Life after Virginia

Letters between Virginia Woolf's husband, Leonard Woolf, and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons, which have just been published, represent one of the last collections of papers relating to the Bloomsbury group to be released into the public domain.

Charting the relationship between Leonard and the woman with whom he began an affair shortly after his wife's suicide in 1941, the volume provides a long-awaited insight into Leonard's second love affair and will be crucial to scholars interested in Virginia Woolf's posthumous reputation.

The letters, whose contents range from anecdotal details of their domestic lives to intimate declarations of love, are written in a style of ease and affection that attests to the strength of the 27-year relationship between the elderly Leonard and a married woman 20 years his junior. But the publication also reopens the controversy recorded in the British press following Leonard's death in 1969. Leonard had made Trekkie his executor and residuary legatee but the will was disputed by his two nieces and a nephew in a bitter court case. These letters were finally but reluctantly produced in court as evidence against the allegation of undue influence. Parsons won the case and the letters, along with all the Woolf manuscripts, were presented to the University of Sussex library.

Leonard first met Trekkie, a painter and commercial artist, in 1925 when he published a novel by her sister Alice, but it wasn't until after the deaths of Alice and Virginia that the pair became intimate.

In 1941, when their correspondence began, she was some years into her second marriage to well-known publisher Ian Parsons.

While Ian was away during the war effort, Trekkie spent much time in Monk's House, Leonard's home in Sussex. It was not that unusual at the time for a woman whose husband was away during the war to have such an arrangement.

But, rather than fizzling out when Ian Parsons returned, the relationship developed, and eventually Leonard bought a house next door to Trekkie and Ian in London. Soon, Trekkie was spending half the week with Ian and the other half with Leonard. She also took holidays with them both, and remained committed to the two men throughout her life. Ian fully approved of the arrangement, (he himself had affairs during his marriage to Trekkie) and he and Leonard later became business partners when Ian's publishing firm, Chatto & Windus, took over Leonard's Hogarth Press. Judith Adamson, editor of the letters, sees the undoubtedly eccentric arrangement as "an inventive and honest solution for a woman who loved two men in different ways at the same time". At a recent lecture in Cambridge, she also stressed her desire that the volume be seen as simply a collection of letters between two people who loved each other rather than a controversial postscript to Woolf criticism. Wishful thinking: in light of the legacy of Virginia Woolf, the apparent "betrayal" by her husband after her death has only added fuel to the feminist fire against Leonard, who has become for many the archetypal tyrannical "other" of the feminist subject.

Virginia Woolf's marriage to Leonard, the Jewish political and economic writer, has proved a stumbling block to many critics of her life and work. After spending most of his 20s as a colonial official in Ceylon, Leonard Woolf returned to London and his Bloomsbury friends, whom he had met during his undergraduate days at Cambridge, to find two new recruits to the social set - the Stephen sisters, Vanessa and Virginia.

Woolf swiftly fell in love with Virginia, and, after slight hesitancy on her part, they were married in 1912, a decision which her biographer and nephew Quentin Bell calls "the wisest decision of her life". What followed was a marital and business partnership that flourished during the following decades. In 1917, the couple bought a hand-printing press, which began as a hobby, but in just a few years the Hogarth Press became an established publishing house, publishing not only Woolf's novels, but also works by Katherine Mansfield, T.S. Eliot and the first English translations of Freud.

Their marriage was challenged by Virginia's ill-health - she underwent many periods of mental illness, and it was Leonard who picked up the pieces every time. Throughout her life, he often acted as a kind of live-in nurse, ensuring that his wife ate properly and had enough rest and freely barring visitors when she was sick.

Leonard's contributions to his wife's creative impulse are also interesting. It was to him that she gave the first draft of every novel to read, hoping for his validation, and while he did publish political books himself, it was really as Virginia's editor and advisor that he made his mark.

His position in Bloomsbury was problematic, however: he always remained tacitly apart from the Bohemian lifestyle, and Virginia's sister, Vanessa, was dubious about his over-protective stance towards her sister.

Feminist critics also picked up on what they saw as his over-fastidious, fussing nature. Having valorised Virginia as a feminist icon and role model since her death, many have been quick to inscribe Leonard in the role of dominating patriarch who repressed her true lesbian impulses.

The fact that the Woolfs' marriage was never consummated is notorious, as is the evidence of Virginia's affair with aristocratic novelist Vita Sackville-West, upon whom she based her novel Orlando.

Thus, Leonard is seen as an awkward element that simply doesn't fit the picture of Virginia's life and feminist politics as expressed in A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Evidence of his domination is given little substance by her own diaries and letters, however, and her suicide note to him contains sentiments that surely must make Woolf's feminist crusaders hesitate: "I want to tell you that you have given me complete happiness. No one could have done more than you have done."

The critical backlash against Leonard was given full expression in a recent book by Irene Coates, in which she lays the blame for Virginia's death at Leonard's feet. It is this theory that Judith Adamson, through the publication of these letters, wishes to refute. Anyone eager to find scandalous details of the sexual dynamics of the Leonard-Trekkie relationship will be disappointed: the letters are as much about affectionate companionship as anything else. Nonetheless, they present a fascinating posthumous comment on the Woolf marriage. The correspondence is haunted by the ghost of Virginia. Leonard converted his wife's writing room at Monk's House into a studio for Trekkie, and in this way the two female artists are curiously connected.

But, most importantly, the letters implicitly call for a release from the almost pathological theorising of academic criticism and ask to be allowed stand alone as a testament to a real and enduring love