Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

TEXTUAL ARCHEOLOGY: AN AUSTRALIAN STUDY OF
VIRGINIA WOOLF IN 1942
by Suzanne Bellamy
This is the story of an artefact from an almost lost world, a 180,000-word MA thesis
on Virginia Woolf’s novels written in 1941/2, fi nished in the shadow of news of
Woolf’s death. It aroused the publishing interest of Leonard Woolf but went unpublished,
as the war intervened. Its author won her MA Honours in Australia and the University
Medal in English in 1942, but then put the thesis aside. Original scholarship, dashed
hopes and tragedies, prescient vision, and mysterious timeliness precede its now resurfacing.
Th e Second World War took much away from us, interrupted lives and projects, broken
threads of ideas, lost chances and opportunities. In the hope of reuniting these severed parts,
this paper brings together again the lives of Virginia Woolf and a young Australian student,
Nuri Mass, and acts as a preliminary fi eld survey of what will become a full length study
of the Mass thesis on Woolf, an annotated version of the original and a contextual study of
both the author and Woolf scholarship at the time of its writing.
Nuri Mass (1918-1993) is well known in Australia as a writer, artist, and book
illustrator, publisher and peace activist. I fi rst met her as a student in the 1970s, around
the time when I was researching radio programmes on Virginia Woolf for the Australian
Broadcasting Commission. She was then well known for her founding of Th e Writers Press,
even setting up her own printing press in the late 1940s, inspired by Virginia and Leonard
Woolf. She had made a career in book publishing and writing rather than in academe,
had two children, was widowed early, and led a productive creative life in printing and
publishing. We had long conversations, and I loved hearing and reading the stories of her
almost mythic early life in the desert of Argentina, with her depressive immigrant Spanish
father Pedro from Barcelona, who was a writer and gold miner, geologist and engineer, and
of her Scottish mother Celeste who was a brilliant artist and considered herself psychic.
Yet lives are often mysterious and so much always remains hidden, and during all our
talks over many years, Mass only once mentioned hesitantly that she had done a thesis on
Virginia Woolf as a young university student in the early 1940s in Sydney. After her death
in 1993, her daughter Tess collected her archive of manuscripts, letters, diaries, artwork,
botanical drawings, and book illustrations, an unpublished autobiography, and all her
published works, and deposited it all in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where it has sat
still uncatalogued. Buried there in a box was her pioneering study of Woolf.
Hearing of Ruth Gruber’s recently re-published thesis on Woolf from 1932, I
remembered Mass telling me about her thesis from 1942 (a light bulb in the brain). It
seemed the time had come to fi nd it. I thought Woolf scholars might now be interested
in other early readings, so with the family’s permission I went to the Mitchell Library in
Sydney. Th ere was the thesis among her papers, untouched and unread since its writing
and assessment in 1942. At the time it was thought to be the fi rst full-length academic
study of Woolf on that scale, and its publication was assumed. Th e earlier study by
Winifred Holtby was available, and of course now we know of Gruber’s study. In this