[Woolf, Virginia]--Hardy, Thomas.

virginia woolf's copy of the work she classed among "the great english novels", by one of her favourite contemporary authors.

Thomas Hardy was one of the authors with whom her family was on familiar terms. She herself admired him greatly and read his works frequently. In 1919, Hardy was a notable exception (with Conrad and Joyce) from her general denunciation of modern novelists in her celebrated article on "Modern Fiction".

For almost a decade she worked steadily on another "famous article" ("the one I'm always talking about") on Hardy which Bruce Richmond had asked her to write in February 1919. It was finally published as the leading article in the TLS, 19 January 1928: "...Hardy's genius was uncertain in development, uneven in accomplishment, but, when the moment came, magnificent in achievement. The moment came, completely and fully, in Far From the Madding Crowd...The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which, however fashions may chop and change, must hold its place among the great English novels...".

Her first meeting with Hardy is described in great detail in her diary entry of 25 July 1926, where she records Hardy's comment about her father's publication of Far From the Madding Crowd: "We stood shoulder to shoulder against the British public about certain matters dealt with in that novel". She was impressed by his "freedom, ease & vitality": "...He seemed very 'Great Victorian' doing the whole thing with a sweep of his hand (they are ordinary smallish, curled up hands) & setting no great stock by literature; but immensely interested in facts; incidents; & somehow, one could imagine, naturally swept off into imagining & creating without a thought of its being difficult or remarkable; becoming obsessed; & living in imagination...".

Her earlier letters and diary entries abound with references to him:

[30 May 1909]: ...I do nothing but read Mrs Carlyle and Thomas Hardy...
[21 May 1912]: ...As for Thomas Hardy, he's a great man; his style is not made to fit, but what of that? If we had but his ribs, his thighs, his stomach and his entrails!...
[31 January 1919]: ...Thomas Hardy has what I call an interesting mind...

Virginia Woolf evidently acquired this volume while she was still "V[irginia] Stephen": i.e. before 1912, when she married Leonard Woolf.

The lot includes a typed letter of provenance signed by Marjorie Tulip ("Trekkie") Parsons, recording in August 1994 that this volume "was in the library of Virginia Woolf and remained in her possession until her death'', that it passed at that time to Leonard Woolf, and then, she says, "at Leonard's death it passed to me and has remained in my possession until now".

books from virginia woolf's library are extremely rare