Virginia Woolf, "The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Virginia Woolf, "The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories" (Princeton UP, 2025)

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Moteza Hajizadeh
Guest: Professor Irmila Seshagiri
Date: October 7, 2025

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Overview

This episode explores the surprising and significant release of three early, previously unpublished stories by Virginia Woolf—now collected as The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories—edited by Professor Irmila Seshagiri and published by Princeton University Press. The conversation delves into the stories’ discovery, their context in Woolf's early career, literary genre, feminist themes, the pivotal role of Violet Dickinson in Woolf’s life, and connections to Woolf’s later works.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Professor Seshagiri’s Route to Woolf (03:08–05:38)

• Professor Seshagiri describes how she transitioned from aspiring Shakespearean to modernist scholar, driven by a theatrical project based on Woolf’s letters.
• The experience embedded Woolf’s voice and concerns deeply in her intellectual life.
• Memorable performances included a run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and an invitation to the international Virginia Woolf Conference.

“When you do a play, you hear words over and over and over again in the course of rehearsals and performances. And so those words that she wrote about herself, about her life, about her art just became part of my thinking and part of my brain.”
— Prof. Seshagiri (04:12)

Reflections on Reading Woolf (05:38–07:10)

• Host admits to initially struggling with Woolf—especially To the Lighthouse—due to language barriers and the non-linear modernist style.
• Seshagiri empathizes, highlighting the challenge of Woolf’s prose and the importance of supportive teaching.

“There’s a rhythm and a cadence, and the poetry of what she’s accomplishing with each sentence… But I agree with you that she's not perhaps the easiest novelist to just open the book and fall in with.”
— Prof. Seshagiri (06:31)

The Discovery of the Manuscripts (08:13–17:31)

• Clarification: The stories weren’t entirely undiscovered; rough drafts had been published in 1979, but never in a fiction collection, always labeled as unfinished or minor.
• The Life of Violet consists of three stories: “Friendships Gallery,” “The Magic Garden,” and “A Story to Make You Sleep.” They were written in 1907 for Woolf’s friend Violet Dickinson, originally as an inside joke.
• The key revelation was a polished, revised typescript found at Longleat House, unknown to Woolf scholars and distinctly more sophisticated than the New York Public Library’s rougher draft.
• The process involved international archive sleuthing, pandemic delays, and a dramatic reveal at Longleat House in 2022.

“It was almost like seeing a child grown up so that you could recognize the child that once was when it was younger, but now the child has grown and is bigger and is more self-sufficient, if you will.”
— Prof. Seshagiri (16:38)

Violet Dickinson’s Influence and the Stories’ Context (17:31–27:19)

• Violet Dickinson, 17 years Woolf’s senior, was a major confidant—Woolf’s “surrogate mother, older sister, a kind of aunt...her nickname...was Aunt Maria.” (19:02)
• After family traumas, especially the deaths of her mother and half-sister, Woolf’s correspondence with Violet was emotionally and creatively sustaining.
• Violet not only provided emotional support but practical encouragement, connecting Woolf to her first paid publication opportunities.
• The stories are a literary tribute and personal inside joke for Violet, but Woolf’s decision to revise and repeatedly polish the stories demonstrates her commitment to craft, even at this early age.

“It seems when you read [the letters], that there wasn’t a thought or a feeling she had or an experience that she underwent that she did not record and immediately transmit to Violet.”
— Prof. Seshagiri (19:16)

Violet's Role in the Drafts (27:19–28:45)

• Violet Dickinson’s annotations and suggestions appear in drafts; some of her handwritten changes were incorporated into Woolf’s revisions.
• This rare collaboration is distinctive; later, Woolf rarely took external input in such a direct way.

“We don’t have a lot of evidence later of any kind of collaborative writing like that, someone else’s hand on the typescript that Woolf then respects enough to say, yeah, I’m going to take your word or your punctuation or your name for another character.”
— Prof. Seshagiri (28:19)

Genre Experimentation & Feminism in the Stories (30:01–38:25)

• Woolf subverts the conventions of biography, producing a mock biography filled with fairy-tale, fantastical, and comedic elements.
• The male biographer-narrator’s voice is unreliable, self-conscious, and obsessed with his own accuracy, parodying the seriousness of conventional life-writing.
• The stories’ feminist energy is palpable: Violet’s literal and metaphorical largeness cannot be contained by social or literary conventions.
• Early versions of themes recognizable in A Room of One’s Own and Orlando emerge here—especially women’s autonomous spaces and communal female solidarity.
• The notion of “a cottage of one’s own” is directly present as a precursor to Woolf’s later, iconic “room of one’s own.”

