Virginia Woolf stunned the literary world when she committed suicide nearly 60 years ago.

But Bet Inglis feels like she has known the famous writer intimately for the last 27 years.

She knows almost everything there is to know about Virginia Woolf, from the food she ate, to the people she spent time with, to the music she was listening to the day before she died.

In fact the 65-year-old Scotswoman knows a great deal about many of Sussex's literary legends, from the founding figures of the Bloomsbury Set to the celebrated poet Rudyard Kipling.

For nearly three decades, Bet has sifted through the minutiae of their everyday lives, the gossip, the domestic details and the literary breakthroughs, in her capacity as archivist at the University of Sussex.

The Bloomsbury collection at Sussex is among the best in the world, so Bet has been in a unique position to guide and advise the world's prominent academics.

She spent two years working with Hermione Lee, whose recent biography of Virginia Woolf is thought to be a definitive text.

Together, they went through every letter, every postcard, every diary entry and every photograph to build up a complete picture of the literary giant.

Now Lewes-based Bet is retiring from the hallowed halls of the manuscript archives but she says she will take every one of her memories of the Woolf papers with her.

She said: "It has been marvellously interesting working with these wonderful papers and I think my 27 years here have been one of the joys of my life. I have been extremely happy in my job and I have met hundreds of marvellously interesting people."

For Bet, the two most interesting people she has "met" in her job have been Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

In fact, she did meet Leonard several times in her local butcher's when she lived in Ringmer but Bet feels she has really grown to know him through his diaries.

Leonard's diaries detail all the food he shared with his novelist wife as well as mentioning the music they listened to.

He was still writing the diaries until four days before his death, his handwriting becoming more and more illegible.

Bet has made some discoveries of her own while she has been looking after the archives.

She says the best find was in the Kipling collection. "I think it was a letter from Kipling's one-time secretary being less than complimentary about him and his wife's relationship with the servants.

"We also unearthed two letters of the poet Ezra Pound which were startlingly interesting. In the best letter he was deploring the British monarchy and the British church in very colourful language. These letters were completely unrevealed until we showed them last year."

In the collection of more than 100 letters belonging to Virginia and Leonard Woolf there is correspondence from TS Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen and Vanessa Bell.

To Bet, each one is a literary treasure.