Mrs Woolf Comes to Dinner

Abstract

The visit of Miss Strachey’s close friend, Virginia Woolf, in 1929 to read us a paper was a rather alarming occasion.¹ As I remember it she was nearly an hour late; and dinner in Clough Hall, never a repast for gourmets, suffered considerably. Mrs Woolf also disconcerted us by bringing a husband and so upsetting our seating plan. After the paper there was coffee with Mrs Woolf in the Principal’s rooms. Mrs Woolf was really very well disposed to us as a group of intellectual young women; but we found her formidable. All I remember of her talk is that she praised very highly a poem of Stella Gibbons’s, ‘The Hippogriff’.² It was disquieting to learn later, when I was in Paris as a research student, that Mrs Woolf had brought out a book (A Room of One’s Own) describing her Newnham dinner. Her purpose was, of course, to evoke pity for the poverty of the women’s colleges: but at the time it made us, her hosts, decidedly uncomfortable.

From ‘Mrs Woolf Comes to Dine’ and ‘A Room of One’s Own’, A Newnham Anthology, ed. Ann Philips (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) pp. 174–5.