New Bloomsbury Archive: King's College, Cambridge

In The Guardian, 19 March 2010

At the bottom of the page, you can access 5
photos from Frances Partridge collection

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/19/bloomsbury-archive-virginia-wool
f-death


New Bloomsbury archive casts revealing light on Virginia Woolf's death


A revealing letter about the disappearance and
suicide of Virginia Woolf in 1941 is part of a
new archive of letters by the Bloomsbury group
that is being opened to public viewing for the
first time.

The two collections belonged to the novelist
Rosamond Lehmann and the diarist and writer
Frances Partridge, once described by fellow group
member Clive Bell as having "the best legs in
Bloomsbury". Lehmann and Partridge became friends
at Cambridge University, later getting to know
the group of intellectuals that also included
Woolf, EM Forster, Lytton Strachey and JM Keynes.

One of the documents in the archive, which has
been acquired by King's College Cambridge, sees
Clive Bell writing to Partridge on 3 April 1941,
shortly after Woolf's final disappearance. "I'm
not sure whether the Times will by now have
announced that Virginia is missing. I'm afraid
there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned
herself about noon last Friday," writes Bell.
"She had left letters for Leonard and Vanessa
[Woolf and Bell]. Her stick and footprints were
found by the edge of the river. For some days, of
course, we hoped against hope that she had
wandered crazily away and might be discovered in
a barn or a village shop. But by now all hope is
abandoned; only, as the body has not been found,
she cannot be considered dead legally."

Bell wrote that it had become evident some weeks
earlier that Woolf "was in for another of those
long and agonising breakdowns of which she had
had several already". "The prospect of two years'
insanity, then to wake up to the sort of world
which another two years of war will have made,
was such that I can't feel sure that she was
unwise," he added.

The archive's thousands of pages of letters,
including some from Woolf herself, and 30 albums
of photographs featuring key members of the group
such as Forster and Strachey, are being opened to
the public by King's. The collection also details
the Bloomsbury group's reaction to the suicide of
the artist Dora Carrington, the first wife of
Frances Partridge's husband Ralph Partridge. She
shot herself two months after Strachey - with
whom she was besotted - died of stomach cancer.
She was still alive when Ralph and Frances
arrived at the Wiltshire house, hours later.

"For me the final touch of horror seems to be
given by the fact that she was still alive and
conscious when you arrived," wrote Clive Bell to
Frances Partridge in 1932. "What can it have been
like - I'm glad I can't clearly imagine it. This
world of tragedy in which all my dearest friends
are engulfed is only half-real to me because I
left England a day or two after Lytton died.
Hadn't you and Ralph better get out of it for a
bit?"

Lehmann - whose controversial first novel Dusty
Answer, partly about her time as a student in
Cambridge, catapulted her to fame - provides a
lighter note in an August 1932 letter to
Partridge about an argument between her husband
Wogan Philipps and his father. "It started with
an argument about capital punishment (W against,
Papa for, of course) and developed at lightning
speed into communism, filthy painting, being in a
filthy set, rotten intellectuals, intention of
making Wogan squirm and beg for every penny, etc
etc," she wrote. "Before we knew where we were,
Wogan was presented with a document to sign,
agreeing to go into Morris's motorworks as an
ordinary mechanic and then go to Russia for six
months and find any work he could. Meanwhile
another letter was composed to Morris asking him
if he would take in Wogan and cure him of
communist nonsense."

She also gives an insight into her lifestyle,
writing about how she had been looking after her
son Hugo while his nurse had a holiday. "I've
really enjoyed it, tho' it makes one feel rather
blank in the head. He really is rather an amusing
child," she wrote.

King's archivist Patricia McGuire said the two
collections also provide glimpses into what
Partridge and Lehmann "were reading or listening
to, into what art galleries and exhibitions they
were attending and into how they responded to
major political events of the day, such as the
Spanish civil war".

"In a way, these two women belonged to a
generation that could only have existed between
the wars," she said. "They had education,
training and rights but they also had lots of
free time and didn't necessarily have to keep a
house. They had well-developed points of view,
were articulate about their emotions and at the
same time struggled with their bohemian
lifestyles and the more conservative, older
generation."

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