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Posts Tagged ‘purple ink’

More on Virginia Woolf and purple ink

Posted in 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, short stories, tagged , , on Saturday 19 April 2025| 3 Comments »

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

  1. Is Virginia the only one who wrote in purple ink on Hogarth Press documents?
  2. 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”).
Feel free to add to this discussion in the comments section below.

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Virginia Woolf, the Hogarth Press and the color purple — as in ink

Posted in 27th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, Mark Hussey, Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours, tagged , , , , , , on Friday 11 April 2025| 3 Comments »

I have written about Virginia Woolf and fountain pens and her ink preferences before. But today I learned of a new discovery that links Woolf even more strongly to the everyday work of the Hogarth Press, thanks to her use of purple ink.

First page of The Hours notebook 2 (purple ink). Courtesy of SP Books

Nicola Wilson of the University of Reading and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project, a digital project that debuted at the 2017 Woolf Conference and focuses on the Hogarth Press, posted this note to the VWoolf Listserv:

We have recently found evidence of Woolf’s purple pen in the Hogarth Press archives up to Feb 1940 – on the stock cards! Taking account of the figures? This is very exciting as it gives a real indication of Woolf’s presence at the Press and corroborates the kind of information on figures she tracks in the diaries.

Purple ink and the Hogarth Press

Esther Folkersma made the discovery while working with Danni Corfield to clean, sort, and organize the Hogarth Press stock cards as part of her research internship with MAPP.  The Hogarth Press stock cards indicate where the stock of a specific book was being held, when the entity received the stock and how many copies they received, how many copies were issued, the number of copies printed at what date, the number of bound copies, and the balance in sheets.

“As more and more purple appeared under our sponges, brushes, and scalpels, and as the colours became more pronounced, Woolf’s presence in these cards grew,” Folkersma wrote in a post on the MAPP blog.

“The scale of Woolf’s handwriting in these stock cards surprised me, as her presence in the press, at least in a material sense, is often difficult to find, even though the significance of her role in the press has always been undeniable, especially as seen through her own diary entries.”

Folkersma explains that “the abundance of Virginia Woolf’s purple ink readily found on a majority of the Stock Value Cards illustrates her involvement in the press to an extent beyond what I had even gathered from her diaries. These very utilitarian cards show how involved Woolf was in the more administrative operations behind the scenes.”

Purple ink and The Hours (Mrs. Dalloway)

According to Mark Hussey, Bloomsbury scholar and author, “most of The Hours (‘Mrs Dalloway‘) holograph is in Woolf’s favored purple ink, with some in black and a little in blue. Her corrections on the American proof are also in purple ink.”

In 2019, SP Books published a gorgeous edition of the handwritten manuscript of what would become Woolf’s famous 1925 novel, allowing anyone who could obtain a copy to see that many of the pages were written in purple ink. I did and wrote a post about it.

Purple ink a chapter, a letter, and a diary entry

Folkersma also recommends reading Ted Bishop’s chapter “Getting a Hold on Haddock: Virginia Woolf?s Inks” from Virginia Woolf and the World of Books (2018), the selected papers from the 2017 conference.

And she mentions two Woolf quotes — one from a letter and one from a diary

This ink is Waterman?s fountain pen ink. Cheap, violet, indelible. (Which sounds as if I were paid to write their advertisements). – from a 1923 letter to Dorothy Brett

The degradation of steel pens is such that after doing my best to clip & file one into shape, I have to take to a Waterman, profoundly though I distrust them, & disbelieve in the capacity to convey the nobler & profounder thoughts.” – from a 1918 Diary entry

Roundtable participants at the 2017 Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf sit below a screen showing a digitized ledger sheet from the Hogarth Press. Note the purple ink.

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