Listings for Reader:
Leonard Woolf
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Arnold Bennett : An Old Wives Tale
Virginia Woolf, on her honeymoon, to Lytton Strachey, 1 September 1912: 'You can't think with what a fury we fall on printed matter, so long denied us by our own writing! I read 3 new novels in two days: Leonard waltzed through the Old Wives Tale like a kitten after its tail: after this giddy career I have now run full tilt into Crime et Chatiment, fifty pages before tea, and I see there are only 800; so I shall be through in no time. It is directly obvious that he [Dostoevsky] is the greatest writer ever born'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
James Joyce : Ulysses
Virginia Woolf to Clive Bell,14 April 1922: 'Now Mr Joyce ... yes, I have fallen; to the extent of four pounds too. I have him on the table. His pages are cut. Leonard is already 30 pages deep. I look, and sip, and shudder.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Bertrand Russell : Which Way to Peace?
Virginia Woolf to Julian Bell, 14 November 1936: 'Politics are still raging faster and fiercer [...] Leonard is trying to convince the labour party that the policy of isolation is now the only one. Berties book convinced him.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Leonard Woolf : 'The Three Jews'
Saturday 30 January 1915: '[Leonard] was kept late at Hampstead: didn't get home till 10.15 [...] He read Janet "The Three Jews".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Manuscript: Unknown
Stephen Gwynne and Gertrude Tuckwell : Life of Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke
Wednesday 5 December 1917: 'L[eonard]. reading Life of Dilke [...] I'm past the middle of Purgatorio, but find it stiff, the meaning more than the language, I think.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
unknown : Greek grammar
Monday 2 May 1932: 'Well it is five minutes to ten: but where am I, writing with pen & ink? Not in my studio. In the gorge, or valley, at Delphi, under an olive tree, sitting on dry earth covered with white daisies. L. is reading his Greek grammar beside me'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Ethel Smyth : A Three-Legged Tour in Greece
Sunday 8 May 1932: 'Here it is, the last evening [of holiday in Greece]; very hot, very dusty. The loudspeaker is braying; L. reading, not without sympathy, Ethel Smyth; it is 2 minutes to 7'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
J. G. Frazer : The Golden Bough
Sunday 21 May 1933: 'Tonight sitting at the open window of a secondrate inn in Draguignan [...] I dip into Creevey; L[eonard]. into Golden Bough.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: report of death of George Duckworth
Tuesday 1 May 1934: 'L. opening the first Times to come our way, said George Duckworth is dead. So he is. And I feel the usual incongruous shades of feeling [goes on to reflect further on Duckworth and his death]'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Newspaper
Thomas Hardy : poems
Tuesday 3 September 1918: 'Last night, L[eonard]. read Hardy's poems aloud.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: Bible
Wednesday 16 November 1938: 'Dinner at Clive [Bell]'s [...] we all talked: about Jews: about Clive's lunch party with Willy Maugham & de la Mare: which are the best books for the illiterate: then about being Jews: then about technique: the word broken in the Bible; L[eonard]. read passages.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: The Book of Job
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 20 March 1901: 'It is late, quite late & I have been sitting all the evening over an immense fire with a wind roaring round the house [...] I have been sharing my chair with my dog & reading the Book of Job again & now I feel quite sunk in the drowsy dreaminess of brain-weariness [...] ever so many thanks for the book which is a perfection of delight to me. If there is one thing which spoils one's pleasure in reading Job & Ecclesiastes it is the horror of those two barbarous columns in the ordinary barbarously bound bible -- & I have always prayed for a relief from those awful double columns, which are the hall-mark of religious respectability.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Charles Marriott : The Column
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 9 April 1901: 'I have been in the wilderness to-day but before I end I must tell you that I did live last week an hour or two -- which being interpreted is that I read The Column by Charles Marriott which if you have not, do. If I were a reviewer I should shout & scream "A New Great Author". But I'm not. Farewell.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Honore De Balzac : Le Pere Goriot
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 1 September 1901: 'London in August! [...] I like it because I choose it by refusing to fly London with the rest of the world [...] I like wandering through the deserted streets tawdry with painter's ladders & half starved cats & soiled fluttering tags of newspapers [...] It fascinates me by its bare brutality of ugliness, & produces the aesthetic titillation of a slum. During that season too I batten upon Balzac & his hold remains on me for weeks afterwards so that I am rereading Le Pere Goriot out on the cliffs & rocks here.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Thomas Kyd : The Spanish Tragedy
