A black and white photo shows a woman with her hair up and a man standing on the beach in front of the ocean, both wearing knee-length bathing costumes.

Virginia Stephen and Clive Bell

A sepia portrait of a teenage girl with bangs and hair pulled back, wearing a high-collared top and posing in front of a curtain.

A handwritten page with the heading, "A Watchman" with a block of translated text written in English.

Agamemnon, English translation and marginal notes in the hand of Virginia Woolf

Aeschylus

Agamemnon

English translation and marginal notes in the hand of Virginia Woolf

ca. December 1922

Woolf developed an early and lasting interest in the classics, and in 1897 began taking classes in Greek and Latin. Twenty-five years later, she embarked on a “complete edition” of the Greek tragedy Agamemnon, including text, translation, and notes. In this hand-bound volume, Woolf pasted lightly corrected sections of the text on the rectos (or right-hand side of the openings) and penned her translation—taken largely from the classics scholar A.W. Verrall’s—on the facing pages. In her essay “On Not Knowing Greek,” Woolf noted of Agamemnon, “The meaning is just on the far side of language.”

Holding Division: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature

Catalog Record: Virginia Woolf collection of papers

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