To the Postbox

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work. ‘I should much prefer that the book should be, as you say written impersonally, from material in the British Museum,’ Woolf wrote. ‘My feeling is that when people are alive, so much personality is bound to creep in, that it is better for the critic to keep aloof as far as possible.’ By the time Holtby’s Virginia Woolf was published in October 1932 it had been pipped to the post by two books, one in German and one in French. But still, hers has the slightly bruised honour of being the first English-language monograph about Woolf.