Not Afraid of Virginia Woolf

The 'village girl' who got to Cambridge University

Elsie Duncan-Jones née Phare © Newnham College Library Archives

In 1928, a twenty-year-old student called Elsie Phare (later known as E.E. Duncan-Jones) wrote to Virginia Woolf, inviting her to give a talk on the subject of women and fiction to the Arts Society at Newnham College, Cambridge. The society’s president Elsie Phare was in her second year studying English Literature, so it must have been thrilling when one of the great modernist writers of the time provisionally accepted the invitation (the following year T.S. Eliot politely turned her down). The success of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) had made her busier than ever, so there was some difficulty in trying to find a suitable date, but Elsie Phare was determined and did not give up easily. Eventually ‘Mrs Woolf’ sent ‘Miss Phare’ a polite letter, type-written in purple ink, accepting the date of 20^th October 1928. The talk that Virginia Woolf gave that day, together with the one she gave soon afterwards at the oth…