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 4 January 1902: 'Beppo is an innovation is he not? [...] if there are five acts of 500 lines each, it will not be the longest play on record as [Thomas Kyd's] The Spanish Tragedy which I have just read has -- counting the additions of Ben Jonson I believe -- about 2970 lines.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: The Pall Mall Gazette
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 4 January 1902: 'I sent the Goth [i.e. Thoby Stephen] a cutting from a newspaper entitled "What is Sport?" being a diatribe against the current idea. I got back six closely written pages to prove that the writer was "talking through his hat" in true Gothic style. From the same paper I cut out the enclosed which I thought might interest you. I have spent most of the vac. it seems to me cutting extracts out of newspapers.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Newspaper
Maxim Gorky : Foma Gordyeeff
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 1 April 1902: 'I have read nothing [over Easter vacation] except a book by the new -- comparatively -- Russian, Gorki. It is called Foma Gordyeeff & is ultra-Russian, savage & what is better pitiless to sentimentality, though not inhumanly pitiless. For all that I don't like it -- he is too crude & unartistic & has merely baldly told what a number of bored & rather brutal fools would do with their lives. The book is often consequently baldly sordid'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
George Gordon, Lord Byron : 'Turkish Tales'
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 July 1902: '[italics]I[end italics] dribble on among Aristotle, golf & Byron. The last is a stiff job -- my God I've never read such trash as those Giaours and Corsairs. I had never read them before & assumed that they were nauseous, but I never imagined such feeble banalite as they contain. The letters however make up for a great deal & on the whole there is some amusement in steadily plodding through a whole author & really for once getting to know about one [...] I have also at last read [Joris Karl Huysmans'] A Rebours ... it [italics]is[end italics] diseased magnificence. The words simply dazzle me. I rather thought that sentence in the colossal chapter on the flowers & des Essintes' [sic] nightmare was in a way an epitome of Huysmans if not of all France. "Tout n'est que syphilis." Pish! I suppose everything is.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
George Gordon, Lord Byron : Letters
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 July 1902: '[italics]I[end italics] dribble on among Aristotle, golf & Byron. The last is a stiff job -- my God I've never read such trash as those Giaours and Corsairs. I had never read them before & assumed that they were nauseous, but I never imagined such feeble banalite as they contain. The letters however make up for a great deal & on the whole there is some amusement in steadily plodding through a whole author & really for once getting to know about one [...] I have also at last read [Joris Karl Huysmans'] A Rebours ... it [italics]is[end italics] diseased magnificence. The words simply dazzle me. I rather thought that sentence in the colossal chapter on the flowers & des Essintes' [sic] nightmare was in a way an epitome of Huysmans if not of all France. "Tout n'est que syphilis." Pish! I suppose everything is.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Joris Karl Huysmans : A Rebours
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 July 1902: '[italics]I[end italics] dribble on among Aristotle, golf & Byron. The last is a stiff job -- my God I've never read such trash as those Giaours and Corsairs. I had never read them before & assumed that they were nauseous, but I never imagined such feeble banalite as they contain. The letters however make up for a great deal & on the whole there is some amusement in steadily plodding through a whole author & really for once getting to know about one [...] I have also at last read [Joris Karl Huysmans'] A Rebours ... it [italics]is[end italics] diseased magnificence. The words simply dazzle me. I rather thought that sentence in the colossal chapter on the flowers & des Essintes' [sic] nightmare was in a way an epitome of Huysmans if not of all France. "Tout n'est que syphilis." Pish! I suppose everything is.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
George Bernard Shaw :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Arthur Schopenhauer :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Barry Pain :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Robert Browning :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Oscar Wilde :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Gustave Flaubert : Madame Bovary
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: A Manual of Ethics
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
William Shakespeare :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 January 1903: 'I don't think my December list of books read equals yours. It includes however Bernard Shaw, Schopenhauer, Barry Pain, Browning, D'Aurevilly, Oscar Wilde, Flaubert, A Manual of Ethics & Shakespeare [...] I don't see how anyone, after reading Madame Bovary, can doubt which is the supremest of all novels -- though I now remember writing the same to you about Le Pere Goriot.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
George Stout : [on Psychology]
