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Archive for the ‘Lytton Strachey’ Category

The Charleston Festival is back — in person — beginning yesterday and running through May 29 at Charleston in Firle, Sussex.

The festival is the main fundraising event for the longtime home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant and the country refuge for the Bloomsbury group.

Of particular interest to Bloomsbury scholars is Sunday’s program with Alex Jennings and Jonathon Pryce. At 5:30 p.m., the actors will do a live reading of “The Love Lives of Lytton Strachey,” revealing “a playful and uncensored portrait of a queer universe, shared in glorious candid detail with trusted friends,” according to the website.

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So many exciting links to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf resources are popping up on social media this week. Since I don’t fry_booklet_virginia_woolf_1-209x300have time to write about them because I am busy preparing for the 25th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries, June 4-7 at Bloomsburg University, I am posting links to them here.

  1. On Twitter, I learned of a rare find in the basement of the Bristol Museum of a booklet printed for the Fry memorial exhibition held at the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery in 1935. It contains the text of the exhibition’s opening speech written and delivered by Woolf. “After further research, it appears this booklet is one of the most sought after publications by the writer,” wrote Fay Curtis in her museum post. “The print run was just 125, which is why they are so rare today, and the curator at the time had several to give away. Thankfully for us, he slipped one into the exhibition file – where it remained for eighty years. We have now removed it from the old file in the basement and entered it into the Fine Art collection.”
  2. On Facebook, I learned that a copy of the exhibit booklet is available at the University of Toronto Libraries.
  3. Facebook also told me Virginia Woolf is on the move at Victoria Library. Here’s the post, which pictured the small Woolf doll on a picnic blanket in front of a college building: “Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is on the move. She left her secure box in the E.J. Pratt Library for the summer and will be visiting places on campus. Her first stop is in front of the Victoria College building.Victoria Library FB post screenshot” The Woolf doll is actually listed in the library catalog.
  4. From Catherine Hollis via Facebook comes the news that letters from George Mallory to Lytton Strachey are up for sale. You can view the lot.
  5. From the VWoolfListserv comes news that letter from Clive Bell to Lytton Strachey are also up for sale.
  6. This morning, the items below popped up on Twitter:

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Lytton [Strachey] is still alive this morning. We thought he could not live through the night. It was a moonlit night. Nessa [her sister] rang up at 10 to say that he has taken milk and tea after an injection. He had taken nothing for 24 hours and was only half-conscious. This may be the turn or it may be nothing. Now again all one’s sense of him flies out and expands and I begin to think of things I shall say to him, so strange is the desire for life. – Virginia Woolf”s Diary, 25 December 1931

For quotes from more authors regarding their Christmas week blues, read this Dec. 22, 2014, article in The Independent.

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My two-week stint doing research at the NYPL Berg Collection is over, and letters and rare books took up the last two days of my Short-Term Research Fellowship on the topic of the Bloomsbury pacifists.

The letters were written by Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey to a variety of correspondents, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant and Nick Bagenal. I was thrilled to have the opportunity to read them in their original form, taking time to decipher the usually elegant handwriting of the letter writers and savoring the idea of a world where friends and colleagues posted missives to each other on a regular, if not daily, basis.

It was special to be able to touch and handle papers nearly 100 years old that belonged to writers and artists I have read so much about and admire so greatly.

It was also invaluable to have access to such rare books as Clive Bell’s Civilization (1928), Julian Bell: Essays, Poems and Letters (1938) and David Garnett’s A Rabbit in the Air: Notes from a Diary Kept While Learning to Handle an Aeroplane (1932).

So while I knew that my research would come to an end, I felt sad when it did. I even felt a little lost when I turned the last page of Garnett’s book, realized I had no more documents or books in my queue and knew that I would soon be on my way back to my regular everyday life in Ohio.

I will miss the grandeur of the NYPL’s Schwartzman building, the luxurious silence of the Berg reading room, the helpful friendliness of librarians Anne Garner and Rebecca Filner, the expertise of Curator Isaac Gewirtz and the technical expertise of a regular volunteer and Yeats scholar named Neal who eagerly came to my aid when my laptop refused to reboot after loading some troublesome and unwanted Microsoft updates.

I hope all of those mentioned above will consider this an official public thank you for helping me have such a valuable experience.

Here are links to past posts about my research at the Berg and the Morgan Library & Museum:

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