Disclaimer: This post is an extended piece of prose that discusses a range of topics and attempts to cover the writing life of an artist. It was not possible to count in and cover everything, although it goes through the life, fiction, essays, polemics, diaries, and gives a wide range of historical context throughout.
VIRGINIA WOOLF is one of recent history’s greatest writers. A figure that would have multitudes of stingingly critical things to say about our current age; the LGBTQ+ fight, crises and crisis, the struggle for freedom, to name a few.
The here and now will prove relevant in many areas, to go in tandem with Virginia’s life and work. This is a celebration and deserving tribute to one of modern literature’s most rare heroes. On the publication of this writeup, Virginia will have turned 142 years young, and - while it is rightly said that it is disrespectful to ask the age of our elders - we must assess how they created their masterworks.
Early Life
VIRGINIA WOOLF was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.1 Her father was Leslie Stephen, and her mother Julia Jackson. Both were widows when they met in 1878. They already had four children by this time. A fifth followed in 1879 with Vanessa, then a sixth in 1880 with Thoby. Virginia followed him. Then finally Adrian came in 1883. Coincidentally, both her parents had strong familial ties with literature; her father Leslie was the son of Sir James Stephen, a renowned historian, and brother of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a respected lawyer and law writer. Leslie’s first wife happened to be the daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, author of Vanity Fair, his second had been a respected associate of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Leslie himself is best remembered as the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a catalogue of now up to 65,000 men and women who have shaped the British past. He was also an alpinist, journalist, biographer, and historian of ideas; his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) still holds great merit. All this considered, it was no surprise that Virginia’s father had a library, and equally unsurprising, Virginia had a free run of it that she did not waste, providing a better alternative to the public school life and university education she was denied. Her brothers were sent to Clifton and Westminster.
Unfortunately, tragedy struck her pretty early, as in 1895, her mother Julia passed away, and in that year, she had her first breakdown. It is a testament to Virginia’s early blooming signs as an artist, and strength of character that she had to relearn to read, and did so adamantly. Her father Leslie once remarked: “Gracious, child, how you gobble”.2 It was with this initial liberal mindset and good nature that she was allowed to choose her reading freely. Having said all this, her relationship with her father was rather trying, and did not help to palliate her anxiety. He became more deaf and melancholy with age, had an emotional side, and this would undoubtedly not have been helped by multiple bereavements. Leslie eventually fell ill in 1902 and died in 1904. Virginia suffered another breakdown.
From the tragic passings of her parents Virginia underwent dark times. However, on her recovery, and a new century having dawned, she had a breakthrough. Within the ancient language of Greek, this became a language in which she would gain a great understanding. She moved, with her brothers and sister, to a house in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. It was here, and at several other nearby addresses, that what eventually became known as the “Bloomsbury Group” was formed. Virginia and her circle in Bloomsbury benefited from the changing times of the 1840s, when the social mix of the area began to change, with professional people replacing the gentry. It is perhaps no surprise that highbrow novelist Henry James described it in 1904 as an “antiquated, ex-fashionable region”. However, Virginia, her sister Vanessa, and her brothers Thoby and Adrian found the area refreshing, and a pleasant change from their conservative roots in Kensington.
Virginia had for a long time considered herself a writer. Thus, it was in 1905 that she began to write for publication in the Times Literary Supplement. In her circle were many individuals, some who became more famous than others, though whose names alone could pique anyone’s interest; John Maynard Keynes, Edward Morgan Forster, Roger Fry; also Clive Bell, who married her sister Vanessa, Vita Sackville-West, Lytton Strachey (who once proposed marriage to her), and Leonard Woolf. Despite further bouts of ill health in these years, she travelled a good amount and had a stimulating social life in London. She did adult-education teaching, worked for female suffrage, and shared the fanaticism of her friend Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910.
In 1912, after another bout of nervous illness, she married fellow Bloomsbury Group member Leonard Woolf. She was now thirty, and had not yet published a book, though her first project of longform fiction was in preparation. Sadly, she was often ill with depression and anorexia, and in 1913 attempted to take her own life. Although after a period where her madness bordered on the severe and violent, her health seemed to settle down. In 1917 a printing press was installed at Hogarth House in Richmond, where she and Leonard were living. The Hogarth Press was inaugurated in part as a therapeutic outlet for Virginia, and with this, it provided a great surge in her creativity, that for the most part from here on, rarely waned.
The Fiction
Virginia’s career as a writer of fiction covers the years 1912-41, stifled considerably at multiple points due to familial and friendship losses that led to bouts of depression and mental breakdowns, but of her creative industry in the field itself, there are few that get close to the distinction and extraordinariness of her work. She would go on to publish nine novels, as well as a generous amount of short stories, illustrating a powerful output and passion that would metamorphosise through the years, eventually becoming an essential contributor to the rapidly evolving artistic movement of “modernism”3. Firmly set though she was since the early 1900s as a distinguished member of London’s exclusive cohort of academics, artists, and writers, many of them would closely influence her intellectual and political ideas. It is uncoincidental, if one delves deep enough into the bed of pages she produced, that scholars, writers, and readers alike have come more and more to value the uniqueness of her work, so that she holds a freedom separate from any constricting or pincered context that might limit her creative talent.
Her debut novel, The Voyage Out4, is a unique reading experience on its own, and allows for an intriguing passage into Virginia’s early creative endeavours. It illustrates her beliefs, experiences, and concerns at the time, formed against the backdrop of Edwardian England and a chaotic European landscape that had descended into violent war in 1914. It is at once an elusive character study depicting conflicts of morals and social class, and also an investigation into the self, and self-discovery. Her protagonist, Rachel Vinrace, absorbs and assesses the people around her, moderating a quiet inner sense of loneliness. Before the rising action that takes place on the boat in the story, it is worth paying respect to fragments of the opening passage of the book, which mainly concerns Rachel’s aunt and uncle, Mr and Mrs Ambrose: “As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is best not to walk down them arm-in-arm… some enchantment had put both man and woman beyond the reach of malice and unpopularity. In his case one might guess from the moving lips that it was thought; and in hers from the eyes fixed stonily straight in front of her on a level above the eyes of most it was sorrow.”5 A beautiful and sentimental passage on its own, Virginia manages to rival the sadness in the book with a reasonable swathe of humour. The story is set upon a British ship called the Euphrosyne - named in accordance with the Greek goddess of good cheer, joy, and mirth (a tongue-in-cheek nod to the party on the boat), and likely a quiet reference to Virginia’s knowledge of Greek mythology, and the language itself, which she had been learning in private lessons with Janet Case since 1902 - where a fascinating, and rather funnily annoying group of interconnected characters proceed to argue and chat away to each other during the voyage from London to South America. Woolf reveals many of the characters’ beliefs and convictions, which bare all the curious experiences and moot flaws of a hypocritical society at large.
A snippet of Woolf’s ear for dialogue and ability to balance conversation is arguably best displayed in various fragmentary exchanges. A great example comes in Chapter VII, when the group eventually dock by the Amazon coast, saunter up a hilly trail, and have somewhat settled in the Ambrose’s villa, though the classicist William Pepper is not convinced and resorts to book into a hotel: “ ‘I’ve identified the big block to the left,’ he observed, and pointed with his fork at a square formed by several rows of lights.”6 Later the next day at lunch he’s playing with his food rather disconsolately, still in a miserable mood; “lifting fragments of salad on the point of his fork, with the gesture of a man pronging seaweed, detecting gravel, suspecting germs… ‘If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible!’ he snapped / ‘If you die of dullness, neither will I,’ Helen echoed in her heart.”7 More exchanges in this vein take place as certain characters do not exactly meet eye to eye on this social voyage. It is worth noting Woolf’s third-person omniscient narration of events surrounding these exchanges, for they are full of deeper philosophical musings regarding the characters’ psyches, and in regards that one between Mr Pepper and Mrs Ambrose, it is both wise and tragic. Rather sneakily, Virginia introduces the character of Clarissa Dalloway early on in the book, only appearing for a limited portion, though who provides a great deal of joviality and spirit to proceedings.
One of the most emotionally enduring passages comes in when the character of Terrence Hewet (an aspiring writer and the main male interest of the work) is caught in conversation with Hirst, one of the “academic” minds on the voyage, when they are lodged in a hotel in South America. Essentially, Virginia depicts a conversation between two male minds that seem to be lost in the very early hours of the day (1am), chewing the cud over what life holds for the pair of them. It is beautifully described, the dialogue seamless and shiny:
‘Are we all alone in our circle?’ asked Hewet.
‘Quite alone,’ said Hirst. ‘You try to get out, but you can’t. You only make a mess of things by trying.’
‘I’m not a hen in a circle,’ said Hewet. ‘I’m a dove on a tree-top…’
‘I respect you, Hirst,’ he remarked.
‘I envy you - some things,’ said Hirst. ‘One: your capacity for not thinking; two: people like you better than they like me. Women like you, I suppose.’
‘I wonder whether that isn’t really what matters most?’ said Hewet. Lying now flat on the bed he waved his hand in vague circles above him.
‘Of course it is,’ said Hirst. ‘But that’s not the difficulty. The difficulty is, isn’t it, to find an appropriate object?’
‘There are no female hens in your circle?’ asked Hewet.
‘Not the ghost of one,’ said Hirst.8
Poignantly sharp and striking, this segment can be construed as the moment whereby Virginia describes her love for Leonard Woolf in real life, in the name of Hewet. Though, it still leaves a lot hanging regarding where love comes from, and, moreover, how many interactions an individual will have over the course of a lifetime attributing to the concept of love and where we find it.
