Mrs Dalloway, the seamstress Lugton, and all the animals of the world. The story of an untitled Virginia Woolf manuscript

A central figure in the English modernist movement, Virginia Woolf became famous as a children’s author after her death, upon the discovery and publication of ‘Nurse Lugton’s Curtain’ and ‘The Widow and the Parrot.’ The study is innovative and relevant in its exploration of the stories’ connections to Woolf’s personal and literary life. Focusing on the untitled pages found in the manuscript of Mrs Dalloway, M. Ivankiva sets out to establish the relation between the story’s holograph penned for Woolf’s niece and the novel’s poetics and problems and define the place of this manuscript in the writer’s legacy. The article details the history of the manuscript, from its drafting and editing by the author to its discovery and first posthumous publications to the first Russian edition in 2022. The scholar concludes that ‘Nurse Lugton’s Curtain’ marks a borderline case in Woolf’s oeuvre: small and big prose, between the realms of literature for grown-ups and children’s fiction, having a public and a private addressee. This liminal nature is reflected in the work’s central images of the town of Millamarchmontopolis and the animals who came to the lake to drink.