“The marriage plot vanishes. It’s not that it’s there and has to be resisted, it’s just not there. Woolf imagines other possibilities.”
— Prof. Seshagiri (41:13)

“Nothing was ever finished for her. All the way through to her last novels, nothing was ever finished. She was always revising.”
— Prof. Seshagiri (26:48)

Continuity With Woolf’s Later Works (38:25–40:37)

• The fantastical and playful tone of these stories connects to the later novel Orlando, where boundaries of gender, genre, and chronology are similarly blurred.
• The stories anticipate key feminist and utopian motifs, such as solidarity among women and breaking free from patriarchal constraints, both recurring in Woolf’s mature work.

“We see Woolf’s emphasis on what a society of women can achieve, what can women together do? … here we have it within the plot, and we see these women… coming together and laughing and breaking rules… just being natural…”
— Prof. Seshagiri (39:16)

The Transformative Power of Female Friendship (40:37–42:38)

• Female friendship is not only biographically foundational but is imagined as a utopian and creative force.
• The stories present relationships among women as generative of alternative possibilities—defining their lives outside of marriage or conventional patriarchal structures.
• Profoundly, Woolf imagines a community of equals, regardless of class or background, gathered around creative and intellectual pursuits.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Collaboration:
  “That, too, is a small but significant detail because we don’t have a lot of evidence later of any kind of collaborative writing like that.”
  — Prof. Seshagiri (28:19)

• On the Power of Female Friendship:
  “From a literary point of view, friendship between women opens up imaginative possibilities. There are no constraints imposed by patriarchal expectations of female characters in these stories.”
  — Prof. Seshagiri (41:13)

• On Woolf’s Revision Habit:
  “Nothing was ever finished for her. … She was always revising.”
  — Prof. Seshagiri (26:48)

• On Feminist Utopias:
  “There are visions of different types of utopias in these stories that come into being when women’s friendships with one another get to drive the plot rather than the presence or absence of women’s relationships to men.”
  — Prof. Seshagiri (42:10)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:08–05:38 — Prof. Seshagiri’s literary journey and connection with Woolf
• 08:13–17:31 — The archival quest and the discovery of the Longleat typescript
• 17:31–27:19 — Violet Dickinson’s role in Woolf’s life and the context of the stories
• 30:01–38:25 — Genre subversion, mock biography, and feminism in the stories
• 38:25–40:37 — Links between the stories and Woolf’s later works
• 40:37–42:38 — The literary and personal power of women’s friendship

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Professor Seshagiri’s Forthcoming Projects (42:55–43:48)

• First scholarly edition of Woolf’s autobiography, A Sketch of the Past (Cornell University Press).
• New edition of To the Lighthouse for its 100th anniversary (W.W. Norton, 2027).
• Monograph on the legacies of modernism in contemporary culture.

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Final Thoughts

This episode is an insightful journey into an extraordinary scholarly discovery, shedding new light on Virginia Woolf’s creative process, her early feminist experimentations, and the power of women’s friendship as both lived reality and literary possibility. Through archival detective work and a fresh editorial lens, Prof. Seshagiri and host Moteza Hajizadeh offer listeners an accessible yet deeply engaged introduction to The Life of Violet, a vital addition to the Woolf canon.

