VIRGINIA WOOLF: DIRECT AND INDIRECT SPEECH AS REPORTED BY THIRD PARTIES
(RESEARCH IN PROGRESS)
Last updated 1 March 2003
References followed by ‘passim’ are too extensive to be quoted.
‘Dreadnought Amused at Hoax. Captain of Ship and Sham Attache [sic] Meet in Street. Lady Prince's Story.’, Daily Mirror (15 February 1910), p. 5:
“I had only two days’ notice of the adventure,” she [Virginia] said, “and I entered into it because I thought I would like the fun.
“I felt rather nervous until I got in the train at Paddington. Although I wore a false beard and moustache and a wig and a turban and flowing robes. I could not realise that no one would recognise me. When we got into the special saloon of the train my nervousness disappeared, and I felt that it did not matter what happened.
“We were received at Weymouth by the flag lieutenant, who gravely saluted us, and then we were taken to the Dreadnought in the admiral’s pinnace.
“So far everything had worked perfectly. I spoke as little as possible in case my voice, which I made as gruff as I could, should fail me. I found I could easily laugh like a man, but it was difficult to disguise the speaking voice.
“As a matter of fact the really only trying time I had was when I had to shake hands with my first cousin who is an officer on the Dreadnought, and who saluted me as I went on deck. I thought I should burst out laughing, but, happily, I managed to preserve my Oriental stolidity of countenance.
“There were soem amusing incidents on the return journey. Mr Cholmondely gravely told the railway officials that that the princes could not have any meals served with the naked hand. There were no spare gloves on the train, and the officials consequently had to buy a few pairs, and the attendants who waited on us at dinner appeared wearing grey kid gloves. We gave them princely tips.
“Prince Maketen, the chief, had a very bad cold. He had trouble with his nose and face all day, and the twitching of his face had been so constant that during dinner half his moustache fell off. Fortunately none of the state servants saw the accident, or the game would have been up.
“Taking off my beard and moustache after I reached home was a long operation. They were gummed on, and I thought my face would never feel clean again. The powder soon came off, and so did the wig.’
Jacques-Émile Blanche, ‘Entretien avec Virginia Woolf’, Nouvelles littéraires (Paris, 13 août 1927, pp. 1-2), partly reprinted in English in Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage edited by Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 212, 214: ‘she [Virginia] asks about Marcel Proust and talks about French literature; she enjoys nothing more than reading our authors and incidentally creates a very flattering picture of our country. “What was Proust like in his youth? Tell me, tell me. How did he make an entry into high society? Society must have understood little of what he wrote?”
‘... she pressed me to tell her more about Marcel Proust, about French matters.’
Berta Ruck, A Story-Teller Tells the Truth: Reminiscences and Notes (London: Hutchinson, 1935), p. 260:
‘Virginia Woolf wrote back [unpublished] that she did not remember ever to have heard my name. Her using it had been a freak of sub-conscious memory. Afterwards we met. She took me to the Greek plays at the Queen’s Theatre, Hammersmith.’
Desmond MacCarthy, Leslie Stephen (Cambridge at the University Press, 1937), p. 37:
'Many years afterwards, his daughter, Virginia Woolf, asked him [Stephen] which was his favourite among his books ...'
Jacques-Émile Blanche, More Portraits of a Lifetime, 1918-1938, translated and edited by Walter Clement (London: J. M. Dent, 1939), pp. 62, 215-16:
‘Virginia Woolf is of the opinion that her contemporaries have ceased to believe. ... How she questioned me about Marcel Proust! ... When she left, Mrs. Woolf said: “You ought really to write your recollections of England for the Hogarth Press.’
Mary Agnes Hamilton, Remembering My Good Friends (London: Jonathan Cape, 1944), p. 143: ‘Once she [Virginia] said that all the impressions that counted and made up her mental furniture had been deposited before she was eight years old; they were like a row of lamps; all one did, later, was to turn them up and down; it was only a working-out. She asked, What makes one write? ... People, she said, did not much interest her; what did was the feeling of life as it passed - that was what she wanted to render. ... The last time I met her was at Murder in the Cathedral ... I talked with her and Leonard in the interval, and we agreed ... in disliking it; finding it both ugly and cruel.’
