This was to have been a confutation. My intention was to rebut and for the record's sake to correct certain fashionable errors concerning the life of Virginia Woolf. What could be more proper, and what, it has to be said, more tedious? If the defence of truth had remained my only object, I should have left these words unwritten, or at least should have addressed them to a very small audience. But the pursuit of truth sent me back to my sources, and there I found a story, in many ways sad, but also funny and certainly instructive. It seemed worth extracting this record of a friendship from the great mass of evidence in which it is embedded. I hope that the reader will agree with me in finding it interesting in itself but, just as Prince Hal's" plain tale" is made livelier by being contrasted with Falstaff's" eleven buckram men," so too the simple facts are made more striking by the inventions of Virginia's recent interpreters. Let me therefore begin with a quotation from one of them.

Volume I [of Virginia Woolf's Letters] has a rarely preserved portrait of a female artist in the making, love and work intensely intertwined in her relations with women who encouraged her to write, read, and think, and gave her the nourishment of womanly love and literary criticism, which she was to seek and find in female friendship