, que las palabras no pueden cruzar: que se debe atravesar solo en una angustia sin aliento”.
El tema principal que se extrae de sus cartas es la vida en sí misma: amistades, amantes, literatura, religión, política, sus obras y algunas vislumbres de su enfermedad mental. Disfruté especialmente las cartas a su gran amigo Lytton Strachey, y las enviadas a su amante Vita Sackville-West , pero me alegro también de haber descubierto otras Virginias: la crítica literaria, la ensayista, la cínica y cotilla, o la maternal con sus sobrinos y sobrina.
Una de las cosas que más me han gustado sobre esta edición son las notas detalladas al pie de página y las explicaciones sobre sus amigos y otras personas mencionadas, y también sobre las interminables referencias que siempre hizo sobre poesía y literatura inglesa (especialmente Shakespeare) en su cartas:
"(...)¿Te conté que estoy leyendo toda la literatura inglesa? Cuando llegue a Shakespeare, las bombas caerán. Así que he preparado una última escena muy agradable: leyendo a Shakespeare, habiendo olvidado mi máscara de gas, me desvaneceré y olvidaré por completo... ".
En resumen, Selected Letters ha sido una lectura increíble y estoy segura de que volveré de vez en cuando mientras sigo leyendo sus obras u otros estudios sobre su vida y obra. También me alegra que me ha llevado a nuevas lecturas y autores –creo que es aconsejable completar su imagen leyendo Selected Diaries y probablemente una correspondencia seleccionada entre Virginia y Vita, pero esto es por gusto personal–; y en general, he llegado a comprender y conocer mejor a Virginia, y me sentí como en un último gran abrazo con ella.
March 25, 2016
I've been reading this collection of Virginia Woolf's letters for a long time, usually a letter at a time, and it's brought me close to her. She strikes every kind of note: loving, sharp, acute, desperate, funny, gossipy, bitchy, poetic. nostalgic. In many ways her letters are more readable than her novels because with her novels she was trying too hard, too conscious that she was writing a novel. The book begins with letters she wrote as a child and ends with one of her three suicide notes.
I came away with a marvellous collection of quotes:
All we can ever know of ourselves are scraps, spots, and fragments, held in momentary harmony and sympathy.
All good and evil comes from words.
The only thing in the world is music—music and books and one or two pictures.
Too many books have been written already—it’s no use making more.
Let me create you. You have done as much for me.
They were richer beings when they were together.
Letter writing for her was “mere tossing of an omelette.”
I never shall believe, and never have believed, in anything any doctors says…They can guess at what’s the matter, but they can’t put it right.
I am no judge and don’t know from hour to hour whether my gifts are first—second or even tenhth rate. I go from one extreme to another.
If I’m not sure of my brains power I am quite sure of my heart’s power.
I don’t suppose that even the most sensitive author cares what the Guardian says of him—preaching the charities of the parish in the next breath
I don’t think that they [two Cambridge male students] are robust enough to feel very much.
Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.
I never wash, or do my hair, but stride with gigantic strides over the wild moorside, shouting odes of Pindar, as I leap from crag to crag, and exulting in the air which buffets me, and caresses me, like a stern but affectionate parent.
If you must put books on one side and life on t’other, each is a poor and bloodless thing. But my theory is they mix indistinguishably…
Virginia sometimes referred to herself collectively as “the apes.”
A true letter should be as a film of wax pressed close the graving in the mind; but if I followed my own prescription this sheet would be scored with some very tortuous and angular incisions.
A mind that knows not Gibbon knows not morality.
I’m inclined to let her name stand alone on the page. It contains all the beauty of the sky, and the melancholy of the sea, and the laughter of the Dolphins in its circumference…a breathing peace like the respiration of Earth itself.
The women in her first novels were “subtle, sensitive tactful, gracious, delicately perceptive, and perspicacious” whereas the men were “obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude, tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain tyrannical, and stupid.” Comments from Clive Bell
To be 29 and unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer. Virginia Woolf, 1911
My quarrel with marriage is that the pace is so slow, when you are two people.
I’ve never met a writer who didn’t nurse enormous vanity.
Things in London were much the same as usual: a good deal of love, spite, art, gossip, and opera.
Why did you never prepare me for the Scottish dialect, and the melodious voice which makes me laugh whenever I hear it?
