Urmila Seshagiri THE LIFE OF VIOLET with David James

The Life of Violet

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet-a teasing tribute to Woolf's friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.

In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers "as marvelous as her height," gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building "a cottage of one's own," and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates women's friendships and laughter.

A major literary discovery that heralds Woolf's ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read.

Urmila Seshagiri

Urmila Seshagiri is Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The author of Race and the Modernist Imagination, she is writing a book about the complex legacy of modernist aesthetics in contemporary literature and culture, provisionally titled Still Shocking: 21st-Century Encounters with Modernism. She is the editor of Virginia Woolf’s The Life of Violet, Jacob’s Room, and To the Lighthouse, and she is preparing the first scholarly edition of Woolf’s memoir, A Sketch of the Past.

David James

David James is a professor of English at the University of Birmingham. His most recent books are Discrepant Solace and (as editor) Modernism and Close Reading . For Columbia University Press, he coedits the book series Literature Now. His forthcoming book, Sentimental Activism, assesses the contemporary reanimation of sentimentalism across a variety of literary genres and in the itineraries of cultural criticism.