Few feelings are more thrilling for a literature scholar than unearthing an archival gem. Urmila Seshagiri, professor of English at the University of Tennessee, got to experience such a jolt when she was told about previously unseen typescripts of three short stories by Virginia Woolf .

These interconnected tales, written in 1907, comprise a mock biography of Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson, an independent woman who moved in aristocratic circles and who would be crucial to the development of Woolf’s early writing.

In 2022, Seshagiri was finally able to make the trip to Longleat House, a stately home in south-west England, and open up a cream-coloured case containing a polished version of the stories. Another set exists in the US at the New York Public Library, catalogued as Frie

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