It is in the person of an aforementioned character within The Voyage Out, with wit and maturity, that would go on to become the focus of one of Virginia’s most distinct works in her oeuvre. She had ventured more prominently into the experimental and internalised field of modernism, that she began working with more in the late 1910s, and eventually into the 1920s and beyond. This work eventually became Mrs Dalloway9, published in 1925. It is a short and sharp narrative set over the course of one day, where point of view and voice flip and warp in erratic yet poetic fashion from page to page. In the story, Clarissa Dalloway goes about her business in London, tyring to gather all the necessary things she needs and prepare herself for a party she is to host in the evening, whilst sporadically meeting familiar acquaintances and friends that cause her to muse on past events and memories. It is told in significantly lurid yet fleeting detail, as Woolf alters the narrator from third-person to Clarissa’s alert and vivid first-person vantage. This would prove to become one of the primary demonstrations of internal monologue in fiction, or in other words, “stream-of-consciousness”10, an effective literary device that was becoming prevalent in other works of fiction at the time. The novel opens with one of the most societally brilliant lines in literary history: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”.11 As Alex Luppens-Dale puts it in an eloquent review assessing the opening line:
“Why start with the flowers? Flowers are naturally feminized. They are also frivolous and something not everyone can afford… The first sentence of the novel sends her on her way so that she can begin observing the world around her. That first sentence tells us right off the bat that nothing in this story is going to be handed to us.”12
By any stretch, Mrs Dalloway, while certainly baring claims to being Woolf’s greatest fictional achievement, it more than anything contributed to an artistic culture that was beginning to write in à la mode styles. The decade or so following her first novel, Woolf went on to write two more, being the once again Edwardian Night and Day13, and the more experimental Jacob’s Room14. These works were the culmination of an extensive period broadening and honing her literary style, which was beginning to utilise to greater effect the more common techniques to be found in the modernist artistic movement. Indeed, it was T.S. Eliot who said of Jacob’s Room: ‘that in that book she had freed herself from any compromise between the traditional novel and her original gift’.15 It could be surmised that this was being displayed and put to use in Woolf’s deliberate forays into the shorter form of fiction. Veritably, one will find some of her most individualistic and striking works in her short stories, not least in the likes of The Mark on the Wall16, and Kew Gardens17, which, if one reads with a perceptive eye, will uncover the seeds, structures, and girders being put in place for her writing to develop into something that broke the bounds of what fiction could do with regards to its more dated elements of character, plot, limited and rigid themes. The first line of The Mark on the Wall comes in rather strangely: “Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present year that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.”18 This beautifully constructed sentence begins to play with the theme of memory, and this very much is a theme that would develop over the twentieth-century. The linguistic devices in the story are somewhat elusive, but the first-person narration holds it together extremely well: “I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises.”19 This expresses a “wish” for goodness and pleasantness, but indirectly upon the self, and Virginia goes to delightful lengths in the piece to attempt to express it.
Virginia did not dismiss the wealth of literature that preceded her, indeed, she embraced and had very high praise for the more realist authors of the past century, such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and the bodies of works that were coming in from the likes of France, Germany, and Russia. Having said this, it is anything but easy to see the shift in prose between Virginia, and the likes of the Shelleys, Arthur Conan Doyle, and even further back with Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, where gothic works begin to take shape to a great degree. The evolution that literature was going through and what was being said about race, religion, class, that tried to show a true reflection of society, with rapidly changing moral codes and artistic radicals trying to make the world a better place.
By the turn of the twentieth century, largely through the active and unshakeable work of Emmeline Pankhurst, the Women’s Rights movement was beginning to become a reality. It is perhaps not a surprise to see some of the causes and reasons for this, such as the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an all-women suffrage advocacy organisation that was dedicated to “deeds, not words.” The illustrations in real life of the union’s mantra was truly unforgiving, reckless, and most importantly, effective. Eventually, the group adopted direct action tactics such as bombings and arson, and even more tragically, a woman named Emily Davison, an active member of the WSPU, during the summer of 1913, ran in front of the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby, with many now believing she did so in attempting to attach a suffragette scarf to the horse’s bridle as a symbolic act of protest, campaigning for women’s right to vote. She died four days later due to the injuries sustained. This, along with other events attributed to the WSPU, led to several individuals leaving the union in 1913. However the work going on around this time is unshakeably profound.20
What this meant in regards to early twentieth-century fiction is noticeable. We see divergent patterns in how to depict modern life, that was becoming beset by war, but some of the literature that was being produced because of it was inspirational. There are slights and turns in the landscape of how to begin “the novel.” It was happening to a powerful degree across European literature. Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time - which one can genuinely spend an entire lifetime reading, because it is very long, and published in large fragments nowadays - uses an opening line that is quite succinctly told in the first-person, but the reader cannot quite conclude whether the sentence is fact, or fiction: “For a long time, I used to go to bed early.”21 This is where the unreliability of memory starts to play its part in the literary scene. It is hard to know where we sit now with regards to treatment of this very fragile word, “memory”, but one can very much attempt to explore it in the literary world.
Virginia was using this changeable tract of memory as a great linguistic tool across her works. The opening line of her more experimental novel Jacob’s Room, is written in the guise of the writer, but it gets hazy quickly: ‘So of course,’ wrote Betty Flanders, pressing her heels rather deep in the sand, ‘there was nothing for it but to leave.’22 Using the opening line to the story as a character writing, is an interesting narrative technique. Very soon the story is filled with musings: ‘Well, if Jacob doesn’t want to play’23 It is Virginia using reflections on who will become the protagonist in the story. It is clear and firm, but somewhat elusive all at once. It seems that the style Virginia intended to adopt was to try and almost make the writing into a portrait. Having said this, the reader will soon struggle. The dialogue uses the character of “Jacob” in calls and spoken word: “ ‘Ja-cob! Ja-cob!’ Archer shouted.”24 It is the first sign in the book of Virginia using verbs in the past tense, to build an idea of Jacob, and what will eventually become his family and friends illustrating who he is, his growth and history.
Virginia produced a book in the mid 1920s that often eludes readers and critics, but holds firm as an almost uncategorizable masterwork. Orlando25, is a flowing, not overtly long novel, that is more than anything a dedication to a dear relationship of Virginia’s. She had befriended the aristocratic socialite and writer Vita Sackville-West in 1922, and, following an intimate friendship and lengthy exchange of letters over the following years, at times fuelled with light jealousy and curious intrigue, Virginia decided to begin constructing a work in the proceeding years during which time modernist literature was almost definitely in its prime. Although Virginia began writing the bulk text of Orlando in an automatic, frenetic burst in the Autumn of 1927 after Vita had taken up temporarily with another woman, it would seem almost certain that the ideas and seeds would have begun gestating five years earlier when the two of them met.
The transcendent sketching of a singular life that is Orlando, a fleeting parade through English history and literature in the guise of a biography that is fictional, yet somewhat true, whose subject is fixed in not time nor gender, truly does defy category and type. It proved to be Virginia’s best-selling book at the time, partly due to the blather and gossip - Virginia included photographs of Vita, thus the dedication to her is inarguable and firm and there was no secret upon its release as to who it was modelled on. Though also so wide-selling because it was so translucently creative, so different, so vogue. It is difficult to imagine how Virginia could have license to play so freely with sexual freedom and identity in that far more Conservative era, but did so as she forayed into a more liberally coloured future. The character of Orlando’s fluid morphing from male to female anticipated and played a huge part in generating the oncoming theoretical movements that are still unfolding in how we think about sex and gender.
Reading the book is a delight that cannot be described unless it is done good and well, and even then the character depiction is particularly ambiguous at many moments, for it tells of chivalry, the great freeze that beset London in the distant past, and how one transforms themselves in the name of love and trying to live a better life. The history inside the book is vast, and the sentences are written in especially diarised prose at times, but doing so allows the reader and the writer, the poet and the traveller, to become one and the same. The natural world described in the story is boundless, while there are people from different nations, most prominently when Orlando meets a Russian princess and almost voyages with her on a ship heading East from the Thames, though is smartly eluded and left to pass time back in solitude. It can be also be read as a lesbian love story, but one so cleverly complex that it escaped the doomed fate of other books of the time which were tried for obscenity, such as The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, published in the same year. Arguably Virginia’s largest victory with the novel though, was that Vita loved it. Despite the fact that it was motivated to a certain extent by envy, and significantly hones in to the heart of Vita’s personality, it also reflects her as the dauntless nobleman Vita had always felt herself, on some level, to be - chiefly the fact that, if she had been born male, she would have inherited her father’s property in Knole. With her father’s recent death, the house and the title had officially passed to her uncle. Although, in the pages of Orlando, Virginia gorgeously reflects that imagined outcome that was never achieved. On this note, Virginia makes a clear dedication to property law in the preface of the book, which is on the whole a particularly saturated and confessional writeup paying thanks to the many friends and people of interest who inspired it: ‘I am specially indebted to Mr C.P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have been written.’26
In essence, Orlando is a story about a person who transitions through many many years, surviving all the way up to the twentieth-century, and goes through a sex change in the process. However, the writing makes one feel mystified; to the point where Virginia is questioning the actions of the protagonist. For example: ‘Could one mention furniture in a peroration?’27 This is in reference to stones to a building Orlando finds themself in, but the word “peroration” in English means the concluding part of a speech that is meant to leave a sense of joy with the audience. So indeed, is furniture even necessary in this context? Are we as readers empathising here with the question? Is the “one” the right way to address Orlando and ourselves? Then at the end of the chapter itself: ‘The King was walking in Whitehall… Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.’28 It seems to mirror her first novel The Voyage Out in this sense, in its momentary fixation with travelling across the sea, but in Orlando, the journey is not to get to a destination like the characters do in her first novel, but to be in acceptance of change and nature.
The element of the book that gives it added leftfield distinction, is the subjective third-person narration of Virginia’s pen that tells the tale in the voice of a biographer. Virginia goes to great lengths to try and strongly mimic a biographer’s voice in telling the details and events of an individual’s life in a deliberately informative tone, though does so to borderline comical degrees: ‘Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads.’29 It is as if Virginia, in catching herself mid-writing, describing the events of the character, still wants to remind the reader that the story as a whole is essentially a piece of literary entertainment; and in reminding us that we will eventually come to a conclusion of life after all is done and written about, in which the ultimate sanctuary is finally death.
From the first few sentences in the opening chapter, to the timestamp on the second, where we receive a supremely illustrative portrait of the character - what stimuli around Orlando is affecting him/her, as well as us as readers as Virginia attempts to make clear what the world would be like for an androgynous nobleperson / poet / traveller, for the character itself bares a multiplicity of activities and ambitions. This segment in Chapter Two is particularly resonant, fuelled with supreme mastery of prose: ‘Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and butcher a poet’s; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldly length of this sentence, has further complicated our task and added to our confusion by providing… a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us… (and) has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress and a capacious one at that.’30 This segment, written in the voice of the narrator-biographer, capture the narrator’s reflections on the often strange acts of nature, which undoubtedly shape people in odd and unusual ways. As we know, in the real events of life, things do not fall into place so well together as in an idealistic Victorian romance; it is not the most beautiful faces who are destined for success; perhaps, the poet with his uniquely individual and pulchritudinous words, does have an ugly and incongruous face. Nature is surprising and jarring and is accountable for much that seems out of place in the world.
