The Missing Letters of Leonard Woolf to Nancy Nolan 1943-1969.

While fan-mail to Leonard Woolf may be regarded as a measure of readers interests in Virginia Woolfs fiction and essays, or indeed of Leonards own political and autobiographical writings, they are also indicative of readers attraction to Leonard Woolfs character and of his responsive interest in the lives of others. Nancy Nolans and Evangeline Levines letters are remarkable for the duration of the correspondence and are expressive of the interior lives of both women, conveying as they do the immediacy of the social and historical conditions of the societies in which they lived (Ireland and the US). In the absence of a substantial collection of Leonard Woolfs replies, it is difficult to assess the interactive nature of this type of correspondence or his personal rather than professional interest in fan-mail. This article describes the serendipitous discovery of a substantial cache of Leonards letters to Nancy, enabling further work on the significance of the Nolan-Woolf correspondence and epistolary friendship, 1943-1969.