How to… think about Virginia Woolf

Alexandra Harris, School of English

I. Thinking biographically

‘For if there are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not – Heaven help us – all having lodgement at one time or another in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two. …These selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere … so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains … and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all.’ (Orlando)

Woolf in Vogue, 1924

Finding room, among all the big stories, to pay attention to Woolf’s routines, to her daily working life, and to her joy in ordinary things…

‘I have taken my fence’ (VW on finishing The Waves)

‘I am the happiest woman in SW1 simply because we had hot rolls for breakfast…’ (VW in 1931)

‘I like driving off to Rodmell on a hot Friday afternoon and having cold ham, and sitting on my terrace and smoking a cigar with an owl or two’.

(letter to Hugh Walpole, 16 July 1930)

‘Seen: Janie, Walther; Joan Easedale; Nessa. Clive. Helen. Duncan. Been to Richmond Park (saw snake by the Serpentine) Concert. Saw Morgan & Bob & Eth Williamson. Asked to speak at some lunch. Read all early R. letters. noted them. Also library books: also Keats: also MSS.’‘calm full complete bliss’

(Diary, 15 October 1935)

‘ We do not, alas, live our lives in themes, but day by day’.

(Roy Foster in his biography of W.B. Yeats.)

Should we read chronologically through a life?

And write chronologically?

Salutary effects of chronological reading, cont.

When you’re immersed in the moment, nothing feels inevitable.

Woolf did not know what would happen next, and it’s helpful to simulate that sense of life unfolding day by day.

HL on the opening of The Hours.

V in 1935 did not know that The Years would become a nightmare. ‘The main feeling about this book is vitality, fruitfulness, energy’. (Diary 29 December 1935)

V and Leonard in 1938, making plans for the next ten years.

Troubles with chronology:

Life and art do not always work synchronise.

During WW1 she’s writing Night and Day. Her war elegies come afterwards, and last the rest of her life.

While she’s having the affair with Vita Sackville-West, she’s writing To the Lighthouse, about her parents. She’s not writing about the afffair (though it’s there below the surface). So in my book a chapter on TTL comes between Vita appearing and the chapter on Orlando.

II. Thinking Contextually

Part of a cultural panorama

Her writing compared withwork in other art forms Shifting sensibilities in a particular historical moment

‘orts scraps and fragments’

‘orts, scraps, and fragments’

‘all life, all art, all waifs and strays – a rambling, capricious, and somehow unified whole’

Some problems with a big cultural span:

How to compare unlike - or unequal – things?

Can we write about expressions of taste as a form of art?

III. Thinking atmospherically

‘The way to do it is to set people talking in a room with their backs to the window, and then, as they talk about something else, let someone half turn her head and say ‘A fine evening’, when (if they have been talking about the right things) the summer evening is visible to anyone who reads the page, and is forever remembered as of quite exceptional beauty’. (VW, ‘Mr Kipling’s Notebooks’)

‘The generous reader, reading luxuriously in some sheltered garden where the view between hedges is of a vast plain sunk beneath an ocean of air, will find that a page of De Quincey is no mere sheet of bald signs, but part of the pageant itself. It will carry on the air and the sky, and, as words do, invest them with finer meaning.’

(VW, ‘The English Mail Coach’)

‘Panic seized her. Blood seemed to pour from her shoes. This is death, death, death, she noted in the margin of her mind; when illusion fails. Unable to lift her hand, she stood facing the audience.

And then the shower fell, sudden, profuse.

No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black, swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears, Tears. Tears.

‘O that our human pain could here have ending!’ Isa murmured. Looking up she received two great blots of rain full in her face. They trickled down her cheeks as if they were her own tears. But they were all people’s tears, weeping for all people. Hands were raised. Here and there a parasol opened. The rain was sudden and universal. Then it stopped. From the grass rose a fresh earthy smell.’ (Between the Acts)