At times the prose takes on a rather curious, almost stinging air, such as when Orlando is lodged up in a new property in the 1600s, and is perceived in the main as a welcome and entertaining guest, though finds himself (for Orlando is “he” at the time) reflecting on the past with light fear and haste: ‘That he did not know a geranium from a carnation, an oak from a birch tree, a mastiff from a greyhound, a teg from a ewe, wheat from barley, plough land from fallow… Even the maids, who despised him, tittered at his jokes… Indeed, the house had never been so lively as now that he was there - all of which gave Orlando a great deal to think about, and caused him to compare this way of life with the old. He recalled the sort of talk he had been used to about the King of Spain’s apoplexy or the mating of a bitch; he bethought him how the day passed between the stables and the dressing closet; he remembered how the Lords snored over their wine and hated anybody who woke them up. He bethought him how active and valiant they were in body; how slothful and timid in mind. Worried by these thoughts, and unable to strike a proper balance, he came to the conclusion that he had admitted to his house a plaguey spirit of unrest that would never suffer him to sleep sound again.’31 Virginia is describing a state of restlessness that Orlando is in, for he constantly has things to think about, dwell on, in some ways prepare for, as he passes through the years, and potentially entering a state of quiet insomnia is a state that most would vehemently not desire.
Mention of the opening sentence to the first chapter is worthwhile, for it carries slight gothic undertones, when Orlando is immediately introduced as in a male-form: ‘He - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it - was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.’32 This is slightly on the sensitive side of social topics, for this is in essence capturing a scene of human mutilation of a head, though one must bare in mind the deep social context of the times of the 1920s in the United Kingdom; political parties jostling for power in Westminster, the Easter Uprising in Ireland, and racial ties between Afro-Caribbeans and migratory populations shunned to the periphery of Western society; vis a vis, achievements and notability of multiculturalism was in such an infancy at the time that many people of colour barely got mention for writing a perfectly constructed journal entry that made it into the Times Literary Supplement. However, the opening line comes beaming in, of mention of a character, unknown, disguised, invisible to our eyes, because human suffering has been passed down from generation to generation.
Virginia’s remaining novels of the 1920s and into the 30s - To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, are further examples of an output that attempt to depict a period in European history that was ultimately descending into a rather dark and shaky period, considering the rise of fascism in the 1920s. To the Lighthouse is set on a Hebridean island, though once again it is very experimental. The opening lines go: ‘Yes of course, if it’ll be fine to-morrow,’ said Mrs Ramsey. ‘But you’ll have to put up with the lark’, she added. Once again, this is a demonstration of dialogue half-caught in a conversation, where the reader is almost plundered into a setting that is unknown, unless we discover along with the writer where the tale will go. ‘It’s due west’, said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them… That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse… the hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone.’
The Waves especially, is a book that deals with friendship and nature. It is regarded as her most experimental novel, where characters speak through the pages in different guises and soliloquies. It can be argued that it is also cryptic, but then again, why would it not be? Considering her previous works in the 1920s were very experimental and played around with themes of time, memory, and, personal intrigue. The opening line to The Waves goes as follows: ‘The sun had not yet risen.’33 This shows simply that the novel will deal with the natural world in one way or another. The following passages on the opening pages pretty much describe nature and the character’s relationship with it. It is not quite certain where the story is exactly set, but the dialogue comes in swiftly: “‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me.”34 So we are quickly made aware that the narrative is set in a colourful world of some kind. “ ‘I see a crimson tassel’, said Jinny, ‘twisted with gold threads.’ ”35 It is likely the characters are describing the sky, but even then it is dubious.
The Essays
Virginia once wrote of the essay the following: “The principle which controls (the essay) is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.”36 In her vast expanse of essay writing, Virginia’s writing flourishes to a stellar degree. In terms of the craft, one may not find many greater exemplars, at least in the early twentieth-century; writing with mightily sharp and stylistic personality, calling-out and critiquing washed-up editors’ and fellow writers’ outmoded opinions, responding to other scholarly essays in newspapers and journals, and giving other books (of which she sifted through what seems an interminable load) their critical due, or their fervent lambasting, if it so warranted. We pay homage nowadays to the more modern, yet no less involved essays and polemics - that have continued to come in their bulky medleys, and gone through a large evolution in content and form - of the likes of George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, James Baldwin, Johnathan Franzen, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Susan Sontag, Bernadine Evaristo, Zadie Smith etc., to name only a few. Although, it seems doubtless, if one attempts to guide themself and read closely, that the abundance of outstandingly creative and entertaining pages of essay-writing that Virginia produced have left vital impressions and almost certainly influenced the way that future generations have approached and shaped their writerly pursuits.
In a small Penguin Books edition published in 1995, that one could buy for a mere “60p”, one will find something mesmeric. The book is titled Killing The Angel In The House37. In the first essay in the edition, titled Professions for Women38, which was initially delivered as a lecture in 1931, the words dazzle and hurt. The segment that sings with profound fervour comes rather early on: “Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare - if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.”39 One will assess the particularly choice words Virginia uses in this early passage, and understand that literature provides her, and many others, with almost immeasurable meaning and purpose in life; it has been an endeavour that anyone and everyone can and should be able to take up, and is joyous in that it is an easily accessible way of stirring the human imagination. However, that “easy accessibility” has of course been painfully hampered over hundreds of years due to the deep-rooted polarity in career opportunities based on gender and social class. Women have been writing for a very long time, although their contributions have often been overlooked through recent history, and in terms of class structure and social hierarchy, it was once deemed very bad practice to allow and attempt to teach individuals born into or brought over through the slave trade to read and write; views that nowadays are scurrilous and would provoke righteous counterattack in public life.
Having said all this, Virginia’s shining words in this first essay in the collection are given more as a tribute to the genuine practice of writing itself and how she became successful and made it her occupation. The piece eventually becomes a staunch defence of the art of writing in its most authentic and truest form, how she had to murder - figuratively that is - a ghostlike “Angel” who attempted to hamper her writing output and influence the attitudes and styles Virginia would adopt: “Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex.”40 The pronouns “her” and “she” here refer to that ‘Angel’ in the main title of the small book, who Virginia “kills” as an act of personal necessity and self-improvement; the Angel is described by her as a “phantom” that initially plagued her conscience in her earlier years and tried to influence her to write in a way that fitted in with common, lowbrow, patriarchal views; to fall in line with charming and pleasing men. Thus, Virginia ostensibly confesses to metaphorically killing her so that her true character as an artist and writer could flourish. The essay also quite powerfully follows as a sort of subsidiary to a grand polemic she had already given and published a few years before - A Room of One’s Own - and as it describes so potently and vehemently her feministic and writerly views in a relatively short space, it is worth digesting in full, to give a flavour of the eloquent virtuosity of her uniquely intellectual mind. If anything else, it provides a quite acute and rare face to Virginia’s writing career, as she describes this problematic encounter, in reference to the title, in plain and aggressive verb phrases and statements: “I turned upon her and caught her by the throat”, “I took up the inkpot and flung it at her”, “She died hard”.41 A sadistic yet somewhat alluring peek at the avenues of the mind of a writer entirely dedicated to the seriousness of her craft.
There is another great essay of Virginia’s, simply titled ‘How Should One Read a Book?’42, and since nobody can truly answer that question, Virginia attempts to do that very thing over the course of a swashbuckling eleven pages. As her initial statement claims regarding essay-writing, it does not fail in giving pleasure from first word to last - it is a digressive and meandering delight of a read. The essay eventually becomes an immensely creative and imaginative analysis of how to approach, read, and eventually judge books - mainly in the realm of fiction and poetry - and how doing so in particular ways allow us to become better readers, and eventually responders to the books we desire to digest.
At the outset, Virginia articulately muses on the act of reading itself in superbly playful fashion, enticing people of all backgrounds and abilities to follow her line of argument and instructions, as it essentially becomes a “read within a read” - for we are reading an essay about how to read other books. She eventually states, correctly, that within society there is no legal or done way of reading, anyway, so we should embrace the act of doing so as a way of asking ourselves what we want to get out of it: “One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it. Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike. For though reading seems so simple - a mere matter of knowing the alphabet - it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it.”43 There is the common trope of the “room” surfacing once more - this space of solitude and peace as a critical component for the reader and writer to develop their practice; while it eventually became Virginia’s key noun to use as the basis for her stout dialectic for female intellectual freedom, in this context it is more broadly and lightly utilised as a “here and now” space; for readers of all ages and backgrounds to appreciate and talk about literature; the clause “we breathe the air of freedom” is an enormously comforting, communal call for enthusiasts and readers all over the world (many whom she will never meet) to breathe the same air as her, for there do not exist any rules or regulations whatsoever that restrict our desire to “read books”.
It is crucial, too, to recognise the great sense of irony Virginia continues to write with in the essay, for she goes on to instruct us in this playfully didactic guise, as if she is an adult teacher instructing a large group of Key Stage 2 students of nine or ten years of age. Although, of course, she does not mean to be patronising; she tells us how we should go about reading in this tone as it acts as the appropriate one to adopt to go in tandem with the topic of the essay i.e. the title is so simple a question, yet at the same time actually a rather difficult one to answer, and as a biproduct of this Virginia means to instruct us in this supercilious way; she goes on to write: “… if we remember, as we turn the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design… if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our own design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.”44 Once more there is that communal feeling Virginia provides as though she were addressing us in this quiet, scholarly room with the repetition of “if we”; “if we remember / if we try to follow”, maintaining that teacher and student air, while also carrying that lightly condescending tone, as though we have been welcomed with open arms to hear and follow the logic of her lecture on how to read books; we are now essentially dummies, almost mere bobbling, nodding heads with our mouths gawped wide open saying: “Yes, Ms Woolf. Yes, Ms Woolf.”
One of the key lines soon follows, in what is a more simplistic answer and take on the essay question, and what eventually becomes a catchphrase and common thread for the piece as a whole: “To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it.”45 Here is arguably the first sentence in the essay that fulfils its main aim; it directly answers the question, yes, but it opens a clear pathway for Virginia to take us down; we are implanted with an easily understandable strand of thought; we think, “ah, to read a book well, we should read as if we are the writer, now I am interested!”; moreover, and most importantly, it is the phrase that delights the reader; she gives us a clear statement and it answers the essay question effectively and lucently. Thus, we empathise and understand totally her line of thought, and we as readers as a collective are eager to continue reading and following her imagination and wisdom; we are getting that so sought after “pleasure” that we seek, and we sure as hell do not feel we have wasted our time.
