Virginia Woolf was the most distinguished of the four Englishwomen who welcomed the poet. Her chief impetus to meet Eliot, backed by her husband, Leonard Woolf, was a result of the Egoist edition of his first volume of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations. Mary’s lover Clive Bell took a dozen copies to Garsington, and there Katherine Mansfield read ‘Prufrock’ aloud to enthusiastic applause. Mansfield, an expatriate herself, understood better than most how insecure Eliot felt, with his side glances and painfully slow speech.
When ‘Prufrock’ came Leonard Woolf’s way, the poem struck him as saying something no one had said before, and as a rarity in that not one line fell below ‘the heights’.
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