Item 34: Virginia Woolf, Diary entry for December 18, 1928

On a visit to London from Italy, Beerbohm met Virginia Woolf at a dinner that Ethel Sands, the queer painter and society figure, hosted. Woolf reported afterwards in her diary that the conversation with Beerbohm had been an “interesting, flattering, charming kind of talk.” At the time, he was even more of a celebrity than she was, and she recorded his response to her calling him “immortal[:]" “In a small way, he said; but with complacency.” Years later, when Woolf’s diary was published posthumously, Beerbohm told his friend S.N. Behrman, the playwright and New Yorker magazine columnist, how much he disliked reading it. “Her perpetual concern with herself was distasteful to him,” Behrman recalled.