Reading on to the essay’s conclusion, it gets whimsically better. Virginia, soon after instructing us to read as though we are writing the book, gets us to imagine how three novelists - Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy - would differ greatly in their descriptions of a scene of meeting a beggar in the street. In that chronology, she wisps and warps her words terrifically, talking of Defoe being “a master of narrative”, asserting valiantly that “it is character that interests” Austen, and with Hardy the beggar “will take on some of the size and indistinctness of a statue”46 Essentially, we are given a grand and entertaining literary tour by Virginia of how narrative tone and voice are unique and ever-growing components of literature on their own; a published author of prose or poetry will inevitably not be the same as another, and while we continue to make and undertake comparisons, and find obvious similarities between certain groups of them, at the end of it all it is a writer’s individuality and distinct storytelling voice that we admire, sometimes yearn for. Eventually, she writes: “Reading is not merely sympathising and understanding; it is also criticising and judging. Hitherto our endeavour has been to read books as a writer writes them. We have been trying to understand, to appreciate, to interpret, to sympathise. But now, when the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge.”47 These commanding authoritative statements keep us hooked later on in the essay, for they address a key process within the essay question i.e. what should we do after we have finished the book? We still require that information from Virginia, and she continues to tell us in that beguiling and jocular tone she has adopted throughout. It is not worth spoiling the remaining couple of pages to the conclusion, for the exuberant descriptions and linguistic curlicues of her prose truly dance and sparkle like full beam Christmas lights in the heart of December; she finalises her thoughts on how we are to feel once we have read a book, how we often behave and the reactions we have, how we should solidify and weigh up our own opinions against other readers and critics, and most crucially, through all the different points we have read and considered in the essay, she offers us the suitable and reader-friendly summary we need - short and clear suggestions for answers as to how we should in fact “read a book”; I have underlined many passages in these last couple of pages, and written things in the margins such as: “Succinctly said <3”, “Falls into place in the end”, and “I feel seen, V :) xx”, so, one can imagine my honest urge for you to go ahead and read the essay, and learn how to do the impossible.
In another one of Virginia’s essays titled The Decay of Essay-Writing48, she writes - with distinguished polish and flair - how the form of ‘the essay’ itself, is, in her time, becoming overly saturated by modern scholars and writers; more a popular medium of literature to feed the masses, thus potentially losing its soul and charm. It is a particularly concise and short (only roughly three book-length pages), yet equally complex piece; a verbose yet quiet attack on Virginia’s own “team”, in essence, as she had already established herself as a great practitioner of the art of essay-writing. While the piece itself maintains a very descriptive and cynical air, it leaves some room to offer comments of hope to the reader on how to salvage the form and write from the heart, rather than succumbing to its potential for negligence and controversy.
The essay begins with a critical line of comments and thoughts on how knowledge and information in Britain has become burdened, in many ways swollen, with gigantic feeds of letters, literature, and news that merely serve to uphold British society and its interests. Virginia writes with feelings of bemusement and frustration on the matter: “The spread of education and the necessity which haunts us to impart what we have acquired have led, and will lead still further, to some startling results. We read of the over-burdened British Museum - how even its appetite for printed matter flags, and the monster pleads that it can swallow no more.”49 It is a clever critical statement about British Imperial rule, for how can the British Museum complain of being “over-burdened”, when British rulers themselves have been responsible for taking ancient historical artefacts and showcasing them in their own museums due to the fact they have fought and won battles of warfare on foreign land? The former part of the quote provides a similar tone of pessimism, in that the information the general British public have learned in school and elsewhere only goes to advocate and justify Britain’s imperial and patriotic stance internationally; it “haunts” us as a nation that we are expected to impart all these things we have “learned” about. Thus, in her mind, it has led to an overly inflated amount of information that British citizens receive, which leads to feelings of staleness and tedium, as she closes the opening paragraph: “Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger - come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them.”50 This concept of hugeness, enlargement, overwhelmingness, “snowed up” heaps, and what she eventually labels the British “monster”, provides a common thread in the piece to argue as to why essay-writing has declined and needs redeeming.
Virginia goes on to describe the difficult task of writers in her age, that the public at large are in constant want of new and original things to read about that prick their conscience: “But if you have a monster like the British public to feed, you will try to tickle its stale palate in new ways; fresh and amusing shapes must be given to the old commodities”.51 This “monster” of the British public was one that had a literacy rate in England and Wales of 97% for both sexes in 1900. True, this was being influenced by the availability and accessibility of books and other printed materials, which went through a staggeringly rapid growth in the 19th and 20th centuries due to the industrial boom, technological innovations, the increase in public libraries, and mass production; indeed, the advent of “news”, and reading about news had become an evermore popular practice over the last few hundred years; the broadsides that had emerged in the 1500s became the tabloids of the day, until they were eventually replaced by newspapers in the mid-1800s. While chivalric tales and courtly fiction writing and poetry had been a popular medium in Britain since the writing days of Caxton and Chaucer, the more modern forms of realist (as well as fantasy) fiction, non-fiction biographies, articles, essays, and diaries were now beginning to be published in serial format in newspapers and magazines; Dickens famously published his books initially in serial form as a way of reaching a wider audience and making literature more affordable and accessible. So, regarding Virginia’s important remark, it is perhaps safe to agree with her that the British public had now reached a point (by the early twentieth-century) where their reading habits could be said to be growing rather stale and tiresome; had they in fact read enough about war and romance, nature and religion, the bildungsroman tales of David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre, or to a more intellectual end, writerly essays on matters of equality, creative freedom, science, and politics? To Virginia, it should appear obvious that there is a vital onus on current-day authors and writers to try and always make their writing, especially their essays, fun, new, and engaging.
The essay finally begins to take a shift in tone, as we are led away from Virginia’s descriptive, opinionated, silver-tongued lists and metaphors - an atypical marker of many of her pieces. Almost by necessity, she wants to make clear to us the background history and path essay-writing has taken up to its present day. Rather funnily, the key line itself it is what we millennials and Gen-Z’s may nowadays describe as the “meta” comment - it refers to the craft that Virginia is currently using (the essay), and what will become the main concern of hers with regards to the piece as a whole: “Perhaps the most significant of these literary inventions is the invention of the personal essay.”52 She states that it is at least as old as the writing of Montaigne, that he was the first of the “moderns”, and since then, it has been utilised with “considerable frequency”, until it has reached her own time and become incredibly popular with the public; a form of literature that is “so immense”, yet “so peculiar”, something that has been made our own and may be looked back on by our distant future ancestors as something that is characteristic of the times we lived in, or as she writes: “will strike the eye of our great-great-grandchildren”.53 This remark almost suspends the piece, at least momentarily, into a state of “meta-meta” writing, for we now find ourselves reading an essay about essays, while provoking us to think about how we view essays of the past, and how our own essay-writing will be viewed by people far, far ahead of us. It showcases once more, Virginia’s immensely idiosyncratic prose, and the linguistic frameworks she envelopes us in; she likes to be self-referential and self-reflective where she can; it is her way of dualistically entertaining and informing us, providing that essay-like pleasure, while also getting us to absorb and think about the broader picture.
Virginia at last gets to the crux of what the majority of essays essentially do, and the form they are written in, as a way of reminding us that they often lend themselves towards egotism and self-interest: “perhaps if you say that an essay is essentially egoistical you will not exclude many essays and you will certainly include a portentous number. Almost all essays begin with a capital I - ‘I think’, ‘I feel’ - and when you have said that, it is clear that you are not writing history or philosophy or biography or anything but an essay… primarily an expression of personal opinion.”54 Virginia is generally correct in her argument, for the use of ‘I’ in an essay depends on the type, purpose, and audience of the piece of writing; as she states within this segment, if you are writing about “the rheumatism in your left shoulder”, it is a prerequisite that you will end up speaking with the common pronoun ‘I’, and thus it will automatically take the form of a self-regarding piece. Virginia follows this passage in the next paragraph with an ingenious touch, as she writes the only sentence in the essay that includes the use of her ‘I’, when she writes, once again self-reflectively: “we are not, I hope, in the main more egoistical”55 (the “I hope” is not written in italics in the actual piece). It provokes the reader to smile with pleasure on the one hand, and incredulity on the other, as the essay starts to murmur with mystery, leaving us to ponder and question Virginia, as well as ourselves: “wait, how egoistical are you being, Virginia?”, “how often should I write with the ‘I’ in my writing?”, “when does the use of ‘I’ just begin to get a little too much for the reader to bare?”.
It is arguable that the most pleasurable line of the entire piece comes on the second page, containing the bulk of Virginia’s argument. After she has somewhat whimsically pondered on how our current age is highly skilled in our “manual dexterity with a pen” in contrast to the old days of Homer and Aeschylus, who “could dispense with a pen… not inspired by sheets of paper and gallons of ink”, she writes this utterly magnificent line that defies all the quiet morosity of the black-inked, tightly-spaced letters and words that complete the essay in full, as it preternaturally flows in with calming and delicate grace (sadly it does begin with a “but”): “But our essayists write because the gift of writing has been bestowed on them.”56 The words flitter and tingle on the page with class and nobility; a silent call and demanding of writers, from every age, background, and walk of life to continue to uphold the art of of writing, and to keep doing so as effectively and frequently as they can. While it does appear as if Virginia is describing essayists and the writing they produce as some sort of cult-like, deep-rooted, spiritual “bestowment”, a “gift” or special power that has been brought down by the Gods and heavens from above, it is in fact anything but that. For it is actually a choice, first and foremost. It is a choice that essayists, and creative writers in all their shapes and guises - novelist, graphic novelist, poet, comic-book writer, journalist, playwright - have made, and inhabited that making so it subsumes their being and drives their art. The “gift of writing” Virginia alludes to is not something that is merely held and put to use for a passive period, and then when they feel like they have had enough of it they randomly throw it onto somebody else’s lap. Not at all. It means we write because we love to use words to delight, influence, inform, inspire, entertain, twist and warp our readers in a way that only we can. And we can only do it because we have learned and honed and highlighted and sifted and underlined and read and tired our luck at it for a very long time. It strikes the reader as quite ironic that this positive statement from Virginia flares up within an essay that is, for the most part, arguing that essays are becoming less good at their job. That said, the words should more than anything act as a helpful and inspirational reminder that writing should never be undertaken with haste and erraticism; it should function to the end of understanding, empathy, clear and careful thought, and, as we have so frequently mentioned, pleasure. They are not simple things to catch for the writer, so they know that they have to approach it in the right and honourable way.