One can get within speaking distance of you, which is quite impossible with an ordinary male doctor.
I read [Henry James] and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and just as pale as Walter Lamb.
I feel a rabbit, who’s really a hare, on a lawn with other rabbits, who are really rabbits.
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumbness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
Did you ever read George Eliot? Whatever one may say about the Victorians, there’s no doubt they had twice our—not exactly brains—perhaps hearts. I don’t quite know what it is; but I’m a good deal impressed.
What Virginia thinks Vanessa thinks of Virginia’s life in contrast to hers: “I do think you lead a dull respectable absurd life—lots of money, no children, everything settled: and conventional. Look at me now—only sixpence a year—lovers—Paris—life—love—art—excitement—God! I must be off.”
On the writing of Proust: such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it.
How does one ‘work’ at one’s novel? Well, scribbling journalism is one way, and lunching with Lady Colefax to meet Hugh Walpole, is another.
Life grows steadily more enchanting the fatter one gets. (quoting Roger Fry)
“We [the Hogarth Press] are publishing all of Dr Freud, and I glance at the proof and read how Mr
AB threw a bottle of red ink on the sheets of his marriage bed to excuse his impotence to the housemaid, but threw it in the wrong place, which unhinged his wife’s mind, and it is to this day that she pours claret on the dinner table. We could all go on like that for hours, and yet these Germans thing it proves something—beside their own gull-like imbecility.” Virginia Woolf, 1924
He [Lytton Strachey] says that she [Elizabeth I] wrote to an ambassador: “Had I been crested and not cloven you would not have dared write to me thus.”
You’re abundant in so many ways, and I a mere pea tied to a stick. [To Vita Sackville West]
Our souls are so creased and soured in meaning that we can only unfold them when we are alone.
I slightly distrust or suspect the maternal passion. It is obviously immeasurable and unscrupulous.
I was always sexually cowardly, and never walked over Mountains with Counts as you did, nor plucked all the flowers of life in a bunch as you did. My terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery….And then I married, and my brain went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped final, and not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three--I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself. 1930
But what I want of you is illusion—to make the world dance. 1930
I have three whole days of solitude still—Monday, Thursday, and Friday. The others are packed with this damnable disease of seeing people. Please tell me what psychological necessity makes people wish to “go and see” so and so?
What’s the point of writing if one doesn’t make a fool of oneself?
I should like to die with a complete map of the world in my head.
What do I know of the inner meaning of dreams, I whose life is entirely founded on dreams (yes, I will come to the suicide dream one of these days). Written in 1930, 11 years before she killed herself
What’s the point of writing if one doesn’t make a fool of oneself?
If I call him not a born writer, it’s because he writes too well—takes no risks—doesn’t plunge and stumble and jump at boughs beyond his grasp, as I, to be modest, have done in my day.
“I’m the happiest woman in England,” I said to Leonard yesterday, for no reason, except that we had hot rolls for breakfast and the cat had eaten the chicken.
The general impossibility, which over comes me sometimes, of ANY understanding between two people.
I can’t altogether lay hands on my meaning.
It [grief at the death of Lytton Strachey] is like having the globe of the future perpetually smashed.
What a passion her love was…an elemental passion, unscrupulous, tyrannic, pure. [Of the love of Gwen Raverat for her husband.]
I write in the morning—to boil my year’s pot; but from 4.30 to 1.30 I read. Isn’t that gorgeous? …books: printed, solid, entire: Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes it’s like the other passion—writing—only the wrong side of the carpet. Heaven knows what either amounts to.
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?...doesn’t it break your heart almost to think of me, with this passion, always consumed with the desire to read, chopped, chafed, bugged, battered by the voices, the hands, the faces, the bodily presence of those who are pleased to call themselves my friends?
I want to know all that you are thinking and seeing, and I want to be there, and I want to be there. (To Vita.)
She’s [Vanessa Bell] taken her own line in London life; refuses to be a celebrated painter; buys no clothes; sees whom she likes as she likes; and altogether leads an indomitable, sensible and very sublime existence.
If you notice a dancing light on the water, that’s me. [To Vanessa Bell after the death of Julian her son]
I can’t say what it means to me to come into a room and see you sitting there. [In the same letter as above]
Asking him [T S Eliot] a question is like putting a penny in the slot of the Albert Hall.
