Woolf was relieved to receive the following praise by Lytton Strachey for her first novel, The Voyage Out: “At the end I felt as if it was really only the beginning of an enormous novel, which had been—almost accidentally—cut short by the death of Rachel.” In Woolf’s response three days later, she says: “What I wanted to do was to give the feeling of a vast tumult of life, as various & disorderly as possible, which should be cut short for a moment by the death, & go on again ...” Woolf wrote a total of ten novels before she died in 1941.

Presented by Frances Hooper ’14.
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College

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