This London & North Eastern Railway travel poster by Frank Henry Mason (1875-1965) shows the Orford Ness Lighthouse, which was built in 1792. Unfortunately it was recently decommissioned due to the encroaching sea and unless shored up it is expected to be swallowed up by the North Sea within the next seven to eight years: We have given a donation towards the worthy efforts to keep it going here.

A visit to the wonderful Lavenham Press who print the Persephone Biannually and Catalogue led seamlessly to a comfortable and restorative night at the Crown and Castle in Orford; it has been a hostelry for eight hundred years. In May 1935 Robert Watson Watt started to stay there for weekends, driving every Friday afternoon  from Slough. He made the first experiments on Orford Ness using radio waves to detect incoming aircraft – the system that was to become radar, and without which we might well have lost the Battle of Britain in 1940. After dinner in the hotel, Watson Watt would discuss his ideas with his colleagues long into the night.  Cf. also the BBC TV play in 2014 – Castles in the Sky.

In her Persephone Preface Lyndall Gordon sees The Wise Virgins as being, crucially, about women’s lives.”What I should like to know is,” Harry presses Gwen, “how you live, what you do with yourself all day. I don’t understand it. That’s what’s interesting,” He gives Gwen books by Dostoevsky and Ibsen as antidote to virginity and vicar’s teas.’ In this respect The Wise Virgins is very like Reuben Sachs: both novels ask whether women shouldn’t do more than ‘fill their days with golf, visiting, chat, and good works.’  In 1912 when Leonard asked this it was the height of the Suffragette movement but of course his contemporaries did not realise that he was far, far in advance of his time in asking it – that he was an early and important feminist. The 1950 painting of Leonard is by Trekkie Parsons, with whom he lived after Virginia Woolf died; by the 1950s feminism was slowly beginning to catch up with him; but it would be another  thirty years before The Wise Virgins was first reprinted; and another twenty-five years after that before we at Persephone Books had the privilege of republishing it again and showing it for what it is: not only a superb novel but a great feminist document.

‘From the opening pages of the novel the line is drawn between “intellectual people who really do live in London” and those they despise who live in red-brick villas, “all exactly the same, like the people who live in them.” Two different worlds just a short ride apart on the newly built tube…. [Harry’s] struggle to define and determine his individuality mirrors Leonard’s, but ultimately fails when, unlike Leonard, he gives way to the force of sexual desire. Having eaten of the apple, Harry Davis must say goodbye to the Paradise of Bloomsbury, and spend the rest of his days in a dreary corner of suburban Richstead’: The Persephone Forum. This 1914 painting of Hampstead Garden Suburb by William Ratcliffe, used to illustrate the kind of milieu Leonard was railing against, is used on the Forum

Leonard and Virginia married on 10th August 1912. On their honeymoon Leonard began writing The Wise Virgins, ‘a book by a gifted adolescent in revolt’ (Victoria Glendinning) ‘as he lashed out at his family’s vulgar and commonplace values and attitudes, at Gordon Square’s snobbish, over-critical values and attitudes, and at the young Jew, himself, bitter, angry and displaced, in between the two worlds and fitting in nowhere.’ (This makes the book sounds much more angry than it really is; in fact it’s ironic subtitle ‘a story of words, opinions and a few emotions’ is pretty accurate. And it’s a romance of course.)

It is very hard to find a photograph of Virginia and Vanessa together during the years before they married. Here is one when they were still very young, indeed possibly it is 1897 when they were 18 and 15 since that is the year their half-sister Stella Duckworth died and they are both looking so sad. Leonard Woolf would have met them not long afterwards.

Next Sunday at the Guardian in King’s Place there is a Jewish Book Week event about The Wise Virgins with Lyndall Gordon,  Victoria Glendinning and Anne Sebba. We shall celebrate the book on the Post this week. First of all, a photograph of Vanessa Stephen at her easel in 1905: the photograph is in the Tate Archive. Leonard Woolf was then 25 and had just gone to Ceylon for seven years; but he had often met the Stephen sisters during his years at Cambridge. The theme of The Wise Virgins, which he wrote in 1912, is whether he should marry (the Bohemian) Vanessa or Virginia or (the sensible) girl next door in Putney.