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Transcript

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[Marshall Poe]

Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moteza Hajizadeh, and today I'm honored to be speaking with Professor Irmila Seshakiri about a recent book that she has published with Princeton University Press. And this is a surprise to a lot of literature lovers. The book we're going to discuss is called the Life of Violet 3 earliest stories from Virginia Woolf. And Ermila has done a wonderful job of editing these sources. These are three unpublished stories from Virginia Woolf that have been published for the first time by Princeton University Press. And I'm so excited to talk to Ermila about this work. Professor Irmila Seshagari is Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She's also the author of Race and the Modernist Imagination. She's the editor of Oxford World Classics edition of Virginia Woolf Jacobs Room and a contributor to Los Angeles Review of Books. Ermila, welcome to New Books Network.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

Before we talk about, we start talking about this book and I must say it's going to be a difficult interview because we want to talk about the work of fiction without really spoiling the content. But we'll talk about it anyhow. Can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us how you became interested in literature and especially Virginia Woolf.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Thank you. I am, as you said in your very gracious introduction, a professor of English Literature at the University of Tennessee. And I've always loved language, I've always loved literature, and I've always gravitated towards fiction. And I thought I was going to be a Shakespearean when I began graduate school. And then I took a seminar on modernism, and there was no turning me away from the modern novel at that point. And I actually came to Woolf in a very unusual way. I had read a couple of works in College. I read Mrs. Dalloway and I read A Room of One's Own. But when I got to graduate school, I met two people who wanted to make a play about Virginia Woolf's life as it was represented in her letters. So we formed a theater company and we wrote and assembled a play that told the story of her life with the language of her letters, from her very earliest letters to her very last ones. And we cast it and we performed it at the University of Illinois, where I was doing my graduate work. We were invited to the, which was then only the fourth Woolf International Virginia Woolf Conference. And then we had a 10 day run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which was fantastic. And doing that work with those actors and with my collaborators gave me an insight into Woolf's life and her writing. And when you do a play, you hear words over and over and over again in the course of rehearsals and performances. And so those words that she wrote about herself, about her Life about her art just became part of my thinking and part of my brain. And then a few years later, when I began writing my dissertation, the first chapter that I wrote was the Wolf chapter. And I wrote about to the Lighthouse and Orlando. And then it was my very good fortune and now somewhat unreal privilege to secure a job at the University of Tennessee. And I've been here now since 2002.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

Wonderful. Uh, I. I hope you don't hate me for saying that. I study English literature myself. Regina Woolf, as. I don't know, she. When I was a student, she was never my favorite author, I guess, for a reason that English was my second language. So I prefer to read the classics rather than the modernist. And I prefer to read something that was, you know, linear with a middle beginning and end. So I found her text a bit difficult and challenging. So I. I think I started with to the Lighthouse, but after I graduated, actually, I became more fond of Virginia Woolf.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Yeah, I have many. I have met many people over the years who have that experience, and I think it's very hard to start with to the Lighthouse. I would not advise somebody who hasn't read Wolf to start with that. I think it can be very challenging and it can just be confusing. What's happening here? Nothing's happening. Happening. I don't understand. But I think that if you have a teacher or professor who can guide you through how to understand what she's trying to do, then there's a rhythm and there is a cadence, and the poetry of what she's accomplishing with each sentence in each novel comes out. But I agree with you that she's not perhaps the easiest novelist to just open the book and fall in with.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

You're absolutely right. And I think it's important because like I told you, I studied English. My English was my second language, and I. I studied that in Iran. And we had a course, British Novels, and there were two courses, British Novel Number One and then two. So they had to jam three or four novels into their sample of English literature. And one of them was Regina Woolf, to the Lighthouse. And I don't think it was the right decision at that time. But you. You're absolutely right, because after I graduated, you know, and I said, okay, everybody's talking about this Wolf. Let me just get over my trauma maybe, and start reading her. And I started to enjoy her even more then, yeah, let's talk about this book. It's. I was amazed when I saw the. When I saw that the book is going to be published by Princeton three earlier Stories, Three stories from Virginia Woolf that has never been published before. It's the first time I found it absolutely surprising. Tell us about this book. How did it come about? How did you discover these stories? And it's called the Life of Violet. What does that title refer to? There's a lot in there.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

