Uncollected Letters of Virginia Woolf

Stephen Barkway is a co-founder of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and was its Chair from 1998 to 2018. He co-edits, and regularly contributes to, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin and in 2018 he gave the Annual Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture ‘This Sheet is a Glass’: Virginia Woolf, Woman of Letters. Stuart N. 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 volumes 5 and 6 of The Essays of Virginia Woolf (2009 and 2011) and transcribed Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993).

• AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsVirginia Woolf’s HomesEditorial NoteIntroductionThe Uncollected LettersAppendix I. Uncollected Letters Listed in Number OrderAppendix II. Additions and Corrections to The Letters Vols 1-6Appendix III. Additional LettersSelected BibliographyIndex

The extraordinary erudition, care, detail and thoroughness of [the editors'] work is characteristic of much editorial work on Woolf. [...] The Uncollected Letters surpasses almost all of them in the range of people who march through its pages, each of whom is introduced with a detailed biography, substantial contextual material and multiple cross-references. Often the footnotes are more interesting than the letters, especially when those are simply invitations to tea. And, like Woolf’s invitations, these footnotes have personality – something almost unheard of in scholarly editions.[...] In their painstaking and devoted labours, Stephen Barkway and Stuart N. Clarke have rendered Woolf accessible and legible to all of us in letters, notes and postcards that, like the Ramsays’ house in To the Lighthouse, have escaped the engulfing darkness of time.