The New York Times Book of The Dead by William McDonald

Author:William McDonald
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Published: 2016-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

VIRGINIA WOOLF

January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941

LONDON—Mrs. Virginia Woolf, novelist and essayist, who had been missing from her home since last Friday, is believed to have been drowned at Rodwell, near Lewes, where she and her husband, Leonard Sidney Woolf, had a country residence.

Mr. Woolf said tonight:

“Mrs. Woolf is presumed to be dead. She went for a walk last Friday, leaving a letter behind, and it is thought she has drowned. Her body, however, has not been recovered.”

The circumstances surrounding the novelist’s disappearance were not revealed. The authorities at Lewes said they had no report of Mrs. Woolf’s death.

It was reported her hat and cane had been found on the bank of the Ouse River. Mrs. Woolf, who was 59, had been ill for some time.

The Woolfs ran the Hogarth Press from 1917 to 1938, when Mrs. Woolf retired to devote her time to writing. Her last book was “Roger Fry, a Biography,” published last year.

Mrs. Woolf was born in 1882. She was a daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. James Russell Lowell was her godfather. She was granddaughter of Thackeray and relative of the Darwins, Symondes and Stracheys.

She grew up in a household that Stevenson, Ruskin, Lowell, Hardy, Meredith and other writers visited. As the wife of Leonard Woolf and the sister-in-law of Clive Bell, Mrs. Woolf had a literary circle of her own.

She was the author of 15 books of high quality, in which the critics met up with at least four different kinds of thinking and writing. This led to her being characterized as “the multiple Mrs. Woolf.”

In the “Three Guineas” Mrs. Woolf replied to the question of a barrister: “How in your opinion are we to prevent war?” The keynote of this work was her remark that the inquiry must be unique in the history of human correspondence, “since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented.”

Of one of her novels, “The Years,” Ralph Thompson, book reviewer of The New York Times, said: “Mrs. Woolf is nearest perfection when dealing with the past or with a present that has already begin to lose itself in the past. Then she is near perfection indeed.”

When not working on novels and longer essays, Mrs. Woolf frequently wrote for critical literary magazines, entering a number of literary controversies. One of her last tilts was with book reviewers in December, 1939.

She contended it was a “public duty” to abolish the book reviewer, holding that reviews were so hurriedly written that the reviewer was unable to deal adequately with the books his editor sent him. Mrs. Woolf declared no Act of Parliament would be necessary to abolish the reviewer, contending that the tendencies she deplored would soon condition him out of existence.

Commenting editorially on Mrs. Woolf’s description of Augustine Birrell as a “born writer,” The New York Times in August, 1930, described Mrs. Woolf as “one of the most subtle, original and modern of moderns, herself a born writer.”

Mrs. Woolf’s published works began with “The

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