Leonard Woolf to Saxon Sydney-Turner, 20 June 1903: 'Are you in London & are you going to bring your [cricket] team? I wish you would as I am in a raging temper, which I try to cure by reading Stout's Psychology.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: Times Literary Supplement
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 28 December 1904: 'I am sitting in the hotel garden surrounded by strange trees & masses of wonderful creepers [...] I have been reading the Times Literary Supplement'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Newspaper, Serial / periodical
Henry James :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 27 January 1905: 'I sit in the Kachcheri [a government office] most of the day & sign my name. I play tennis, dine, read Henry James (Jaffna has a library which contains him & [Dinah Craik's] John Halifax, Gentleman), & go to bed.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
William Shakespeare :
Leonard Woolf to Desmond MacCarthy, 26 February 1905: 'The books you gave me were a godsend at once. I had to travel for two nights & a day in a bullock waggon through the jungle in order to reach this place [Jaffna]. For discomfort it was simply hell. I had to lie on my back on the hard floor of the waggon & was battered & jolted along for 36 hours but I took one of the small Shakespeare volumes with me in my pocket, & it helped me to forget my aching bones.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Alfred de Vigny :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 5 March 1905: 'De Vigny has come. I haven't read him all, but I'm rather disappointed: isn't he rather metallic? I read a good deal in odd moments, & a curious mixture, I think. A book I have always meant to do, I finished last week & could hardly put down at all, The Life of Parnell [...] Also the Life of Russell by the same man [R. B. O'Brien] & [Disraeli's] Coningsby which is absolutely preposterous, & [Voltaire's] La Dictionnaire Philosophique.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
R. B. O'Brien : The Life of Parnell
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 5 March 1905: 'De Vigny has come. I haven't read him all, but I'm rather disappointed: isn't he rather metallic? I read a good deal in odd moments, & a curious mixture, I think. A book I have always meant to do, I finished last week & could hardly put down at all, The Life of Parnell [...] Also the Life of Russell by the same man [R. B. O'Brien] & [Disraeli's] Coningsby which is absolutely preposterous, & [Voltaire's] La Dictionnaire Philosophique.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
R. B. O'Brien : The Life of Russell
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 5 March 1905: 'De Vigny has come. I haven't read him all, but I'm rather disappointed: isn't he rather metallic? I read a good deal in odd moments, & a curious mixture, I think. A book I have always meant to do, I finished last week & could hardly put down at all, The Life of Parnell [...] Also the Life of Russell by the same man [R. B. O'Brien] & [Disraeli's] Coningsby which is absolutely preposterous, & [Voltaire's] La Dictionnaire Philosophique.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Benjamin Disraeli : Coningsby
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 5 March 1905: 'De Vigny has come. I haven't read him all, but I'm rather disappointed: isn't he rather metallic? I read a good deal in odd moments, & a curious mixture, I think. A book I have always meant to do, I finished last week & could hardly put down at all, The Life of Parnell [...] Also the Life of Russell by the same man [R. B. O'Brien] & [Disraeli's] Coningsby which is absolutely preposterous, & [Voltaire's] La Dictionnaire Philosophique.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Voltaire : La Dictionnaire Philosophique
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 5 March 1905: 'De Vigny has come. I haven't read him all, but I'm rather disappointed: isn't he rather metallic? I read a good deal in odd moments, & a curious mixture, I think. A book I have always meant to do, I finished last week & could hardly put down at all, The Life of Parnell [...] Also the Life of Russell by the same man [R. B. O'Brien] & [Disraeli's] Coningsby which is absolutely preposterous, & [Voltaire's] La Dictionnaire Philosophique.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Denis Diderot :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 4 June 1905: 'I live, I believe you know, with [Bernard] Dutton. He could only exist in the 19th century. He is a timid egoistic maniac [...] He has however hundreds of books in horrible print & binding -- I found some Diderot among them, which I had not read -- wonderful but quite mad.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Henry James : The Golden Bowl
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 23 July 1905: 'I have just finished The Golden Bowl & am astounded. Did he invent us or we him? He uses [italics]all[end italics] our words in their most technical sense & we can't have got them all from him'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Clive Bell, Walter Lamb, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Leonard Woolf et al : Euphrosne
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 3 September 1905: 'Euphrosne arrived. It is a queer medley. There are only 3 things in it wh. I ever want to read again, the Cat [by Strachey], Ningamus & the thing about the song, I forget its name.'
