"I Don't See How to Write a Book Without People in It"

Virginia Woolf was forty years old when she addressed this letter to Gerald Brenan, who was twelve years her junior and was to write several books. She wrote it in the year of the appearance of Jacob’s Room, three years before Mrs. Dalloway. This is drawn from The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume II, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, to appear in November.