Virginia Woolf

Yesterday, for the first time in history, I gathered all my Virginia Woolf books together on one shelf. For the last 40-odd years as their numbers grew they have been scattered around in the bedroom, the living room, the guest room, the family room, my library, and in Boxes 113, 125, 136, 206, and others. There was even one in among my cookbooks, Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography.

I have more than 40 books by and about VW, if you count Nigel Nicholson’s Portrait of a Marriage, a biography of Lytton Strachey, and a couple of other peripherals. I even have the five volumes of VW’s diary and the six volumes of her letters

And yet, when I decided to read along with the informal “Woolf for Dummies” course Susan Hill is doing on her blog, I had to order two books for just the first part. How could I own more than 5,000 books and not have Jacob’s Room?