VIA W.W. NORTON & COMPANY How Virginia Woolf Shunned—and Then Embraced—T.S. Eliot Lyndall Gordon on the Rocky Beginnings of a Literary Friendship By Lyndall Gordon November 23, 2022 Virginia Woolf was the most distinguished of the four Englishwomen who welcomed Thomas Stearns Eliot. Her chief impetus to meet Eliot, backed by her husband, Leonard Woolf, was a result of the Egoist edition of his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations . Mary’s lover Clive Bell took a dozen copies to Garsington, and there Katherine Mansfield read “Prufrock” aloud to enthusiastic applause. Mansfield, an expatriate herself, understood better than most how insecure Eliot felt, with his side glances and painfully slow speech. When “Prufrock” came Leonard Woolf’s way, the poem struck him as saying something no one had said before, and as a rarity in that not one line fell below “the heights.” Leonard and Virginia Woolf had just then bought a small hand press, planning ...