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First edition, first impression, the copy of the Bloomsburyite Barbara Hiles Bagenal, given to her in the year of publication by her love interest Saxon Sidney-Turner, and accompanied by a 1963 postcard from Duncan Grant to Bagenal and her companion Clive Bell. Bagenal was the second apprentice to work at the Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf found her romantic life "a source of endless fascination" (Quentin Bell, p. 50). Bagenal (1891-1984) has inscribed the first blank in blue ink, "Barbara Bagenal 1925 from S.S.T.". In pencil, she has signed the front free endpaper and added Saxon Sidney-Turner's telephone number on the front pastedown. Duncan Grant's postcard to Bagenal and Clive Bell is dated 23 December 1963 and wishes a "happy you know what to both. How are you? I am deep in snow. See you in Menton in a month. Take care of yourselves mutually. Love DG". It was Clive Bell's last Christmas, as he died the next September. Menton, France, was a frequent retreat for Bloomsbury figures and its landscape inspired artists such as Bagenal, Grant, and their host Simon Bussy, who lived nearby alongside Dorothy Strachey. Bagenal was the centre of a love triangle involving Sidney-Turner and Nick Bagenal, whom she married in 1918. Virginia Woolf gossiped about the trio to Vanessa Bell, "think of the three of them discussing the question over the stove in her studio and Nick saying 'No, Saxon: you must marry her;' and Saxon refusing to be happy save in their happiness, and First edition, first impression, the copy of the Bloomsburyite Barbara Hiles Bagenal, given to her in the year of publication by her love interest Saxon Sidney-Turner, and accompanied by a 1963 postcard from Duncan Grant to Bagenal and her companion Clive Bell. Bagenal was the second apprentice to work at the Hogarth Press. Virginia Woolf found her romantic life "a source of endless fascination" (Quentin Bell, p. 50). Bagenal (1891-1984) has inscribed the first blank in blue ink, "Barbara Bagenal 1925 from S.S.T.". In pencil, she has signed the front free endpaper and added Saxon Sidney-Turner's telephone number on the front pastedown. Duncan Grant's postcard to Bagenal and Clive Bell is dated 23 December 1963 and wishes a "happy you know what to both. How are you? I am deep in snow. See you in Menton in a month. Take care of yourselves mutually. Love DG". It was Clive Bell's last Christmas, as he died the next September. Menton, France, was a frequent retreat for Bloomsbury figures and its landscape inspired artists such as Bagenal, Grant, and their host Simon Bussy, who lived nearby alongside Dorothy Strachey. Bagenal was the centre of a love triangle involving Sidney-Turner and Nick Bagenal, whom she married in 1918. Virginia Woolf gossiped about the trio to Vanessa Bell, "think of the three of them discussing the question over the stove in her studio and Nick saying 'No, Saxon: you must marry her;' and Saxon refusing to be happy save in their happiness, and Barbara suggesting copulation with each on alternate nights" (II, p. 214). When a lovesick Sidney-Turner wrote to Vanessa Bell for advice on the matter, she replied that "there's something even more wonderful in just caring without getting the exact return" (p. 203). Decades later, Bell wrote of "Clive's little Barbara" (p. 511) after her husband had taken Bagenal as his constant companion from the 1940s until his death in 1964. READ MORE Octavo. Original dark red cloth, spine lettered in gilt. Spine faded and expertly repaired, gilt unaffected, rubbing to cloth, small corner wear, free endpapers browned, foxing to edges and outer leaves. A very good copy. Kirkpatrick A9a; Woolmer 82. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 1972; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 1975; Marlowe A. Miller, Masterpieces of British Modernism, 2006; The Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, 1993.

Mrs Dalloway is a novel by Virginia Woolf published on 14 May 1925. It details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictional high-society woman in post–First World War England. It is one of Woolf's best-known novels.