Item 33: Mr. Beerbohm Reading Mrs. Woolf (1928)

Julie Carlsen: So in this part of the exhibition, we take a closer look at the relationship between two contemporary celebrities, Max Beerbohm and the modernist writer Virginia Woolf, who is perhaps best known as the author of To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, and Orlando.

We can see here how Beerbohm, who famously declined to caricature living women, praised Virginia Woolf’s "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" in his letter to her of December 30, 1927, but then days later, he drew this parody of himself falling asleep while reading her book in a private letter.

And this makes me think a lot about the relationship between the private and public lives with celebrities both today and in Max’s time. I think today with social media, we’re really used to seeing these sort of snippets of celebrities’ private lives. And I think we’ve all sort of learned that social media is not real, and while we might know what someone’s kitchen looks like, we don’t really know what their life is like.

I wanted to draw attention to how different this was in Max Beerbohm’s time. We see now Virginia Woolf’s diary; we see Max’s diary. We know what she said privately about him and what he said privately about her. But at the time, these were really private. As far as anyone else knew, Beerbohm loved Virginia Woolf’s book because that’s what he said to her. It’s only from the vantage point of today, now that we have access to these incredibly private items, that we’re able to see this clearer picture.