Newly Found Virginia Woolf Stories Turn Feminism on Its Head

If you ever needed proof that the foundations of literary revolutions are often laid in secrecy and self-doubt, then The Life of Violet, a newly unearthed trio of early stories by British author Virginia Woolf offers a vivid reminder.

Written in 1907, years before Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse shook the literary world, these stories were originally intended for the private amusement of a friend. Now, more than a century later, they re-emerge as a shimmering early blueprint of a writer who would go on to change not only the English novel but the very shape of feminist thought.

What’s striking about this rediscovery isn’t just its Indiana Jones-worthy backstory, the hidden manuscripts, aristocratic estates, scholarly sleuthing but how these playful, surreal, and satirical stories offer a Woolf unfiltered by the expectations of public genius.

This is Virginia Stephen, not yet Virginia Woolf, already lacing fantasy with subversion, already toying with biography, gender, and society’s absurd performances with a sly, knowing smile.

One of the most important literary figures of the 20th century, she was a disruptor. A modernist icon, a pioneer of stream-of-consciousness writing, a feminist firestarter before the word feminist had its modern bite, and a master of irony, melancholy, and wit. Her novels (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando) and essays (A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas) were written to kick the doors open to really assertively depict the female gaze.

Now, the rediscovery of The Life of Violet, a long-lost collection of three early stories by Woolf, is being heralded as one of the most significant literary finds of the decade. Written in 1907, when Woolf was just 25 and still signed her work “Virginia Stephen,” the stories were locked away in the attic of an English stately home for more than a century before being stumbled upon, quite literally, in a cream-coloured box at Longleat House by scholar Urmila Seshagiri.

The stories are strange. Gloriously so. They centre on Violet, a giantess with “powers as marvellous as her height” — written as a spoof biography by a clueless male narrator. She battles sea monsters, travels to Tokyo on a whale, and navigates the bizarre constraints of upper-class English society.

The Life of Violet is the longest work of fiction, with multiple chapters, that Woolf attempted at this point in her life, when she was mainly writing essays and reviews. “It jumps out as a more complex, more polished work than any other attempt at fiction,” Seshagiri, the expert who recognised the book's value and teaches English and humanities at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville said in an interview.

Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces.

The Life of Violet that was published this month blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.

In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers “as marvelous as her height,” gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building “a cottage of one’s own,” and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order.

Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women’s friendships and laughter.