Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume VI: 1936-1941, Woolf, Virginia. Published by The Hogarth Press, London, 1980. First Edition. Sixth Volume. 8vo up to 9½” tall., 556pp. Aqua cloth boards with gilt titles. Volume is clean of markings; one corner page fold. Light spine slant, bumping to corners and rubbing to spine tail and head edges. Fading to jacket and light soiling and wear. A very scarce first edition of the final volume of Woolf’s letters.
The last volume of Virginia Woolf’s “Collected Letters” runs from 1936, when she was finishing “The Waves”, to 1941, when she drowned herself. But there is little or no shadow of impending tragedy over her sparkling correspondence with Vanessa, Vita, Ethel Smyth and her many other friends, such as T.S. Eliot, John Lehmann and Stephen Spender; nor did it curtail her writing: apart from “The Years”, she published “Three Guineas” and her biography of Roger Fry, and wrote “Between the Acts”. When war came Virginia and Leonard, bombed out of Bloomsbury, lived at their cottage in Sussex, exposed to the air-battles and under threat of invasion, and it was here that she committed suicide in March 1941.