I guess that was a lot of questions. So let me start by providing some background. And the first thing that I have to clarify is that I didn't discover a new book by Virginia Woolf that nobody had ever heard of before. What I discovered was a revision, a finished, professionally typed version of three stories, three early stories, as the title tells us, that scholars have known about, only in rough draft form. So the New York Public Library acquired a massive collection of Woolf's papers. And among them is an item that is called Friendships Gallery, and it's typed in violet ink. The typewriter ribbon was violet colored. And it's three stories. One is called Friendships Gallery, one is called the Magic Garden, and one is called A story to make you sleep. And scholars have known that these were works that Woolf composed in 1907 when she was 25 years old, and they were written as a kind of inside joke for her friend Violet Dickinson. And I'll talk a little bit more about Violet later. And the typescript that's in the New York Public Library is not very polished. It's readable, but there are parts of it where you can see Woolf doesn't really know how she wants to and descendants or format a paragraph or, you know, she's got a few different possibilities on the page, and she's gone back and she's done handwritten edits over the typing, and it's very much a draft in process. Those three stories were only published once, in 1979, in an academic journal called 20th Century Literature. And transcribing them was the work of a scholar named Ellen Hawks. And the transcription that was published is necessarily approximate because it's very hard to know how to transcribe a rough draft. How do you put in all the possibilities of. Well, it could have been this word. It could have been this word. This was crossed out. I don't know if she wanted the first word, the word above it, the word below it. You know, how do you do that? And Hawkes's transcription was then reproduced in volume 6 of Virginia Woolf's Collected Essays, and it was put in these three stories or put in in an appendix of unfinished essays or unpublished essays. They weren't even categorized as stories, and that was in 1979. That was a really long time ago. And these three stories that are known collectively under the title Friendships Gallery, even though that wasn't Woolf's title, and that's only the title of the first story, have never been printed in a collection of Virginia Woolf's fiction. They're not in the Complete Shorter Fiction. They're not in more recent collections of Woolf's fiction that have been produced by Penguin or by Vintage or by any other, you know, an academic publisher. They've just been shunted to the wayside because they are so approximate, so rough, so young. In 1907, Woolf has not begun publishing fiction. So, Fast forward to 2018, and this is where I enter the story. I was at the University of Sussex conducting research for my scholarly edition of Woolf's autobiography, which is called A Sketch of the Past. And she was writing her memoir, this autobiography, when she died. And so at the time of her death, it was unpublished, and it was unfinished and unpublished. And Woolf, of course, famously wrote two suicide notes. One of them said to her husband, Leonard, will you please destroy all my papers? The other one didn't say that, and Leonard didn't destroy her papers. And I was researching this memoir, which was only published in 1976 and has never been published in a formal scholarly edition. And so it's a sort of very monumental undertaking that I had set for myself. It's my Everest project, if you will. And I came across a reference in my research for this edition of this autobiography to something that Woolf wanted from her friend Violet Dickinson. And I asked the archivists in the Sussex Library, do you have this item by Violet? And they said, no, but you might reach out to Longleat House in Wiltshire. I had never heard of Longleat House. And I sent them an email, and they said, yes, we have this item by Violet Dickinson because we have her papers here, and we assume you'll also be interested in Virginia Woolf's Friendships Gallery. Now, I was very. I immediately wrote and said, oh, you must have a copy of what's in the New York Public Library. I've seen that. I don't need to see it. And they wrote back and said, no, we have an original work by Virginia Woolf called Friendships Gallery. We've never heard of this New York Public Library item that you're talking about, but we have an original Virginia Woolf work here. I didn't know what to think. So I contacted the archivist in the New York Public Library, Carolyn Vega, who oversees the Berg Collection, where Woolf papers, Woolf's papers are. And she had Never heard of the Longleat item. And we wanted to see this item right away because, of course, what is it? But there are very strict estate rules governing how documents at Longleat can be accessed. Violet Dickinson's papers are still under copyright. And this item, this mysterious New Friendships Gallery, could not be scanned, xeroxed, photographed, shown during a Zoom or a FaceTime session. And so there was a long, complicated process that I will skip over. And just when it seemed feasible in March of 2020 that I was going to be able to go to Wiltshire and visit Longlead House, the pandemic happened. And during the pandemic, I was unable to send. Obviously I could not go myself and I couldn't hire a research assistant in the UK to go to Longleat House and study this item for me, because Longleat then closed to researchers, they closed to the public. And so it was not until 2022 that I made my way to Longleat House. After the Pandemic, and with the generosity and the guidance of the Longleat archivist, Emma Challoner, went into this mansion that is like something from a movie, this enormous mansion outside of Bath Manor House, and walked up the a staircase with portraits and carved wooden balusters on either side. And she led me into a reading room and handed me a box. And I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know if this was going to be a huge disappointment. I didn't know if it was going to be identical to the work that was in the New York Public Library. I didn't know if it was going to have new chapters that were unknown to readers. So I lifted the lid and there was this saffron bound book that said Friendships Gallery on the COVID And I opened it and I started reading it. And it was an unforgettable moment for me because I could see immediately from the first page that Woolf had revised the work and that it was different. It was better, it was more sophisticated, it was more polished, and at the same time it was the same work. It was almost like seeing a child grown up so that you could recognize the child that once was when it was younger, but now the child has grown and is bigger and is more self sufficient, if you will. And I don't want to push that metaphor too far, but it was as. As thrilling for being recognizable as it was for being new. And I sat down in a chair and I just reread and read for the first time these three stories. And I was so enchanted and captivated and Stunned that there was this item that had her handwriting on it, that had her revisions that were unknown. So that's the very long story of how that discovery came to be.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

