Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer closely associated with the 20th-century modernist movement. Her letter to her future brother-in-law Clive Bell, dated circa November 10, 1906, discusses arranging a visit between Bell and her sister Vanessa Stephen as well as the health of her older brother Julian Thoby Stephen.
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen, 1882-1941) was an English writer and founding member of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of British writers, artists, philosophers, and intellectuals who influenced early 20th-century thought, art, literature, and criticism.
Woolf was the third of four children born to Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson; formerly Duckworth,1846-1895), an art model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), a writer, in South Kensington, London.
Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Stephen, met their future husbands, Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, through their brother Julian Thoby Stephen (known as Thoby), at an end-of-the-year party at Trinity College in 1900. Woolf lived in South Kensington until her father's death in 1904, when the Stephen siblings moved to Bloomsbury.
In 1905, the Stephens began hosting social gatherings of Thoby's intellectual, artistic, and writer friends. These friends would eventually become the core of the Bloomsbury Group. During the autumn of 1906, the Stephens visited Greece and Turkey. Thoby contracted typhoid fever while on the trip and eventually died on November 20, 1906. Vanessa accepted Clive Bell's marriage proposal two days later.
Woolf died by suicide in Rodmell, England in 1941.
The Virginia Woolf letter to Clive Bell, dated circa November 10, 1906, is an autograph manuscript signed by her. In the letter, Woolf discusses arranging a visit between Bell and her sister, Vanessa Stephen. She also mentions that her older brother Julian Thoby Stephen's fever seems to be getting better, and hopes that Thoby's friend Sydney Turner might visit him the following day.
Purchased, 2022.
Processed by Amy Lau in 2025.
Other materials by or about Woolf are held in the Virginia Woolf collection of papers (Berg Coll MSS Woolf), Virginia Woolf letter to Ellery Sedgwick (Berg Coll 28385), William Beekman Collection of Virginia Woolf and Her Circle (Berg Coll MSS Beekman), Virginia Woolf letter to Susan Lushington (Berg Coll MSS 185983), Virginia Woolf letter to Roger L. Scaife (Berg Coll MSS 186016), Bloomsbury Group correspondence (Berg Coll MSS 186411), Lytton Strachey collection of papers (Berg Coll MSS Strachey), Stephen Spender collection of papers (Berg Coll MSS Spender), and Vita Sackville-West collection of papers (Berg Coll MSS Sackville-West).