A great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world
In the days and weeks that followed Virginia Woolf's death, her husband received many letters of condolence
In the wake of Virginia Woolf's suicide in 1941, her husband, Leonard, found himself at the receiving end of an extraordinary outpouring of grief as friends, family members, and strangers expressed their condolences by post. This remarkable collection of letters, a testament to Virginia Woolf's impact on the literary world and beyond, is preserved within the Leonard Woolf Papers at the Special Collections of the University of Sussex Library in England, and in 2005, they were brought to light in Sybil Oldfield's Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf—a deeply moving book that contains some of the most beautifully articulated expressions of mourning, reflection, and homage I’ve ever encountered. It’s from that volume that the following excerpts have been plucked.
No words can express our feelings at this dreadful heartrending thing. We are absolutely overcome. All our thoughts are with you. There isn’t anything one can say, and one must not intrude on your sorrow. But all my life I shall remember the feeling of light, and of happiness, that she gave one. As a person, as well as in her art. Everything seemed worthwhile, important, and beautiful.
Edith Sitwell
Letter to Leonard Woolf
4th April 1941
Nothing in the world could have been better than you two coming together. One will miss her letters so much; tho’ my writing she said was that of a drunken spider.
Violet Dickinson
Letter to Leonard Woolf
19th May 1941
It is most frightfully sad for you, and I felt awful when I heard of aunt Virginia’s death. You must let spring and the birds and flowers make you happy. I am keeping aunt Virginia’s letters that she wrote to me as anyone would keep a treasure.
If you have any I would very much like you to send me a photograph of her. A real friend always lives in one’s mind, but to have a picture of them is nicer. I wish I could have said goodbye to her before she went. But I can try and cheer you up.
Elaine Robson, aged 10
Letter to ‘Uncle Leonard’
April 1941
She was the one person who should not have died, who cannot be spared. No one like her ever, nor could be.
Rose Macaulay
Letter to Leonard Woolf
3rd April 1941
She came to see me in Chelsea when I too was shipwrecked—and as she talked she was more comfort than all the rest, because she kept on saying “If it were Leonard”—then I knew she understood—love like ours (hers and yours and ours) is so rare, it’s recognised and known only when it is the engulfing thing—“If it had been Leonard what should I do—what can you do”—No attempt at comfort—she knew better—and so in all the black darkness and the terrible solitude you know that that was Virginia.
Sybil Colefax
Letter to Leonard Woolf
April 1941
I have no words of grief. Your letter stunned me, and at present I can only think of you, with feelings I will not attempt to express. The loveliest mind and spirit I ever knew, immortal both to the world and us who loved her. . .
For you I feel a really overwhelming sorrow, and for myself a loss which can never diminish.
Vita Sackville-West
Letter to Leonard Woolf
31st March 1941
I suppose you know that every soul who has ever known you can think of no one else now. One wonders if one ever will.
Ethel Smyth
Letter to Leonard Woolf
20th April 1941
Dear Leonard—
Forgive me calling you—whom I hardly know—by your Christian name. But I wanted in some way to associate myself with all that you are suffering from your beautiful Virginia’s death. If I am suffering, how much more you must be.
Margot Oxford
Letter to Leonard Woolf
8th April 1941
I remember her so well as a beautiful silent girl in her father’s house and though her fame made me later on a little shy of her we always seemed to go comfortably back to those old days when we talked together.
I do not know what to say to comfort you. I cannot comfort myself for the loss of my husband and I know so well what you must be feeling.
One can only say to oneself that they went in the fullness of their powers and be thankful that they are spared a great deal that we shall have to go through and that they are now where no stupidity or malice can hurt them.
Susan Tweedsmuir
Letter to Leonard Woolf
7th April 1941
That headline in the Evening Standard brought back, brings back so many memories of her in what seem now to be very distant days; evenings by firelight in Spanish rooms, walks on mountains, summer afternoons on English lawns. I never knew any human being who gave such an impression of quality to everything she said and did. She suggested to me that nursery rhyme about what little girls are made of, only it wasn’t sugar and spice that had gone to her fabrication but some pure crystalline substance which with every change of light took on new and delicate colours.
Gerald Brenan
Letter to Leonard Woolf
6th April 1941
Virginia’s death takes the colour out of the world for people who like me had a love for her out of proportion to our knowledge or nearness. I can’t bear to think what it means for you.
You have had the rarest woman of our generation as your wife. Nobody who hadn’t seen, as we did in Greece how you lent her your strength to live with could ever understand how much of all she has been was made possible by your tender understanding of her whole nature. I don’t think anything can comfort you now, but I do hope that later you will get some happiness from knowing not only what you have had in her but also what you were for her.
Margery Fry
Letter to Leonard Woolf
6th April 1941
How she made one remember that the exquisite things are to be found, whatever the cruelty of the world—though it was too much for her to bear—how you tended that spirit and cared for its integrity and surrounded her with your flowers.
Together you showed a way of living inspiring to your friends and now it is your particular vision and courage which sustains me at least of them.
Mary Hutchinson
Letter to Leonard Woolf
2nd April 1941
Virginia was a kind of reasonable faith in my life, as in that of a good many people, and now this thing has happened. I told her once that one of her books had answered some profound question for me, but didn’t know what question exactly. There was something like that about her all the time: she was an answer and I took it for granted that it would always be there: as no doubt you did.
Naomi Mitchison
Letter to Leonard Woolf
10th April 1941
It may be that that most extraordinarily beautiful and sensitive spirit has broken through into great light. To me she seemed always on the edge of it. How glorious, judged by its results, her life has been.
Life dwells neither in body nor brain—that is the point I have come to after many years (not from sympathy with spiritualism nor from any dogmatic thought). And I simply can’t in any way feel that death has touched her.
Rachel Dyce Sharp
Letter to Leonard Woolf
3rd April 1941
[A]bove all I don’t want to trouble you with words now. And it is no time to speak of my own feeling. As far as I am concerned, a great deal of the meaning seems to have gone out of the world. She illuminated everything, and one referred the most trivial things to her in one’s thoughts. To have been allowed to know her and love her is a great thing.
Elizabeth Bowen
Letter to Leonard Woolf
8 April 1941
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