Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, March 26, 1930. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Papers, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections.
Virginia Woolf was fascinated by biographical writing, even though she considered it something of a doomed genre. She wrote traditional and imagined biographies, of people and dogs, that experiment with how to recount a life. Her novels ask if, when, and how her characters’ innermost selves could be expressed externally. But she knew that sometimes we cannot access the details of our own lives. In one autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf lamented that her own memories produced a misleading account of her life because “the things one does not remember are … important; perhaps they are more important.” These things fell under the category of “non-being,” Woolf’s term for the parts of life not consciously lived. Woolf believed it was essential to capture the oblique, woolly moments that, inevitably, take up most of our lives, but by the time she was at her desk, writing “A Sketch of the Past,” she had already forgotten what she had discussed with her husband, Leonard, over lunch and tea. To recover some fragments of Woolf’s own non-being, we can look at what she barely remembered writing: her postcards. Scholars have paid little attention to these dashed-off missives. In fact, her editors intentionally left them out of the six-volume set of her collected letters, published between 1975 and 1980. As they explain in volume 5, nearly fifty postcards—which can be found in archives across the U.S. and the UK—were deemed unsuitable for publication because they “concern social arrangements or small business affairs which are often mentioned again in another context, and throw no new light on her character or life.”
Woolf’s own writings seem to counter their assessment. The postcards’ practicality and ephemerality are why they are essential to understanding her. Her diaries and letters contain writing that is more ritualistic and more intentionally tied to her work, not least because she increasingly expected they would be published someday. The postcards materialize an unselfconscious act, a persona not quite public, a version of herself meant to be seen by one other person for a fleeting moment.
Every time I went to a new archive to look at postcards, I wondered whether there was something cruel and unusual about dissecting perhaps the only texts that Woolf may have considered safe from future readers. Woolf likely imagined these cards would end up in a garbage can or, at best, someone’s attic. Even if she believed in preserving banality in theory, she may have had a different set of rules for herself. Would she be happy to see her non-being brought to the surface?
Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, January 21, 1930. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Papers, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections.
1.
Slipped into a transparent sleeve, tucked into a manila folder inside a storage box, is an unassuming brown card. One side pre-stamped, addressed to her friend the writer Lytton Strachey when he was living at Gordon Square. On the other side, there is no salutation, only a note scrawled in violet ink by an unhesitating hand: “It would be charming if you would come to tea tomorrow (Wednesday) 4:30 I shall be alone. Perhaps you’d ring up. Virginia.”
Woolf’s longer letters are belabored interactions—it is good of you to write. Yours sincerely. Others are sprawling exchanges signed your loving aunt. The postcards are briefer and more uniform. Their contents generally follow the above format: no salutation, an invitation, and a suggested time, usually signed only with a “V.,” “V.W.,” “Virginia,” or, when writing to her sister, Vanessa Bell, “B.”—a shorthand for Woolf’s nickname, Billy Goat.
Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, November 25, 1925. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Papers, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections.
2.
Most of the postcards written from England are invitations for tea or dinner. In this postcard to Strachey, Woolf cheekily refers to herself and Leonard as “the Wolves” and, at the end, almost as a postscript, dashes off, “And what about Florence Nightingale?” As modern interlopers, we might also ask, “And what about Florence Nightingale?”
Postcards begin in the middle. They are like bumping into Clarissa Dalloway on her way to buy flowers. Strachey was one of Woolf’s primary postcard recipients, and these cards are part of their ongoing, relational web of chatter; we are eavesdropping on a conversation we cannot quite make out. Woolf’s correspondence gets at the ineffable quality of friendship—what does not need to be explained (and what the biographer will never hear).
3.
This card to Strachey is postmarked 12:45 A.M. In the midnight pickup, we glimpse a particular era of daily communications—a postal system in which efficiency had just collapsed distance, and invitations could be made and answered before teatime.
In the 1830s, half a century before Woolf was born, an educator and inventor, Rowland Hill, agitated for change due to widespread dissatisfaction with the existing postal system’s inefficiencies. In the old system, the recipient paid for postage, so postal workers had to meet the recipient to collect payment. Clerks calculated the fees for each letter based on distance, and letters were invasively searched for additional sheets hidden within them. Hill advocated for a system based on uniform penny postage, which his supporters called a “godsend” and a “birthright.”
Once the reforms took hold, more people sent more mail. By the early twentieth century, one-third of all British civil servants were employed by the post office, allowing for multiple pickups per day. During the 1929–1930 financial year, more than six billion letters were sent through the Royal Mail.
The postal system shaped the way Woolf thought about correspondence and the kind of writing that appears on these postcards. Her communications were entangled with the Royal Mail—even when she was protesting the government. This card presents a large antiwar graphic, featuring one hand balled into a fist (labeled IGNORANCE, SELFISHNESS, SUSPICION, CONTEMPT, INDIFFERENCE) and an open hand (labeled GOODWILL, UNDERSTANDING, SYMPATHY, EXPECTATION, COOPERATION) under the header WHICH IS THE BETTER WAY? The image would not go unnoticed by its recipient—but it also requires no comment. Woolf just scribbled around it, in the narrow margins available, a dinner invitation to Strachey. She did mention the meandering shape her writing had taken: “an odd L I daresay.”
Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey, May 14, 1931. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Papers, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections.
4.
When the postcards were first introduced in 1870, they were only available in prepaid form that could be purchased from the post office. It was not until 1894 that “private cards” became available—as in postcards that could be stamped by the sender.
Once private cards were born, tourist hubs began to produce picture postcards, like the travel and museum souvenirs that Woolf sometimes sent. Generally, Woolf did not comment on the images on the postcard. One exception is this postcard featuring a portrait of George Eliot, produced by the National Portrait Gallery, for which Woolf had authored the small description printed on the back. Woolf became part of the creation of these cards that she was always sending. When she got hold of one, she dashed off a letter to Lytton, writing gleefully beneath her own quotation, “What a haul just delivered in the letter box!”
Virginia Woolf to Vanessa Bell, May 16, 1933. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Collection of Papers, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.
5.
In 1933, Virginia and Leonard Woolf took a motoring holiday through Italy and France. From Siena, she sent a card featuring an early Italian fresco by Simone Martini to Vanessa, an artist. Woolf wrote, “I’m going to try to write you a long letter tonight, but you dont [sic] deserve it, dumb deceptive Dolphin. Not a word from you. how foolish you are to prefer Tott. Court Rd. to nightingales, orange flowers, strawberries; I’m just off to buy a farm in the hills. This is where we must live. V.”
The note is a flash. Woolf’s handwriting is quick, fluid, irregular: unselfconscious. The note says “I’m thinking of you, I wish you were here,” meanwhile promising a longer letter. Woolf’s travel postcards maintain the same tone and style as her at-home missives, aiming to minimize distance rather than to organize proximity.
Virginia Woolf to Mrs. Spira, January 20, 1939. Courtesy of the Virginia Woolf Papers, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections.
6.
At the beginning of World War II, Woolf used her personal and professional connections to protest the wrongful internment of an Austrian lawyer and refugee, Dr. Robert Spira, and advocate for his release. In the letters she wrote to his wife, Woolf is sensitive and kind. Here, she lets her know that “if your husband would like to come with you tomorrow we should be glad to see him.” When she mailed out these cards, Woolf would often paste the Royal Mail stamps sideways or upside down, as a protest against English leadership and the existence of British internment camps on the Isle of Man.
Virginia Woolf to Julian Bell. Courtesy of the William Beekman Collection of Virginia Woolf and Her Circle, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library.
7.
Woolf, the modernist, is often seen as representing a break from the Victorians, but her postcards show us that this break was not entirely clean. For most of her life, Woolf preferred to write with a dip pen, which, she wrote in 1918, she considered the only pen that could “convey life with precision.” Although she tried fountain pens at various times, she thought they possessed a “muffled respectability.”
Woolf’s preferred ink color was violet, which she felt lent a softness to her correspondence. Purple had become a popular color for inks and textiles since the patenting and mass-marketing of the synthetic dye, aniline purple in the 1850s. George Eliot linked violet ink to “lady novelists” in a sardonic essay about her contemporaries, though she used it as well. The purple may have held some feminist connotations, as it was one of the emblematic colors of the suffragette movement.
Woolf usually typed as a courtesy to those who struggled to read her scribbly handwriting. She felt a distance from the machine—her handwriting was an extension of herself in a way that the typewriter was not. Even as an intensely modern writer, her stationery preferences were holdovers from the Victorian marketplace.
Here, her struggle to type—awkward spacing, irregular ink, backspaces—is visible as she asks her nephew Julian for help locating the source of a quotation: “For Heavens sake tell me where does ‘Die like a rose in aromatic pain’ come from? Pope? And what is the right quotation? And where are your xxxxxd poems.” It was unusual for her to type a note to Julian—but imperfection, of memory and of typing skill, offers a different kind of intimacy.
A little way into Woolf’s 1922 novel Jacob’s Room, the narrator digresses while describing a sitting room. “Let us consider letters,” she begins—“how they come at breakfast, and at night, with their yellow stamps and their green stamps, immortalised by the postmark—for to see one’s own envelope on another’s table is to realise how soon deeds sever and become alien.” In these melancholy terms, a postcard is both a phantom of its sender and an independent entity.
Once it has been received, it cannot be revised, reversed, or reclaimed. The postcard is the self because it is instinctual and once gone, unobservable. As soon as it has been sent, it is history. The postcard is also a seeking, vulnerable self, extended toward someone else. It is the one-sided thought that asks to be acknowledged.
These communications outline our existence; as we forget them, they still live somewhere within us and somewhere, on someone else’s table. These brief, fragmentary selves last far longer than the versions of ourselves we knowingly present. The non-being spreads wide.
Sarah Bochicchio is a writer and art historian. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in the history of art and early modern studies at Yale University.
The postcards have been published with permission from the Society of Authors as the literary representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf.
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