I think human beings are fundamentally crushed by a sense of their insignificance.
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In springtime from the cuckoo bird
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides
Wordsworth
Here I cook dinner, so must stop, just, it happens, as a flock of fine feathered ideas perches on my wire.
I think that the art of painting is the art for one’s old age. I respect it more and more. I adore its severity; it’s bareness from impurity. All books are now rank with the slimy seaweed of politics; mouldy and mildewed….Those distorted human characters are to me what the olive tree against the furrowed hill is to you [her painter sister, Vanessa]
The immense reciprocity demanded by civilisation.
Another confused note in the general clamour.
I always think of my books as music before I write them.
I came away with a marvellous collection of quotes:
All we can ever know of ourselves are scraps, spots, and fragments, held in momentary harmony and sympathy.
All good and evil comes from words.
The only thing in the world is music—music and books and one or two pictures.
Too many books have been written already—it’s no use making more.
Let me create you. You have done as much for me.
They were richer beings when they were together.
Letter writing for her was “mere tossing of an omelette.”
I never shall believe, and never have believed, in anything any doctors says…They can guess at what’s the matter, but they can’t put it right.
I am no judge and don’t know from hour to hour whether my gifts are first—second or even tenhth rate. I go from one extreme to another.
If I’m not sure of my brains power I am quite sure of my heart’s power.
I don’t suppose that even the most sensitive author cares what the Guardian says of him—preaching the charities of the parish in the next breath
I don’t think that they [two Cambridge male students] are robust enough to feel very much.
Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it.
I never wash, or do my hair, but stride with gigantic strides over the wild moorside, shouting odes of Pindar, as I leap from crag to crag, and exulting in the air which buffets me, and caresses me, like a stern but affectionate parent.
If you must put books on one side and life on t’other, each is a poor and bloodless thing. But my theory is they mix indistinguishably…
Virginia sometimes referred to herself collectively as “the apes.”
A true letter should be as a film of wax pressed close the graving in the mind; but if I followed my own prescription this sheet would be scored with some very tortuous and angular incisions.
A mind that knows not Gibbon knows not morality.
I’m inclined to let her name stand alone on the page. It contains all the beauty of the sky, and the melancholy of the sea, and the laughter of the Dolphins in its circumference…a breathing peace like the respiration of Earth itself.
The women in her first novels were “subtle, sensitive tactful, gracious, delicately perceptive, and perspicacious” whereas the men were “obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude, tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain tyrannical, and stupid.” Comments from Clive Bell
To be 29 and unmarried—to be a failure—childless—insane too, no writer. Virginia Woolf, 1911
My quarrel with marriage is that the pace is so slow, when you are two people.
I’ve never met a writer who didn’t nurse enormous vanity.
Things in London were much the same as usual: a good deal of love, spite, art, gossip, and opera.
Why did you never prepare me for the Scottish dialect, and the melodious voice which makes me laugh whenever I hear it?
One can get within speaking distance of you, which is quite impossible with an ordinary male doctor.
I read [Henry James] and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and just as pale as Walter Lamb.
I feel a rabbit, who’s really a hare, on a lawn with other rabbits, who are really rabbits.
Of course, literature is the only spiritual and humane career. Even painting tends to dumbness, and music turns people erotic, whereas the more you write the nicer you become.
Did you ever read George Eliot? Whatever one may say about the Victorians, there’s no doubt they had twice our—not exactly brains—perhaps hearts. I don’t quite know what it is; but I’m a good deal impressed.
What Virginia thinks Vanessa thinks of Virginia’s life in contrast to hers: “I do think you lead a dull respectable absurd life—lots of money, no children, everything settled: and conventional. Look at me now—only sixpence a year—lovers—Paris—life—love—art—excitement—God! I must be off.”
On the writing of Proust: such is the astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification that he procures—there’s something sexual in it.
How does one ‘work’ at one’s novel? Well, scribbling journalism is one way, and lunching with Lady Colefax to meet Hugh Walpole, is another.
