Love Letters: Woolf & Parsons

BOOK REVIEWS who people her book, she carefully assesses the historical as well as the literary background within which they worked. Her knowledge of the field is excellent, as is her assessment of other research which adds to hers. Overall, this book is a scholarly find. Deborah Martinson ------------------------ Occidental College Love Letters: Woolf & Parsons Love Letters: Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons 1941-1968. Judith Adamson, ed. London: Chatto & Windus, 2001. xxiii + 312 pp. $35.00 READ RIGHT THROUGH, as one reads a novel, these letters offer a wonderful combination of pathos and light comedy, of the political, the social and the domestic, and of two fascinating protagonists. We might think we already know one of them but it turns out we have had at best a partial portrait (even as provided by himself), and the one most of us don't know, Trekkie Ritchie Parsons, is a novelist's dream—quirky, loyal, funny, loving, endlessly observant, sometimes hesitant, sometimes wilful , a chronicler of persons and places. Since Leonard Woolf figures in so many end-driven narratives where he is variously the (almost) murderer or the stern demanding prison warden, the cross Virginia Woolf had to bear, or very occasionally, the martyr and full-time nurse, it is important to have documented a very different Leonard, relatively relaxed, happy, and in love. One might object that "after" doesn't necessarily erase "before." True enough, but it does nuance it and in some instances provides strong evidence to put to rest some of the more hysterical claims, especially those in Irene Coates's 1998 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf where Leonard Woolf is seen as orchestrating the circumstances leading to Virginia's death ("The major reason for Virginia's death was Leonard's own desire for her not to be there." Coates, 422). Thus these letters become all the more important, in so far as their intricate narrative offers at the very least a retrospective context for assessing Woolf s person, position and historical place. We were not meant to read them. It was in every sense a private correspondence for their eyes alone. That they have a public life is due to the legal action brought by the children of Woolf s brother, Philip, involving claims of will altering, "undue influence" supposedly exercised by Trekkie Parsons, who was his executrix, over the dying Leonard and so the letters became legal evidence that there had been "no improper relationship " and hence no undue influence. In a finely detailed introductory ac179 ELT 46 : 2 2003 count Judith Adamson describes these events as well as provides important context for the relationship the letters reveal. "Improper"? Well what do such words really mean and in any event who knows (as no one should). The relationship was intimate and deeply loving and it endured until Woolf s death. It began quietly. They had met and corresponded several times in 1941 concerning Woolf s visits and assistance to Trekkie's sister , the novelist Alice Ritchie, whose books had been published by the Hogarth Press and who was now dying of cancer. Most of the early letters are from Trekkie—friendly, appreciative of Leonard's concern for Alice, and preserved no doubt because Leonard saved (and filed) most everything, while his to her were evidently discarded. It's in early 1943 that his letters begin to appear and soon are very warm. By summer, he is ecstatically in love and the correspondence becomes just that, as letter answers letter and their very different but in the event supremely compatible personalities learn to speak and understand each other's language . She is twenty-two years younger, sensible, curious, but unsure of how to respond. He is self-conscious and a bit terrified, particularly terrified of losing her, given what he knows to be his difficult personality: ".. . the appalling insistence which I know I possess & cannot control, which is due to some horrible fire in my entrails & must be a weariness of flesh and mind to other people. I had hoped that age would put it out but I don't really think it does. It makes things obsess me. But only once before in my life has it...