A letter from Virginia Woolf to her friend Philip Morrell urging him to “go on living”, because “far too many of my friends have given that up lately”, a year before the novelist committed suicide, will go under the hammer this week.
Written in July 1940, the letter sees the To the Lighthouse author enquiring about her friend’s health. Morrell, a Liberal politician, had been diagnosed with a weak heart by his doctor, and told he must not climb stairs.
“My dear Philip, I was so glad to get your letter,” writes Woolf, in a three-page letter which is being sold at auction this week by Dominic Winter. “Indirectly I’d heard of your illness, and was wanting more news. You must take up your lodging on the ground floor, and go on living. Far too many of my friends have given that up lately.”
She goes on to tell him that she is living in Sussex; the letter was written on 12 July, shortly after the start of the Battle of Britain, and Woolf says that she is “exposed to raids, but in the air and with flowers, rooks, gulls, and our lovely view”.
She ends by enquiring about Morrell’s “memoir or sketch” of his late wife Lady Ottoline Morrell, a literary hostess who was both loved and mocked by the Bloomsbury set. The two enjoyed an open marriage, with Philip Morrell at one point pursuing Woolf.
“Amiable and amorous, still handsome and with an honourable career behind him, he was nevertheless somehow ridiculous (or at least Virginia found him so),” writes Quentin Bell in his biography of Woolf. “He pursued her briefly and cumbrously with unexpected visits and tentative love-letters; she eluded him without much difficulty. Neither Vita [Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover] nor Leonard [Woolf, the author’s husband] can have felt a moment’s uneasiness on account of Philip.”
Philip’s wife, Lady Ottoline Morrell was also taken with Woolf, writing of the novelist in her diaries: “This strange, lovely, furtive creature never seemed to me to be made of common flesh and blood. She comes and goes, she folds her cloak around her and vanishes, having shot into her victim’s heart a quiverful of teasing arrows.”
Chris Albury at Dominic Winter, which has a guide price of £1,000-£1,500 on the letter, said that “any letter from Virginia Woolf is exciting, and there is always a mystique concerning any that might illuminate the tangled relationships of any of the Bloomsbury group and Garsington Manor set”. The Morrells lived at Garsington Manor in the 1920s, with Woolf a regular visitor.
“What I like about this letter is how it manages to say so much in so few lines, and so colourfully,” said Albury. “In three short pages she conveys her genuine compassion for Philip and interest in his literary projects, her desire that everyone should live their lives, insights into her choice of candidates for biographies, and a thumbnail description of her current country life against the backdrop of the Battle of Britain.”
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