...remembering all this, I feel myself curled up snugly in old mother wallabies [sic] pouch. My little claws nestle round my furry cheeks. Is mother wallaby soft and tender to her little one? He will come and lick her poor lean mangy face. When you are at your worst do you think of Mrs Lyttleton, Mrs Crum, or me. Think this out. When you wake in the night, I suppose you feel my arms round you.

Although generally affectionate, Virginia could also be quite harsh. The blind observance of formality, which she considered the definition of idiocy, particularly tried her patience. For example, when relatives came to visit her dying father and offer her their sympathy she fumed to Violet Dickinson, "Relatives swarm. I liken them to all kinds of parasitic animals really I think they deserve no better. Three mornings have I spent having my hand held and my emotions pumped out of me."

But she never mentions the things that really bother her. Her mother died when Virginia was 13. The woman who came to take Mrs. Stephen's place in the household, Virginia's half-sister Stella, died two years later. When she was 22, her father passed away; two years after that, her brother Thoby died of typhoid fever. Virginia only spoke of the last death, and even her reference to that was fortuitous. Violet was very ill with the same disease and in order to conceal Thoby's death from her, Virginia made up cheerful prognostications and a few stories about him. This went on for a month before Violet heard the grim truth and the game was up. Virginia did not mention Thoby again until long afterwards.

Readers who examine these letters for evidence of Woolf's fits of insanity will be disappointed. There are only the slightest variations in style and tone. Generally the onset of her breakdowns (she had two during the years this volume of her letters covers) was marked by a particular bitchiness in Virginia. As she recovers, her letters are extraordinary for their clarity and maturity. She emerges from each breakdown refreshed, with a new power of vision. After one summer-long madness she writes to Violet,

You will be glad to learn that your Sparroy [Virginia herself] feels herself a recovered bird. I think the blood has really been getting into my brain at last. Its [sic] the oddest feeling, as though a dead part of me were coming to life.

And later,

I do think I may emerge less selfish and cocksure than when I went in and with greater understanding of the troubles of others.

The present volume of letters ends with her engagement to Leonard Woolf, a name she was at first unable to spell. (In letters to friends announcing her engagement, she calls him Leonard "Wolf.") According to Virginia, Leonard found her writing the best part of her. She repeated gleefully his promise that "if I cease to write when married, I shall be divorced."

By that time, she was already an accomplished writer. Her reviews had been published in the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. She had published no fiction, although she had been working on her first novel for six years. Little that is in her letters contributes to an understanding of that first work, The Voyage Out. The editors make a case for certain parallels in characterization and action (the death of both Rachel and Thoby, for instance) but such parallels, especially when compared to those in Woolf's later novels To the Lighthouse and The Years, are quite tenuous.

What makes reading these letters worthwhile is the style in which they are written. She moves easily from one detail to the next, with no connection except an ampersand (which the editors wisely eliminated in favor of the less obtrusive "and"). Like her handwriting (which was wretched) her style was completely unstudied. It was simply the way the words came out. Nicolson, who heard her speak when he was a child, says the letters give quite an accurate representation of her conversation. One reason she charted the vicissitudes of character in her novels was that her style was flexible enough to do so. By the end of this volume of her letters, one realizes why Woolf wrote as she did. This was the style closest to her heart, embodying her personality--quick, sharp and radiant.