To conclude the short piece, Virginia once again alludes to the essay’s essential feature of being a form of self-interest and a way of expressing one’s personal concerns: “its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full.”57 Although many will happily disagree - and perhaps this is a healthy sign about literary criticism - that a personal essay’s tone or apparent overuse of personal expression (‘I’) is detrimental to the form, Virginia urgently wants writers, men and women, to embrace essay-writing as being an opportunity to create and have fun; the extravagant possibilities it can offer; its ability to bring into focus ideas and things that other people would never think of; its potential for unconventionality and quirkiness; its ability to provide a rare, scattered dosage of meaning and pleasure amidst a rapid and disorientating working world. Hence, Virginia writes the following (I must state that I found her prose to be singing gloriously at this point, but that is only me): “If men and women must write, let them leave the great mysteries of art and literature unassailed; if they told us frankly not of the books that we can all read and the pictures which hang for us all to see, but of that single book to which they alone have the key and of that solitary picture whose face is shrouded to all but one gaze - if they would write of themselves - such writing would have its own permanent value.”58 It is a call for freedom and liberty against the hypocritic and wealthy publishing world; a mischievous critique of the highbrow literary editors who are limiting the array of great writing that is out there, particularly those in the younger generations. The close to the essay is a little more paradoxical and indecisive, yet it captures what Virginia feels is going awry with essays themselves, and offers a tiny glimmer of hope that they can be redeemed through good and truthful words: “To say simply ‘I have a garden, and I will tell you what plants do best in my garden’ possibly justified its egoism; but to say ‘I have no sons, though I have six daughters, all unmarried, but I will tell you how I should have brought up my sons had I had any’ is not interesting, cannot be useful, and is a specimen of the amazing and unclothed egoism for which first the art of penmanship and then the invention of essay-writing are responsible.”59
There is another relatively short essay of Virginia’s in the same collection - Selected Essays - that swerves sharply from the discussion of the essay form, to the novel. It is somewhat linked to The Decay of Essay-Writing, nevertheless, as it becomes an equally gallant vindication of modern literature, attempting in her writing to argue how fiction is regressing with regards to its sense of “character”. The essay is called Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown60, titled so in relation to a contemporary fellow novelist, as well as an implied allegory to characters in fiction; both become key players throughout the essay. In simpler terms, Virginia feels the novel itself is decaying in the early twentieth-century because authors are declining in their ability to illustrate and shape their characters in their stories. Having said that, the essay is far from a simple composition; it is a deeply compelling, thought-provoking, and expressive piece of prose, full of literary evidence and references that forcefully espouse her views, having been inspired to do so due to a rise in the concerns and debates surrounding the modern state of fiction.
The essay ignites as a reply to Virginia’s reading of the views of fellow novelist and essayist, Arnold Bennett: “The other day Mr Arnold Bennett, himself one of the most famous of the Edwardians, surveyed the younger generation and said: ‘I admit that for myself I cannot descry any coming big novelist’.”61 The keyword that Virginia deliberately uses in direct regard to Mr Bennett is a vital literary definition and sets the historical context for the piece, for the “Edwardians” were very much part of a separate, yet still interconnected literary epoch; as we reach the 1920s the United Kingdom had now been under the reign of George V (Edward VII’s son) for a decade or so, therefore there had been a distinct cultural shift from around 1910, where literature arguably began to change in its depiction of character, the stylistic features it adopted, and the themes that it addressed - the authors that would eventually become known as the “Georgians”. Aptly, it is this juncture in the recent history of literature, and the emerging novelists of the day, that Arnold Bennett vehemently attacks, as Virginia quotes him again and writes: “The Georgians fail as novelists, he said, because ‘they are interested more in details than in the full creation of their individual characters … The foundation of good fiction is character-creating, and nothing else…”62 While these words appear as pointed castigation of Virginia’s generation, she leans somewhat comfortably into the sentiments, going on to close the opening paragraph: “None of this is new; all of it is true; yet here we have one of those simple statements which are no sooner taken into the mind than they burst their envelopes and flood us with suggestions of every kind.”63 Thus, we can assume, the hand-rubbing and pen-wagging has suitably begun, for the “flood of suggestions” in Virginia’s mind brings forth a truly detailed, powerful, and grand analyses of prominent fiction writing from the late 1800s through the turn of the century, as she attempts to define where and how the novel had started, and continued to decline in the creation of their individual characters.
As a follow-on, Virginia talks of the vast assortment of novels becoming something of a burdensome pile in her current age, that due to the “evaporation” of “character-making power”, they “are for the most part the soulless bodies we know, cumbering our tables and clogging our minds.”64 Although as an immediate aside, she goes on to write: “That, too, may pass.”65 Her argument begins to take shape, however, when she pinpoints the fact that current history and society is critical to the matter i.e. a key aspect to the decay of novel writing is a biproduct of the societal shift from Edwardian England, to Georgian England; her allusions and questions of the history of the times is written with sharp clarity and verve: “Mr Bennett blames the Georgians. Our mind fly straight to King Edward. Surely that was the fatal age, the age which is just breaking off from our own, the age when character disappeared or was mysteriously engulfed”,66 going on to name H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett himself as just some of the culprits. They are strong claims, indeed, particularly in regards to some of the finest and most prolific writers of the turn of the century, none more so than in Wells, who would turn out to become an enigmatic “futurist” and “visionary”, foreseeing the advent of aircrafts and tanks, space travel, nuclear weapons, and satellite television. Though as we already know, Virginia’s matchless linguistic weapons are immensely creative and potent, and she goes on to burrow into a distinct body of fictional works to make her point stand firmly on two feet.
Inducing a light metaphor of adopting the mind of a painter in reducing their detailed compositions to more simple pictures and ideas, Virginia feels the need to take this more simplistic vantage point in addressing Edwardian fiction. She writes in regards to it that: “Every sort of town is represented, and innumerable institutions; we see factories, prisons, workhouses, law courts, Houses of Parliament; a general clamour, the voice of aspiration, indignation, effort and industry… in all this congeries of streets and houses, there is not a single man or woman whom we know.”67 In essence she is arguing that fictive depictions of society have become overburdened with place and locality, significant buildings and places of interest where the action arises, but among it all, the characters themselves are getting filtered down, thinned out, lost amidst the swarm of the scene, so that when we consider the broader picture of the story, we barely even “know” them. Is it a mark of the end of the Victorian age? Is it the uncertainty of the nature of events that is to come in an unexpected era with the rise of Edwardian Britain? Virginia answers that it is because of this awkward juncture, the fin de siècle, which, for all its joyful and theatrical celebrations, had in itself sparked such a huge and jarring cultural change, that it arguably left fiction writers in a bit of quandary as to what, or more importantly, how to create their characters in a strikingly new and unexpected time. Be that as it may, she is not shy from combatting her initial argument, as she references one of the works of the previously mentioned authors that still contain strong and lucid characters: “Figures like Kipps or the sisters (already nameless) in The Old Wives’ Tale (Arnold Bennett, 1908) attempt to contradict this assertion”.68 Though once again, Virginia instantly notes how the book can hypothetically stand beside a Victorian work, and be multitudes less full and strong in its formulation of their characters - she cites Thackeray’s Pendennis soon after making this claim: “how flimsy a body is apparent directly they are stood beside some character from that other great tract of fiction which lies immediately behind them in the Victorian age.”69 After giving very honourable mentions to the characters in Thackeray’s work, in which she describes how “the procession is endless and alive”, she makes perhaps her most pertinent argument with regards to the distinction between Victorian and Edwardian novels: “And so it goes from character to character all through the splendid opulence of the Victorian age… The whole country, the whole society, is revealed to us, and revealed always in the same way, through the astonishing vividness and reality of the characters.”70 While this claim may appear hyperbole to many voracious readers, it is quite difficult to argue against the might and weight of the character studies to be seen in the likes of David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Middlemarch, Vanity Fair etc.
Virginia once more seamlessly glides into the social and historical context of this period (the turn of the century), in which literature and Edwardians felt almost forced to “change their tactics”. She asserts that the triumphs of the Victorian age would prove immensely tough to be rivalled, and that the triumphs achieved would inevitably lead to the next generation of writers thinking that they could do a great deal better. However, fiction in her eyes did not necessarily improve, more than it became radical: “No sooner had the Victorians departed than Samuel Butler, who had lived below-stairs, came out, like an observant boot-boy, with the family secrets in The Way of All Flesh.”71 This semi-autobiographical novel she alludes to, published posthumously in 1903, is in the main a work of social criticism that attacks Victorian-era hypocrisy, and became accepted as a work that would, along with many other Edwardian-era pieces, generate an allegiance of writers who stood firmly against the social moralities that were common amongst the Victorian middle-classes. While we shall refrain from direct references to the book itself, it is pretty horrifying to consider that with regards to Victorian views on sexuality, certainly in the former half of the 1800s, married women were expected to agree to sex whenever their husbands wished for it, and it was seen as immoral for men to ask for sex in certain situations, “such as when their wife was sick”. Thus, while we are focusing on attitudes regarding the fictional worlds of the last few centuries, it is still vital that we mention how real-life political and societal views have evolved inexorably, and we hope enhanced, since some of these, what Virginia terms, “opulent” times.
At any rate, Virginia’s argument remains fervent, as she brings to note how writers (around the year 1900 and beyond) altered their styles and views, attempted to “fashion the world afresh”; in other words, to face modernity full in the face and write in a fresh and different way. She eventually writes: “So the young novelist became a reformer, and thought with pardonable contempt of those vast Victorian family parties… as they pursued their own tiny lives, that society was rotten and Christianity itself at stake.”72 This is mildly teasing and tongue-in-cheek writing from Virginia, for while there did exist great concern across the West as to how society would move forward, and indeed great Empires were in the midst of being threatened by radical revolutionaries, at the turn of the century, there was not in reality a wide acceptance that everything around everyone was perished, and certainly, as we still know, Christianity still plays a huge role in the functioning of many states around the world.
