1754: TO V. SACKVILLE-WEST
52 Tavistock Square [W.C.1]

Friday [13 May 1927]

Darling Vita,

What a generous woman you are! Your letter has just come, and I must answer it, though in a chaos. 
(Nelly returning: her doctor; her friends; her diet etc) I was honest though in thinking you wouldn't care for 
The Lighthouse: too psychological; too many personal relationships, I think. (This is said not of the dummy 
copy) The dinner party the best thing I ever wrote: the one thing that I think justifies my faults as a writer: This 
damned 'method'. Because I dont think one could have reached those particular emotions in any other way. I 
was doubtful about Time Passes. It was written in the gloom of the Strike: then I re-wrote it: then I thought it 
impossible as prose—I thought you could have written it as poetry. I don't know if I'm like Mrs Ramsay: as my 
mother died when I was 13 probably it is a child's view of her: but I have some sentimental delight in thinking 
that you like her. She has haunted me: but then so did that old wretch my father: Do you think it sentimental? 
Do you think it irreverent about him? I should like to know. I was more like him than her, I think; and therefore 
more critical: but he was an adorable man, and somehow, tremendous.

Look here, dearest creature, the young men [at Oxford] have taken us rooms together at the Clarendon 
before getting my letter: also they want us to dine with them first at 7: so we must get there about 6. I daresay 
train is simplest. Let me know what suits you. I'm rather bothered about my paper; it mayn't suit; it may be dull. 
Ask Harold whether one can say that God does not exist to Oxford undergraduates? As one could to Cambridge. 
Also would you please, please please send us that story you said you had almost ready? This is most important, 
as Lord Olivier is not alive enough to support the story series. Couldn't you bring it with you on Wednesday?

But why do you think me "lonely". Lovely I understand: not altogether, lonely.

Yes, its an immense relief that you like it; I had been sure you wouldn't. I have so many more books in 
my head that I should be unhappy to think the whole progeny was doomed to drive us further asunder. The next 
will be better than this I think. An old creature writes to say that all my fauna and flora of the Hebrides is totally 
inaccurate. Dear me! whats to be done about it?

So dearest, train, Wednesday, to arrive for dinner. I rushed into a whore's shop in Leicester Sqre and 
bought a coat

Come here any time you like. Tell Harold we want him to come and dine with us, and I see some hope 
now of getting dinner soon. Will he?

The Story! The story!

VW.

(oh I forgot—
Virginia Woolf)

One needn't dress for the young men, need one? No.