Mitz
The Marmoset of Bloomsbury
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An intimate portrait of the life and marriage of Leonard and Virginia Woolf - and their pet marmoset monkey called Mitz - from the National Book Award-winning author of THE FRIEND
'A perfect little gem of a book' NIGEL NICOLSON
'Nunez takes us beneath the surface to the essential mysteries of the human heart' WALL STREET JOURNAL
In 1934, a 'sickly pathetic marmoset' came into the care of Leonard Woolf. After he nursed her back to health, Mitz became a ubiquitous presence in Bloomsbury society. Moving with Leonard and Virginia Woolf between London and Sussex, she developed her own special relationship with each of them, as well as with their cocker spaniels - and with various members of the Woolfs' circle, among them T. S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West.
This tender and imaginative mock biography offers a striking look at the lives of writers and artists shadowed by war, death, and mental breakdown, and at the solace and amusement inspired by its tiny subject.
'A wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion - to writing, to other people, and between humans and their pets' NPR
'At its very best the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway' CHICAGO TRIBUNE
'In plumbing the mysterious affections between species, it comes to represent the solace and fragility of human relations more generally' PARIS REVIEW
Winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
'A perfect little gem of a book' NIGEL NICOLSON
'Nunez takes us beneath the surface to the essential mysteries of the human heart' WALL STREET JOURNAL
In 1934, a 'sickly pathetic marmoset' came into the care of Leonard Woolf. After he nursed her back to health, Mitz became a ubiquitous presence in Bloomsbury society. Moving with Leonard and Virginia Woolf between London and Sussex, she developed her own special relationship with each of them, as well as with their cocker spaniels - and with various members of the Woolfs' circle, among them T. S. Eliot and Vita Sackville-West.
This tender and imaginative mock biography offers a striking look at the lives of writers and artists shadowed by war, death, and mental breakdown, and at the solace and amusement inspired by its tiny subject.
'A wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion - to writing, to other people, and between humans and their pets' NPR
'At its very best the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway' CHICAGO TRIBUNE
'In plumbing the mysterious affections between species, it comes to represent the solace and fragility of human relations more generally' PARIS REVIEW
Winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
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- Published: Jul 14 2026
- Pages: 176
- 196 x 126mm
- ISBN: 9780349021461
Press Reviews
- Paris Review
A charming, airy, and disarmingly melancholy novel [that] makes of Bloomsbury a kind of snow globe-diminutive, self-contained, beautifully agitated-within which major and minor figures are given room to float past at their leisure
- NPR
A wry, supremely intelligent literary gem about devotion - to writing, to other people, and between humans and their pets. Like The Friend, Mitz captures the heartrending downside of love and connection - loss. But it also reminds us, beautifully, of the "great solace and distraction" of literature
- Wall Street Journal
In short, glistening sentences that refract the larger world, Ms. Nunez describes the appealingly eccentric, fiercely intelligent Woolfs during a darkening time
- Village Voice
Mitz shimmers with an emotional truth missing from the most rigorous Bloomsbury histories
- Chicago Tribune
At its very best the book takes on the edginess of Mrs. Dalloway
- Rosenthal Family Foundation Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters
A lesson to all of us who foolishly believed that Flush exhausted the unpromising genre of pet biography, Mitz takes Flush back to the muse, the marmoset that briefly belonged to Virginia and Leonard Woolf. In prose so lucid, so supple, so exquisitely entertaining we only slowly realize we are in the presence of art, Sigrid Nunez constructs a diagram of love and solicitude and abiding solitude: Mitz is tender, astute, wise, funny, and deeply, unsentimentally sad-for all its charm, a novel of masterly formal intelligence