Letters as Resistance: Dorothy Osborne, Madame de Sévigné and Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Virginia Woolf was not very gratified when her friends assured her in September 1920, in the course of her writing of Jacob’s Room, that her main claim to immortality would be not as a novelist but as a letter-writer. It is evident from the context that she was being compared with the seventeenth-century French letter-writer, Madame de Sévigné (Diary, 2. 63–4). She read the compliment, no doubt correctly, as a put-down. Her friends’ subtext stated that her claims to real writing (novels) were nothing much in the long run, but her letters — that supremely feminine form which would remove her from competition with Strachey and other male members of the Bloomsbury group — would ensure her immortality (of a kind). Not mainstream, not literary, not male. She accused herself ruefully of vanity in disliking this sidelining in the literary stakes, as Strachey boldly compared the Bloomsbury group to Johnson’s set. Virginia Woolf in this literary scene seems cast as Mrs Thrale. No one would now risk the folly of admiring Virginia Woolf primarily for her letter-writing skills, but nevertheless her letters bear an integral relation to some of the most radical aspects of her non-fictional writing. The form of the letter always guaranteed her a special freedom, and when she read women letter-writers in the early modern period she registered a tradition of free writing and thinking whose legacy she had herself inherited.