Interestingly, Virginia harks back to the late 1800s, and provides an essential detail with regards to literary translation that “subtly” worked to diminish the creation of character in fiction. Namely, Constance Garnett’s translations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. She writes passionately after mentioning ‘Ms Garnett’: “After reading Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, how could any young novelist believe in ‘characters’ as the Victorians had painted them? For the undeniable vividness of so many of them is the result of their crudity.”73 Indeed, it is true that many of Dostoyevsky’s creations, particularly in his more mature works, contain very morally ambiguous, and at times vulgar characters, although there is a counterargument to be made about the nowadays revered Russian author. Dostoyevsky had already displayed considerable talent in his earlier short stories and novellas, such as Poor Folk and The Double, - if one reads them discerningly they are deeply complex yet fascinating compositions - with his narrative concerns and styles developing over time, leading to him depicting individuals who were shunned into the background of society, consigned to civilisation’s underbellies and underground peripheries, and damaged by their social environments; often they are working-class, rundown, or very morally compromised men who have reached desperate points in their lives, therefore act in certain ways because of these circumstances. We see this perhaps most relevantly with his protagonist in Crime and Punishment, Rodion Raskolnikov, who commits murder because of his rather destitute state, thinking he is morally superior to the person who’s life he takes and that he feels he is above the law because of this.
Despite the Russian author’s well-known, though curious explorations into the human psyche in these works - in many literary realms considered masterpieces - the books have not always been to everybody’s taste; many readers have often criticised, borderline complained of them being difficult to get through for their staleness, the dryness in prose, the often ordinariness of Dostoyevsky’s descriptions; perhaps that is where Virginia finds herself struggling also with regards to the characters within them. It could very well also be down to the high level of translation by Garnett, for the denseness of these grand Russian works undeniably needed an ably skilled translator to capture the true style and sentiments that were originally written. What is certainly clear is that Virginia has read Dostoyevsky’s later works and found the characters to be completely devoid of any true, colourful nature or life: “But what keyword could be applied to Raskolnikov, Mishkin, Stavrogin, or Alyosha? These are characters without any features at all. We go down into them as we descend into some enormous cavern.”74 She goes on to describe Dostoyevsky’s illustrating of his scenes where his characters flow around as being essentially haphazard and volatile; “lights swinging”, “booming of the sea”, “dark, terrible, and uncharted”, thus “we need not be surprised if the Edwardian novelist scarcely attempted to deal with character except in its more generalised aspects”.75 This is quite an unorthodox, critical angle that Virginia takes, claiming that these novels of Dostoyevsky, while not at their core “Victorian”, still to a degree fall within the times of a Western World that was marked by Victorian-like components (industrialisation, radical thinking, progression in social ideals). In her mind perhaps, though they are greatly explorative and nihilistic for large portions, Dostoyevsky may have influenced the way that the following Edwardian novelists would write, for the worse in her opinion; “generalising” their characters and worlds, instead of truly “making” them, or as she goes on to write: “The Edwardian novelists therefore give us a vast sense of things in general; but a very vague one of things in particular.”76
In the latter paragraphs of the essay Virginia hones in on her fervent feelings of character becoming lost in fiction. She mentions the authors she has discussed prior, and argues with valiant poise that life itself relies on the conflict and interconnection of characters - that it is what humans are made to do. She once again cites Arnold Bennett’s quote on the foundation of good fiction being “character-creating, and nothing else”, and that in much of his, Galsworthy’s, or Wells’ work, we are given in none of them “a man or woman whom we know”, repeating that staunch remark from earlier. The particularly hard-hitting and stern lines come as we read on, however, as she ardently asserts: “In real life there is nothing that interests us more than character, that stirs us to the same extremes of love and anger, or that leads to such incessant and laborious speculations about the values, the reasons, and the meaning of existence itself. To disagree about character is to differ in the depths of the being.”77 At this point we gather that the lid has truly been raised and that Virginia’s argument, if anything else, is a clarion call to all novelists and writers of modern fiction to look around and realise that life is being lived in the very interactions and relationships we have and foster each and everyday; that herself and her fellow writers have a duty to “step up their game” and imitate the real and rounded livelihoods that we all observe. She goes even further and says that the novelist should be “much more uncompromising than the friend”, whereby she brings to the table the metaphorical counterpart in the title, “Mrs Brown”: “When he finds himself hopelessly at variance with Mr Wells, Mr Galsworthy, and Mr Bennett about the character - shall we say? - of Mrs Brown, it is useless to defer to their superior genius… He must set about to remake the woman after his own idea. And that, in the circumstances, is a very perilous pursuit.”78 This is where the heart of the problem lies for Virginia. The symbolic “Mrs Brown” becomes the fleeting figurehead of the piece; the possible character that a novelist may at once pluck from the air and think that they can craft her into one of the greatest, most grand, and multifaceted characters that fiction will ever know; but as Virginia argues, if the novelist cannot truly “make” her with the things they eventually write, if she does not have a clear and certain appearance, a consistent personality, and one that connects genuinely with the other characters in the story, then the “character” of the novel is burdened with defects and loses at the first hurdle, or as she writes so eloquently: “For what, after all is character - the way that Mrs Brown, for instance, reacts to her surroundings - when we cease to believe what we are told about her, and begin to search out her real meaning for ourselves?”79
As a consequence of all Virginia’s allusions and analysing throughout the piece, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown becomes a superbly distinct piece of essay-writing. It starts out as a musing, where Virginia feels that a fellow novelist’s words on the current state of fiction have struck a chord with her, bringing on a “flood of suggestions of every kind”, but the results of her musing feeds and inspires her bookish imagination and knowhow, as she creates a literary investigation of marvellous proportion; an essay filled with first-class descriptions, rich writerly verve, and key nuggets of context; the inexplicable link fiction shared with the real events of the turn of the century and the course it would eventually take, more or less as a reaction against Victorian society. It all provides her with the meat and evidence to focus minutely on how character had been written, how it evolved, and how it currently plays out in the fiction of her day. She assumes a near sociological eye, traversing through the possible reasons and events that brought it all about. By the end, Virginia is in an almost imploring mode; like all distinguished and passionate writers, she wants the best for books, especially the novel. After all - and I think many of us can agree - fictional spaces and worlds in books are one of the few areas in life where we go through a quiet, social contract with the author and attempt to meet ourselves in their depiction of what life is, or could be. As Alice Walker beautifully puts it: “If you're silent for a long time, people just arrive in your mind.” However Virginia, at least at this point in the early twentieth-century, knows that that to lose the essence of characters themselves in these worlds would be painstakingly harmful to the fiction. So she morphs stridently from a thoughtful literary analyses, into a powerful incitement for all writers of the modern age to look back, turn around, observe acutely everything that is going on around them and seek to create the idealised “Mrs Brown”, to try and recapture what is rapidly declining in the novel. She concludes the piece on an optimistic note, believing that writers are concerned and deeply engaged in the pursuit of bringing the elusive, yet well-sought after essence of “character” back to literature: “The capture of Mrs Brown is the title of the next chapter in the history of literature… that chapter will be one of the most important, the most illustrious, the most epoch-making of them all.”80
One of the other essays in Killing the Angel in the House, is titled The Intellectual Status of Women, and in the very brief introduction it says the following: “In the autumn of 1920 the successful Edwardian novelist Arnold Bennett published a collection of his essays, Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-discord. Virginia, staying in the country and working on Jacob’s Room, found herself ‘making up a paper on women, as a counterblast to Mr Bennett’s adverse views reported in the papers’ (Diary, II, 26 Sept. 1920, p. 69).”81 What one uncovers in the essay as a whole is essentially an exchange of letters that Virginia and her friend Desmond MacCarthy wrote in response to Arnold Bennett’s essays. Desmond MacCarthy begins the dialogue, under his pseudonym, Affable Hawk, in a piece published in the New Statesman: “Samuel Butler used to say when asked what he thought about women, ‘I think what every sensible man thinks’; and when pressed further he would add, ‘Sensible men never tell’. This was ominous and also characteristic; the crusty bachelor was a strong strain in him. Mr Arnold Bennett has written a book about women - not my women, you observe, which is a title that would suit most other books written on the subject.”82
The defence that Desmond MacCarthy gives further on is certainly intriguing: ‘I own I have done this myself and said many things which seemed to me clever and penetrating at the time, but were not scientific. One such aphorism I recall because the first half of it would meet, I think, with Mr Bennett’s assent, since he quotes with approval Lady Mary Montagu’s remark, ‘I have never in all my various travels but two sorts of people, and those very like one another; I mean, men and women.’ My aphorism ran thus: ‘Men and women are really more alike than they can believe each other to be; but they ought not to behave to each other as though this were true.’83 It is an eloquent rebuttal, and the dialogue is continued by Virginia in the next letter to the New Statesman:
‘To the Editor of the New Statesman.
Sir, - Like most women, I am unable to face the depression and the loss of self-respect which Mr Arnold Bennett’s blame and Mr Orlo Williams’s praise - if it is not the other way about - would certainly cause me if I read their books in the bulk. I taste them, therefore, in sips at the hands of reviewers. But I cannot swallow the teaspoonful administered in your columns last week by Affable Hawk.’84
So even at this point, readers are put into a quandary as to who is saying and writing what. An exchange that is, in many respects, breaking up friendships. Virginia continues in her opening letter: ‘How, then, does Affable Hawk account for the fact which stares me, and I should have thought any other impartial observer, in the face, that the seventeenth century produced more remarkable women than the sixteenth, the eighteenth than the seventeenth, and the nineteenth than all three put together? When I compare the Duchess of Newcastle with Jane Austen, the matchless Orinda and Emily Brontë, Mrs Heywood with George Eliot, Aphra Behn with Charlotte Brontë, Jane Grey with Jane Harrison, the advance in intellectual power seems to me not only sensible but immense; the comparison with men not in the least one that inclines me to suicide; and the effects of education and liberty scarcely to be over-rated. In short, though pessimism about the other sex is always delightful and invigorating, it seems a little sanguine of Mr Bennett and Affable Hawk to indulge in it with such certainty on the evidence before them.’85 To even write about what the title in question alludes to, at the outset, is rather laughable to Virginia, and the grace and distinctly good writing is on display.
