STEPHEN, Sir Leslie (1832-1904). First editor of DNB and father of Virginia Woolf.
Autograph Letter Signed to Dr [?Ernest] Gowers, 1 page 8vo on black-edged paper, 22 Hyde Park Gate, 28 July 1895. Regretting that he will not be able to attend a meeting 'to which, indeed, in my present circumstances I should scarely have felt myself equal'.
'It was on 5 May 1895 that Julia Stephen died very suddenly: her heart had given up following an attack of influenza which had turned into rheumatic fever. It was a tragedy for her husband and for her two families. Stephen's grief was terrible, but his solution was equally characteristic. He almost immediately sought relief in literary work, easing the pain of his loss by preparing an intimate family memoir to preserve for her children a record of their courtship and marriage. Even in the depths of his sorrow he was methodical, working up documentary evidence from letters into a dated sequence around which he could build his own memories. The grief shows itself, as was intended, in many unbridled passages, but these gain from being grafted onto a well-crafted essay prepared by an experienced biographer. Stephen used the later pages to record family events and the deaths of friends and relations; the threnody became a necrology. This unusual, emotionally loaded compilation became known to his descendants as the 'Mausoleum Book'; after many years of neglect it was eventually published from the manuscript (by then in the British Library) in 1977. Alongside his own records of those final years of bereavement are the distinctive later memories of his daughters, Vanessa and Virginia, which helped to shape Stephen's reputation.' [Alan Bell in Oxford DNB].
[No: 23350]