Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Woolf is now upheld as one of the founding figures of modernism. Born in 1882 into an artistic household in Kensington, she grew up surrounded by writers, which gave her a sense that she had as much right to put pen to paper as any of the literati who passed through her family drawing room.
She is often placed in the same funereal category as Sylvia Plath: brilliant but tortured female writers who killed themselves, in Woolf’s case by weighing down her pockets with stones and walking into a river. Yet despite depressions she had a tremendous sense of fun: she and five friends once secured a royal tour of the HMS Dreadnought by disguising themselves as the Prince of Abyssinia and his entourage. Flippant and sombre, lyrical and curt: Woolf’s voice is mercurial, and she delights in pulling the rug from under her readers’ feet.
Key Decision Founding the Hogarth Press with her husband, Leonard. This freed her to produce work without having to bend to the whims of publishers. In a marginal note in an early draft of “Mrs Dalloway”, she declares: “I will write anything I want to write.”
Strong points
1) Teasing. Woolf gives with one hand and takes with the other, offering
tempting glimpses of her characters’ inner lives. “As for following him
back to his rooms, no – that we won’t do,” reads a passage in “Jacob’s Room”. 2)
Suspicion of words. Language was a fickle friend to Woolf, and her characters
struggle to say what they mean. The eponymous hero(ine) of Woolf’s gender-bending
novel “Orlando” suffers particularly: “ransack the language as he might,
words failed him”. 3) Ignoring the clock. Woolf thought that chronological
storytelling was not only boring but false. Instead, she flits between present
and past, building up her characters as composites of memories and experiences.
Golden rule Fight back. “Lock up your
libraries if you like,” she writes in “A Room of One’s Own”, “but there
is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”
Virginia Woolf’s pen is a battering ram against the doors closed to women.
She loathed “any dominion of one over another”.
Role Model
Painters. They populate her novels and her personal life. As a result her
descriptions are often chromatically vivid, such as this from “Jacob’s Room”:
“the Scilly Isles were turning bluish; and suddenly blue, purple, and green
flushed the sea; left it grey; struck a stripe which vanished.” She admired
the painter’s ability to stand back and take in their work as a whole, and
even took to writing standing up at a desk-cum-easel so that she could do
the same.
Favourite trick
Ventriloquism. Woolf was an exponent of the “free indirect style”, whereby
the narrator inhabits the voice of the character. In “Mrs Dalloway”, for
instance, the following lines are attributed to the narrator, but they are
unmistakably Clarissa’s thoughts: “Hugh’s socks were without exception the
most beautiful she had ever seen — and now his evening dress. Perfect!”
As J. Hillis Miller put it, the narrator is a function of the character’s
thoughts in Woolf’s writing, not the other way around – “they think therefore
I am.”
Typical sentence
“All the same, that one day should follow another; Wednesday, Thursday,
Friday, Saturday; that one should wake up in the morning; see the sky; walk
in the park; meet Hugh Whitbread; then suddenly in came Peter; then these
roses; it was enough.”
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