It's. It's fascinating. And I really love the way you depicted, you know, the moment you walk into the manor. I can only imagine the suspense. Wow. And you mentioned Regina Wolf's friend. What was her. What was her influence on Wolf? Was she was more than a friend, of course. Was she like a literary sounding board to Wolf?

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Violet Dickinson was 17 years older than Virginia Woolf. They met when Woolf was 20 and Violet was 37. And Violet was born into a wealthy family in Somerset, and she was 6ft 2 inches tall. She was born in 1865. And I cannot imagine all the things that that meant for her. To be a woman, a quote, well born woman, a wealthy woman, and to be 6 foot 2. It is a state of exile. It is potentially a dead end. You're unmarriageable. You are. What are you going to do? You don't belong to a professional class. You don't belong to a working class. You're not at this moment in history. It's not possible to go off to college. She's not going to leave home and become a, you know, let's say a governess or a showgirl or something. You know, there aren't a lot of opportunities for her. So she lived a very courageous, very interesting life. She had tons of friends, tons and tons of friends. And among them were the daughters of Leslie Stephen and Julia Stephen. So Stella Duckworth, who was Virginia Woolf's older half sister, was friends with Violet, and that's how Woolf met Violet. And Stella, her older sister, died. Woolf's mother died when Woolf was 13, in 1895, suddenly, out of the blue. Very traumatic. Eight children at home, and her mother just died of perhaps traumatic fever. We don't really know how she died. And then Stella Duckworth, who was the oldest daughter, Julia's the mother's daughter from her first marriage, stepped into the role of being the maternal figure in the lives of the children. She got married in 1897, and she was suddenly stricken with illness, perhaps appendicitis, perhaps peritonitis, we don't know. And she died. And so these two deaths were immensely traumatic for Woolf. And it was in the seven years between Stella's death and Woolf's father's death in 1904 that her friendship with Violet was central to her life. They were friends, they socialized together, they were prolific correspondents. And if you Ever have a chance to look at the first volume of the six volumes of Woolf's published letters? More than half of them are letters that she wrote to Violet. It seems when you read them, that there wasn't a thought or a feeling she had or an experience that she underwent that she did not record and immediately transmit to Violet. So Violet has been regarded as a kind of surrogate mother, older sister, a kind of aunt. In fact, Woolf's nickname for her was Aunt Maria. And she was very funny. She had a tremendous sense of humor. And these letters are very often very funny that she sends to Violet. So Woolf in these years is living a life that she describes in her memoir as the division in our lives was very curious. Upstairs, where she had. She and her sister Vanessa had their bedroom where she would write and Vanessa would paint. She would say, upstairs was pure intellectual, downstairs was nothing but convention. And that's where her father and her half brothers would come and expect to be served tea and to entertain guests and to have all of the protocols of, you know, coming down, dressed for dinner observed all the way through 1904 when Leslie Stephen died of cancer. So she was leading a life that felt split into two halves, where there was the artistic, creative, intellectual side of her that was desperate to thrive and to create and to grow. And then there was her social Persona, which her half brothers were insisting be channeled into a marriage market. And she didn't want to be, you know, presented at parties and at balls and be introduced to wealthy, young aristocratic men, the, you know, the sons of well placed politicians or statesmen or landowners. She just wanted to read and to write and to be with people who are intelligent like herself. And it's during this period that she begins to send her writings to Violet. And Violet is an emotional support. That's how she's been known all along. The role that Violet plays in biographies of Woolf is this intense, intimate companion who takes care of her when she has her first breakdown. She writes to her mothers, her. Gives her wise counsel. But she also recognized Woolf's immense talent as a writer. And in 1904, she introduced Woolf to an editor at the Guardian, not the Guardian newspaper we read today, but a clerical newspaper and said, you should start writing essays and reviews for this paper. And so it was Violet who facilitated Woolf's first paid appearance in print and launched her career. And we owe Violet a great deal for that because it's that first step that paved the way for subsequent writings. So in 1905, Violet and her friends, Lady Robert, Lord Robert and Lady Nellie Cecil went on a huge, several months long around the world cruise, starting from England and going to Canada and then to Japan, many, many cities in Japan, and then Hong Kong, China and Singapore, and then down to Sri Lanka and then up to Egypt and to all Cairo, to Aden and then back up to Italy. And Violet wrote to Woolf during this trip, and she wrote her postcards and letters, and none of these unfortunately survive, but we can infer their content from Wolf's letters back to Violet, all of which survived. And Woolf was really tickled by this trip. She. It really seized her imagination. And so in 1907, she said, I'm going to write a life of Violet. I'm going to write something about the aesthetic sense in Nellie and Violet. And then she, In August of 1907, she sends these stories, these three stories to Violet Dickinson to read. And everybody thought that was it, that she had written these stories for Violet to mock their mutual friends and their aristocratic conventionality, their traditions, their superficiality, and then to make a fantasy out of the around the world trip, focusing on the Japan portion. And nobody knew that Woolf took the time to revise these stories and to perfect them. And that's in itself, that knowledge is so fascinating because it shows us the care she brought to her literary writing at a time when we really think that she's putting most of her effort into publishing short essays for the Guardian, for the tls and thinking about the novel she wants to write. She spends many years working on the Voyage out, her first novel, which she publishes in 1915, but we're not used to thinking of her as a writer of short stories in 1907, 1908, and then to have the work professionally typed, and then to take that professional typescript and continue working on it, because the long lead typescript that I discovered has further hand edits. So she was still working on it, you know, she was. She. And she always did that. She. Nothing was ever finished for her. All the way through to her last. Her last novels, nothing was ever finished. She was always revising. And so it's. It's very lovely to find an early work that gives us that same evidence.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

