Newly-Identified Vita Sackville-West Manuscript for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House Leads Bloomsbury Catalogue

A new catalogue from James Cummins Bookseller includes a previously unrecognized draft manuscript by Vita Sackville-West for A Note of Explanation, the miniature book she wrote for Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle and which has been cited as an inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. 

The catalogue offers more than 100 books, manuscripts, letters, and artwork by Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Vita Sackville-West, and the Hogarth Press, but its centrepiece is Sackville-West’s original autograph draft composed in 1922. It covers three pages of text on two foolscap leaves, written entirely in her hand in black ink, with amendments throughout. 

Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House was first proposed by Princess Marie Louise, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She commissioned the architect Edwin Lutyens to create an intricate, to-scale house for Queen Mary, her childhood friend. More than 200 authors were invited to contribute miniature books to its library including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, A. A. Milne, and Sackville-West. 

Most contributors supplied versions of works already in print but Sackville-West instead wrote an original, unpublished story specifically for and about the project. Her tale follows a time-travelling nymph who finds herself inside the dolls’ house. The story has since been cited as an inspiration for Orlando, the novel Woolf published six years later in 1928, and dedicated to Sackville-West. This untitled draft was known to exist, having been listed in the 2003 Sotheby’s sale of Sackville-West’s archives. However, it had not been identified or confirmed as the direct antecedent of the Dolls’ House volume until now. 

Other highlights include:

• first editions of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf in her sister Vanessa Bell’s original jackets, including two unrestored copies of The Waves (the London first edition and the first American edition) and the large-paper edition of Flush, for which Bell drew the interior illustrations
• a copy of the 1927 limited Kew Gardens unusually signed by both sisters
• Vanessa Bell’s own copy of Flush
• examples from Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press including Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude (1918) issued in just 300 copies, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1923), the first English edition in book form, hand-printed by the Woolfs
• a previously unrecorded Vanessa Bell watercolor of Charleston
• a 1910 postcard from the young Virginia Stephen to Clive Bell, written from the Burley nursing home during the first of her three mental convalescence stays there