The good news is that The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf (2025) is now out in
Amazon U.S. is also offering the volume at a price of $246.39, but no discount is available.
Edited by Stephen Barkway and the late Stuart N. Clarke, the volume includes more than 1,400 uncollected and newly discovered letters from Virginia Woolf, including several substantial series of letters with previously unrecorded correspondents.
Important letters to contemporary writers, such as Stella Benson, Rebecca West, Lyn Lloyd Irvine and Berta Ruck, have been unearthed from archives, as well as fifty letters to T. S. Eliot. This book also features substantial collections of letters to Lady Colefax, Winifred Holtby, Mary Hutchinson, Christabel McLaren (Lady Aberconway) and Raymond Mortimer, as well as previously unrecorded correspondents, according to the publisher.
Background on the new letters and the editors
For 25 years, Clarke and Barkway searched for previously unpublished letters from Virginia Woolf and included them in the pages of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, which is issued free to members of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain.
During their search, the pair of editors also put out a call to members and beyond for any letters from Woolf that did not make it into the six-volume collection of her letters published by Hogarth Press/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich between 1975-80.
Clarke is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was editor of the Virginia Woolf Bulletin from 1999 to 2022. As well as contributing almost 300 items to the Bulletin, he edited Volume five and Volume six of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (2009 and 2011) and transcribed Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993). Barkway is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was its Chair from 1998 to 2018.
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Beth, thank you for your insight and your praise for the new volume of Woolf’s uncollected letters, as well as the news that EUP plans to publish a paperback version. Your enthusiasm is such that I think I will take the plunge and purchase the hardback, using the 30 percent discount offered by EUP!
Welcome news about this volume! I pre-ordered it, so have had (and savored) it for a while, and I wanted to comment a bit on the price. Yes, The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf is expensive (though the discount helps). But the book is over 1000 pages long! A hefty tome for the price. And the Edinburgh University Press has done an extraordinary job of making this reference work worth buying; the reader can see their investment in this project on every page. It is full of notes, useful appendices (Stuart’s corrections of errors in the original six volumes of letters, for example, involving information that came to light after their publication), and thoughtful details, such as a chronological table of the collection’s letters since the editors organized the volume by correspondent. The descriptive commentaries about correspondents, along with their occasional replies to Woolf, show Stuart Clarke and Stephen Barkway at their detective best, and the press clearly supported their efforts to connect all sorts of dots between and among letters, diaries, memoirs, and works by Woolf AND by correspondents. The book is not only lovely, but it will be a boon to Woolf (and modernist) biographers, critics, and common readers for decades to come. A monumental achievement. If you can possibly afford it, I hope you take the plunge. You will be glad you did. And if you cannot afford it, urge your library to buy it. The EUP has done Stuart and Stephen and Virginia Woolf proud, and if we can, we should reward presses who embody their authors’ vision so incredibly well in pages, print, and space. Finally, take heart: the press has plans to publish the collection in paperback at some point!