Newly Digitized Virginia Woolf Manuscripts Available Online

King’s College London is the new institutional home for WoolfNotes, where it will be steered by Woolf scholars, Clara Jones and Anna Snaith. Spearheaded by scholars Michèle Barrett and Brenda Silver, and technical director Gilly Furse, WoolfNotes is a major digital humanities project that brings into the public domain Woolf’s last remaining substantial unpublished work: her reading and research notes. Her personal reading and research notebooks demonstrate the depth of her historical knowledge and the wide range of her reading, casting new light on both her fiction and critical work. WoolfNotes presents high specification images of approximately 7,000 manuscript and typescript pages from the archives of the Monks House Papers in Sussex (UK), the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library, the Beinecke Library at Yale and the Smith College Special Collections, with the support of the Woolf Estate (managed by the Society of Authors). The open access availability of these materials, evidencing the extensive nature of Woolf’s scholarly research and reading, will change public perceptions of this important writer.

The core of the project is the 67 reading notebooks that Brenda Silver researched and described in detail in her original 1983 book, published by Princeton University Press, Virginia Woolf’s Reading Notebooks. This book was digitized in 2017 and published by the University Press of New England. Silver identified many if not all of the sources read by Woolf, including the specific editions, and pointed to the use that she made of the reading in her published works. In addition, Silver provided a detailed account of the contents of each notebook, particularly useful since Woolf was writing for herself and her handwriting in these notebooks is at times very difficult to read. Of these original 67 notebooks, RN 1-67 in WoolfNotes.com, 33 are archived at the New York Public Library Berg Collection, 33 at The Keep in Sussex, and 1 at the Beinecke Library, Yale.

WoolfNotes.com also includes a number of other Woolf manuscripts related to her reading. RN 68 is a reading notebook entirely at home with the original 67. It was privately owned by Mrs Frances Hooper and bequeathed to Smith College in 1986. It contains reading notes on Trollope and other novelists, presumably connected to ‘Phases of Fiction’. RNs 69-99 await the discovery of further reading notebooks.

To learn more, visit: WoolfNotes.com

Virginia Woolf Manuscripts at Smith

This material can be found in the Virginia Woolf papers, Series I. Correspondence of Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey, Woolf to Strachey. This series includes 101 letters from Woolf, with an additional postcard addressed to Duncan Grant, and 39 letters from Strachey. Enclosures include a poem by Strachey (Box 1, folder 61) and a letter from Richard Aldington to Woolf (Box 2, folder 123). A few letters are also written by Leonard Woolf (Box 1, folders 45, 77, 78). The correspondence is accompanied by an autograph manuscript preface by James Strachey for the 1956 Hogarth Press edition of Letters: Virginia Woolf & Lytton Strachey (Box 1, folder 2). Of the 32 letters from Woolf not published in this edition, most are invitations written on halfpenny and penny postcards. One is illustrated with an anti-war graphic (Box 2, folder 137). Picture postcards in the collection depict Alfoxton House, Holford (Box 1, folder 46) and other landscapes in England and Europe. A portrait of George Eliot, with a caption by Virginia Woolf, illustrates a 14 May 1931 card to Strachey (Box 2, folder 143). The correspondence begins in 1906 after Virginia's elder brother, Thoby Stephen, died of typhoid fever. The correspondence ends in 1931 when Strachey died from stomach cancer. In addition to family and friends, Woolf and Strachey discuss literature and their travels. They mention Ralph Partridge, Dora Carrington, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Henry James, Katherine Mansfield, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa and Clive Bell.

See the Virginia Woolf Papers in Five College Compass for more digitized materials.

Smith College Special Collections, 
specialcollections@smith.edu