The 'missing' letters of Leonard Woolf to Nancy Nolan 1943-1969

Abstract

While fan-mail to Leonard Woolf may be regarded as a measure of readers interests in Virginia Woolf s fiction and essays, or indeed of Leonard s own political and autobiographical writings, they are also indicative of readers attraction to Leonard Woolf s character and of his responsive interest in the lives of others. Nancy Nolan s and Evangeline Levine s letters are remarkable for the duration of the correspondence and are expressive of the interior lives of both women, conveying as they do the immediacy of the social and historical conditions of the societies in which they lived (Ireland and the US). In the absence of a substantial collection of Leonard Woolf s replies, it is difficult to assess the interactive nature of this type of correspondence or his personal rather than professional interest in fan-mail. This article describes the serendipitous discovery of a substantial cache of Leonard s letters to Nancy, enabling further work on the significance of the Nolan-Woolf correspondence 1943-1969.