Life grows steadily more enchanting the fatter one gets. (quoting Roger Fry)
“We [the Hogarth Press] are publishing all of Dr Freud, and I glance at the proof and read how Mr
AB threw a bottle of red ink on the sheets of his marriage bed to excuse his impotence to the housemaid, but threw it in the wrong place, which unhinged his wife’s mind, and it is to this day that she pours claret on the dinner table. We could all go on like that for hours, and yet these Germans thing it proves something—beside their own gull-like imbecility.” Virginia Woolf, 1924
He [Lytton Strachey] says that she [Elizabeth I] wrote to an ambassador: “Had I been crested and not cloven you would not have dared write to me thus.”
You’re abundant in so many ways, and I a mere pea tied to a stick. [To Vita Sackville West]
Our souls are so creased and soured in meaning that we can only unfold them when we are alone.
I slightly distrust or suspect the maternal passion. It is obviously immeasurable and unscrupulous.
I was always sexually cowardly, and never walked over Mountains with Counts as you did, nor plucked all the flowers of life in a bunch as you did. My terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery….And then I married, and my brain went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped final, and not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three--I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself. 1930
But what I want of you is illusion—to make the world dance. 1930
I have three whole days of solitude still—Monday, Thursday, and Friday. The others are packed with this damnable disease of seeing people. Please tell me what psychological necessity makes people wish to “go and see” so and so?
What’s the point of writing if one doesn’t make a fool of oneself?
I should like to die with a complete map of the world in my head.
What do I know of the inner meaning of dreams, I whose life is entirely founded on dreams (yes, I will come to the suicide dream one of these days). Written in 1930, 11 years before she killed herself
What’s the point of writing if one doesn’t make a fool of oneself?
If I call him not a born writer, it’s because he writes too well—takes no risks—doesn’t plunge and stumble and jump at boughs beyond his grasp, as I, to be modest, have done in my day.
“I’m the happiest woman in England,” I said to Leonard yesterday, for no reason, except that we had hot rolls for breakfast and the cat had eaten the chicken.
The general impossibility, which over comes me sometimes, of ANY understanding between two people.
I can’t altogether lay hands on my meaning.
It [grief at the death of Lytton Strachey] is like having the globe of the future perpetually smashed.
What a passion her love was…an elemental passion, unscrupulous, tyrannic, pure. [Of the love of Gwen Raverat for her husband.]
I write in the morning—to boil my year’s pot; but from 4.30 to 1.30 I read. Isn’t that gorgeous? …books: printed, solid, entire: Do you know I get such a passion for reading sometimes it’s like the other passion—writing—only the wrong side of the carpet. Heaven knows what either amounts to.
My own brain is to me the most unaccountable of machinery—always buzzing, humming, soaring, roaring, diving, and then buried in mud. And why? What’s this passion for?...doesn’t it break your heart almost to think of me, with this passion, always consumed with the desire to read, chopped, chafed, bugged, battered by the voices, the hands, the faces, the bodily presence of those who are pleased to call themselves my friends?
I want to know all that you are thinking and seeing, and I want to be there, and I want to be there. (To Vita.)
She’s [Vanessa Bell] taken her own line in London life; refuses to be a celebrated painter; buys no clothes; sees whom she likes as she likes; and altogether leads an indomitable, sensible and very sublime existence.
If you notice a dancing light on the water, that’s me. [To Vanessa Bell after the death of Julian her son]
I can’t say what it means to me to come into a room and see you sitting there. [In the same letter as above]
Asking him [T S Eliot] a question is like putting a penny in the slot of the Albert Hall.
I think human beings are fundamentally crushed by a sense of their insignificance.
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In springtime from the cuckoo bird
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides
Wordsworth
Here I cook dinner, so must stop, just, it happens, as a flock of fine feathered ideas perches on my wire.
I think that the art of painting is the art for one’s old age. I respect it more and more. I adore its severity; it’s bareness from impurity. All books are now rank with the slimy seaweed of politics; mouldy and mildewed….Those distorted human characters are to me what the olive tree against the furrowed hill is to you [her painter sister, Vanessa]
The immense reciprocity demanded by civilisation.
Another confused note in the general clamour.
I always think of my books as music before I write them.
September 21, 2025
This took me about a year, as I read an entry each night before I fell asleep. Pretty astonishing, illuminating and humanizing; that said, what's most infuriating is how the sentences Woolf wrote in her diary are so eloquent and fluid.
e.g.
18 January 1915
The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think.
