(MENAFN- The Conversation) 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 Friendships Gallery (the title of the first story). However, to see these drafts reworked by Seshagiri gives them fresh editorial impetus.

It had previously been presumed these stories were a lighthearted footnote to Woolf's canon in draft form, written as a joke for a friend rather than work to be taken seriously. But now they have been published, bound and critically contextualised for the first time as The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories.

In contextualising these stories, Seshagiri introduces us to a young Virginia Stephen's“first fully realised literary experiment”, written as she stood on the precipice of Bloomsbury Group-inflected fame.

Juvenilia – work produced when an artist is still young – often isn't taken seriously. Woolf was even quoted as saying:“I don't want immaturities, things torn out of time, preserved.”

But the typescripts stored at Longleat House suggest otherwise. Woolf had made amendments and opinions were sought from her sister Vanessa Bell, who thought the work was“very witty and brilliant”.

Seshagiri writes about the seemingly minor changes made by Woolf in detail, with“each clause balanced and weighted for impact”, as well as her overall compositional vision. And she explains how Woolf wove in Dickinson's own pencilled edits.

Despite such attention to detail, the stories are short – unlike Dickinson, who stood at six feet two inches. Woolf conceptualises her friend as a giant, both literally and figuratively.

Read more: How Virginia Woolf's work was shaped by music

Together, Friendships Gallery, The Magic Garden and A Story to Make You Sleep can be read as a manifesto on female friendship and the importance of intergenerational exchange (Woolf was 20 and Dickinson 37 at their first meeting).

These were not merely society ties – their friendship ran deep: Dickinson cared for Woolf during a mental health crisis in 1904 at her home in Welwyn in Hertfordshire. Dickinson is also credited with enabling Woolf's early literary ambitions as she took steps toward her inimitable style.

Violet Dickinson was a close friend and supporter of Virginia Woolf. New York Public Library

In Friendships Gallery, we meet Violet as a child and follow her to middle age, although Woolf's narrator refuses to fill in the blanks that“yawn like awful caverns”. Instead of facts, we find anecdotes woven into an elevated mediation on biography.

Woolf asks:“Where does care for others become care for oneself?” Individual care is extended collectively outwards, as Violet's bold laughter and antics slough off Victorian values. Through her friend's example, Woolf maps out a route towards independence for a new generation of women.

In The Magic Garden, Violet takes tea in an aristocratic home, fielding information on gardening and plumbing. Such information fuels her quest for autonomy, as she cries out with joy about the benefits of having“a cottage of one's own”. Such calls for creative independence preempt Woolf's later manifesto, A Room Of One's Own (1929).

While the first two stories are anchored in an insider's perspective of English class dynamics, skewering prevailing social norms, the last, A Story to Make You Sleep, takes inspiration from Dickinson's visit to Japan and the letters she wrote to Woolf.

Turning from mock biography to ancient myth, the story follows a giant princess who saves a village through laughter, before riding a sea monster into an unknown destiny. Unmoored from a context Woolf knew, the use of made-up words and faux Japanese customs stand out – a point Seshagiri reflects on with nuance in the Afterword.

These fantastical, farcical, anti-fairytales offer a glimpse into the early friendships that underpinned Woolf's world in the years after her parents passed away. They also hint at the playfulness to come in Flush: A Biography (1933) – a social commentary told from the perspective of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel. They equally foreshadow the tale of queer love and time travel in Orlando: A Biography (1928), based on Woolf's relationship with the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West.

Beyond Woolf's own canon of experimental biography, they also connect her to a tradition of surreal, feminist fabulists. In them, she finds odd kinship with the likes of Leonora Carrington and Angela Carter.

Read more: Virginia Woolf on the magic of going to the cinema

In bringing together these stories under the title The Life of Violet, the edition charts a literary turning point in the Woolf's life. The stories are filled with recurring subjects found in her writing: of women's history and education, of egalitarianism, of experimenting, and of blending biographical fact with fiction.

They remind us that Woolf had a playful, sardonic side and used comedy, as much as highbrow literary experiments, to push beyond the boundaries of tradition. Discoveries such as this also show that the steady image of literary figures (especially those with a booming industry behind them) is never fixed – but rather, reshaped through new readers and ongoing interpretation.

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