Logan Pearsall Smith, ‘Tavistock Square’, Orion, Vol. II (1945), pp. 74, 76, 79:
‘nor could the visitor forget that beauty which which had been for generations an inheritance of her mother’s family. ... a Family Curse, Virginia Woolf had more than once insisted, since owing to th this fairness of aspect many women of her race had made grand, unsuitable, and almost always unhappy marriages; while those of them whose heads were furnished with brains rather than with coronets, had found themselves shut away into harems of gallentry, and thus deprived of opportunities for rationjhal discourse.
‘On paradoxes such as this Virginia Woolf loved to expatiate ...
‘I happened to express the opinion that journalism of this kind [i.e., writing for ‘Vogue] might be detrimental to authors of promise, who, if they habitually wrote for people of fashion, might very likely end by writing carelessly. ... my chance remark roused her to one of those outbursts of defiance ... It was I and my associates, it was people like Goose [Gosse] and Robert bridges, and all the respectabilities and solemnities and humbugs who wrote for papers like the Times Literary Supplement, who were the enemies of unfettered thought in England; we deliberately did out [our] best to stifle all freedom, all rebellion, all ribaldry, in the English press. Were it not for the fashion papers, the writers I referred to, Mrs. Woolf declared, would be gagged and suffocated; only in the columns that were put so freely at their disposal couuld they feel themselves free to express what they really thought. ...
‘Undiscouraged by this failure [of The Prospects of Literature, published by the Hogarth Press], Mrs. Woolf asked me, when I called on her one afternoon, to write for them at greater length a tract on this subject. I happened to speak rather vaguely of the publication some day of various essays of mine to be collected in one volume; and Mrs. Woolf suggested that this book should be published by the Hogarth Press.’
Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), p. 187:
‘I remember my intense astonishment when, at a dinner party, Virginia Stephen made made a slightly doiuble-edged joke, and my father understood it!’
Violet Trefusis, Don’t Look Round (London: Hutchinson, 1952), p. 108:
“My dear Mrs. Keppel, you wouldn’t hesitate if you saw the new Lanchester with the fluid fly-wheel!’
Susan Tweedsmuir, ‘Letter to Elizabeth Bowen, May - September 1952’, A Winter Bouquet (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1954), pp. 77-84:
Leslie Stephen ‘said to me, “my daughter Virginia is a great purist about language, ahe does not like us to use the word ‘wire’. We always have to say ‘telegram’.” Years afterwards I told Virginia this story of her father, and her comment was “what a shocking little prig I must have been.’
She saw Virginia when Vita was presented with the Hawthorden Prize on 16 June 1927, but they didn’t speak: ‘I wrote a letter ... I got a letter [unpublished] from Virginia saying that she too had wished to speak to me, but had also been too shy to make a move. She invited me to Tavistock Square.
‘Virginia asked me with eager curiosity about the parties to which I was taking my daughter Alice.
‘She also asked me questions about my mother, whom she had always revered and admired. She talked of her father’s friendship with my parents, and of her father’s admiration and affection for my mother, and of her friendship for him. She admitted she had hardly read any of John [Buchan]’s books, but said that she would like to read Cromwell. When I described it to her, she said, “he sounds like a good Oxford scholar.” There was just a faint underlying mockery about the word “Oxford.” Cambridge would have been better I felt.
‘... if she poked fun at you she was delighted if you poked fun back at her.
‘... she said, “the young like my novels, my own friends like my other books best.” ... Virginia told me how she and her father had once gone to tea with my mother and he had asked her advice whether they should go for a family holiday to the country or to the seaside. My mother warmly advocated one or the other plan - I forget which - but it happened to be what Virginia wanted and she still remembered my mother’s casting vote with gratitude. Virginia plied me with questions about my own life. She had not lost the alarming quality noticed by my mother, and her questions were swift and probing.
‘... She was very much amused by the fact that I was, in the parlance of the day, “taking a daughter out” and sitting sometimes for several nights a week on the chaperones’ bench. ... [see letter no. 1781]
‘Virginia asked me suddenly if I would like to see Vanessa and went to the telephone to ask if Vanessa could come round and see me. “You must come and see Susie.” She added, “she is taking a daughter out.”
‘... to Snowshill. It was a warm summer day. The bare green Cotswold slopes and the beechwoods showed their most austere loveliness and, as we drove Virginia said, “this is what the country looked like when I was a child.”
‘She liked my writing ...
‘... she said of someone, “but my dear, she’s such a highbrow.” ... She said, I remember, that she was very sorry for the children of the 1930s. They had none of the sense of romance with which we grew up. They mostly lived in flats or small houses and did not know of shadowy passages and baize doors behind which servants lived a vivid life, often making alliances with children, and promoting a mutual underground movement against authority enthroned in the drawing-room or library.’