Desmond MacCarthy continues the dialogue: ‘Affable Hawk writes: Sappho was at the height of her fame about 610 BC. She was a contemporary of Jeremiah and Nebuchadnezzar; when she wrote the Buddha was not born.’86 It seems that merely engaging with ancient yet delicate history, in essay form and letters, has its limits, for if one considers it, there is no certainty of us ever knowing what Sappho, or her contemporaries such as Alcaeus, or her brothers Charaxos and Larichos, thought, felt, or how they behaved; no existence of an account that we can deem absolutely true and valid; it is still widely accepted that little is known for certain about her personal life, and the bulk of her poetry is now lost or contained in sparse fragments. Still though, throughout these letters, a clear and thought-provoking conversation seems to not want to stop until one has had the effective “final word”. Virginia writes next: ‘It is true that she was born 2,500 years ago. According to Affable Hawk the fact that no poetess of her genius has appeared from 600 BC to the eighteenth century proves that during that time there were no poetesses of potential genius… Certainly I cannot doubt that if such opinions prevail in the future we shall remain in a condition of half-civilized barbarism. At least that is how I define an eternity of dominion on the one hand and of servility on the other. For the degradation of being a slave is only equalled by the degradation of being a master.’87 These are immensely fluent and well-worded lines of Virginia’s that one will tread through in shallow waters - we read them in their emphatic might and are left to ponder and unravel the meaning - for they are genuine, and carry the weight of multitudinous, powerful seas, and we feel she has the right to claim so, because we already know that she holds authority on matters relating to women, and thus can likely trust her word when it comes to thousands of years of history of creative writing of the sexes. The last two sentences taken on the whole contain and mirror each other with their duality in meaning, containing polar opposite nouns: “dominion… servility”, “slave… master”. It is ingenious responsive writing from a master woman of letters and words, flipping the initial question of “The Intellectual Status of Women” right on its head; for surely, why dare we query the legitimacy, the manifest nature of the work of women writers that have preceded us in centuries gone by? Virginia writes factually in “Professions for Women”, all one needed was paper and pen - it should always be a harmless occupation, no?
It is almost like reading through a blind realm and picking at the fragments, for even now, papyrus texts and poems of these greats survive in the most diminished form. Therefore, the conclusions that Desmond and Virginia draw on literature are limited, and at times, can only be written about in grand comparisons and contradictions. To write on the sexes in such a way as to trace it back to Ancient times and beyond, is going to prove difficult, and require research of a very special kind.
The Polemics
Through the publication of A Room of One’s Own88 in 1928, a book-length polemic on gender and writing, Virginia strengthened her authorial status and writerly genius. First, as an exponent that could shift seamlessly from the pleasure of fiction to the serious moralism of polemicist, and secondly as a voice of leadership and pragmatism, laying the foundation for students and common readers alike to listen, interpret, and be influenced by her complex, yet stout arguments for freedom and a more egalitarian society.
The long essay itself is written in an immensely stylistic fashion, almost cryptic-like. It is also immensely discursive, requiring a close and slow reading eye to analyse and pick out the hollow spots, where the underlying concerns and messages are to be found to a poetic and stellar level.
The opening line of A Room of One’s Own is perhaps one of the fullest and best exemplars of a sentence on feministic theory: “But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction — what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own?”89 To start with the conjunctive “But” is not dubious, but the continuation of studies and stories that had preceded her in the many centuries prior. Virginia goes on to mention the names of literary figures from the past century and beyond. Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Bronte’s, among many.
A key passage comes much further in, within which one will find themselves lost in the malaise of the sharp points so articulately made; Virginia has already written, with a deep dissection of the writing life of many people (Virginia including herself among them), going to immaculate lengths in discussing the difficulty of writing poetry, prose, plays, essays, letters, bounds and bounds of political treatises. Where one finds themselves tens of pages in, we can identify that the prose is pretty much perfect: ‘It was the relic of the sense of chastity that dictated anonymity to women even so late in the nineteenth century. Currer Bell, George Eliot, George Sand, all the victims of inner strife as their writings prove, sought ineffectively to veil themselves by using the name of a man. Thus they did homage to the convention, which if not implanted by the other sex was liberally encouraged by them (the chief glory of a woman is not to be talked of, said Pericles, himself a much-talked-of man) that publicity in women is detestable. Anonymity runs in their blood.’90 Books are abound in the “room”, we find minutely carved out letters and words forming themselves into scintillating sentences, citations, questions - from the pen of a writer than only the writer can hope to achieve.
It quickly becomes apparent that the work is a delicately crafted responsive essay to the patriarchal forces of the era, becoming literarily more than itself; so rhapsodically thought-provoking and strong of what has been said and written through the ages - in poetry and in vocality. Truthfully, one cannot even begin to hope to get through it in its entirety without having done prior reading, for I was struggling with it after merely a page, or two. By fifteen or thirty pages, within which chapter one and two have passed, one finds themselves flicking pack a few pages to comprehend and make sure they have understood just what kind of words they have read. Very soon in the opening chapter, Virginia is discussing poetry, copies of texts that are within her grasp where she can draw and shape her opinions of writing from the past: ‘A book lay beside me and, opening it, I turned casually enough to Tennyson. And here I found Tennyson was singing: ‘There has fallen a splendid tear / From the passion-flower at the gate. / She is coming, my dove, my dear; / She is coming, my love, my fate; / The red rose cries, ‘She is near, she is near’; / And the white rose weeps, ‘She is late’; / The larkspur listens, ‘I hear, I hear’; / And the lily whispers, ‘I wait. / Was that what men hummed at luncheon parties before the war? And the women?’91 The aside from Virginia is firm and funny enough, and adds the flourish that is needed, ostensibly going to prove that what people deem as “good”, or even “great” writing, takes absolutely acute and digestive authorial ability; in other words, one cannot, does not, or even crafts their own masterworks, without going through creative hardship, and suffering.
Further support is made when writing of Shakespeare: ‘What was Shakespeare’s state of mind, for instance, when he wrote Lear and Antony and Cleopatra? It was certainly the state of mind most favourable to poetry that there has ever existed. But Shakespeare himself said nothing about it. We only know casually and by chance that he ‘never blotted a line. Nothing indeed was ever said by the artist himself about his state of mind until the eighteenth century perhaps.’92 Indeed, no one really knows about the minds of these writers - Sappho, Dante, Descartes, Machiavelli; they are forces to their own kind. They all lived their lives to the same degree as any other; holding all the musicality, yet sickness of the human being. It is within these very words where Virginia’s points are made about human nature, artistry, creativity, writing, and knowing that at the end of it, there is scarcely anything all along.
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It was only nearly a decade later that she published her second grand essay, Three Guineas93, written amidst the menace of impending war. Similar in theme and scope, it turned out to be a sweeping elocution of her pacifist politics, divulging into the causes of gender inequalities, and the potential for women to use their position in society to become vital in the promulgation of preventing war. Once more, like many of Virginia’s writings, it begins distinctly as a reply to a letter, structured as a response from an academic gentleman asking for Woolf’s support to help prevent the eruption of warfare that was looming in the late 1930s. The gentleman’s letter was intended to gain Woolf’s opinion on the political unrest unfolding in continental Europe, essentially seeking lucid and practical steps on how best to go about mitigating the rise and threat of fascism. Virginia was a committed pacifist, along with many of her fellow friends and writers within the Bloomsbury Group circle, such as Lytton Strachey and her husband Leonard Woolf (both conscientious objectors during World War I). Thus, the extended essay naturally turned into an opportunity for Virginia to address the patriarchal society’s role in war, arguing that the education and professional system for women needed fundamental changes for the well-meaning intentions to help prevent war to become a reality.
‘Three years is a long time to leave a letter unanswered, and your letter has been lying without an answer even longer than that.’94 Although it sounds like Virginia is adopting the tone of a novel-like correspondence of epic proportions, it soon becomes apparent that the matter is far more serious and unique within the polemic realm of essay writing and letters; it is, and will be, an epic exchange of views in the course of modern history. ‘But one does not like to leave so remarkable a letter as yours - a letter perhaps unique in the history of human correspondence, since when before has an educated man asked a woman how in her opinion war can be prevented? - unanswered. Therefore let us make the attempt; even if it is doomed to failure.’95 Stout words, for Virginia knows that solid language and evidence is needed to support her following call for the prevention of war, bridging the gap across the gender divide in the process.
Virginia is quick to acknowledge herself and the gentleman as coming from the educated class, but there is an inflection point where she knows she has to muster the correct resources to form the grand reply that is required: ‘Moreover, we both earn our livings, But… those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that for three years and more I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it.’96 Virginia then mentions Mary Kingsley, renowned English writer and ethnographer, and cites her powerfully: “ ‘I don’t know if I ever revealed to you the fact that being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had. Two thousand pounds was spent on my brother’s, I still hope not in vain.’ ” This is crucial, as Virginia knows it is necessary to bring to light that Kingsley speaks not for herself alone, though for many of the daughters of educated men, which links historically to the inequality of education between men and women, providing the basis for what will follow, namely, the Arthur’s Education Fund (AEF)97. Virginia goes on to write with profound force:
‘But to us, who see it through the shadow of Arthur’s Education Fund, it is a schoolroom table; an omnibus going to a class; a little woman with a red nose who is not well educated herself but has an invalid mother to support; an allowance of £50 a year with which to buy clothes, give presents and take journeys on coming to maturity. Such is the effect that Arthur’s Education Fund has had upon us… The fact that Arthur’s Education Fund changes the landscape - the halls, the playing grounds, the sacred edifices - is an important one; but that aspect must be left for future discussion. Here we are only concerned with the obvious fact, when it comes to considering this important question - how we are to help you prevent war - that education makes a difference.’98
Woolf critically uses this historical symbol of the AEF as a marker in the gender disparities in education and societal expectations. Although, of course, it becomes somewhat obsolete, for the real progress in preventing human warfare comes from gaining and using knowledge, as she goes on to write, in the multiple fields of “politics, international relations, of economics”, which are vital in understanding the causes which lead to war. Truthfully, as we know, one does not need an academic life at an elite educational institution, such as Oxford and Cambridge, to help prove their research and studies, or create their thesis for a better society, although it can of course be beneficial. Therefore, Virginia’s citations and criticisms are sound, for they are rooted in the keys of where the main disparities lie in relation to public opinion and debate - gender pay, opportunities from a young age, family background and dynamic, location - it all plays a part. As Virginia so beautifully goes on to write: ‘Had you not believed that human nature, the reasons, the emotions of the ordinary man and woman, lead to war, you would not have written asking for our help. You must have argued, men and women, here and now, are able to exert their wills; they are not pawns and puppets dancing on a string held by invisible hands.’99 And of course they are not; we are not - we are all playing our part in the cogs and pegs that are needed for the progress and hope for a better tomorrow for our world. It does not come from just the “educated”, as the airy term so often gets handed around, but from the footman, the builder, the coachman, the theologian in the street, the cook, the cleaner, the student, the teacher; they are all quiet clarion calls and receptacles where there is contained the foundation where help, peace, and truth are found - common amongst our species.
