The good news is that The Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf (2025) is now out in print. The bad news is the cost: $245. But the other good news is that Edinburgh University Press is offering a “launch discount” code that saves you 30 percent off the published price. Use code NEW30 at checkout.
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.
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.
Knowing I am always on the lookout for bits about Virginia Woolf, a friend sent me links to two articles. Today, I am sharing them with you, along with an online resource about Woolf’s reading.
Two articles about Woolf
Title: “A Selection of Virginia Woolf’s Most Savage Insults” Author: Emily Temple Source:Pocket, although the post was originally published on Literary Hub on Oct. 12, 2017. Synopsis: The article covers moments that remind us how certain people really should have been afraid of Virginia Woolf, because she was full of epic—and sometimes kind of horrible and classist—insults. Read it here.
Title: “Virginia Woolf on Why We Read and What Great Works of Art Have in Common” Author: Maria Popova Source:Pocket, although the piece was originally published on Jan. 23, 2020 on The Marginalian. Synopsis: This piece discusses the thoughts of Woolf’ and other authors on the value of reading over time. Read it here.
More on Woolf’s reading
Last summer, a new digital resource was made available for readers and scholars interested in Woolf. WoolfNotes.com, a project that digitizes her reading and research notes, is now live on the King’s College, London, website.
This major digital humanities project brings into the public domain Woolf’s last remaining substantial unpublished work.
In a world that feels heavy right now, this post will be rather light, focusing on how Virginia Woolf still inspires fashion.
This time, it’s how Christian Dior’s spring/summer line shown during Paris Fashion Week provides a new take on Woolf’s Orlando, emphasizing the novel’s gender fluidity.
As described on the Dior website, it provides “an opportunity to reawaken essential themes related to sartorial memory — in particular the creativity of previous centuries.”
Dior designer Maria Grazia Chiuria could not have picked a better work of fiction to get creative with the fashions of previous centuries than Woolf’s psuedo-biography Orlando, in which the male/female title character lives through 400 years of history — and fashion.
opulent, gender-fluid silhouettes and intricate detailing
a reworking of classic Elizabethan sillouettes
a monochromatic color palette of black, white and cream, with flashes of red
ruffled shirts with high colors
long black coats, some heavily tailored, many trenches
intricately detailed dresses
combinations of leather and lace
“The start of the final act evoked the fusion of masculine and feminine styles. Intricately embroidered ribbons, richly woven fabrics and delicate embellishments stood alongside sharp tailoring, trench coats and oversized bags,” reflected fashion historian Robert Ossant, as quoted in The Industry Fashion story.
“The contrast of structure and softness embodied Orlando’s gender duality.”
The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, in association with the directors of the Clifford’s Inn Management Company Limited, has commissioned and installed a blue plaque on London’s Clifford’s Inn where Virginia and Leonard lived from 1912-13 following their honeymoon.
The Woolfs lived in flat 13, with Virginia writing most of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915) while living there. The block of flats was rebuilt in the 1930s, but the entrance on Clifford’s Inn Passage, where the plaque is placed, is where the Woolf’s would have entered the building.
The Passage, one of the oldest alleys in London, is the route which the Woolfs would have used to go to the Cock Tavern on Fleet Street.
Other tenants in the building during the Woolfs’ residency were individuals working in law, as well as photographers, tailors, architects, and artists including both painting and sculpture. The building was also used for commercial purposes. It was home to organizations including the Society of Women Writers and Journalists, the London Typographical Society, the London Positivist Society and the Art Workers’ Guild.
When ongoing construction work in the neighborhood is finished and the Clifford’s Inn Passage undergoes renovation and tree planting, the VWSGB will hold an unveiling ceremony for the plaque.
A call for papers for a special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany #104 has gone out on the topic of “Woolf and Failure.”
For this special issue of the Virginia Woolf Miscellany, readers and writers are invited to think about, analyze, expose, and otherwise wallow in failure.
Failure circulates throughout Woolf’s work, and carries with it many meanings. Fears of failing or of being a failure characterize many key characters’ psyches; narratives are built on incomplete, unrealized, or failed artistic projects.
Failure is also a central presence in many of Woolf’s essays; it has a particular role in her review work, but also forms the foundation of “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.”
That generation-defining essay is founded on Arnold Bennett’s assessment that Woolf failed to create real characters in Jacob’s Room, and contains within it Woolf’s assertion of her own failure to capture “Mrs. Brown” in telling her story.
That sanguine expression of failure in the essay jars against the fears of failing to achieve her artistic vision that Woolf records in her personal writings.
Even as Woolf explores her own worries and points out the failures of others—such as Charlotte Brontë’s anger marring Jane Eyre—she also exposes and questions the structures of expectation and the norms (both social and fictional) that determine failure and success.
Our own failures add meaning
While we can readily credit our later successes to lessons learned from earlier failures, we often experience failure in less linear and more cyclical ways. Failure surfaces at different points in our lives and work, and fears of failing and the risks involved in achieving anything other than success recur in sometimes unexpected situations.
Failure is ordinary, not extraordinary—and when we recognize failure’s ordinariness, its significance in Woolf’s work may take on new meaning.
And yet failure need not be a bummer — nor need this special issue. As Jack Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure, “under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2-3).
In what ways might Woolf’s work offer examples of this mode of failing or this way of understanding what failure offers?
Lastly, since each of us contends with failure in our own lives in and out of the classroom, this special issue also welcomes personal reflections on the experience of failure. Where do our understandings of failure intersect with our work with Woolf? How have our failures shaped us, and continue to shape our scholarship and teaching?
Possible approaches might include:
Defining failure in or through Woolf
Representations of failure in Woolf’s novels, short stories, and essays
Failure in Woolf’s personal writings
Failure as action (failing) or identity (being a failure)
Reading Woolf’s work through theories of failure, such as Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure
Woolfian aesthetics of failure
Failures of imagination and/or execution
Political, social, and ethical failures
Failed identities
Examinations of Woolf’s failed projects
Woolf’s assessments of her own failures and those of others
Woolf and other women writers: does Woolf’s success at infiltrating the canon mean others’ failure?
Our own experiences of failure as students, scholars, and teachers of/with Woolf
How to submit
Please submit essays of 2,500 words or fewer to Mary Wilson at mwilson4@umassd.edu by Aug. 31, 2025.