Nancy Cunard, Grand Man: Memories of Norman Douglas (London: Secker & Warburg, 1954), p. 78: ‘I felt I should begin to learn printing - an old wish already, that Virginia and Leonard Woolf had tried to dissuade me from: “Your hands will never be free of printing-ink!’
Cf. Nancy Cunard, ‘The Hours Press: Retrospect - Catalogue - Commentary’, Book Collector (Winter 1964, p. 488), reprinted in Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel 1896-1965 edited by Hugh Ford (Philadelphia [etc.]: Chilton Book Company, 1968), p. 69: ‘Leonard and Virginia Woolf ... wrote: “Your hands will always be covered with ink.’ (Formerly F12.)
Cf. Nancy Cunard, These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928-1931 (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; London and Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, 1969), p. 8: ‘I can still hear their cry: “Your hands will always be covered with ink!’
Clive Bell, ‘Virginia Woolf’, Old Friends (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), pp. 92-118, passim (partly reprinted in Jean Russell Noble [q.v.]).
Clive Bell, ‘Encounters with T. S. Eliot’, Old Friends (London: Chatto & Windus, 1956), pp. 119-20:
‘Virginia liked Tom [Eliot] from the first and appreciated his poetry: also she teased him. ...
‘Between Virginia and myself somehow the poet became a sort of “family joke”: it is not easy to say why. ... Virginia was a born and infectious mocker.’
May Sarton, I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography (NY: Rinehart & Co., 1959), pp. 219-20:
‘She told me how someone had just presented her with a small Chinese vase, and how improbable it seemed that at that very moment primroses shiould appear out of thin air, to be placed in it ...
‘... she teased me about poetry, and told me that it was easy to write poems and immensely difficult to write novels. ... she looked at me with suddent intensity, and, said, “You are writing a novel? Ah, then all this must seem totally unreal to you.”
‘... she spoke of it [The Years] that day as an immense act of will, to break the mold of The Waves; she said that someone had called her on the telephone, a disembodied voice like that of a sybil, and had said, “You are becoming too special, too involved in your own inner world. Come back to us.” So she labored at The Years, which was, she said, to be “about ordinary people.” She had worked on it in a curious way, many scenes at a time, picking out first one then another like the pieces of a mosaic. So that the horror in this case, as she explained, had been in the transitions, the linking passages.
Leonard Woolf, Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1960), p. 70:
‘There was something of the “silly” in Virginia, as I always told her and she agreed ...’
Evelyn Irons, ‘An evening with Virginia Woolf’, New Yorker, (30 March 1963), pp. 115-16,118:
‘Vita Sackville-West’s [voice on the telephone] said, “Look here, Virginia wants to see your paper [the Daily Mail] being printed. ...
‘On the wall of one of the [telephone] booths somebody had chalked the notice “Reporters who have been eating biscuits are requested not to ask for Chichester.” She [Virginia] read it and said, “I suppose that is necessary when one must telephone to Chichester so often” ... I could only tell well-worn stories, such as the one about Lord Northcliffe’s yes man, who took his hat off every time he had to speak to the Chief on the telephone. This struck her as not at all funny but natural and rather sad ...
‘Mrs. Woolf stood beside a printer, peered at the forms, and quickly read a paragraph or two back to him, even though the type was upside down. He was delighted, and said, “We don’t often get ladies coming in from outside who can do that.”
“Ah, but you see, I’m a printer myself,” she said, smiling briefly at him and evidently pleased that her little trick had been such a success. ...
‘Virginia poked about among the Caslon, Cameo and Gouldy Bold, asking how many points the most sensational headlines ran to (seventy-two), and what had been the last event to evoke them? ... When I asked if she was tired, she said, rather sharply, “I want to see it all - I’m interested in exactly how things are done here” ...’
Robert Gathorne-Hardy, ‘Introduction’, Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), pp. 24, 44:
‘I said how interesting it was to see in Ottoline, together with the rebel against her palatial background, always evident the aristocrat. “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Woolf, very meaningly ... Mrs. Woolf seized on it [the suggestion that Ottoline should write her memoirs] enthusiastically, adding that she would like to publish the book. “But, Virginia,” said Ottoline, “I can’t write, and I’m sure it would turn out dreadfully sentimental.” “That wouldn’t matter,” said Virginia Woolf. “If you write naturally the truth will float to the top.’