2 November 1917
But I was glad to come home, and feel my real life coming back again—I mean life here with an L. One’s personality seems to echo out across space, when he’s not there to enclose all one’s vibrations. This is not very intelligently written; but the feeling itself is a strange one—as if marriage were a completing of the instrument, and the sound of one alone penetrates as if it were a violin robbed of its orchestra or piano. A dull wet night, so I shall sleep.
3 November 1918
It's the curse of a writer’s life to want praise so much, and be so cast down by blame, or indifference. The only sensible course is to remember that writing is after all what one does best, that any other work would seem to me a waste of life, that on the whole I get infinite pleasure from it; that to me a waste of life; that I should make one hundred pounds a year, and that some people like what I write.
2 April 1919
I admit I hate not to be liked.
15 September 1931
I have come up here, trembling under the sense of complete failure—I mean The Waves—I mean L. accuses me of sensibility verging on insanity—I mean I am acutely depressed and already feeling rising the hard and horny back of my old friend Fight fight.
31 May 1933
Today it’s a little warmer—tepid meat: a slab of cold mutton. It occurs to me that this stage, my depressed state, is the state in which most people usually are.
15 September 1935
Shall I ever have time enough to write out all that’s in my head? Though suppose what’s in my head becomes sillier and feebler? But why should it?
e.g.
18 January 1915
The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing a future can be, I think.
2 November 1917
But I was glad to come home, and feel my real life coming back again—I mean life here with an L. One’s personality seems to echo out across space, when he’s not there to enclose all one’s vibrations. This is not very intelligently written; but the feeling itself is a strange one—as if marriage were a completing of the instrument, and the sound of one alone penetrates as if it were a violin robbed of its orchestra or piano. A dull wet night, so I shall sleep.
3 November 1918
It's the curse of a writer’s life to want praise so much, and be so cast down by blame, or indifference. The only sensible course is to remember that writing is after all what one does best, that any other work would seem to me a waste of life, that on the whole I get infinite pleasure from it; that to me a waste of life; that I should make one hundred pounds a year, and that some people like what I write.
2 April 1919
I admit I hate not to be liked.
15 September 1931
I have come up here, trembling under the sense of complete failure—I mean The Waves—I mean L. accuses me of sensibility verging on insanity—I mean I am acutely depressed and already feeling rising the hard and horny back of my old friend Fight fight.
31 May 1933
Today it’s a little warmer—tepid meat: a slab of cold mutton. It occurs to me that this stage, my depressed state, is the state in which most people usually are.
15 September 1935
Shall I ever have time enough to write out all that’s in my head? Though suppose what’s in my head becomes sillier and feebler? But why should it?
December 30, 2017
I drank this book slowly for half a year, and what a book it was.
First off, I'd like to say that the many footnotes were crucial to comprehension and very helpful on Joanne Trautman Banks's part, and I thought the letters she chose for this selection were great at serving their purpose of giving us a real picture of Virginia Woolf through her own words.
It was interesting getting to know Virginia as a person; I'm a bit sad to have finished the book because it feels like saying goodbye to a good friend, and of course the last two letters are suicide notes to her sister and husband. I'm glad there are volumes of more letters I could explore if I wished to; Virginia had many friends and correspondents.
It really surprised me how many names I recognized. All the authors of the time seem to have known each other, had controversial opinions on one another. Their connections were very interesting and have made me look into works that seem long forgotten today.
I loved learning of Virginia's jealousies of other writers, her passionate love affairs with men and women, her relationship with her sister and her nephews and her long-winding mental health journey that culminated in her suicide. Her issues with writing, her goals and her own opinions of books that I've read. It was all very intriguing and I feel motivated to read everything she's ever written. Even in letters, her writing is beautiful.
This is, of course, no fault of the book, and I am thankful these negative things were included by the editor—it is ALWAYS very disappointing, though not unexpected, when supposed intellectuals can overcome the prejudice of their own gender, but not prejudices of race (she makes many absurd jokes about Jewish people, even while she married one), class (she mistreats her servants, calls poorer classes stupid and hardly sees them as human), and she's incredibly xenophobic to anyone who isn't British, particularly Americans but reaching other cultures. How hard would it be for a woman with so much going for her to overcome these prejudices of the time? Truly very disappointing to see, over and over again, with favorite authors of older times.
Overall, in spite of my frustrations with Virginia's racism and classism, I greatly enjoyed the novel and getting to know one of the great literary women of history.
