Bibliography - Nigel Nicolson
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The Flight of the mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1888-1912, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, published 1975 (xxiv + 531 pp., London: The Hogarth Press, ISBN-10: 0701204036 & ISBN-13: 9780701204037) accessible at: East Sussex Libraries

A collection of Virginia Woolf's correspondence from age six to the eve of her marriage twenty-four years later.

The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1912 - 1922, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, published 1976 (xvii + 627 pp., London: The Hogarth Press, ISBN-10: 0701204206 & ISBN-13: 9780701204204) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1923 - 1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, published 1977 (xxiv + 600 pp., London: The Hogarth Press, ISBN-10: 0701204435 & ISBN-13: 9780701204433) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Opening soon after Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West and culminating with the publication of Orlando, this volume of letters covers Bloomsbury's most triumphant period. This was the time when Woolf wrote five of her best-known books, including Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and whilst she became one of the most famous writers of her generation, many of her friends - Lytton Strachey, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster - had become equally eminent. The slow evolution of Virginia's affair with Vita is traced through some of her wittiest letters, while her correspondence with her sister Vanessa and other friends reveals a strong sympathy with people beneath her ironic view of life.

Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1929 - 1931, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, published 1978 (xxii + 442 pp., London: The Hogarth Press, ISBN-10: 0701204486 & ISBN-13: 9780701204488) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

Virginia Woolf is 47 at the beginning of this volume, and struggling to complete her masterpiece, "The Waves" - rewriting it three times, interrupted by illness and unwanted visitors. But she continued to meet and correspond with old friends such as Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West and Ottoline Morrell, and made several new ones. The most important of these was the composer Ethel Smyth - over 70, explosively energetic, and openly in love with Virginia - who gradually replaced Vita as her most intimate friend. Virginia's letters to Ethel, in which she discussed frankly her madness, sex, her literary aspirations and even her thoughts of suicide, are among the strongest and most personal she ever wrote.

Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1932 - 1935, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, published 1979 (xviii + 476 pp., London: The Hogarth Press, ISBN-10: 0701204699 & ISBN-13: 9780701204693) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

In the early 1930s, Virginia Woolf was writing "The Years", as well as "Flush", the second volume of "The Common Reader", and her only play, "Freshwater", while leading an active social and business life in Bloomsbury, and accompanying Leonard on holidays abroad. She made an important new friend in Elizabeth Bowen, and lost two, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, whose deaths affected her deeply. Her growing feminism and concern about the rise of fascism emerge in letters to Vanessa Bell, Ethel Smyth, Vita Sackville-West, and some of the other 70-plus correspondents in this volume, such as Stephen Spender, Ottoline Morrell, Hugh Walpole, and her nephews Julian and Quentin Bell, to whom she wrote many of her merriest letters.

Leave the Letters Till We're Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1936-41, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann, published 1 September 1980 (xviii + 556 pp., London: The Hogarth Press, ISBN-10: 0701204702 & ISBN-13: 9780701204709) accessible at: West Sussex Libraries & East Sussex Libraries

The last volume of Virginia Woolf's "Collected Letters" runs from 1936, when she was finishing "The Waves", to 1941, when she drowned herself. But there is little or no shadow of impending tragedy over her sparkling correspondence with Vanessa, Vita, Ethel Smyth and her many other friends, such as T.S. Eliot, John Lehmann and Stephen Spender; nor did it curtail her writing: apart from "The Years", she published "Three Guineas" and her biography of Roger Fry, and wrote "Between the Acts". When war came Virginia and Leonard, bombed out of Bloomsbury, lived at their cottage in Sussex, exposed to the air-battles and under threat of invasion, and it was here that she committed suicide in March 1941.