Ottoline Morrell, ibid., pp. 178, 204:
‘our ... own queer and imaginative friends, our scallywags, as Virginia once called them. ... She feels artists are “rather brutes”, that literature and poetry are much finer.’
Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1964), passim.
F. W. Maitland, The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, ed. by C. H. S. Fifoot (CUP in association with the Seldon Society, 1965), pp. 329, 385:
"I need hardly say that Gerald Duckworth (qua publisher) is for one volume, or that Miss Stephen - Miss Caroline I mean - and Virginia would like a great deal more [of the biography of Leslie Stephen]. ...
"Yesterday I had a short note from 'Ginia saying that Nessa is engaged to marry Mr. Clive Bell, Thoby's great friend. Apparently they exchanged promises before the funeral."
Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919-1939 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1967), passim.
Leonard Woolf, The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years 1939-1969 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1969), passim.
Dora Carrington, Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diaries edited by David Garnett (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 45, 176, 245, 477:
‘Roger [Fry] asked me if we stayed there [Asheham] as Virginia was in rather a panic as strange people had broken in, eaten all the food and moved the beds!!!!
‘Virginia told him [Ralph Partridge] that you [Lytton Strachey] had told them you didn’t intend to come to Tidmarsh much after Italy and you were nervous lest I’d feel I had a sort of claim on you if I lived with [you] for a long time, ten years and that they all wondered how you could have stood me so long and how on earth we lived together alone here, as I didn’t understand a word of literature and we had nothing in common intellectually or physically. ... Virginia then told him that she thought I was still in love with you. ...
‘Virginia said ... “You know Gerald [Brenan] is going to get married; he has just written and told Leonard that he is engaged to that American girl.” ... Then she said: “I thought he probably would get married very soon, but of course it may be one of his jokes.” ...
‘I found Virginia’s conversation irrestible. She is very enthusiastic about your story [Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for the Wedding], and so was Leonard. They gave you a tremendous high praise ...’
Harry Kessler, The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan: Count Harry Kessler, 1818-1937, transl. & ed. by Charles Kessler (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 372:
"Virginia Woolf said, 'You know you have been spoiling my sleep this last week, by my husband insisting on reading me passages of your book [Walter Rathenau, His Life and Work].'"
Sylvia McCurdy, Sylvia: A Victorian Childhood (Lavenham, Suffolk: Eastland Press, 1972), p. 67:
‘A long willowy girl with a lovely Madonna-like face [Virginia Stephen (later Woolf)] came in to ask if she might have a few lessons in binding old books of music ... For anyone wishing to write her father told her, Greek literature was a better guide than Latin. ... At a young people's dinner party at my home I remember her saying that all girls should dress for dinner in tight-fitting blue silk dresses. Burne Jones would have agreed with her.’
Sylvia [Stebbing] McCurdy, Sylvia: A Victorian Childhood (1972), p.67, quoted in Marianne Tidcombe, Women Bookbinders: 1880-1920 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press & London: British Library, 1996), p. 165:
‘One day in October 1901, “A long willowy girl with a madonna-like face”, Virginia Stephen (later Woolf), came in to ask if she could have a few lessons on how to bind old books of music, and she and Sylvia Stebbing soon became friends. ... Virginia and her sister Vanessa (later Bell) continued to come to the workshop [in Museum Street] from time to time, using it as “an amusing place in which to pass a few hours”.’
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1972), passim.
C. H. Rolph, Kingsley: The Life, letters and Diaries of Kingsley Martin (London: Victor Gollancz, 1973), pp. 174-5:
'Virginia Woolf characteristically remarked to Francis Meynell at one of his parties: "The Hogarth Press may not make any money but at least we didn't publish the Week End Book."'
Vanessa Bell, Notes on Virginia’s Childhood: A Memoir edited by Richard J. Schaubeck, Jr. (NY: Frank Hallman, 1974), passim.
Robert Gathorne-Hardy, ‘Introduction’, Ottoline at Garsington: Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1915-1918 (London: Faber and Faber, 1974), p. 20:
‘She [Virginia] confessed to Ottoline that during the life of Katherine Mansfield she could hardly, from jealousy, read her books.’
Ottoline Morrell, ibid., p. 244:
‘I said mine [journal] was filled with thoughts and struggles of my inner life. She opened her eyes wide in astonishment. ... She talked of her book Night and Day. The theme of it is that we all live in some dream world of our own with occasional rocks of real life emerging, but the dream is the ether round us.’
