MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Now for some news in the world of 20th-century modernist literature. Virginia Woolf, the novelist and essayist author of "Orlando" and "Mrs. Dalloway," was also a poet. That's according to a recent finding from a scholar in Liverpool. NPR's Andrew Limbong has more.
ANDREW LIMBONG, BYLINE: The funny thing is, Sophie Oliver isn't even a Virginia Woolf scholar. She's a lecturer in modernism at the University of Liverpool, and she was doing research on a different literary figure, Gertrude Stein, at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive library at the University of Texas at Austin.
SOPHIE OLIVER: And I'm there for a month. And it's really hot, so I never go outside because I went to Texas in August for some reason.
LIMBONG: So while she's basking in the AC, she thought, oh, I might as well poke around the Virginia Woolf files. And while she's looking through a folder of letters, Woolf wrote to her niece Angelica.
OLIVER: Suddenly, at the back, there's these two pieces of paper that were obviously once folded on kind of blue note paper, so they're quite different from the letters, and they've got this pencil writing on them. It's obviously these two kind of quickly drafted poems. And I immediately think, well, that's odd because Virginia Woolf isn't a poet.
LIMBONG: One poem, a jokey punny poem about hiccups, was dedicated to her nephew, Quentin. The other - titled Angelica - goes like this.
OLIVER: The name was lazy and lovely, but the name was not the whole of her. There was the body and the soul of her. Angelica. Angelica. The angel name, but, oh, the shame. Drink she took to. Dadie, too. Fellow Dadie, oh, how shady to sport with Dadie and the tangled yellow hair.
LIMBONG: Oliver scoured existing Woolf research, asked Woolf experts, and couldn't find any other mention of these poems. But the other question was, who is this Dadie person?
OLIVER: Dadie was the nickname of a man called George Rylance, who was a poet - a scholar of Shakespeare.
LIMBONG: A friend of Woolf's, who's around at least often enough that Woolf could do that thing aunts love to do - razz her niece about having a crush.
OLIVER: These are signs, I think, of Woolf's ebullience. The fact that she was kind of silly and liked to indulge in play and nonsense, I suppose, with these children as her way of connecting with them. She didn't have children of her own. That was a sore point for her.
LIMBONG: The two poems add some more texture to our existing idea of Virginia Woolf. As for Oliver, accidental finds like these are the thrill of archival research. Not bad for an afternoon AC break at the library.
Andrew Limbong, NPR News.
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