Trained to silence
John Mepham, 20 November 1980
Having read some of Henry Brewster’s letters to Ethel Smyth, Virginia Woolf wrote to Ethel that she found them ‘very witty, easy, well written, full of sparks and faces and shrewdness’, though she admitted that she got ‘a little tired of the lunches and dinners and Pasolinis and Contessa this and that’. Most important, however, the letters lacked intimacy. ‘I want more – now what is it? – just saying things as they come into one’s head. I cant catch him off his guard. But thats, it may be, because he writes so well.’