Jean Russell Noble (ed.), Recollections of Virginia Woolf (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1975 [the contribution by Leonard Woolf does not appear in the first edition of 1972]), passim.
Dirk Bogarde, A Postillion Struck by Lightning ([London?]: Triad Granada, 1978; first published by Chatto & Windus, 1977), p. 134:
'"Fishing?" she said in a silly way. Because what else could they be doing? ... She looked vaguely round her and said: "I think I'm lost, I can't find the bridge."'
'Reg ... looked sullen. "Up behind you, on the road, he said gruffly ...
'"Thank you," said the lady and then she held up the bunch of flowers for us all to see.'
E. E. Duncan-Jones (Phare), ‘Mrs Woolf Comes to Dine’, A Newnham Anthology edited by Anne Phillips (Cambridge: Newnham College, 1979 [second edition, 1988]), p. 174:
‘All I remember of her talk is that she praised very highly a poem of Stella Gibbons’s, “The Hippogriff”.’
U. K. N. Stevenson (Carter), ‘A Room of One’s Own’, ibid., p. 175:
“I’d no idea the young ladies of Newnham were so beautifully dressed.’
Mulk Raj Anand, ‘Tea and Empathy from Virginia Woolf’, Conversations in Bloomsbury (London: Wildwood House, 1981), pp. 94-102, passim.
Mulk Raj Anand, ‘A Talk with Lytton Strachey in Virginia Woolf’s Drawing Room’, ibid., p. 128:
‘I saw Virginia Woolf coming in.
“Oh Mr. Anand,” she said, “what about that Doctor who does yogi?” ...
“I wouldn’t mind standing on my head to see what it feels like,” said Lytton Strachey.
“You might break your neck,” Virginia Woolf said.
‘... I withdrew sheepishly.
“Bye!” Mr. Strachey called.
“Bye” Virginia Woolf whispered.’
V. Sackville-West quoted in Valuable Autograph Letters . . . [for sale on 20-21 July 1981] (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet & Co., 1981), p. 334:
‘I saw Virginia today ... saying that she “felt stupid’.
Frederic Prokosch, ‘An Encounter with Virginia Woolf’, Voices: A Memoir (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983), reprinted in Programme for Vita & Virginia, Sydney Theatre Company at the Sydney Opera House, 1997:
“Yes? You wanted to see me?”
“Yes, I did Mrs Woolf. I’ve collected a sheaf of poems and I thought you might like to look at them. There are only thirty-three ...”
“I shall be happy to look over them, since there are only thirty-three ...”
“Oh, Mrs Woolf ... that’s not the reason I came here! I came here because ...”
“You wanted to look at me, I suppose? ... Well, now you have looked at me.”
“The Waves - oh, Mrs Woolf, what a miraculous book it is! It is not a novel, it is a cobweb full of sunlight...”
“But after all,” she parried, “what is a novel, my dear boy? Have you really thought about it? What is this so-called novel?” ...
“Well, ... [h]ow do you feel about Dostoevsky?”
“Today,” she said blandly, “I have no feelings about Dostoevsky.”
“Or Gogol ...?”
“I have no thoughts today,” she said softly, “about Gogol.”
“Or Pirandello?” I said wildly. ...
‘Mrs Woolf froze imperceptibly. “I feel no kinship with Pirandello.”
‘... “Or Ulysses, Mrs Woolf! What are your personal sentiments about Ulysses?”
‘... “I have no sentiments about Ulysses. At least none that are worth mentioning. When I read it it struck me as a wild miscalculation. ... A catastrophe,” she murmured. “A veritable collapse of the critical faculties.’
Michael Baker, Our Three Selves: The Life of Radclyffe Hall (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), p. 236
'Storm Jameson went to see Virginia Woolf, whom she had never met before, and anxiously enquired whether they were really expected to testify that The Well of Loneliness was a great piece of literature: "Instead of snubbing or mocking me, as I deserved, she said gravely: No, there will be no need for that." [letter of 27 March 1981 to author]'
From Defence Counsel documents, Morris Ernst Collection, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas: Virginia Woolf 'asked that, because she might be nervous, "for temperamental reasons", she be allowed to be one of the last to appear and then only if she was absolutely indispensable.'
Peter Jacobs, 'Mlle Youniac(?) et Mme Woolf, or the French Translator's Visit', Virginia Woolf Miscellany, No. 31 (Fall 1988), p. 2
'Woolf was not really interested in the quality of the translation [of The Waves, by Marguerite Yourcenar] - "Faites ce que vous voulez", ("Do as you wish) she said ...'