First off, I'd like to say that the many footnotes were crucial to comprehension and very helpful on Joanne Trautman Banks's part, and I thought the letters she chose for this selection were great at serving their purpose of giving us a real picture of Virginia Woolf through her own words.
It was interesting getting to know Virginia as a person; I'm a bit sad to have finished the book because it feels like saying goodbye to a good friend, and of course the last two letters are suicide notes to her sister and husband. I'm glad there are volumes of more letters I could explore if I wished to; Virginia had many friends and correspondents.
It really surprised me how many names I recognized. All the authors of the time seem to have known each other, had controversial opinions on one another. Their connections were very interesting and have made me look into works that seem long forgotten today.
I loved learning of Virginia's jealousies of other writers, her passionate love affairs with men and women, her relationship with her sister and her nephews and her long-winding mental health journey that culminated in her suicide. Her issues with writing, her goals and her own opinions of books that I've read. It was all very intriguing and I feel motivated to read everything she's ever written. Even in letters, her writing is beautiful.
This is, of course, no fault of the book, and I am thankful these negative things were included by the editor—it is ALWAYS very disappointing, though not unexpected, when supposed intellectuals can overcome the prejudice of their own gender, but not prejudices of race (she makes many absurd jokes about Jewish people, even while she married one), class (she mistreats her servants, calls poorer classes stupid and hardly sees them as human), and she's incredibly xenophobic to anyone who isn't British, particularly Americans but reaching other cultures. How hard would it be for a woman with so much going for her to overcome these prejudices of the time? Truly very disappointing to see, over and over again, with favorite authors of older times.
Overall, in spite of my frustrations with Virginia's racism and classism, I greatly enjoyed the novel and getting to know one of the great literary women of history.
November 15, 2010
Virginia Woolf was startlingly classist and (sadly, less surprisingly) racist, but so charming, brilliant (and pleasingly aware of it), warmly human. I read this slowly, beginning to end, and felt so upset when I read her last two letters: it was a little like losing a friend.
December 30, 2024
wyjątkowa, jedyna w swoim rodzaju Virginia, jak dobrze było się znowu do niej zbliżyć
July 17, 2022
‘I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way’.
I had an irresistible feeling I saw a gleam in her eye while re-living dearest moments of hers.
It is simply the mirror of her multidimensional soul.
I had an irresistible feeling I saw a gleam in her eye while re-living dearest moments of hers.
It is simply the mirror of her multidimensional soul.
June 23, 2008
Beautifully written letters, with some poignant moments - very pleasant 'reading to sleep' material.
Read
April 24, 2012“When the Day of Judgment dawns and people, great and small, come marching in to receive their heavenly rewards, the Almighty will gaze upon the mere bookworms and say to Peter, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”
July 6, 2025
من همیشه سعی می کنم به آن سوی کلمات بروم.
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هر چه خیر و هر چه شر است زاده ی کلمات است.
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پس ما هیچکس را نمی شناسیم؟ فقط روایت های خودمان را از آن ها می دانیم که احتمالا تجلی خود ما هستند.
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نامه هایت چون مرهمی بر قلب از راه می رسند.
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چرا زندگی بشر چنین آش درهم جوشی را ترکیب می کند و چرا همه ی اتفاقات زندگی آدم به قدری غیرمنطقی است که یک زندگی نامه نویس خوب مجبور است همه ی آن ها را نادیده بگیرد؟
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تو این یک سال گذشته سعی کردم اکثر کتاب های ویرجینیا وولف رو بخونم . اسم این کتاب هم "جان های همدل" است. مجموعه ای از نامه نگاری های وولف که ما را در جریان اتفاقات زندگی او قرار می دهد... چه زندگی هنر و دنیای نویسندگی او و چه در حوزه ی زندگی اجتماعی و عاطفی او... بخصوص با مقدمه ی مفصل و خوبی که در ابتدای کتاب آمده و اینکه نامه ها دسته بندی شده اند و در ابتدای هر فصل و هر دوره از سال های زندگی او مختصری از بیوگرافی وولف هم آمده است.
انقدر روایت های وولف در بیان جزییات زندگی اش، لحظات شادی و غمش، ماجراهای چاپ و نگارش کتاب هایش و ... زیبا بیان شده که خواننده را در طیف وسیعی از احساسات قرار می دهد که برای من که کلا به کتاب های نامه ای علاقه دارم، لذت بخش بود.
