Virginia Woolf to Saxon Sydney-Turner, 25 February 1918: 'Asheham is very lovely at the moment. I started upon Sophocles the day after we came -- the Electra, which has made me plan to read all Greek straight through [...] I found great consolation during the influenza in the works of Leonard Merrick, a poor unappreciated second-rate pot-boiling writer of stories about the stage, whom I deduce to be a negro, mulatto, or quadroon; at any rate he has a grudge against the world, and might have done much better if he hadn't at the age of 20 married a chorus girl, had by her 15 coffee coloured brats and lived for the rest of the time in a villa in Brixton, where he ekes out his living by giving lessons in elocution to the natives'.