(quoted from Marguerite Yourcenar's Les Yeux Ouverts: Entretiens avec Matthieu Galey [Paris: Le Centurion; reprinted by Livre de Poche, 1980], p. 195.*)
Letters of Leonard Woolf edited by Frederic Spotts (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990), passim.
A Passion for Friendship: Sibyl Colefax and her Circle by Kirsty McLeod (London: Michael Joseph, 1991), p. 157
'Virginia Woolf came to see her [Sibyl Colefax, when she was widowed in 1936] and made no attempt at comfort but "just kept on saying, 'If it were Leonard, what should I do - what can you do?' Then," Sibyl said to Leonard later, "I knew she really understood."'
Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson edited by Nigel Nicolson (London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1992), passim.
Vanessa Bell, Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell edited by Regina Marler (London: Bloomsbury, 1993), passim.
Various contributors in "Portrait of Virginia Woolf"(transcription of BBC radio broadcast of 10 July 1956), Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, Vol 1 ("Recollections and Obituaries; Early Critical Reviews; Bloomsbury; Writers on Writing"), ed. by Eleanor McNees (NY: Routledge / Robertsbridge, E. Sussex: Helm Information, 1994), pp. 83-101, passim.
J. H. Stape (ed.), Virginia Woolf: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1995), passim.
Quentin Bell, Elders and Betters (London: John Murray, 1995 [published in the US as Bloomsbury Recalled by Columbia University Press]), passim.
Leslie Stephen, Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen: Volume 2, 1882-1904 edited by John W. Bicknell (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 1996), passim.
Lady Nelly Cecil quoted in Ancestral Houses: Virginia Woolf and the Aristocracy by Sonya Rudikoff (Palo Alto, California: The Society for the Promotion of Science and Scholarship, 1999), pp. 58-9:
‘She [Virginia] is mad about Greek ... she asked where & how Lady [Gwendoline] Godolphin [Osborne] was ... she despises her yoke-fellow [Lady Nelly] so heartily ... It seems she believes herself ... a member of the middle classes, and conceived ... that she had a grievance against me since last Nov. - which must be wiped out in ink - so now we are quits & thats all right. I want her to write a Lady Dolly [‘The Memoirs of Lady Dorothy Nevill’] every month but she says she can’t read such a dull sort of book again. ... V. - Wasn’t Lady Dorothy very improper? ... I thought there was some story? ... (demurely) Rather unusual isnt it to have an illegitimate child at 17? ... she thinks pretty badly of aristocrats. Well - we must mend our manners & our wit & above all keep out of print - that is the deadly sin ... She has a silly little decadent brother-in-law who fills her mind with poisonous class jealousy ... and makes her believe we despise literary society ...’
Nigel Nicolson, ‘Virginia Woolf, my Mother’s Lover’ (?extract from Virginia Woolf [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000]), Daily Telegraph or Sunday Telegraph, ? November 2000, Review Section, pp. 1-2:
‘Ever heard of Moore?” Virginia asked Vita. “You mean “George Moore, the novelist?” “No, no. G. E. Moore, the philosopher,” ... she turned to a girl of 18 and said, “Now you tell us a story.” ...
[To Nigel Nicolson:] “Tell me, what have you done this morning?” “Well, nothing much.” “No, no, that won’t do. What woke you up?” “The sun ...” “Was it a happy sun or an angry sun?” ... “Which sock did you put on first, right or left?” ... It was a lesson in observation but it was also a hint: “Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.” ...
‘When we were throwing fragments of bread to the ducks one day, she said, “How would you describe the noise that the bread makes when it hits the water?” “Splash?” we suggested. “No.” “Splosh?” “No, no.” “Then what?” “Umph,” she said. “But there’s no such word!” “There is now.”
‘... As we drew out of our local station, she whispered to me: “You see that man in the corner? ... He’s a bus-conductor from Leeds. He’s been on holiday with his uncle, who has a farm near here. ... No question about it.” Then she told me, during the whole half-hour that the journey took, the life history of this man ...
‘[Visiting Knole], pointing at a picture, “Who’s that? What was she like?” and as we never knew, she would invent a name and a character on the spot ...’
E. M. Forster, The Feminine Note in Fiction, ed. by George Piggford (London: Cecil Woolf [The Bloomsbury Heritage Series, No. 28], 2001), p. 6:
'Miss [Virginia] Stephen said the paper was the best there had been [at the Friday Club], which pleases me.'
