The letters Virginia Woolf wrote after her brother’s death, in which she pretended he was still alive, show a writer experimenting, perilously, with fantasy’s transformative potential.
For Virginia Woolf, correspondence became a way to transcend a climate of illness—to envision a future she couldn’t see.Hours after watching her twenty-six-year-old brother die, Virginia Stephen wrote a letter to one of her dearest friends. In that letter, written on November 20, 1906, she did not utter a word about her brother’s death; she did not so much as mention his name. Virginia was twenty-four—six years from marrying and becoming, nine years from publishing her first novel.
Recently, I’ve found myself drawn to these early Woolf letters—to their unsettling mix of grief and hope, loss and desire—because in them I see a writer experimenting, perilously, with fantasy’s transformative potential. To some extent, all letters do this: if I write you a letter today, my words will have to be legible to you days from now. Our friendship will have to stretch to accommodate this asynchrony.
In the midst of this correspondence, two years before Thoby died, Virginia lost her father. She kept writing to Violet through the worst of it. The letters become shorter: daily updates on her father’s temperature, his mood, the doctors’ latest prognoses. But we also see, amid that horror, Virginia reaching out to Violet for the comfort of a letter. Watching her father suffer near the very end, Virginia wrote, “It does seem very hard.
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