Recent talk on the VWoolf Listserv and a post here on Blogging Woolf involved Virginia Woolf and recent news about her use of purple ink. Both raised further comments — and questions.
Here is the background
Craft workshop participant at a Woolf conference using a manual typewriter but no purple ink.
The news was that Virginia’s writing in her trademark purple pen had been discovered by Esther Folkersma, a research internist for the digital Modernist Archives Publishing Project. Virginia used purple ink when writing on the stock cards of the Hogarth Press archives up to February 1940, Folkersma found.
That news raised the following questions — and probably more I haven’t yet heard.
The questions raised
- Is Virginia the only one who wrote in purple ink on Hogarth Press documents?
- Did Virginia ever use a purple typewriter ribbon?
All Woolf writers using purple ink please stand up
Is Virginia the only one who wrote in purple ink on Hogarth Press documents?
Blogging Woolf reader and Woolf scholar Matthew Holliday contributed this comment to the post “Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the color purple — as in ink“:
This is fascinating, but there is one small hiccup—much of that writing in purple ink is in Leonard’s hand. – Matthew Holliday
I would like to have more details about that claim, so I invite any one who knows more about Leonard’s use of purple ink to please chime in by posting a comment below.
What I do know is that Esther Folkersma’s post on the MAPP blog clearly states that she has identified the handwriting in purple ink that she found as Virginia’s.
Virginia’s purple typewriter ribbon
Did Virginia ever use a purple typewriter ribbon?
That question was posed to the list, and Bryony Randall, professor of modernist literature at Glasgow University, provided this information in reply:
Many of Woolf’s short stories – or early drafts thereof – were typed in purple ink, from as early as ‘[A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus]’ to as late as what we previously knew as ‘Gypsy, the Mongrel’, but thanks to Stuart Clarke we now know was published as ‘The Little Dog Laughed’. So certainly a favourite colour in any writing medium! I’ve been able to verify the type colour of those typescripts held in the Monk’s House Papers, but not (yet) those at the NYPL, pending a research trip. – Bryony Randall
Catherine Hollis of UC Berkeley added this information:
“Friendship’s Gallery” (1907-8) was typed in violet ink and bound in violet leather (via Matthew Clarke’s recent essay “My Poor Intimate: Virginia Woolf and Violet Dickinson”).
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I’ve been writing about Woolf since 1976, when I began my dissertation. In 1980, my Woolfwork turned to poetry. Since this discussion is about her use of purple ink–which I’ve followed–I’m sharing a recent poem where it appears. This poem came from a dream.
THE DRESS
I’ve come to a Woolf Conference in St. Ives. On the morning it is to start, I get a message to meet one of the presenters who is staying in Talland House. Climbing the hill, I want to go in from the bottom of the garden, but think it might be private now, locked. I enter by the side gate & knock on the white door. No one comes. I knock harder. Still no one. Perhaps the professor is upstairs, I think, & can’t hear. I try the door, which swings in, & cross the threshold Woolf was carried over as an infant in 1882. A flat-screen TV above that fireplace! Good Lord. I call out. No answer. I sit on an upholstered chair hard as a tire. A red-rimmed clock ticks out fifteen minutes. I go to the bottom of the stairs & call again. Nothing. Maybe the professor’s sick, I think, & climb the stairs. Anybody here? No response. Curiosity leads me through a door to the right where I see a long-ago summer dress—ivory voile, low-waisted, long-sleeved—laid across an armchair. I can see Virginia in it, sitting in the garden, a shawl around her shoulders, the perpetual cigarette between her fingers, about to speak & without so much as the shadow of a thought, I shuck my pants & tunic & slipped into that dress. Too big, too long, too Virginia but for half a parenthesis of a moment I feel illuminated. Then, oh my God, what am I thinking??? How could I do this? What if I sweat on the dress or tear it as I take it off? What if this morning’s paper cut bleeds on it, or tears wake up the ink on my right hand, & I leave a lavender fingerprint? What if I get caught? No explanation. Where would they send me? I’ve just taken the dress ever-so-carefully over my head when I hear the front door open. Just scrambled into my own clothes & laid the dress back across the chair when I hear the professor at the top of the stairs.
Leonard typically used green ink (e.g. when ‘editing’ typescript of Between the Acts) so i would like to see an example of what Matthew means
Mark, I have asked Matthew to provide an example. And thank you for the information about Leonard using green ink.