Lot 51
Woolf, Virginia (1882-1941)
Two autograph letters signed to F. L. Lucas
Auction: 16 June 2026 from 10:00 BST
Description
52 Tavistock Square, London, c.1930. Each written on one side only of a single sheet and addressed to Lucas using his nickname ‘Peter’, one on Woolf's Tavistock Square stationery (20.2 x 16.5cm), thanking him for his review of ‘Julian's book in the New Statesman … [which] must have been so difficult to do, but it was perfectly done', signed ‘Virginia Woolf’, the other on plain paper (10.2 x 16.2cm), ‘If that cursed woman hadn’t been here, I wanted to ask you what the Dr said … please remember how sympathetically we think of you in your present damnable predicament', signed ‘Virginia’ (2)
Provenance
By direct descent from F. L. Lucas.
Footnote
The Cambridge literary scholar F. L. Lucas (1894-1967) was one of a younger generation of writers and artists whose achievements drew them into the orbit of the Bloomsbury group. Together with his sometime lover Dadie Rylands, also a fellow of King's College, Lucas formed ‘a kind of younger outpost of Bloomsbury in Cambridge', the pair providing ‘natural points of contact for the senior Bloomsbury figures when they came over from London or the country’, in which regard Lucas was at an advantage in being able to provide a house to stay in, rather than simply college rooms (Jones, ‘Carrington (And Woolf) in Cambridge', Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2006), pp. 301-334).