Collection of Virginia Woolf’s lost stories published nearly 80 years after her death

Amna Nawaz:

Well, a remarkable literary discovery has thrilled readers of Virginia Woolf. More than 80 years after her death, a new Woolf book has been published this week, a collection of three comic stories written eight years before her first novel.

Malcolm Brabant reports from England for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Malcolm Brabant:

For 80 years, what's being hailed as a literary treasure was buried in the archives of Longleat, one of Britain's finest stately homes.

Longleat contains historic artifacts dating back 1,300 years, and they're under the stewardship of archivist Emma Challinor.

Emma Challinor, Archivist, Longleat House:

It's definitely an exciting thing, maybe not exactly as you would imagine an Indiana Jones scene. We didn't, for instance, have to dig through a secret tunnel and fight through cobwebs.

The volume itself was on a shelf, we knew where it was, we had it catalogued and we knew who it was by, for instance, where it had come from. But I suppose it took an intrepid researcher like Urmila to fully understand the significance of the work. And that really is the great discovery, and that's the treasure.

Malcolm Brabant:

Professor Urmila Seshagiri was the expert who recognized the book's value. She teaches English and humanities at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

Urmila Seshagiri, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: My heart was beating very fast as I walked up that staircase, because I had been waiting four years to see this typescript, and I was consumed by curiosity and this desire to know whether this was an original work.

And when the archivist handed me the document box and I opened it and I saw just from the first page that it was a new work, that Woolf had revised it and had perfected it, I was stunned.

Malcolm Brabant:

So how significant a work is it? It was an early work, when — she was about 25 when she wrote it.

Urmila Seshagiri:

To be sure, "The Life of Violet" adds to our understanding of Woolf as a writer of fiction, as a biographer, as a cultural critic, as a feminist.

But I think the best part is that it shows us that Woolf was very funny and she could write in a broadly comic idiom that was made up of parody and hyperbole and fantasy.

Malcolm Brabant:

This sculpture in the London district of Richmond is a fine representation of Woolf, who inspired poet and academic Jane Goldman to become an expert on the author. "The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf" is one of Goldman's published works.

Jane Goldman, Author, "The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf": She's been an iconic figure since she first became famous with her novels in the 1920s. She's very iconic as a radical experimental writer, a feminist, a pacifist.

Malcolm Brabant:

While famous for inhabiting unconventional intellectual salons in London, Woolf was equally at home in the countryside of Southern England. A 16th century weatherboarded house now belongs to Britain's National Trust that conserves historic landmarks.

Woolf lived next to this 12 century church in Rodmell, a village with a timeless quality.

Virginia Woolf died by suicide in 1941 at the age of 59. She had been bedeviled by mental illness. And in a final note to her husband, Leonard, she wrote: "I feel certain that I'm going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times, and I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices and I can't concentrate. So I'm doing what seems the best thing to do."

After writing the note, Woolf walked to the nearby fast-flowing River Ouse. Her body was found three weeks later.

During Virginia Woolf's life and immediately after she died by suicide, the world didn't look particularly kindly upon her. And that's largely as a result of the lack of understanding about mental illness. Do you think that people do understand what she was really like now? Does this help?

Urmila Seshagiri:

Maybe there's a stubborn tendency to inaccurately label her as a suicidal madwoman, if I may use a very out-of-date and unkind phrase, and that tendency perhaps pronounced in people who haven't read her writing.

But I think that the readers of her work, who are numerous and loyal and scattered around the world, love her writing because it bursts with life and with beauty and it's profoundly affirming.

Jane Goldman:

The culture still wants to make her the poster girl of this suicidal woman novelist and writer. So it's important that, when you read any work by her, you soon find her being very earthy and bawdy and funny in a lot of her writing.

So, to have something at the beginning of her writing career, the very first piece of sustained fiction that she writes, is such a joyous thing to read.

Malcolm Brabant:

And Seshagiri believes the new book will strike a chord with today's students of literature.

Urmila Seshagiri:

Young people who are resistant to having their personas or their thoughts caged in any way are very, very receptive to that liberation, to that freedom of thought, of perception that Woolf offers them.

Malcolm Brabant:

So there's now more texture to the Woolf time capsule, but, as with so many artists, proof that true validation came after she was gone.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Malcolm Brabant in Rodmell, Southern England.