juliafalcao / your-loving-virginia

A corpus of Virginia Woolf's letters

Virginia Woolf's correspondence 💌

A corpus of 3756 letters written by Virginia Woolf between the years of 1896 and 1941. The text, dates, places and recipients were scraped from the ePUB version of Woolf, Virginia: Complete Works (source), which collects material from volumes 1-6 of The Letters of Virginia Woolf (1975-1980), and Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey Letters (1956).

date	recipient	place	text
[mid-August 1926]	Edward Sackville West	[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]	Dear Eddy,\nI have several times taken up the ...
[27 November 1929]	Daphne Sanger	52 Tavistock Sqre, W.C.1	My dear Daphne,\nI am so distressed to hear of...
16th April 1923	Roger Fry	Murcia, [Spain]	My dear Roger,\nThis is an invitation from Bre...
[10? August 1922]	Lady Ottoline Morrell	[Monk’s House] Rodmell [Sussex]	My dear Ottoline,\nI have sent the form to Llo...
27th Nov. 37	Denys Kilham Roberts	52 Tavistock Square, W.C.1.	Dear Mr Kilham Roberts,\nThank you very much f...
Friday [24 September 1937]	Vanessa Bell	[Monk’s House, Rodmell, Sussex]	I didn’t come to tea today,—not that you proba...
[23? January 1923]	Violet Dickinson	Hogarth House, Paradise Road, Richmond, Surrey	My Violet,\nYou are the most faithful of subsc...

The entire set is in vw.csv (normal comma-separated, strings escaped by " when necessary.)

Pre-processing

The only pre-processing I did on the raw text was to adjust whitespace and line breaks; the letters resulting from scraping the book had extra misplaced line breaks so I cleaned them and left only those in between paragraphs. If you don't need these either, just remove all \n.

I also edited the recipients because they were all written as "To Vanessa Bell", for example, so I removed "To " and left only the person's names. Mind you that Virginia wrote them as she wanted so there might be variation in how she referred to the same person in a few cases.

Dates

The dates in which the letters were written/sent are also recorded in various formats. Since I wanted to standardize at least the years for my work, I wrote a function to extract them as best as I could, using dateparser and regular expressions. This code can be found in the notebook extract_years.ipynb and the final version with the "year" column is in vw_with_years.csv. I uploaded it as a separate file because I haven't manually validated all of the rows so I can't guarantee 100% accuracy.