Woolf, Virginia--Keats, John.

8vo, presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to Virginia Woolf by Violet Dickinson ("A.V.S[tephen]. | from V.D. 1906"), portrait frontispiece, tissue guard, illustrated, original brown cloth, spine label, matching cloth chemise and quarter morocco slipcase, endpapers with slight offsetting

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A fine association copy.

Virginia Woolf's intimate and intense friendship with Violet Dickinson (1865-1948) began in 1902. By the next year she was writing to her almost every other day, describing her father's illness and her feelings in detail: "My Beloved Woman, Your letters come like balm on the heart. I really think I must do what I never have done—try to keep them. I've never kept a single letter all my life—but this romantic friendship ought to be preserved... (letter to Dickinson, 28 April 1903). By July she was talking of the "astonishing depths--hot volcano depths..." Dickinson had inspired in her; after her father's death the following year she convalesced at Dickinson's home, "where she mad eher first attempt at suicide by throwing herself from a window" (Hussey 72).  In 1906 they travelled together, with Vanessa, to Greece, to meet with Adrian and Thoby Stephen. After the return from that trip, a definite group began to form around the Stephen home in Bloomsbury—Vanessa married Clive, Virginia married Leonard—and though they kept in touch irregularly throughout their lives, they never revisited the intensity of those first years of the new century.

But Woolf wrote in her diary of a visit paid in May 1919: "She hasn't changed a hair for 20 years, which must be the length of our friendship. We take things up precisely as we left them; a years gap makes no difference; we have had out intimacy; something or other has fused; & never hardens again. Thus I felt in talking to her; it was the usual inconsequent, generous minded, unselfish talk." Dickinson is mentioned in the ironic preface to Orlando among the friends who helped Woolf "in ways too various to specify."

Keatsian allusions, references, and themes can be seen throughout Woolf's ouevre, but are especially pronounced in The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own.  Hussey discusses those found in A Room of One's Own. In A Room of One's Own, Keats is first mentioned as one example of those self-conscious nineteenth-century male artists for whom writing was a struggle and who felt the world was indifferent to their work (AROO 51). Later, Woolf remarks that she would rather have the biography of a shop assistant than the seventieth study of "Keats and his use of Miltonic inversion" which "Professor Z" is at work on (AROO 90), appealing to her audience for something new in literary studies. Keats also appears in A Room as an example of the "androgynous" artists (AROO 103); Phyllis Rose believes that Woolf's androgyny is very similar to Keats's notion of "negative capability" (Rose 189).

Hussey also maps the trail of Keats as a Romantic poet in Woolfs other writing. Woolf was very fond of the Romantic poets and often alludes to their work in her essays. Reviewing the Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne for the Times Literary Supplement in 1918, she wrote that "no one would wish to sacrifice a line that Keats ever wrote; but we cling as firmly to some of his letters as to some of his poems" (E2 229). The "Supreme felicities" of Keats and Shelley, she wrote in 1919, "seem to come when the engine of the brain is shut off and the mind glides serene but unconscious" ("The Intellectual Imagination" [E3 135].) Keats had a "find and natural bearing" ("How it Strikes a Contemporary" [E3 355]), and Woolf found his attitude to criticism and sense of security about the value of his own work comforting when Wyndham Lewis's Men Without Art, an attack on Bloomsbury Group writers, was published in 1934 (D4 250-51). In an article for Vogue in 1924, she wrote that Keats possessed "the rarest qualities that human beings can command-genius, sensibility, dignity, wisdom" (E3 461), but noted also that he treated Fanny Brawne in a typically masculine way "both as angel and cockatoo." In 1931, Woolf described her visit to Keats's house in Hampstead in "Great Men's Houses," one of her London Scene essays.