The two women had been exchanging letters since their return to London, many of them preoccupied with Thoby’s and Violet’s health. The letter Virginia wrote the day he died was to Violet Dickinson, who had accompanied the Stephens on their trip. Thoby Stephen, Virginia’s eldest brother, had been infected with typhoid. She and her three siblings had just returned from a trip to Greece and Turkey, which had ended in disaster. Virginia was twenty-four-six years from marrying and becoming Virginia Woolf, nine years from publishing her first novel. In that letter, written on November 20, 1906, she did not utter a word about her brother’s death she did not so much as mention his name. Hours after watching her twenty-six-year-old brother die, Virginia Stephen wrote a letter to one of her dearest friends. For Virginia Woolf, correspondence became a way to transcend a climate of illness-to envision a future she couldn’t see.
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