"You See You Kind of Belong to Us, and What You Do Matters Enormously": Letters from Readers to Virginia Woolf

Writing to Virginia Woolf about Guineas from Springfield, MA 1938, Agnes K. Potter says her comments are from point of view of this ordinary (Snaith, Three Guineas 97). Q. D. Leavis, however, would have us believe that Woolf did not have ordinary readers; Guineas conversation between [Woolf] and her friends (272). Woolf's careful and honest description of her position leads to Leavis's assumption that all Woolf's must be of Woolf's own class. Anna Snaith's edition of the letters written to Woolf after the publication of Guineas proves that such narrow construction of Woolf's readership is not accurate. (1) Similarly, Melba Cuddy-Keane's investigations of the spotting The Common Reader (Virginia Woolf 110-14) and of individual like John Farrelly (From Fan-Mail 3-32) succeed break[ing] down categories that have identified high culture with high class and show that definitions of Woolf's readership must include respect for both the intellectual impulse and the intellectual accomplishment of non-privileged, non-specialist readers (Imbricated 5). Following Q. D. Leavis's lead, however, Jonathan Rose recently argues that Woolf's essay Middlebrow calls for cultural triage and asserts that modernists made literature difficult to make the common reader illiterate once again and to preserve a body of culture as the exclusive property of coterie (394). He does caution, though, that no two individual reading histories [are] alike, that generalizations about readers, though not completely groundless, neglect the complicated and ambiguous use of literacy, and that [t]he only workable method is to consult the (367). Exactly. As Anna Snaith and Melba Cuddy-Keane discovered, one of the best ways to consult themselves is through their letters to Woolf. (2) Because, as Helen Waddell points out when she encloses someone else's letter about The Waves her own note to Woolf, in spite of all that has already been said print, there is something the manuscript word and the circumstances of the writing that makes it valuable (Letter 78). I discovered the same thing the summer of 2001. At session called Archives the Age of Mechanical Reproduction during the Eleventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf at the University of Bangor Wales, Bet Inglis, the retired Assistant Librarian the Manuscripts Section at the University of Sussex, talked about the treasures the Monks House Papers and casually mentioned that someone should take look at the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen housed there. When I got to the Sussex archives the next week, planning to spend the entire summer on the drafts of early reviews written by Virginia Stephen, I thought I might take an afternoon to follow up on her suggestion. That digression quickly became an obsession, an archive-junkie race through the correspondence to Virginia Woolf located Letters III of the Monks House Papers (SxMs 18). But what intrigued me, what I became addicted to, were not the letters from Elizabeth Bowen, engaging as they are. No, although the known correspondents the authornamed files Letters III certainly claimed some of my attention, what I could not stop reading and transcribing that crazed summer were the letters box tantalizingly called Correspondence of Various Persons re: Books, Articles. (3) Woolf's came alive as I read their letters, and I could not turn my back on them. [G]iving voice ... to the silent (Carr), this collection of letters grows out of and builds on the fine work of Snaith, Cuddy-Keane, and Oldfield, increases the number of actual (as opposed to imagined) Woolf scholars can consult, and moves Woolf studies, particularly studies of her reception, another step closer to full record of letters written to Virginia Woolf about her work and thus to more accurate view of the far wider circle Woolf hoped to reach (L6 420). …