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هر چه خیر و هر چه شر است زاده ی کلمات است.
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پس ما هیچکس را نمی شناسیم؟ فقط روایت های خودمان را از آن ها می دانیم که احتمالا تجلی خود ما هستند.
.
نامه هایت چون مرهمی بر قلب از راه می رسند.
.
چرا زندگی بشر چنین آش درهم جوشی را ترکیب می کند و چرا همه ی اتفاقات زندگی آدم به قدری غیرمنطقی است که یک زندگی نامه نویس خوب مجبور است همه ی آن ها را نادیده بگیرد؟
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تو این یک سال گذشته سعی کردم اکثر کتاب های ویرجینیا وولف رو بخونم . اسم این کتاب هم "جان های همدل" است. مجموعه ای از نامه نگاری های وولف که ما را در جریان اتفاقات زندگی او قرار می دهد... چه زندگی هنر و دنیای نویسندگی او و چه در حوزه ی زندگی اجتماعی و عاطفی او... بخصوص با مقدمه ی مفصل و خوبی که در ابتدای کتاب آمده و اینکه نامه ها دسته بندی شده اند و در ابتدای هر فصل و هر دوره از سال های زندگی او مختصری از بیوگرافی وولف هم آمده است.
انقدر روایت های وولف در بیان جزییات زندگی اش، لحظات شادی و غمش، ماجراهای چاپ و نگارش کتاب هایش و ... زیبا بیان شده که خواننده را در طیف وسیعی از احساسات قرار می دهد که برای من که کلا به کتاب های نامه ای علاقه دارم، لذت بخش بود.
May 3, 2018
what a perfectly imperfect character; i'm still amazed by the beautiful way of depicting common moments
February 14, 2021
"Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!" - The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
May 29, 2024
read for my forensics linguistics case study - more analytically read than for enjoyment
July 20, 2024
super!!! bardzo przyjemnie i szybko mi się czytało:)
October 21, 2024
czytałam to chyba z pol roku ale było warto
September 26, 2025
I'm not a fan of her work and also can't relate to her free exceptional Espirit
February 25, 2019
It feels a bit strange to review someone's personal correspondence! Like her diaries, which I read in 2014, these letters are perhaps not vital reading unless you're already a fan of Woolf or interested in the wider Bloomsbury Group. These letters are witty, kind, caustic, gossipy, romantic and at times cruel and at others give insights into Woolf's political views. Her regular correspondents include her sister the artist Vanessa Bell and Vita Sackville-West.
I was struck reading these again just how modern the romantic arrangements of many of Woolf's contemporaries were. The letters also show some of the largest moments in European history pass by as if background noise - although the Second World War does impinge on her later letters. The collection, of course, concludes with her suicide note to Leonard - a sad conclusion to such a varied collection.
I was struck reading these again just how modern the romantic arrangements of many of Woolf's contemporaries were. The letters also show some of the largest moments in European history pass by as if background noise - although the Second World War does impinge on her later letters. The collection, of course, concludes with her suicide note to Leonard - a sad conclusion to such a varied collection.
May 12, 2012
In one of the last letters in this collection, to her friend Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf writes, "Thank God, as you would say, one's fathers left one a taste for reading!" This is a book that surely seconds that notion. The letters present nothing less than a portrait of the development of a personality. One comes away from the book with a feeling of almost having known Mrs. Woolf, or, at the very least, wishing one could have known her.
For all intents and purposes, letter writing is now a lost art. Reading these letters leaves one bemoaning its demise.
For all intents and purposes, letter writing is now a lost art. Reading these letters leaves one bemoaning its demise.
October 18, 2007
Okay, I never finished it, but it wasn't because of a lack of interest. I don't remember what happened. I had never read someone's letters before. I'll just say it was very cool; how's that? The great thing about this book is that you don't really have to read ALL of it to get something from it...but you'll probably want to. I think I will find this one again and finish it.
May 1, 2015
Another fascinating insight in the mind of this remarkable woman. The more I read about her the more I wish I could of met her. The letters cover the whole array of human emotions but the last two are particularly heartbreaking.
March 20, 2011
Superb. Added so much to my understand of the relationship between Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell, the acclaimed Bloomsbury artist. Highly recommend this book!
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