UnknownCentury: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf
E. M. Forster : Where Angels Fear to Tread
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 29 October 1905: 'The taupe sent his book to me last week. It is really extraordinary that it is as amusing as it is. It is a queer kind of twilight humour don't you think [...] What enraged me in the book was the tragedy. If it is supposed to [italics]be[end italics] a tragedy it's absolutely hopeless; if it's supposed to be amusing, it simply fails.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Voltaire : Letters
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 January 1906: 'I have practically settled down for two weeks here [...] it is one immense sea of hills [...] I walk out onto these & wander from about 7-9 every morning & from 4-6 every evening, the rest of the day I read Voltaire's letters, Huysmans & Henry James.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Joris Karl Huysmans :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 January 1906: 'I have practically settled down for two weeks here [...] it is one immense sea of hills [...] I walk out onto these & wander from about 7-9 every morning & from 4-6 every evening, the rest of the day I read Voltaire's letters, Huysmans & Henry James.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Henry James :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 13 January 1906: 'I have practically settled down for two weeks here [...] it is one immense sea of hills [...] I walk out onto these & wander from about 7-9 every morning & from 4-6 every evening, the rest of the day I read Voltaire's letters, Huysmans & Henry James.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Roger Fry : The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds
Leonard Woolf to Robert Trevlyan, 11 February 1906: 'Very many thanks for Fry's book [The Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds]. It seems, though I have only had time to dip into it, extremely interesting.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Charles Dickens :
Leonard Woolf to Saxon Sydney-Turner, 27 August 1906: 'I am camping out in a tent in the wilderness. I told you I believe I was coming for a month as A[ssistant]G[overnment]A[gent] Mannar. I am now on circuit which means that I ride about 10 miles each day through a desolation of sand to visit a few huts which are called villages [...] I ride through the sand from 6 A.M. to 9 & lie in my tent during the heat of the day & read Dickens whom of course I now consider the greatest of novelists. At any rate he is astonishingly amusing in Kaddukkarankudiyiruppu (which means the village of the man of the Jungle).'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Jean de la Bruyere :
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 4 November 1906: 'I was reading La Bruyere today with the irritation against [John Maynard] Keynes [following letter from Strachey] at the back of my mind. He is in full the "sot" of La Bruyere for his chief characteristic -- with all his damned intelligence -- is that once you have seen him, he never surprises you'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Sir George Otto Trevelyan : The Competition Wallah
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 28 April 1907: 'Today my head is whirring with slight fever. Since I wrote that I have for the first time read The Competition Wallah. It is extraordinary; it might be the Northern Province in 1907 instead of Bengal in the sixties.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
E. M. Forster : The Longest Journey
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 7 July 1907: 'My brother sent me The Longest Journey. Don't you think it is an astonishing & irritating production? What a success he will be! For people will think it all so clever. I thought on every other page that he was really going to bring something off, but it all fades away into dim humour & the dimmer ghosts of unrealities. It might have been so magnificent & is a mere formless meandering. The fact is I don't think he knows what reality is, & as for experience the poor man does not realize that practically it does not exist. Still his mind interests me, its curious way of touching on things in the rather precise & charming way in which his hands (I remember) used to touch things vaguely.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Francis Cornford : Thucydides Mythistoricus
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 15 September 1907: 'I have just read [Francis Cornford's] Thucydides Mythistoricus. It seems to me rather good, except that as a book it has the almost universal fault of not ending.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Gustave Flaubert : Madame Bovary
