New Letters From Bloomsbury Group up For Auction

Posted on July 15, 2008

New letters from The Bloomsbury Group have surfaced and shed some light on one of Virginia Woolfe's lesbian affairs.

Funny, revealing and downright bitchy pen-portraits of the leading figures of the Bloomsbury Group, the key British literary stars of the 1920s and 1930s, have come to light in unpublished correspondence between the poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West and an aspiring young writer.

The letters, to novelist Margaret Howard, which are up for sale at the auction house Sotheby's on 17 July and are expected to fetch around 22,000 pounds, show the depth of Sackville-West's feeling for Virginia Woolf, with whom she had a long lesbian affair, and the amusement with which the aristocrat viewed the rest of Woolf's intellectual set of friends. Sackville-West, who was the model for Woolf's androgynous, time-travelling heroine Orlando, first began writing to Howard, her 'darling waif-novelist' in 1941, the year of Woolf's suicide. The letters make it clear that she was deeply moved by the young woman's appreciation of her dead lover's great talent.

With the decline of the written word and the rise of the electronic age, we assume that we will have full access to most famous writers' emails, long after they are gone. Unless, of course, said writers take great care to delete all his or her emails and erases the hard drive. And even then, someone will be able to recover what's on a hard drive, unless it's physically destroyed. and they're not that easy to destroy by hand. In fact, to really destroy a hard drive you need to hurl it into the fiery pit of Mount Doom.

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