Few feelings are more thrilling for a literature scholar than unearthing an archival gem. Urmila Seshagiri, professor of English at the University of Tennessee, got to experience such a jolt when she was told about previously unseen typescripts of three short stories by Virginia Woolf.
These interconnected tales, written in 1907, comprise a mock biography of Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson, an independent woman who moved in aristocratic circles and who would be crucial to the development of Woolf’s early writing.
