Papers and Memoirs of the Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club at the Sussex University Archive

Abstract

The article describes the results of a search and collection of memoirs of Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the archival center of the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.
Those materials make up the memorial heritage corps of the Memoirist Club, organized within the English community of Bloomsbury, an association of intellectuals formed in London in the first half of the 20th century. Since the form of creating and presenting memoir essays in the Memoirist Club seems uncharacteristic and not widely used for the comprehensive study of that phenomenon, attempts are being made to consider as much as possible the entire body of essays, as well as various documents accompanying the activities of the Club, including unpublished ones. To compile such a body of essays, this archival research was conducted what resulted in studying the published and unpublished memoirs of Virginia and Leonard Woolf as well as supportive correspondence of the Memoir Club activity. The article describes the studied essays versions, calculates the number of published and unpublished essays, and makes an initial comparison of essays found in the archive with published variants. It also describes the procedural features of the late stage of the Club’s existence, reflected in Leonard Wolfe’s correspondence.