WOOLF, Virginia.

£9,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Mrs. Dalloway. First edition, Hugh Walpole's copy, with his morocco bookplate and ownership signature, dated May 1925, to the front endpapers. The two writers had a long, affectionate friendship, often reading each other's novels and discussing their writing over tea or in letters.They first met in 1928, when Walpole presented Woolf with the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for To the Lighthouse, a novel Walpole wrote had "liberated" him. After the ceremony, she invited him to dinner at Tavistock Square, an occasion he recorded in his journal. "Evening enchanting - with the Woolfs and [Lydia] Lopokova. It had a kind of fairy quality about it. I was diffident but Virginia encouraged me, talking about writing as though we were on a level" (quoted in Hart-Davis, p. 289).Woolf and Walpole came from different literary schools, which made for lively conversation and correspondence - Walpole's biographer Rupert Hart-Davis counted 60 letters from Woolf among his papers. In one memorable exchange, Woolf contrasts their different styles. "Well - I'm very much interested about unreality and The Waves - we must discuss it. I mean why do you think The Waves unreal, and why was that the very word I was using of Judith Paris... You're real to some - I to others. Who's to decide what reality is?... Lord - how tired I am of being caged with Aldous, Joyce and Lawrence! Can't we exchange cages for a lark? How horrified all the professors would be!" (Letters, vol. 4, p. 402). In another, Woolf praises

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