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 29 September 1907: 'I read Madame Bovary again as I went up to Hatton in the train last week to look after cattle disease. As I read it again, it seemed to me to be the saddest & most beautiful book I had ever read. Surely it is the beginning & end of realism [comments further].'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
E. M. Forster : A Room with a View
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 25 November 1908: 'I have been reading Forster's last book [A Room with a View] & as last year, at about the same time, it has just stirred the fringe of my brain [goes on to describe having recently had to view, in official capacity, the body of a murdered native woman] [...] I had no idea before that the smell of a decomposing human being is so infinitely fouler than anything else. Is that reality according to Forster? I believe last year I thought that he thought it is. But this book which appears to me really rather good & sometimes thoroughly amusing is absolutely muddled, isn't it?'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
G. E. Moore : 'Professor James' "Pragmatism"'
Leonard Woolf to G. E. Moore, 4 January 1909: 'I don't think you realize how pleased I was to get your letter & paper [...] I read your paper but to tell the actual truth I was disappointed, disappointed in the way in which most papers disappoint one. I want your opus magnum which will tell me what things are true much more than papers which tell me that Pragmatism, which I don't believe in, is false.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Unknown
Guy de Maupassant : 'tale'
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, postscript to letter postmarked 1 February 1909: 'I never thanked you for the books [...] they are a godsend especially as I have just got to the end practically of the last batch I ordered out. I suddenly thought I must read Maupassant again & when I reread the tale about the child who is pinched on the buttocks by the adulterating captain I thought I was right. I also read [the Earl of Cromer's] Modern Egypt & you can deduce my state of mind by the fact that I think it is the greatest book written in the last 25 years.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Earl of Cromer : Modern Egypt
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, postscript to letter postmarked 1 February 1909: 'I never thanked you for the books [...] they are a godsend especially as I have just got to the end practically of the last batch I ordered out. I suddenly thought I must read Maupassant again & when I reread the tale about the child who is pinched on the buttocks by the adulterating captain I thought I was right. I also read [the Earl of Cromer's] Modern Egypt & you can deduce my state of mind by the fact that I think it is the greatest book written in the last 25 years.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: The Times
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 9 February 1911: 'The Times gave me quite a shock the other day to see that A. S. [Gaye] is going to marry.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Newspaper
Fyodor Dostoevsky : The Brothers Karamazov
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 August 1911: 'Les Freres Karamazov is one of the greatest of novels [...] Have you read it? & the extraordinary speech of Ivan about Christ & Christianity & socialism which goes on without stopping for about 50 pages? I am halfway through. The Agamemnon is childish compared to it. I read it in trains & on steamers in inextricable fjords & on great lakes, very slowly, as befits it, in perpetual sunshine; I shall never finish it I think or perhaps it will never end. And Edgar [Woolf] is always sitting by me reading the Ordeal of Richard Feverel [...] We went up the coast from Gotenberg towards Norway [...] Then we wandered up a fjord to a detestable town called Uddevala [...] Then we took a toy steamboat & sailed over the lake [...] to Leksamd & thence here [Raatvik]. It was pleasant to sit on deck reading Les Freres at the rate of a page an hour, gliding past the shores from which the fair haired naked men & women perpetually waved their hands to us.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Fyodor Dostoevsky : Les Freres Karamazov
