Virginia woolf suicide note to her sister

This exhibition celebrates Virginia Woolf’s contributions to literary modernism.

I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Berg Collection: Julie Carlsen, Emma Davidson, Simone Best, and Piruz Haney for their assistance and support, as well as Michael Inman, Curator of Rare Books, and Madeleine Vijoen, Curator of the Print Collection and Spencer Collection, for lending works to the exhibition. 

I am grateful to the community of scholars who have written on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and who do the important work of amplifying the voices of early feminists and women modernists in particular: Merve Emre, Mark Hussey, Mitchell A.

Leaska, Hermione Lee, Urmila Seshagiri, Brenda Silver, Helen Southworth, Alice Staveley, Nicola Wison, and the Modernist Archives Publishing Project team, and many others. 

Virginia Woolf: A Modern Mind would not have been possible without the careful stewardship of Woolf’s archive and legacy. I felt it would be important to give intellectual and physical space in the form of an exhibition gallery—a room, in other words—to Virginia Woolf, her feminist writings, her incisive literary criticism, and her development of modernist narrative techniques. 

This exhibition was developed under the specter of the Covid pandemic, and would not have been possible without the extraordinary dedication of my colleagues at The New York Public Library, as well as scholars, curators, librarians across the world. 

My deepest thanks to Declan Kiely, Director of Special Collections and Exhibitions and my mentor, who has supported this exhibition from the beginning, as well as to William P.

Kelly, Brent Reidy, Tony Marx, and colleagues across the administration who make all of our collection displays and outreach efforts possible. 

For their intrepid and firm commitment to this project, special thanks are due to my colleagues in Exhibitions, who are truly the architects of any exhibition: Susan Rabbiner, Becky Laughner, and Carl Auge; to Mim Harrison for editorial support; and to Paul Carlos, Urshula Barbour and the Pure+Applied team for the artistry of the installation and graphic design and to Anita Jorgensen for the lighting design.

Special thanks are also due to the registrars and conservators who oversee the care of this extraordinary collection: Deborah Straussman and Caryn Gedell, and Mary Oey, Addison Lu, Emily Muller, Denise Stockman, and Ursula Mitra; to Steven Crossot, Kiowa Hammons, Dina Selfridge, and Zoe Waldron for the beautiful photographs and ensuring they can be made available to the public; to Charles Arrowsmith, Laurie Beckoff, Sara Beth Joren, Julia Joseph, Rosalene Labrado-Perillo, Maya Sariahmed, Katharina Seifert, and Elana Sinsabaugh for the impeccable polish you put on everything and the work you do to present the Library’s collections to the public.

This unique volume brings together over two hundred letters from T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, May Sarton, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, Radclyffe Hall, and many others, including political figures and religious leaders. Dalloway. At the time of her death some voices in the press attacked her for showing cowardice in the face of the enemy and for setting a bad example to the general population.

This collection was assembled over several decades, and I am profoundly grateful to William and Helen Beekman for the extraordinary gift of this collection to the Library in 2019. The ensuing collection of letters supports Oldfield's assertion. The William Beekman Collection of Virginia Woolf and Her Circle forms a central part of this exhibition.

And although this exhibition draws exclusively from the holdings of The New York Public Library, the collections and expertise of colleagues from several institutions were critical to this project, namely: the British Library, Houghton Library, Harvard University, the National Trust, Northwestern University and Washington State University. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Jacob’s Room, the novel that signified her first formal break with the genre, as well as early drafts of what would become Mrs.