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THE LIBRARY OF LEONARD AND VIRGINIA WOOLF: THE SCHOLARLY PURSUIT OF DIANE GILLESPIE by Rosemary Streatfeild Photos by Judith Ashworth |
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Unbeknownst to many, concealed in the secure stacks of MASC, are a number of books---about 4,000 all told---all of which were originally owned by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in their own libraries at Monks House in Rodmell in Sussex county, England, and their London home in Victoria Square. This collection has been the focus of Diane Gillespie's scholary pursuits during her tenure at W.S.U. Though she recently retired as a Professor of English, she can still be persuaded to return to the lair to talk about the Woolfs. Diane received her Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Minnesota. She was hired in 1975 in part because of the newly acquired Woolf collection. Her interest, when she began her dissesrtation, had been in two lesser-known British contemporaries of Virginia Woolf: Dorothy Richardson and May Sinclair. Fortunately, on the advice of her more pragmatic Ph.D. advisor, however, she added the better-known Woolf to her study. How the books came to be in our collection is an interesting story in itself. In 1967, John Elwood, then Chair of the Department of English at WSU, was travelling with his family in England and happened to stop in Rodmell to get oil for the car. After inquiring of the proprietor of the petrol (read "gas") station, he learned that Leonard Woolf was still living in the village. He was then taken by the owner of the Bow Windows Book Shop in Lewes, Fred Lucas, to visit Woolf at Monks House. This led to the Elwood family tending Woolf's booth at the Rodmell Fair, and to subsequent meetings with Woolf in his home. After Leonard Woolf died in 1971, Elwood learned that Fred Lucas was preparing to sell the Monks House library. After authorization from the then Director of the WSU Library, G. Donald Smith, Elwood was able to bid successfully on most of the Monks House books. And in 1972, WSU was able to purchase the lot from the Woolf's Victoria Square house. There's a lot more to this story than that, and some of it can be read in the Spring 1984, no. 22, Virginia Woolf Miscellany edited by Diane, and available in MASC. Today, sometimes with Diane's guidance and as items become available, Laila Vejzovic and Trevor Bond continue to purchase additions to the collection, adding to it regularly.
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| Diane's enthusiasm for the collection is infectious. As she talks, I write rapidly to keep up. However, she is not (she tells me later, and to my surprise) shocked by my ignorance of the Woolfs, as shown by my simple questions. Having introduced students to Woolf for 26 years, she is used to providing basic explanations. |  Diane Gillespie and Rosemary Streatfeild explore the Woolf Collection in the MASC Reading Room |
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The collection comprises books owned by both Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Virginia (1882-1941) inherited her books from her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904). She did not attend university so her father's library was her main source for an education. Her father initially provided her with a list of titles to work from, but then let her read whatever she wanted. Nothing was censored, a rare situation for a young, late Victorian female. Since he regularly wrote in the margins of his books, she would see his comments, so gaining experience with intellectual dialogue and interchange of ideas between scholars.
Leonard (1880-1969) had his own collection of books. He had attended Cambridge University, then became a civil servant in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The 70 volumes of Voltaire he took along with him on the voyage are included in the Woolfs' combined library in MASC. When his collection was added to Virginia's after their marriage, they ended up with some duplications (as can be verified from MASC's Short List – see below). Leonard was a very political man, his books reflecting his association with such groups as the Labour Party and the Fabian Society. He also accumulated books on imperialism (having become an anti-imperialist) and international government (having contributed his theories to the development of the League of Nations). The couple's books also reflect their shared interests in gardening and natural history. The Woolf's added to their collection in various ways, including receiving books for review (not all of these were read, judging from the uncut pages in some of the titles) and publications from friends. You can view a list of the books owned by WSU Library in The Short Title Catalog at: http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/woolflibrary.htm
The Woolf's had their own press, The Hogarth Press. Launched in 1917, one of its original purposes was to give Virginia some mechanical work as an alternative to her writing. Both Virginia and Leonard set type and carried out other tasks involved with a publishing house. Originally they had a list that was sent out to a small number of subscribers, but when the press became more popular they had to turn to professional printers. Eventually, as the number of volumes published increased, they had to hire help.
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(Click photo to enlarge.) |
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(Click on photo to enlarge.) |
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After her first two novels (published by Duckworth), everything Virginia wrote was published by the Woolf's press, each (except for Orlando) with an original dust jacket designed by Vanessa Bell. The press also published not only fiction, poetry, and art by the Woolfs' friends, but also books by psychologists like Freud, as well as literary critics, translators, political theorists, biographers, and educators.
Other books printed by The Hogarth Press are illustrated at: http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/hogarth.htm
Leslie Stephen and Leonard Woolf both wrote in margins, and Leslie Stephen did pencil sketches of animals to entertain his children. A cat's head from volume 1 of Stephen's copy of Essays on his Own Times by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which was bound by Virginia, is an example of these illustrations. Other examples include the fish and notes seen in photos below. Stephen also edited the first 26 volumes of the Dictionary of National Biography, all 63 of which were inherited by Virginia Woolf and are on display in the MASC reading room. |
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| Drawing of fish by Leslie Stephen |  |
| Drawing and notes in back of book owned by Leslie Stephen. |
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Virginia did very little marginalia. She kept notebooks of her comments which have been cataloged and edited by Brenda Silver, and are kept in the University of Sussex library and the Berg Collection at New York Public Library. She also bound a few favorite books herself to save them from further damage. Examples of these bindings can be seen online at: http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/images/woolfbindings/woolf-bindings.htm Other interesting details of the collection include book plates, some created by Virginia herself (see photographs below), collaborative translations (for example, Dostoevsky's works), and numerous bibles, including Old Testaments, likely contributed by Leonard who was Jewish.
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| "The Rose" with Virginia's initials in The Works of Edward Fitzgerald |  |
| The "Death Mask of Shakespeare" in her Collected Works of Shakespeare |  |
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Interestingly, there may be more Woolf research materials in the U.S. collectively than in the U.K. The Woolfs weren't well valued in England until the 1970s because of their association with the Bloomsbury Group, considered to be elitist and too much in control of culture in Great Britain. Britain did not found the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain until after the Japanese society was established, and the United States society became international. Still, Britain has retained some small portions of the Woolf Library, housed in three different locations: Trinity and King's Colleges at Cambridge University; Sussex University, and the British Library. If you want to know which library owns what books (worldwide), the Woolf Studies Annual, published and edited at Pace University Press, provides a guide to special Woolf collections.
Diane has published and edited many books, and written and presented numerous articles and papers relating to Virginia Woolf. One aspect she enjoys is Woolf's interest in other art forms, especially painting and photography. She has also written on Woolf's revisionary readings of writers of the past (like Blake, Donne, and Cervantes) and, more recently, about Woolf's individual takes on genres like detective fiction and the romance novel. Diane is author of The Sisters' Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell (1988); co-editor of Julia Duckworth Stephen: Stories for Children, Essays for Adults (1987); editor of The Multiple Muses of Virginia Woolf (1993) and the Shakespeare Head edition of Woolf's Roger Fry: A Biography (1995); and co-editor of Virginia Woolf and the Arts: Selected Papers from the Sixth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (1997).
If you have some time or need to take a break, go browse in the MASC stacks to look through the Woolf collection. Contact MASC to make sure there's someone who can show you around. Take along the Short Title Catalog for call numbers, and details of the bindings, plates, and marginalia from the web sites, and enjoy! Thank you to Diane Gillespie for her time and expertise on the Woolfs. Also thanks to Trevor Bond and Julie King, and Judith Ashworth for the photography.
 Three of Virginia's books published by her own Hogarth Press
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