The Charleston Bulletin Supplements, Virginia Woolf’s last known unpublished work, is being published by the British Library tomorrow, the first time the Supplements have been published since they were first written in the 1920s.
Announced earlier this year, the volume includes work, written or dictated by Woolf between 1923 and 1927 and published in The Charleston Bulletin’s Supplements in collaboration with her nephew, Quentin Bell. The pieces reveal a familiar, playful side of Woolf, as they describe incidents and individuals of her family and household, including servants and members of the Bloomsbury Group. Bell provided more than 40 illustrations.
David Bradshaw’s preface to the volume makes the connection between the Supplements, with their inside jokes and absurdities, and Woolf’s novels, such as Orlando. Claudia Olk, Chair of English and Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, edited the project.
“We are delighted to share these childhood newspapers from the British Library’s archives with a wider audience in a new publication. The Supplements present fantastical narrative excursions into this illustrious family’s history, evoking imaginary details and building up fictional personalities. The writer and the illustrator, aunt and nephew, are united in their dislike of seriousness and boredom and they mercilessly target shallowness and hypocrisy,” Olk said.
The hardback volume is available for £12.99 from the British Library.
Read more about the Supplements:
[…] with them. Virginia had collaborated with Quentin Bell to produce a Christmas Supplement to the Charleston Bulletin. It recorded scenes in the life of Duncan Grant. (D2 […]