Recollections of Virginia Woolf — (1994)

By Joan Russell Noble

“The tantalisingly brief, strongly personal recollections of a fascinating bunch of contributors tell us far more than any biography.”

Lynda Lee-Potter — Daily Mail

“The high standard of literacy is what makes it an enthralling book…. To read this book is to get to know a wonderful human being.”

Cyril Connolly — The Sunday Times (London)

In the words of its editor, “This book is not intended to provide an assessment of Virginia Woolf’s work. A great deal has already been written about her novels and critical essays. It is concerned essentially with Virginia Woolf herself: about whom little has been said in print. It has been written by people who knew her either intimately as relations and friends, or who met her from time to time over a period of years and were acquaintances. Whatever the relationship, their knowledge of her is of course first hand; it extends over the greater part of her adult life, and is set down in these pages mostly in the form of reminiscences, impressions and anecdotes.”

The contributors include T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowe, E. M. Forster, Rebecca West, Christopher Isherwood, Stephen Spender, and Vita Sackville-West. The cumulative effect of this splendid collection is to display the complexities of one of this century's greatest writers, an alternately witty, jealous, teasing, warm, malicious, generous woman, who finally took her own life in 1941.