Abstract
This article discusses “The Villa Jones,” the second unpublished sketch from Virginia Woolf’s 1931 notebook in the Morgan Library, and presents a transcription of this archival discovery. In this letter-essay, Woolf laments building on the Sussex Downs, focusing her ire on the figure of Jones, her archetypal showy and threateningly mobile middle-class villa owner. The article situates Woolf’s tirade against “voluntary view spoilers” in the context of her relationship to the Sussex countryside surrounding her home in Rodmell. As with the “Cook Sketch,” also contained in the Morgan notebook, the flights of imagination and “raucousness” of ”the Villa Jones” suggest that it is a piece of writing that burst out of the pressure of completing her 1931 novel The Waves. But just as the “Cook Sketch” is much more than comic relief, the playful,personal reaction to building in the countryside we find in “The Villa Jones” has much to tell us about the social and cultural politics of England in the 1930s and the vagaries of Woolf’s thinking about social class and community.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 75-96 |
| Journal | Woolf Studies Annual |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue number | 0 |
| Early online date | 1 Apr 2016 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Apr 2016 |