Footnotes

'ALL THE SEARCHLIGHTS ARE ERECT. THEY POINT AT A SPOT EXACTLY ABOVE THIS ROOF. AT ANY MOMENT A BOMB MAY FALL ON THIS VERY ROOM': a vivid meditation on life at war by Virginia Woolf, and of the role of women in such a conflict: "The defenders are men, the attackers are men. Arms are not give to Englishwomen either to fight the enemy or to defend herself". In this essay, Woolf urges that women make their contribution to the war of ideas ("...we can fight with the mind..."), despite the exclusion of women from positions of political responsibility: women's fight should be against the "subconscious Hitlerism" of aggression and the enslavement of sexual stereotyping, and for the freedom of "creative feelings" to "compensate the man for the loss of his gun".

This essay was published in the posthumous collection The Death of the Moth (1942), where it was described as having been 'Written ... for an American symposium on current matters concerning women'; the present manuscript has a few minor variations from the published text. The letters to Mrs Fisher relate to the commissioning of the manuscript, and are revealing of the author's state of mind in the last year of her life. The earliest letter expresses her willingness to write an article "for the book you describe", but with the riders that "conditions in England are such that I have to face the fact that all writing may become impossible", and that she would be bound to offer an article to "one of the American magazines". As for the article itself, she will "try to develop further those views of what should be the attitude of women towards war and peace which I sketched in my book Three Guineas. As I said there, indifference would become impossible once war aroused emotions. Now that war is very close to me, I am experiencing the emotional changes which I foretold. And of course, it is an extraordinarily interesting experience"; the letter ends on a warm note, "it is a great encouragement to me at this moment, when the future looks so dark, to realise, as your letter makes me realise, how actively women on your side of the Atlantic are interesting themselves in problems which will remain of the greatest importance, whatever our fate is here ... I have delayed writing, but only because, as you will understand, we are living at a time of great daily anxiety". The second letter, on 27 July, provides a summary of the first, in case it has gone astray; on 3 September, Woolf announces the despatch of the article under a separate cover (a separate, brief letter accompanied it), noting that she had completed it too late for her proposed magazine publication in The Forum. On 11 November, she approves the recipient's having forwarded the essay to the New Republic, the proposed book having been delayed, concluding with both public and private news: "I hope you are pleased with the result of the Election. We are over here. Privately, we are a good deal distracted; as our London flat has been bombed, and that means a great deal of worry about furniture and so on as you can imagine".

The Woolfs' house at Rodmell was much exposed to air raids in the summer of 1940 when the Battle of Britain was taking place over Sussex and Kent – more so, initially, than their London houses in Tavistock and Mecklenburgh squares, although with the advent of the Blitz both these were destroyed by bombs in September and October. Air raids constantly punctuate Woolf's letters of this period. In this context, this essay and its accompanying letters bears a particular resonance and poignancy; as Lyndall Gordon puts it: 'Rodmell is only 3 miles from Newhaven, where the German Ninth Army would have landed if operation Sea Lion had been carried out. The Woolfs could not know that both of them were already on Himmler's list for immediate arrest, but they were aware of the danger to a Jew and his wife. In 1940 Leonard devised two contingency plans for their joint suicide, though at this point Virginia hoped for ten years more and to finish her novel. But towards the end of the year and early in 1941 she lost confidence that she could reach a wider audience and began to think there was no cure for womanishness bred by manliness – "both so hateful"... Just before 11.45 on the morning of Friday 28 March 1941 Virginia Woolf weighted her pocket with a large stone and drowned herself in the fast-running River Ouse near Monk's House' (ODNB). See illustration on preceding page.