Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

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Nearly seventy years later, in the summer of 2004, I reconnected with Virginia Woolf
when one of my assistants discovered three letters Woolf had written me in 1935 and
1936. Th rilled with the discovery, my editor, Philip Turner, announced: “Stop everything
you’re doing. Remember, you wrote the fi rst doctoral thesis on Virginia Woolf’s work. I’m
going to publish it in its entirety, including these three newly discovered letters and also
her diary entries about you.”
Th e book, entitled Virginia Woolf: Th e Will to Create as a Woman, appeared in 2005.
It had been my fi rst book, and now it was my eighteenth. My two children and I agreed
with my friend, the novelist Cynthia Ozick: “Th ese letters do not belong to you and your
children. Th ey belong to the world.” On 12 December 2005, we donated them to the
Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. Woolf scholars can now fi nd them in the
Collection among the 28 volumes of her diaries and more than 100 of her letters.
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In 2006, the annual Virginia Woolf Conference held in Birmingham opened my eyes
to the global scope of Virginia Woof’s infl uence. When I wrote my thesis in 1932, there
was no such person as a “Virginia Woolf scholar.” At the conference, however, I was accepted
by a group of brilliant and enthusiastic Woolfi ans from all over the world. Some
had even come from Australia, China, and Japan. Th ere I learned from some of the older
scholars that my study was the only one available to them during the rediscovery of Virginia
Woolf by American and British feminists in the 1960s.
Th e conference reawakened my understanding of how much I owed to Virginia
Woolf. She helped me fi nd the courage to write as a woman, and to use words and images
as my tools to fi ght injustice. Th roughout the rest of my life, the words she spoke to me at
52 Tavistock Square were written across my heart: We had such hope for the world.
I wish I could tell her that, despite everything, I still have hope.
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