Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own
Lytton Strachey at Garsington Manor
This letter was written on Garsington Manor stationery where Strachey was a guest along with the “amusing and sufficiently mysterious” Katherine Mansfield. According to Strachey, Mansfield “has an ugly impassive mask of a face—cut in wood, with brown hair and brown eyes very far apart; and a sharp and slightly vulgarly-fanciful intellect sitting behind it.” Apparently, Mansfield spoke with enthusiasm about the Voyage Out to Strachey.
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Strachey’s letter includes an entertaining description of a typical gathering at Garsington, the home of the famous literary hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell:
There were 16 souls here for the week-end that’s just over: from Friday onwards the door seemed to open every two hours and new arrivals appeared in batches of five or seven. I at last lost count and consciousness, going off into a cosmic trance, from which I was only awakened by the frenzied strains of the pianola playing desperate rag-time, to which thirty feet were executing a frantic concatenation of thuds.
Presented by Frances Hooper ’14.
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College
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