![\"Woolf\"](\"http:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/gatenew\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/07\/Woolf1-230x297.jpg\")
Among the 140 items on display through October 26 as part of \u201cVirignia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision\u201d are 11 original letters, hand-printed books and photographs from Smith\u2019s collections.<\/p>\n
In June, those rare archival items were packed into a specially designed crate and escorted on a flight to London by an agent from a fine art shipping firm, said Karen Kukil, associate curator of special collections at Neilson Library.<\/p>\n
A bronze bust of Woolf \u201csupervised\u201d the packing at the library, Kukil added, with a smile.<\/p>\n
Kukil said planning for the loan to the London gallery began two years ago, when Spalding visited Smith\u2019s Mortimer Rare Book Room<\/a> to select items for the Woolf exhibition.<\/p>\n Spalding was familiar with Smith\u2019s collections, having been on campus in 2010 to give a talk in conjunction with \u201cA Room of Their Own,\u201d an exhibition of works by Bloomsbury artists at the Smith College Museum of Art.<\/p>\n Kukil said Smith is pleased to have contributed to the breadth of the new show in London.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s nice about the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is that it\u2019s not only paintings and portraits, but also archival items,\u201d she noted. \u201cThings that capture really important moments in Woolf\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n One of the items on loan from Smith, for example, is a Feb. 17, 1909, letter to Woolf (then Virginia Stephen) from fellow Bloomsbury Group writer Lytton Strachey. Strachey had proposed to Woolf but withdrew the offer almost immediately when he realized they were not in love, Kukil said. His letter to Woolf states that\u00a0\u201cthe important thing is that we should like each other.\u201d<\/p>\n Strachey remained lifelong friends with Woolf and her husband, Leonard, whom she married in 1912. When the couple\u00a0got\u00a0engaged, they wrote Strachey\u00a0a two-word letter, “Ha! Ha!” which is also on loan from Smith in the London show.<\/span><\/p>\n Strachey’s letters are part of Smith\u2019s Frances Hooper Collection of Virginia Woolf Books and Manuscripts<\/a>,\u00a0which was bequeathed to the college in 1986 by Smith alumna Frances Hooper, class of 1914.<\/p>\n Kukil said Smith is also lending\u00a0the London gallery an original Julia Margaret Cameron photograph of Woolf\u2019s father, Leslie Stephen, along with a number of digitized images from Stephen\u2019s photograph album.<\/p>\n Smith alumna Elizabeth P. Richardson \u201943 presented\u00a0the\u00a0album and other items comprising the Elizabeth P. Richardson Bloomsbury Iconography Collection<\/a> to the college in 1998.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The show at the National Portrait Gallery also contains archival items from the British Library and the New York Public Library, including two suicide letters and the walking stick that Woolf\u2019s husband discovered the day she went missing in 1941. Her body was discovered a month later on the banks of the River Ouse. (Click here <\/a>for an\u00a0illustrated timeline).<\/p>\n Among those attending a July 8 private viewing of the London exhibition was alumna Julia MacKenzie,\u00a0Am.S.Dipl,\u00a0<\/span>\u201979.<\/p>\n In an email to Kukil, MacKenzie said she had not only \u201cspotted many of the Smith items\u201d on display, but also had a chance to greet Olivia Bell, wife of Woolf\u2019s nephew, Quentin, \u201cwho was there in a wheelchair at the age of 98.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nearly a century ago, British author Virginia Woolf is said to have refused to sit for a likeness for the National Portrait Gallery in London because of the absence of paintings of women on the walls. She assumed her own portrait would simply languish in a drawer. But on July 10, with help from Smith […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":3,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-9732","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9732"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9732\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9905,"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/9732\/revisions\/9905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smith.edu\/news-stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}