And Violet herself was also involved in. Was she involved in, like, providing maybe annotations to this, to the final version?

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

So Woolf sent the stories to Violet, and Violet's handwriting is on the New York Public Library typescript, which is the draft, and you see that she's crossed out a word here and there and replaced it with her own. There are places where Woolf has tactfully not filled in the names of characters like Lady Blank or Lord Blank. And Violet has gone in and put those names in, in her handwriting to say, no, we're going to identify Kitty, Max and Nellie and Hatfield House and 29 Fitzroy Square, all, you know, things that Woolf had tactfully disguised and anonymized for purposes of the story. So when Woolf had the draft stories, when she revised them and had them typed, she incorporated some of Violet's suggestions. And that, too is a small but significant detail because we don't have a lot of evidence later of any kind of collaborative writing like that, someone else's hand on the typescript that Woolf then respects enough to say, yeah, I'm going to take your word or your punctuation or your name for another character. And that, I think that's a. That's a nice, a nice detail about this discovery.

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[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Experian.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

And I know that literary scholars hate this question, this question of categorizing, but these three stories, it's not really a biography, it's mock biography. You describe it also as a feminist act. Can you talk about the genre or how Regina Woolf played with the genre? And how does it help us to see this as a feminist act? And how does it challenge this? Traditional biographical narratives.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Yeah. And I love that question. And Woolf loved that question because genre is so important. And Woolf knew that the only way to retain the vitality of literary genres was to keep challenging them and remaking them. And most famously, of course, we know she attacks Arnold Bennett, along with John Galsworthy and H.G. wells, for being what she calls materialists, these Edwardian writers in the first decade of the 20th century who immured their works, who draped their characters and their houses and settings and folds, so lifelike that they seemed as though the novel was done to a turn. But she always felt they're missing that essential spirit of fiction. And she rejected the idea of progress in fiction, that what was written 10 years ago was not as good as what is written now. She says fiction is not like a motor car, right? The motor car we have today is going to be an improvement on the one we had earlier. But fiction is not like that. We move a little this way, a little that way, she says. And so genre is where these movements happen. And she famously, every time she writes a novel, thinks about how she's going to remake her storytelling this time. And so with the Life of Violet, she calls it. She says she refers to it as My Life of you. She calls it the Myth, she calls it the Life. She refers to herself as a mythobiographer. And she loves biography. She loves life writing. She always does. She is a novelist whose abiding passion was biography. And if you read her diaries, if you read her letters, if you read her reading notebooks, Woolf was always reading biographies and autobiographies. She was reviewing them for magazines and for newspapers. She herself was writing a number of biographies of real people, of invented people, obscure, famous, dead living. One work that has been lost that I wish would turn up magically is a comic biography of her aunt Caroline Amelia Stephen, who was very religious. They referred to her as. As the nun. And they couldn't stand her piousness and her zeal for, you know, religious devotion. And so she wrote a mock biography of her that Violet thought was hilarious, and she loved it. And she told Woolf's sister that Woolf was a genius. And so the writing of lives is something that had always. At this point, she was 25 years old, and she would be consistently