LONDON (AP) – The British Library has bought an unpublished series of mock newspaper articles handwritten by author Virginia Woolf and discovered in an old tin trunk.
The seven autographed manuscripts are among the library’s purchase of 188 editions of a newspaper called The Charleston Bulletin that was compiled by Woolf’s nephews, Julian and Quentin Bell, as children.
Christopher Wright, the library’s head of manuscripts, said Friday that the works will provide an insight into the influential Bloomsbury group of writers, artists and philosophers.
“This important and exciting acquisition will allow scholars the opportunity to study this material, offering a penetrating perspective on the Bloomsbury group for the first time,” he said. “Although its existence was already known, it has never been worked on before by academics.”
The Bloomsbury group, named after the area of London where its members initially met for drinks and conversation, flourished from 1904 until World War II. Devotees were committed to a rejection of the artistic, social and sexual strictures of the day.
The Charleston Bulletin chronicles life at Charleston House in Sussex, the country refuge of the Bloomsbury group, whose members included Woolf, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West and John Maynard Keynes.
The reports, mostly through the eyes of the boys, provide an adolescent’s view of the adults. Woolf’s contributions, written in her favorite purple ink, show her taking the children’s side and casting a wicked eye over the peccadilloes of the household’s adult population.
In one short piece titled “The Chocolates,” Woolf provided the text for an illustration of her nephew Quentin Bell enjoying the sweets: “Mr. Bell yielding to his passion for sweetmeats. A box at a time; is the only rhyme he said, and poor Quentin went hungry to bed.”
The newspapers also contain artworks by Julian and Quentin’s parents, Clive and Vanessa Bell, and other members of the Bloomsbury group.
The British Library said the collection, owned by Quentin’s wife, Anne Olivier Bell, had remained locked away in a tin truck until his death in 1996. Anne Bell is donating the undisclosed proceeds of the sale to the Charleston Trust for the conservation of the house.
The British Library already owns several important Woolf manuscripts, including “Mrs. Dalloway,” published in 1925.
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