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 2 August 1911: 'Les Freres Karamazov is one of the greatest of novels [...] Have you read it? & the extraordinary speech of Ivan about Christ & Christianity & socialism which goes on without stopping for about 50 pages? I am halfway through. The Agamemnon is childish compared to it. I read it in trains & on steamers in inextricable fjords & on great lakes, very slowly, as befits it, in perpetual sunshine; I shall never finish it I think or perhaps it will never end. And Edgar [Woolf] is always sitting by me reading the Ordeal of Richard Feverel [...] We went up the coast from Gotenberg towards Norway [...] Then we wandered up a fjord to a detestable town called Uddevala [...] Then we took a toy steamboat & sailed over the lake [...] to Leksamd & thence here [Raatvik]. It was pleasant to sit on deck reading Les Freres at the rate of a page an hour, gliding past the shores from which the fair haired naked men & women perpetually waved their hands to us.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Virginia Stephen : fiction MSS
Leonard Woolf to Virginia Stephen, 29 April 1912: 'I've read two of your MSS from one of which at any rate one can see that you might write something astonishingly good.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Manuscript: Unknown
: Spanish dictionary
Leonard Woolf to Saxon Sydney-Turner, 1 September 1912: 'No one has ever given or lent me anything more useful than your little Spanish dictionary. It is always in my hand or pocket. I can now carry on quite a long conversation out of its leaves. We [Woolf and wife Virginia, on honeymoon] stayed in an inn in a village under Montserrat [...] in which only one youth was said to know any language other than Spanish & that was French which was less in quantity & quality than our Spanish. Crowds stood around us while I looked up words in your dictionary & there was nothing which did not eventually become intelligible.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: Poor Law Minority Report
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, describing routine at home at Asheham, 25 April 1913: 'After dinner Virginia reads the Life of Mrs Humphry Ward & I the Poor Law Minority Report.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Unknown
: The Times
Leonard Woolf to Virginia Woolf, 12 March 1914: 'I am sitting here alone, Lytton [Strachey] in the next room writing of Cardinal Manning. I have just read the Times & the Lit. Sup. And that is about all I've done today.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Newspaper
: The Times Literary Supplement
Leonard Woolf to Virginia Woolf, 12 March 1914: 'I am sitting here alone, Lytton [Strachey] in the next room writing of Cardinal Manning. I have just read the Times & the Lit. Sup. And that is about all I've done today.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Serial / periodical
Hurrell Froude : Remains
Leonard Woolf to Virginia Woolf, 13 March 1914: 'Another amusing book I looked at here is Hurrell Froude's Remains. I have read partly Newman's Apologia; he seems to me a self-sentimentalist.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
John Henry Newman : Apologia pro vita sua
Leonard Woolf to Virginia Woolf, 13 March 1914: 'Another amusing book I looked at here is Hurrell Froude's Remains. I have read partly Newman's Apologia; he seems to me a self-sentimentalist.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Lytton Strachey : Life of Dr Arnold
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 27 October 1916: 'I return the MS which I thought amazingly good. It made me laugh until I cried twice, once at "where he remained for the next thirty-six hours" and once at the painful mystery of the animal world.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Manuscript: Unknown
: report of death of Samuel Garrett
Leonard Woolf to Virginia Woolf, 24 April 1923: 'I am on the train from Victoria to Richmond after a very easy journey. Train from Paris packed & if I had not started at 9.15, I should not have got a corner seat [...]On the station at Paris I suddenly heard: "Mr Woolf, I dont suppose you remember me", looked round, & saw Mrs Dominic Spring-Rice [...] I had a long talk with her on the boat. At Newhaven I bought The Times, opened it, & the first thing that caught my eye was that her father had died yesterday. She certainly did not know. Ought I to have broken the news? At any rate, I didnt.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Newspaper
Dorothy Osborne : The Letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple
Leonard Woolf to Virginia Woolf, 25 September 1928: 'It began to rain [...] yesterday afternoon [...] Quentin [Bell, nephew] came and painted the gramophone and after tea I took him for a walk [...] Then I read Dorothy Osborne until bedtime.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
T. S. Eliot : Ash Wednesday
Leonard Woolf to T. S. Eliot, 5 May 1930: 'You are the only living poet I can read twice; only in your case I cannot stop at twice & go on rereading until something from outside intervenes to stop me. The usual thing happened to me the other evening with Ash Wednesday. It is amazingly beautiful. I dislike the doctrine, as you probably know, but the poetry remains & shows how unimportant belief or unbelief may be.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Horace : Satires
Leonard Woolf to Robert Trevelyan, 8 January 1941: 'I want to say how much we enjoyed your Epistle. In these days of confused bitterness its form and content were both refreshing. Your translations and the two conversations were equally or even more refreshing. By a curious coincidence I had been reading Horace's satires after an interval of I don't know how many years. I never read the classics except in bed before I get up in the morning and I nearly always read Greek. But the other day I thought I would begin Horace again and began the Satires. I liked it better than I had expected for I had recollections of being bored by Horace's hexameters. Your translations are extraordinarily satisfactory and satisfying.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
: Classical Greek texts
Leonard Woolf to Robert Trevelyan, 8 January 1941: 'I want to say how much we enjoyed your Epistle. In these days of confused bitterness its form and content were both refreshing. Your translations and the two conversations were equally or even more refreshing. By a curious coincidence I had been reading Horace's satires after an interval of I don't know how many years. I never read the classics except in bed before I get up in the morning and I nearly always read Greek. But the other day I thought I would begin Horace again and began the Satires. I liked it better than I had expected for I had recollections of being bored by Horace's hexameters. Your translations are extraordinarily satisfactory and satisfying.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler : The King's English
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 22 September 1918: 'V[irginia]. induced me to buy The King's English, a book which teaches you exactly how not to write. The difficulty is that that is precisely what it does do, and now I cannot write a sentence, because as soon as I get one down, I see that it is exactly like some horror of Miss [Marie] Corelli [popular novelist]'s quoted as a warning in that damned book.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Marie Corelli : extracts from novels
Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 22 September 1918: 'V[irginia]. induced me to buy The King's English, a book which teaches you exactly how not to write. The difficulty is that that is precisely what it does do, and now I cannot write a sentence, because as soon as I get one down, I see that it is exactly like some horror of Miss [Marie] Corelli [popular novelist]'s quoted as a warning in that damned book.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
John Clare : Madrigals & Chronicles: Being newly found Poems written by John Clare
Leonard Woolf to Edmund Blunden, 14 August 1924: 'I admired your book on Clare very much. It passed through my hands en route for a reviewer last week, and it looked so good that I coveted it for my own.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Frank Hardie : 'Youth, Socialism and Peace'
Leonard Woolf to Frank Hardie, 11 October 1933: 'Many thanks for your letter and for the copy of your article which I had already read with great interest. I think we probably agree to the extent of about 95%. Even on the subject of isolation I have always been strongly drawn to the policy under certain conditions. But the conditions do not at present exist and I feel the gravest doubts as to their ever existing.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Serial / periodical
Turgenev :
Leonard Woolf to Roberta Rubenstein, 14 December 1968: 'What is your evidence for saying that Virginia had never read a Russian novel until she read Crime and Punishment in 1912? The translations of Turgenev by Constance Garnett were published 1894 to 1899. I certainly read some of these at Cambridge in 1901 [...] Anna Karenina in Garnett's translation appeared in 1901 and I certainly read this at Cambridge'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Leonard Woolf Print: Book
Leo Tolstoy : Anna Karenina
Leonard Woolf to Roberta Rubenstein, 14 December 1968: 'What is your evidence for saying that Virginia had never read a Russian novel until she read Crime and Punishment in 1912? The translations of Turgenev by Constance Garnett were published 1894 to 1899. I certainly read some of these at Cambridge in 1901 [...] Anna Karenina in Garnett's translation appeared in 1901 and I certainly read this at Cambridge'.
