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By Gareth Corfield
September 23, 2025 — 10.46am
A lost book by Virginia Woolf will be published next month after its manuscript was discovered in a stately home in England.
The Life of Violet is a collection of three comic stories about a giantess.
Virginia Woolf and the cover of her ‘new’ book.
It will be published on October 7, providing a new insight into one of the 20th century’s most influential feminist writers.
Woolf, known for novels and feminist essays, took her own life in 1941. Her works became inspirational to early modern feminist thinkers because of their focus on the stifling social customs of upper-class England.
The discovery of a new Woolf book which challenges perceptions of her as “gloomy, suicidal and dark” will excite literary scholars.
The Life of Violet was completed eight years before the publication of Woolf’s earliest known novel, The Voyage Out.
Professor Urmila Seshagiri stumbled across the manuscript in Wiltshire’s Longleat House while researching Woolf’s 1939 autobiographical essay, A Sketch of the Past.
In the book, the titular character is described as overpowering sea monsters and social traditions alike by using powers “as marvellous as her height”.
Seshagiri, a University of Tennessee scholar, said this was a reference to one of Woolf’s close friends and mentors, Violet Mary Dickinson, known for her 188-centimetre stature.
Dickinson’s papers, understood to include the manuscript, were located at Longleat because the house was once home to the 7th Marquess of Bath. Both of Dickinson’s great-aunts were lifelong friends of Woolf.
Describing the discovery of the manuscript, Seshagiri told The Sunday Times: “I followed the archivist up this magnificent wooden staircase, hung with ancestral portraits, into a reading room.
“She handed me a cream-coloured box and when I lifted the lid, there was this typescript, in a saffron binding, by Virginia Woolf.”
Book completed in 1907
Previously, only a draft of the Violet stories was known to exist at the New York Public Library. It was dismissed as a “peripheral” piece of writing that the author had “scribbled over” and abandoned, Seshagiri said.
The Longleat typescript shows that, in fact, Woolf completed the work in 1907. It is not known why the then-25 year old, who was a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Group of literary intellectuals, did not publish it at the time.
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In one scene, a character based on Woolf’s acquaintance, Kitty Maxse (the likely inspiration for the character of Mrs Dalloway in Woolf’s later novel of that name), complains about feeling wretched, useless and forgotten by her friends.
Elsewhere, Violet and a friend talk about how “it would be very nice … to have a cottage of one’s own”, prefiguring Woolf’s well-known 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own.
Seshagiri said the discovery of The Life of Violet would help dispel notions that Woolf focused purely on the downbeat and difficult in her literary works.
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