Beschreibung:

Woolf (Virginia, 1882-1941). Typed Letter Signed, ‘Virginia Woolf’, Monks House, Rodmell, Lewes, Sussex, 3 August 1928, to Miss Phare, a brief 5-line note agreeing to come to Newnham [College, Cambridge] on Saturday 20 October, signed in purple ink, minor marks and fold lines, 1 page, 8vo (Quantity: 1) A brief but poignant letter in which Woolf is agreeing the date to give an address to students at the all-women’s college Newnham College, Cambridge. Virginia Woolf’s cousin, Katherine Stephen, was the librarian and later principal at Newnham. Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own was based on two papers given to the Arts Society, Newnham, on the 20 October 1928, and to the literary society Odtaa [One Damned Thing After Another] at Girton College. The college gardens and the hall of the fictional Fernham College in A Room of One’s Own are clearly modelled on Newnham. Elsie Elizabeth Duncan-Jones (née Phare; 1908-2003) was a British literary scholar, translator and playwright. She attended Newnham College, and was president of the college's undergraduate literary society. After Woolf’s visit, Phare wrote a review of the talk in the student magazine Thersities where she highlighted that for Woolf ‘the reasons why women novelists were for so long so few were largely a question of domestic architecture; it was not, and is not so easy to compose in a parlour’, and ‘exhorted her audience to write novels and send them to be considered by the Hogarth Press … If Newnham students were to submit work, they should not try to adapt themselves to the prevailing literary standards which are likely to be masculine, but… should remake the language so it becomes a more fluid thing and capable of delicate use.’