Woolf, Virginia.

8vo, first edition, presentation copy inscribed by the author to sydney saxon turner ("Saxon from Virginia"), original green cloth stamped in gilt, dust-jacket designed by Vanessa Bell, some light soiling to cloth



intimate presentation copies of works by virginia woolf are rare.



a superb presentation, from the "queen" of the bloomsbury group to one of its first members.



Cambridge Apostle Saxon Sydney-Turner (1880-1962) was a classics scholar at Cambridge contemporaneous with Bell, Strachey, Leonard, and Thoby Stephen. His presence at Thoby's inaugural "Thursday Evening" in 1905 marked him as one of the first members of the Bloomsbury Group, and he was also a part of the Stephens' 1909 expeditionary force at the Wagner festival at Beyreuth. Woolf was a close friend, and included him in her farcical preface to Orlando, praising his "wide and peculiar erudition." "According to Thoby," through whom the Stephens sisters heard vivid portraits of his Cambridge friends before they met them, "Sydney-Turner was an absolute prodigy of learning":



"He had the whole of Greek literature by heart. There was practically nothing in any language that was any good that he had not read. He was very silent and thin and odd. He never came out by day. But late at night if he saw one's lamp burning he would come and tap at the window like a moth. At about three in the morning he would begin to talk. His talk was then of astonishing brilliance. When later I complained to Thoby that I had met Turner and had not found him brilliant Toby severely supposed that by brilliance I meant wit; he on the contrary meant truth. Sydney-Turner was the most brilliant talker he knew because he always spoke the truth" (Moments of Being, "Old Bloomsbury," p. 167)



In examining the formation of the Bloomsbury Group, Sydney-Turner wrote to Virginia in 1919 that some members came already bonded, others fell in easily, and for some it took more time. "Perhaps also it's easier between man and man," he writes, "I remember that at one time I thought you rather difficult, which was at least as reasonable as you thinking me shocked [?]," however admitting that "[o]ne may have been the result of the other." (quoted in Rosenbaum, 21)

Kirkpatrick A22; Woolmer 423

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This novel took five years and went through three distinct formats before Woolf settled on the final eleven chapters. In October 1932 she began "The Pargiters: An Essay based upon a paper read to the London / National Society for Women's Service," which a month later had turned into "A Novel-Essay" combining feminist polemics with illustrative fiction. By January she had removed the essay portions, which she would put to better use in Three Guineas, and decided to focus the novel on "the passing of the last fifty years reflected in the everyday life of separate individual members of a family." [i]

The first version was not complete until the end of 1935. As usual the text underwent further transformation, and an impressive succession of trial titles: "The Pargiters," "Here and Now," "Music," "Dawn," "Sons and Daughters," "Daughters and Sons," "Ordinary People," "The Caravan," and "Other People's Houses." Though Leonard would later call this and Night and Day "her worst books," he tried to be supportive, suggesting some judicious excisions. According to her diaries, she rewrote as she reread, and rewrote as she retyped, finding it necessary to "interpolate and rub out most of [it] in proof." (6/11/36). After galleys were pulled she decided to open each chapter with a passage describing the weather.

After a number of notices had appeared, Woolf declared, "no one has yet seen the point—my point." [ii] Muir and Forster both expressed "disappointment," and she gave in temporarily to their opinions—"Dead and disappointing—so I'm found out and that odious rice pudding of a book is what I thought it—a dank failure." But she was soon surprised and encouraged by the numerous reviews, among "the usual spate" of equivocation, that declared this her masterpiece. (Its publication led to an appearance on the cover of Time magazine and a brief sojourn on the New York Times best-seller list, the only book in her lifetime to do so; in 1945 it was published in a United States Armed Services edition, small, paper-bound books printed in healthy numbers and distributed gratis to soldiers stationed around the globe.) Garnett wrote extravagantly, "It would be impossible to over-praise the beauty of Mrs. Woolf's prose in The Years.... She is a supreme imaginative artist, of extraordinary originality and, in my opinion, The Years is the finest novel she has written. It is altogether on a bigger scale than Jacob's Room, and has a fullness and richness in conception and execution which were lacking in To the Lighthouse." [iii] Theodora Bosanquet declared Woolf a "first-rate novelist, who can summon human personalities to her page in the flick of a sentence, but also ... a great lyrical poet." [iv]Keynes called it her best book, according to Woolf, "very moving[;] more tender than any of my books; did not puzzle him like The Waves; symbolism not a worry; very beautiful; and no more said than was needed. Hadn't yet finished it." [v]

Woolf's most illuminating discussion of the novel appears in two letters to Stephen Spender:

[W]hat I meant I think was to give a picture of society as a whole; give characters from every side; turn them towards society, not private life; exhibit the effect of ceremonies; Keep one toe on the ground by means of dates, fact: envelop the whole in a changing temporal atmosphere; compose into one vast many-sided group at the end; and then shift the stress from present to future; and show the old fabric insensibly changing without death or violence into the future—suggesting that there is no break, but a continuous development, possibly a recurrence of some pattern; of which of course we actors are ignorant. And the future was gradually to dawn. [vi]

She later felt she might have achieved this goal had illness not curtailed her writing schedule, preventing her from adding an important section. She also admitted that the subject matter might have been "too big for me to encircle." [vii]

[i] Bosanquet, March 13, 1927
[ii] (3/17/37).
[iii] New Statesman and Nation 3/20/37, TCH384
[iv] Time and Tide
[v] (4/4/37)
[vi] (4/7/37)
[vii] (4/30/37).