In 1908, Virginia Woolf promised England a revolution. Only today do we understand what she meant.

Perhaps the twenty-year-old Virginia Woolf had never encountered such a tall woman until that day. In 1902, Violet Dickinson, widely known in aristocratic London, half-infamous, half-disreputable, but in any case unmissable in every respect, entered the future author's parents' house. This sent shockwaves all the way into her diary: Mary Violet Dickinson was 37 years old, it says, "1.88 meters tall and of an appearance that contradicts everything a Mary should be—so where does the name come from?"

Virginia Woolf gives herself the answer – and it is telling: That, as popular writers always write, is “another story, which we may perhaps tell in due course.”

She could hardly have guessed that Virginia Woolf would actually record this story. Nor could she have guessed what her encounter with Violet Dickinson would trigger. It was nothing less than the birth of the writer Virginia Woolf. She had already written as a teenager, but it was childish compared to what followed.

Not immediately, however. In 1904, after the death of her father, Virginia Woolf experienced a mental breakdown similar to the one she had experienced nine years earlier when her mother died. She then sought refuge with her new friend Violet Dickinson, almost twice her age. At Dickinson's country house north of London, she attempted suicide but survived and recovered.

It would be another three years before Virginia Woolf would write down the story behind Mary, Violet Dickinson's first baptismal name. In 1907, she completed a draft of three short, connected stories, each of which revolved in very different ways around episodes from Violet's life. The following year, she revised this first draft into a finished manuscript.

Neither the draft nor the edited version were published, but they were placed in Violet Dickinson's archive and disappeared for decades. It wasn't until the 1950s, long after Dickinson's death in 1948, which Virginia Woolf survived by seven years, that the draft resurfaced. Leonard Woolf, who was offered the manuscript, declined to publish it. His late wife had expressly requested that nothing unfinished be published.

Another seventy years passed before the completed manuscript from 1908 was discovered by chance from Dickinson's estate. The American English scholar Urmila Seshagiri came across it while researching Violet Dickinson and has now published the three lost stories, previously unknown in this form, under the title "The Life of Violet," with a knowledgeable afterword.

After Virginia Woolf's breakdown in 1904, Violet Dickinson focused her care not only on her friend's emotional well-being. She was convinced of Virginia Woolf's literary talent and introduced her to the editor of the women's supplement of "The Guardian," a church magazine that bears no relation to the current newspaper of the same name.

By 1907, Virginia Woolf had published around sixty works in this and other publications: essays, literary criticism, and travelogues from Spain and England. It wasn't until 1915 that she made her debut as a writer with the novel "The Voyage Out." But this was the beginning of what would one day become a work of world literary stature.

The two dissimilar women became intimate friends and occasional traveling companions. Until Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912, they exchanged hundreds of letters. In the self-confident Violet Dickinson, who defied all the conventions of her class and refused to tie her destiny to a bourgeois marriage, Virginia Woolf found a role model for her thirst for freedom and her emancipatory ideas.

In these three stories, Woolf pretends to depict scenes from Violet's life, but she mostly invents them, and they are always reminiscences distorted into the grotesque and comic. Above all, however, these literary exercises are sketches of what Virginia Woolf imagines as biographical scenarios for herself.

The three plays, each linked to a different phase of Violet's life, tell of escapes from bourgeois existence. It begins with the anecdote about Violet Dickinson's naming, promised in Virginia Woolf's early diary entry: After the godparents somewhat grumblingly mention the name Mary, when the priest asks if that's all there is to it, they cheekily add "Violet." Thus, the child, who will later be given the nickname, is implanted with the seeds of rebellion.

How autobiographical, how almost prophetic, these texts are to be interpreted, perhaps even Virginia Woolf wasn't fully aware of. In any case, in the middle section, which simultaneously draws a wickedly witty caricature of the British aristocracy, she puts a line into Violet's mouth that, slightly altered, would one day become famous: "'To have a cottage of one's own? Yes, my good woman,' cried Violet."

Two decades later, Virginia Woolf would outline in her famous speech "A Room of One's Own" which shackles would need to be broken so that women could be recognized as equal writers. This is where the later idea matures. Moreover, Violet's cry for liberation is followed by a promise: "Thus began the great revolution that is making England a very different country from what it was before."

What this revolution in literature is all about is hinted at in a marginal note that initially seems odd. The male narrator of "The Life of Violet" confesses that he writes in a language other than his native language and therefore doesn't have as much control over it as he would like. What Virginia Woolf is suggesting here is that the language of a new literature is only just being invented. We will read it in the books of Virginia Woolf or in the works of James Joyce.

In these three stories, however, we already see what many later came to fear: Virginia Woolf's sharp mind and her even sharper wit.

Virginia Woolf: The Life of Violet. Three Early Stories. Edited by Urmila Seshagiri. Princeton University Press, Princeton 2025. 144 pp., USD 19.95.