Leonard Woolf's grand passion

LOVE LETTERS: Leonard Woolf and Trekkie Ritchie Parsons, 1941- 1968 edited by Judith Adamson (Chatto, 20)

WHEN Leonard Woolf died in 1969, he left Monk's House and almost everything else he owned to Trekkie Parsons, the South African-born wife of one of his former publishing colleagues, Ian Parsons of Chatto & Windus.

The will was disputed by an angry band of nephews and nieces, claiming that Mrs Parsons had exercised "undue influence" over the venerable old Bloomsburyite.

But Mrs Parsons won the case and, as if to prove that she was no gold-digger, handed over the property and the Woolf archive to the University of Sussex.

If the lawyers could have read this correspondence, covering a 27- year period of unwavering devotion, they might have thought twice about "undue influence", and just who was exerting it.

Trekkie Parsons didn't solicit Woolf's attention; they knew each other slightly in the Thirties through Trekkie's sister, the writer Alice Ritchie, and were brought together by mutual sympathy after the deaths in the same year of Alice (from cancer) and of Virginia Woolf. Trekkie was the antithesis of the typical Bloomsburyite; a modest, unpretentious woman who was preoccupied with observing things (she was an artist and illustrator), not discussing them.

Woolf identified in her an essential womanliness which activated the ardent and romantic side of his personality, hitherto almost entirely dormant. "You have turned a passive, neutral existence into life of passionate happiness," he wrote in 1944. "To know you and love you has been the best thing in life."

The charm of this book lies, surprisingly, in Leonard Woolf saying this over and over again, "an old dishevelled fowl singing away its everlasting single and solitary tune". He emerges as a tender and appreciative lover, without a trace of mawkishness or blackmail in his tone; happiness oozes from his letters, a holiday atmosphere of being truant from his professional life.

Woolf was a political journalist, writer and publisher of immense ability and influence (the excellent footnotes to this volume give a very good idea of how wide it was), but recognised the sterility of a world in which "bony and brainy" men practise "a kind of bleak intellectual ruthlessness upon one another". By contrast, Trekkie was quiet and unglamorous, loved plants and pets and could be relied on never to start a conversation about the Beveridge Report. "I've been five or six hours with you today [...] & you've never said anything or made a movement which did not seem to me beautiful & give me the feeling of ecstasy or satisfaction mental & physical which one gets from a work of art.

I know you'll say this is foolish - but it is not."

Of course it is difficult to be on the receiving end of this kind of attention, and Trekkie's letters often display her discomfort. "I wish I was that lovely person you describe," she wrote in response to one of his eulogies. "Everyone knows the insides of themselves too well to be able to believe very well of themselves." She dealt with the situation in her own way, sharing herself out between Woolf and her husband (who was involved in a longstanding affair of his own and perfectly happy with the arrangement). In her introduction, editor Judith Adamson reveals that Woolf wanted Trekkie to get a divorce and marry him, although this was never a subject raised in the letters and Trekkie discouraged it anyway. One can't imagine that marriage would have made them happier.

Was their affair sexual? Judith Adamson casts doubt on Mrs Parsons's denials, saying, "It would have been very important to [Trekkie] not to be dismissed as Leonard's mistress", but there seems little reason to disbelieve her. Woolf, who was 61 when he fell in love (Trekkie was 39) and 88 when he died, talks almost exclusively about the pleasures of companionship, and only once about the flesh (Trekkie's toe, which he gained possession of and kissed twice - albeit through the shoe). Not that it signifies much in the long run whether they were lovers or not: the pleasures of companionship are what the couple valued most, and, what this book celebrates so beautifully. As Woolf came to realise, "the number of things which matter are infinitely small".

Copyright 2001
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