BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 1 JUNE 1941
BRACERS 19811. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

Little Datchet Farm,
R. D. 1, Malvern, Pa., U.S.A.1
1 June 1941

Dearest Colette

I have today sent you a letter by air mail,2 and am sending this by ordinary mail, to find out which is best. But this will be only a short letter as I said most things in the other. I do hope your health is all right — the lump you wrote about3 alarmed me. All goes as well with us as is possible in these days. I see no prospect of an end to the war, and it seems bound to spread over the whole world. I fear that before long it will be impossible to write to Finland. People in this part of America are almost all passionately pro-English, but one feels the exile very painful all the same. — We see a good deal of Judith Stephen, Karin’s daughter, Virginia Woolf’s niece,4 whom I used to teach logic to. She is very clever and very good; she has been at Bryn Mawr with a scholarship, but is now going back to England. I didn’t know Virginia well, and didn’t care much for her books, so her death5 was not a personal grief to me.

Write again as soon as you can; I like all the details in your letters, and hearing from you is a little island of comparative happiness; though privately all goes well with us all. Much love.

Your devoted
B.
Bertrand Russell.

• 1

  [document] Document 200817.

• 2

  today sent you a letter by air mail See BRACERS 19810.

• 3

  the lump you wrote about This news was contained in Colette’s letter of 1 January (BRACERS 98430). She had noticed the lump before Christmas; by the time she wrote BR it had shrunk in size. By her letter of 18 February, she had visited a doctor, who had said there was no danger of cancer.

• 4

  Judith Stephen, Karin’s daughter, Virginia Woolf’s niece Karin Costelloe (1889–1953), the daughter of Mary Pearsall Smith and Frank Costelloe, married Adrian Stephen (1883–1948), a psychoanalyst and a brother of the novelist Virginia Woolf in 1914. Karin’s daughter, Judith, was born in 1918. She became an anthropologist and married the artist Nigel Henderson in 1943. She died in 1972. It is unclear whether BR means he taught logic to Karin or Judith. He had coached Karin for her very successful moral sciences tripos in 1922. In 1935 he instructed Judith’s sister in mathematical logic.

• 5

  her death Virginia Woolf had committed suicide on 28 March 1941. Oddly enough BR did not comment on the news of another death contained in Colette’s letter of 18 February 1941 — that of BR’s former sister-in-law Elizabeth in the United States. Colette and Elizabeth were friends. Colette’s mother, Priscilla, had cabled her the news and Colette had wondered if BR had gone to the funeral (Colette’s letter of 18 Feb., BRACERS 98431). Elizabeth had had a troubled marriage with BR’s brother, Frank, which ended in separation.