Woolf letter to Mansfield, 1921

Woolf letter to Mansfield, 13 February 1921

On 13 February 1921, Virginia Woolf wrote to Katherine Mansfield 'It seems to me very important that women should learn to write. Does it to you?' Woolf was working on Jacob's Room (1922) at the time.

Smith College Libraries in Northampton MA kindly publish this letter online. They also publish two pages of the proofs of To the Lighthouse (1927) corrected in Woolf's hand.

Seminar on To the Lighthouse, with Trudi Tate and Gillian Beer, July 2018. Photo: @JezPete

In our 2018 summer course on Women Writers, we studied To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf's great novel of love, yearning, and loss. We read this alongside Mansfield's clever, subtle stories in The Garden Party (1922). Both writers made hugely important contributions to the form of the novel and the short story in the early twentieth century. They could certainly write.