Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections<\/a> (MASC) just feels accessible and comfortable, and people like working here,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019ve worked in all kinds of places where you don\u2019t feel as welcome as people do here.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nWhile many illustrations were in MASC, Gillespie soon found herself leaving the country in search of more paintings and firsthand information about the sisters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She said she left for her first two-month trip to Sussex in 1978, where she met Woolf\u2019s niece and nephew. Gillespie later returned for a sabbatical in 1980. Throughout her time in England, she visited private collectors, the Woolfs\u2019 home Monk\u2019s House, the Bells\u2019 home, National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum and Library collections, and the Tate Gallery. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gillespie recalls having trouble entering the gallery because she neglected to make an appointment. However, she said her husband, who willingly followed her around with a camera and a tape recorder throughout her journey, convinced the museum to let her in. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c[He said], \u2018Dr. Gillespie has come 5,000 miles to see those paintings,\u2019\u201d she said with a laugh. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She was even able to visit Bell\u2019s daughter Angelica Garnett in England. Gillespie said she was sipping white wine with Garnett when a cat jumped in through an open window with a mouse in its mouth \u2013 one of many \u201cfun, trivial moments\u201d during an \u201cexciting and heady time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Throughout writing her first book, \u201cThe Sisters\u2019 Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell,\u201d Gillespie explored the collaborative and competitive relationship between the sisters. Although they experienced rocky periods, like a falling out over Clive Bell, she said Woolf dedicated her second novel to her sister, and Bell illustrated the dust jackets for each of Woolf\u2019s books, even posthumously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201c[It was] the two of them against the family and against notions of what women should do with their lives,\u201d Gillespie said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like Woolf, Gillespie dedicated that first book to her own sister. She said she found their relationship reflected in that of the Stephen sisters. Woolf envied her sister for her painting ability and Bell envied her sister for her literary talent, so Gillespie and her sister found themselves charting their own paths, with one venturing into writing and the other into the visual arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The scholarly writing process was never easy, especially having to get and often pay for permissions to use paintings in her books and articles, but Gillespie said she enjoyed tracking down information about Woolf and likens it to detective work. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
She enjoyed following up on tiny pieces of information, reading them closely, and pulling them together, she said. When she read Woolf\u2019s \u201cOrlando: A Biography,\u201d which mentions martyrs, she traced the reference back to \u201cJohn Foxe\u2019s Book of Martyrs\u201d inscribed to Woolf by her brother, corroborating that Woolf\u2019s reading was often reflected in her writing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEvery word, every punctuation mark was important to her. Initially setting type with Leonard Woolf for the Hogarth Press made her very sensitive to words and what they could do,\u201d Gillespie said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gillespie\u2019s connection to the Woolf library has not faded over time. She created the Diane Gillespie Fund for WSU Archives and Special Collections, allowing MASC to purchase more books for the collection and improve its accessibility by digitizing them, said Trevor Bond, associate dean for digital initiatives and special collections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEspecially this year it\u2019s been a real godsend because we overspent our state-allocated money, and so I was able to draw on Diane\u2019s gifts to purchase a whole range of new items, including Sir Lesley Stephen\u2019s letters,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Bond first met Gillespie when he audited the course she taught on 20th-century British modernisms. He said her articles and books using the Woolf library materials have given him a better sense of the collection\u2019s depth and variety. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the library, one of the things that we do is we sometimes act as matchmakers \u2026 matching scholars with collections,\u201d he said. \u201cI just remember a lot of times bumping into Diane out on the mall or in Avery Hall and saying, \u2018Oh, we just got this in, do you want to see it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gillespie does not think the \u201cVirginia Woolf craze\u201d is going to end any time soon and said she does not regret long hours of researching, writing, editing, and contributing to others\u2019 work \u2013 all ways of getting a glimpse into the Woolfs\u2019 lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWhen we go to all technological alternatives, I think that some of the magic is lost that comes from holding a book someone else has held or that\u2019s gone through the hands of all these well-known people,\u201d she said. \u201cYou get a sense of what their lives were like.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whether she is nestled in WSU Libraries\u2019 archives or traveling to England in search of paintings, English professor emerita Diane Gillespie brings the university\u2019s collection of Virginia Woolf\u2019s books to life. For more than 40 years, Gillespie has studied the Leonard and Virginia Woolf Library, a collection of Woolf\u2019s personal books and those of her […]","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[44,43,45,42,40],"class_list":["post-385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-browse","tag-author","tag-diane-gillespie","tag-diane-gillespie-fund-for-wsu-archives-and-special-collections","tag-manuscripts-archives-and-special-collections","tag-virginia-woolf-library"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":409,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385\/revisions\/409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libraries.wsu.edu\/friends\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}