interested in the act of writing a life, whether it was hers or someone else's. So what does that mean for these three stories? This is a mock biography because it is full of fantasy and things that are impossible. First of all, it is a work that has elements of fairy tales, of fantastical otherworldly creatures and happenings. It's a mock biography because it mocks the idea of biography. The narrator of these stories is a male biographer, he. A historian. He insists he's not a novelist. He's very nervous. He doesn't want to get things wrong. He continually says, trust me, I'm telling you this correctly. I'm being very sincere. I don't have time to tell you this, but trust me that what I'm leaving out is not important, or even though I didn't explain this to you, I know that it's true. He repeatedly gets into an obsessive state about the truth of the life he describes to us. And although the form of these biographies is not as radical as the work that we read of Woolf and think about as experimental, two decades later, it is concerned with those experimental possibilities. And Violet herself is the inspiration for that. And that's where the multidimensional feminist elements of the work arise. Feminism is both its spirit, its aesthetic, as well as it's the motor of its plot, in the sense that Violet is a child who grows and grows and grows. And on the first page, the nurse, the. The doctor says to the nurse, fetch the weighing scale when the child is born. And the nurse says, it's the foot rule you want, sir. How do we measure this child? How do we. How do we measure a girl who is big, who is long, who is tall, whose proportions don't fit into the expectations of the proportions for a girl? And what does that mean for everything that she is supposed to do? So, in the first story, friendships, Gallery and I won't spoil anything here, but Violet does go through the motions. Woolf has her going through the motions. She is a child who doesn't want to obey her parents. She doesn't want to learn the lessons that a sequence of governesses come in to teach her. She goes to a ball, but nothing conventionally exciting happens at the ball. And then the story takes a turn, and nothing that you would expect as the outcome from those things takes place, Woolf writes a different story for this character. Similarly, in the Magic Garden, which is the second story, we've got Violet, now grown up, who is bored with her rich, titled, propertied friends. And who's the hero of that story? It's the gardener of the manor, and the gardener who is ruddy and bent and smelly and doesn't have good manners, but speaks about the earth and the land to her in a way that sparks her passions and strengthens her resolve to build a cottage of her own. And here's the origin of that phrase. This is a really wonderful moment in these stories where we can see the wolf we know later who writes A Room of One's Own. Well, this is the first time she tries out that phrase. A cottage of One's Own is in this book that is now published. And Violet Dickinson in real life, did build a cottage, called it Burnham Wood, and welcomed people from all kinds of places and backgrounds into that cottage. And Violet, the character, does the same thing. And then the third story, which is called A Story to make youe Sleep, is an absolute fantasy that is set in Tokyo. And Violet and Nelly Cecil become giantesses and goddesses and princesses, and they go to Tokyo and they do all manner of fanciful, delightful, silly, comical things. And so there is tremendous feminist energy in each of these stories and in the male narrator's mystification about how he can accurately tell the story when none of the forms of storytelling he has can contain Violet, can contain her impulses and her actions and her desires.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

It is. And when I was reading these stories, I really love those kind of, you know, fantastical elements to orient. There's some Oriental imagery in this as well. Is there a continuity between these three stories and the future and the later works of Regina Woolf, such as Orlando? Is there a threat that you see running through early pieces to more to her more mature fiction?

