T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf: 1926-1929

The purpose of this paper is to explore, from the perspective of biographical criticism, the relationship between T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf during the years 1926-1929. Their consolidated literary friendship is further intensified through the publication of Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” in the first number of The New Criterion edited by Eliot in January 1926. Additionally, Woolf’s share with her sister, Vanessa Bell, of the obituary of Eliot’s father-in-law in 1927, obviously brings to mind their intimate familial relationship. The editor Eliot’s share of Orlo Williams’s admiring review, published in The Monthly Criterion, of Woolf’s modernist novel To the Lighthouse (1927) in which she employs her “stream-of-consciousness” technique, definitely reveals the culmination of their literary friendship. Furthermore, Eliot’s interest in the reprinting of Woolf’s essay “Swift’s Journal to Stella” (1925) and her high evaluation of his poem “Fragment of an Agon” (1927) published in The New Criterion obviously underscore their reciprocal literary friendship. In 1929, Woolf’s highest acclamation of Eliot the poet as “a man of genius” who only emerges once in one century, definitely represents their amicable relationship, despite her sympathetic word “poor Tom” due to Vivien’s unhealthy condition.