Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own
Lytton Strachey's Praise of The Common Reader
Virginia
Woolf dedicated her first collection of essays “To Lytton Strachey.”
According to Woolf’s diary, Strachey said The Common Reader “was
divine, a classic.” Before reprinting the essays in November 1925,
Woolf asked Strachey for his help: “you might tell me what the
misprint in the Common Reader was that you snarled out at Leonard once
in Gordon Sqre. We hope to reprint, & I’m collecting the more
obvious & glaring howlers with which, I’m told, the book pullulates...
Your old, rake, & fireside hag, V.” Strachey could not remember:
“And the comble is that I cannot recal[l] the misprint in the
Common Reader. All this is I believe the result of Sir Almeric Fitzroy,
whose ‘memoirs’ I have been reading, and who has reduced
me to a state of sawdust equal to his own ... Your Lytton.”
Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell at Charleston: photograph, 1928?
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| Virginia Woolf. Letter to Lytton Strachey, 8 September [1925]. |
Lytton Strachey. Letter to Virginia Woolf, 11 September 1925. |
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Presented by Frances Hooper ’14.
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College
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