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Yeah, there's a lot of. There are many hints of the wolf to come. So, you know, saying the phrase a cottage of one's own obviously paves the way to A Room of One's own. And Orlando, of course, which is her most magical, impossible, charming novel, where a boy in Elizabethan England turns into a woman lives for hundreds of years. And that's a novel that is also about women owning property and inspired by a woman friend, inspired by Vita Sackville West. We see Woolf's emphasis on what a society of women can achieve, what can women together do? And we have a much more sophisticated philosophical or intellectual approach to that question in Three Guineas, in, of course, in A Room of One Zone, but also in Three Guineas. But here we have it within the plot, and we see these women who are larger than life, coming together and laughing and breaking rules and not doing it with anger, not doing it in the spirit of some kind of social rebellion, not doing it. Just. They're just being natural, they're being themselves. And Wolf architects the story in such a way to give that naturalness a lot of oxygen. So, yes, we see hints of the wolf to come, but we also see this uniquely fantastical impulse in her right now that we don't get later. We don't have dragons and wolf, you know, later silver sea monsters and, you know, sugared almonds falling from trees and so on.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

And one final question, and I guess this is also related to feminism and women authors as well. It's this, the power of. The transformative power of friendship, women's friendship, both in life and literature. There are some examples of that in literature as well. But I'm keen to know how this work life of Violet, what does it teach us about that, that power of friendship between women, both in their personal life and also in their creative life?

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

We could say that at the most literal level, that the friendship between Woolf and Violet inspires the stories. But from a literary point of view, friendship between women opens up imaginative possibilities. There are no constraints imposed by patriarchal expectations of female characters in these stories. So the marriage plot vanishes. It's not that it's there and has to be resisted, it's just not there. Woolf imagines other possibilities. So that the Magic Garden. You have people coming together in Violet's cottage and happily sitting on the lawn and digging. And these are people who are nurses, these are wealthy women, these are Coptic scholars, these are all kinds of people. And that mixing of social classes, that free interchange of ideas between men and women, between generations. There are visions of different types of utopias in these stories that come into being when women's friendships with one another get to drive the plot rather than the presence or absence of women's relationships to men.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

I know that you've recently edited this book and it's been published with Princeton Press. I'm wondering if you're a famous Virginia Woolf scholar, wondering if there's any other project, book project or anything else that you're working on sometime we might expect soon.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Yeah, thank you for asking that. I am bringing out the first edition, the first scholarly edition of Woolf's autobiography, A Sketch of the Past, and hopefully that will be published within the year. And Cornell University Press is set to publish that. And I'm working on an addition of to the Lighthouse for that novel's 100th year anniversary. So the centenary of to the lighthouse is 2027, and I'm producing a new edition of that for Norton, for W.W. norton and company. And I'm also writing a scholarly monograph about legacies of modernism in contemporary culture. So that's a more long term project. I'm not sure when that'll be done.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

Well, that's a lot of work yeah, and I'm really looking forward to that 100 year data centenary edition. I've got a couple of those books. I've got Ulysses here which is one year and I've got a great Gap which was also published by Cambridge. Yes, really, really looking forward to that. Hopefully I didn't get the chance to talk to the editor of these two books, but hopefully. Well, it's two years away, but hopefully I can secure the promise to talk to you about these books on New Books Network.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

It would be my absolute pleasure.

[Moteza Hajizadeh]

Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us. I really, really enjoyed this conversation and I strongly recommend this book to our listeners. The Life of Violet Tree, three early stories from Virginia Woolf. The stories were just fantastic. And I, and I also really love the, the, the, you know, the introduction you had in the book and all the exploration how you came across the manuscript. It was just a wonderful, I guess you have a great, great, let's say story writing skills as well. When I was reading, I didn't really feel like I'm reading a scholarly introduction to, to a book, so really enjoyed reading that as well. Thank you very much, Ermila, for taking the time to speak with us.

[Professor Irmila Seshagiri]

Thank you.