The essential point is soon made by Virginia, of which it is hard to argue with: ‘Scarcely a human being in the course of history has fallen to a woman’s rifle; the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us; and it is difficult to judge what we do not share.’100 Although that is not to say that actual warfare is always won and lost that way. Crucially, Virginia is impelled to cite the lives of others, in the form of biography, in order to try and understand what war means to men; first quoting a segment from “a soldier’s life”, then, “an airman’s”, who espouse fighting and warfare, then starkly counteracts it with the writings of the poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the European war:
“(Wilfred) - ‘Already I have comprehended a light which never will filter into the dogma of any national church: namely, that one of Christ’s essential commands was: Passivity at any price! Suffer dishonour and disgrace, but never resort to arms. Be bullied, be outraged, be killed; but do not kill… Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism…’ (Virginia) - ‘And among some notes for poems that he did not live to write are these…’ (Wilfred) - ‘The unnaturalness of weapons… Inhumanity of war… The insupportability of war… Horrible beastliness of war… Foolishness of war.’ ”101
Difficult to know how to fathom the kind of response to this part of written history, for it is pure, and good and right, and is lit forever.
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These key works of hers would ostensibly be the bolts and screws fitted in firmly for modern feminism to solidify and take shape over the decades that followed. Some of her maxims being, for example, the idea that to produce art one needs favourable material circumstances, or that women writers need adequate funds (£500) and space; now central tenets of modern feminism. Another key idea linked to the initial need for material wealth, was her proposition that the abstract concept of ‘intellectual freedom’ depended directly on one’s material wealth. In other words, it is inseparable from questions of economics, education, class, and gender. Indeed, if one has not grown up with, or has reasonable access to e.g. pencils, pens, tables, chairs, rooms, books, pictures, among ceaseless other resources, then how can one expect to create good art in the first place? Thus, it is not a coincidence that Virginia’s discerning line from A Room of One’s Own, while perhaps a touch passé, still rings through with a profound disquiet today: ‘Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor…’102 It is a line that is at once sad, as it is graceful and prophetic.
Many eminent philosophers and literary minds flourished in continental Europe and the West because of the broad ideas and practical solutions that Virginia offered in these key works, providing solid academic material to extract and build from. Modern minds from various background and cultures, inspired to go on and publish their own grand and radical polemics and treatises, or simply influencing the way people dressed, worked, spoke, and carried themselves, all with the aim of striking back against long in the tooth societal mores.
The Diaries
Virginia Woolf was a genuine expert at keeping a diary. Many literary enthusiasts and readers pour over them today and continue to uncover sharp thought patterns, anecdotes told in clear and lurid detail. Although one should always respect the fact that they are personal and have their own character. A diary is a discrete entry, a place to chronicle musings, recount events, and generally what the person has thought about a particular day.
In a A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf103, it is quoted in the preface by Lyndall Gordon: “Were it not for the diary in the course of 1926, one of her most fertile years, this Virginia Woolf would remain unseen: ‘I have some restless searcher in me. Why is there not a discovery in life. Something one can lay hands on and say, “This is it”? . . . I have a great and astonishing sense of something there.’ ”104 This proves how the soul of a diary remains mostly unseen through an individual’s life; they are always flowingly constructed, marking dates of a year, events during the seasons, thus they bare and contain an eternity that lives on past the more professional writerly works of essays, letters, and novels. It goes on to say in the preface how the extracts captured course through from Virginia’s ‘age of thirty-six in 1918 when she is writing her second novel, Night and Day, until the age of fifty-nine in 1941 when she’s completing her last novel, Between the Acts. What happens ‘between the acts’ can be as fascinating as a polished work or platform speech: it’s the unseen drama of making, with its struggles and breakthroughs.’105 This is still rather spurious to say, for Virginia’s last few large writings, especially her final novel Between the Acts, took a far different energy and focus to fit to suit - being a time when she was experimenting a great deal with playwrighting and what her and her friends’ livelihood was like during a time in England that was becoming beset by conflict and war.
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Nowadays one will find an immense amount of pages of Virginia’s diary writings in both collected and selected book form. Due to the nature of them being more personal and plainly opinionated pieces, it will not be too apt to extract and quote loads of the logs, though a few of them are well worth discussing for their artfulness and poise.
When young artists and writers were coming into their prime in London in the early 1900s, a lot of them were swayed to the more bohemian circles and environs, of which the streets around Bloomsbury, Oxford Circus, and Soho were growing areas. One extract from Virginia’s Selected Diaries106 is particularly poignant. Dated: Tuesday, 18 May, 1920:
‘Gordon Square begins again and like a snake renews its skin outworn - that’s the nearest I can come to a quotation. [No. 50] Gordon Square different - like a looking glass version of 46. You are let in, by a strange servant, go up bare steps, hear children crying at various stages, go up and up - till you reach what is, in the real Gordon Square, servants’ bedrooms. Nessa is right at the top. Well we talked till I left at 8…’107
Nowadays Gordon Square is home to a large square greenspace adorned with nourished gardens and pathways, birds flitting to settle in the grand trees, and busts and monuments dedicated to greats of yester year. Around the gated greenery are tall light cement buildings, some of which house educational institutions such as the Birkbeck School of Arts Building, the Keynes Library, as well as the former homes of Virginia herself, and shakers and movers of and before her era. It is fitting that Virginia writes such a dedicatory and tender passage of the design of the buildings within Gordon Square, for even now people and students of all kinds walk within and use the corridors, rooms, and spaces for teaching, reading, even writing purposes; exhibitions that are displayed and recycled in the Birkbeck Arts & Humanities department, as well as ground, upper, and basement floors that host performative arts functions in drama, the liberal arts, even science and philosophy. It goes without saying that the diaries of Virginia around this time mention the area of Gordon Square within the wider sphere of Bloomsbury and Greater London, as it holds the grounds and frameworks, nature and stones, arts and sciences, publishing, reading, architecture, forming a symbiosis of study and work that is hard to match, certainly in recent times.
Virginia Woolf - Wikipedia
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Biographical Preface by Frank Kermode, p. vii
modernism: an artistic movement that aims to depart from classical and traditional forms
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, (Penguin Classics, 2019)
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, (Penguin Classics, 2019), p.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, (Penguin Classics, 2019), p. 83
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, (Penguin Classics, 2019), p. 84
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, (Penguin Classics 2019), p.97
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, (Panther Books 1976)
stream of consciousness: can be used either literarily, or psychologically, in which a person’s thoughts and conscious reaction to events are depicted in a continuous flow.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, (Panther Books, 1976), p. 1
Alex Luppens-Dale, Mrs. Dalloway and Her Flowers: An Analysis of the First Line of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (bookriot.com), May 9, 2022
Virginia Woolf, Night and Day, (Vintage, 2000)
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, (First published as World’s Classics paperback 1992, Reissued 1999)
Frank Kermode, Biographical Preface, (Something Sweet Press, London, 2001)
Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, The Mark on the Wall, (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2001, Reissued 2008)
Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, Kew Gardens, (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2001, Reissued 2008)
Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, The Mark on the Wall, (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 3
Virginia Woolf, The Mark on the Wall and Other Short Fiction, The Mark on the Wall, (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), p. 5
1913 Epsom Derby - Wikipedia
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, (Oxford World’s Classics Paperback 1999) p. 3
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, (Oxford World’s Classics Paperback 1999), p.3
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room, (Oxford World’s Classics Paperback 1999), p.4
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021)
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), Preface, p. VII
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), p. 76
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), p. 85
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), p. 43
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), p. 43
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), p. 64-65
Virginia Woolf, Orlando, (Bloomsbury Publishing 2021), p. 1
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (Penguin Random House, originally Hogarth Press edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1931), p. 3
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (Penguin Random House, originally Hogarth Press edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1931), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, The Waves, (Penguin Random House, originally Hogarth Press edition, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, 1931), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, (Oxford World’s Classic Paperback 2008), p.
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, (Penguin Group, 1995)
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, Professions for Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 1
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. I-II
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, Professions for Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, Professions for Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009)
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 63
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 64
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 64
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 65-66
Virginia Woolf, How Should One Read a Book?, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 70-71
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009)
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 3
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 3
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 3
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 3
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 4
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 5
Virginia Woolf, The Decay of Essay-Writing, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 5
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009)
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 32
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 32
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 32
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 32
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 32
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 32
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 33
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 33
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 33
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 33
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 33
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 34
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 34
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 34
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 34
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 34
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 35
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 35
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 35
Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics paperback 2008, Reissued 2009), p. 36
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, The Intellectual Status of Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 19
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, The Intellectual Status of Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 19
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, The Intellectual Status of Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 20
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, The Intellectual Status of Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 24-25
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, The Intellectual Status of Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 25
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, The Intellectual Status of Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 26
Virginia Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House, The Intellectual Status of Women, (Penguin Group, 1995), p. 29-34
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (Penguin Classics 2020)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (Penguin Classics 2020)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (Penguin Classics 2020), p. 40
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (Penguin Classics 2020), p. 8-9
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (Penguin Classics 2020), p, 41
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015), p. 89
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015), p. 89
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015), p. 90
Arthur’s Education Fund (AEF): The AEF is a reference to the novel Pendennis, by William Makepeace Thackeray. It represents a fund into which family members contribute to pay for the education of sons. However, daughters are not beneficiaries of the same service, despite their contributions through sacrifices and domestic labour.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015), p. 91
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015), p. 91
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015), p. 92
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, (Oxford World’s Classics, New edition 2015), p. 93
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Chapter 6, (Penguin Classics 2020)
Leonard Woolf (Edited by), Lyndall Gordon (Preface), A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, (Persephone Books, Reprinted 2017 and 2022)
Leonard Woolf (Edited by), Lyndall Gordon (Preface), A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, Preface, p. vii-viii, (Persephone Books, Reprinted 2017 and 2022)
Leonard Woolf (Edited by), Lyndall Gordon (Preface), A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf, Preface, p. x, (Persephone Books, Reprinted 2017 and 2022)
Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries, (Vintage 2008)
Virginia Woolf, Selected Diaries, The Diary, p. 106, (Vintage, 2008)