Literary Witches

Taisia Kitaiskaia

An illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted generations and transformed the world: Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Octavia Butler, Sappho, Audre Lorde, Anaïs Nin, Toni Morrison, Emily Brontë, and more:

Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Nigel Nicolson

How Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West fell in love—the true story behind “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” :

Orlando: A Biography

Virginia Woolf

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes … change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”

Virginia Woolf on clothing as a vehicle of identity and the fluidity of gender:

Virginia Woolf: An Illustrated Biography

Zena Alkayat

A lovely illustrated biography of Virginia Woolf

Moments of Being

Virginia Woolf

“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

Virginia Woolf’s account of why she became a writer remains the most piercing articulation of the creative impulse ever committed to words – devour it at the link:

A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf

“In each of us two powers preside, one male, one female… The androgynous mind is resonant and porous… naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.”

Virginia Woolf on why the androgynous mind is the best mind:

The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume III, 1923-1928

Virginia Woolf

“A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.”

Virginia Woolf on writing and consciousness, in a letter to her lover, Vita Sackville-West:

Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings

How Virginia Woolf’s Orlando radically played censorship and revolutionized LGBT love in literature

Nurse Lugton’s Curtain

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s little-known 1924 children’s story – a lovely allegory about the whimsical wonderland we enter as we slip into sleep – brought back to life in gorgeous watercolors

The Charleston Bulletin Supplements

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s never-before-seen witty family newspaper, illustrated by her nephew, Quentin Bell:

Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf

Sybil Oldfield

“For myself and others it is the end of a world. I merely feel quite numb at the moment, and can’t think about this or anything else…”

T.S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, E.M. Foster, Elizabeth Bowen, H.G. Wells, and others grapple with the ineffable

The Second Common Reader: Annotated Edition

Virginia Woolf

“Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice.”

Virginia Woolf on how to read a book:

A Writer’s Diary

Virginia Woolf

“The habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. … What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through. I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art. ”

Virginia Woolf on the creative benefits of keeping a diary:

Monday or Tuesday

Virginia Woolf

A rare first edition, featuring gorgeous black-and-white woodcuts by Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell:

Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909

Virginia Woolf

“All the Arts … imitate as far as they can the one great truth that all can see.”

Virginia Woolf’s early journals and letters: