Adeline Virginia StephenGiniaWoolf

Her first Christian name, never used, was given in memory of her mother's sister, who died shortly before Virginia's birth.99 Ginia was her earliest family nickname. She later gave herself many more, using different names with different people. Many were animal names: Sparrow, Wallaby, Billy, Ape, Goat, Mandril, and Marmoset. They were elastic, generative: Goat developed into Goatus Esq., or Capra. At fifteen she named herself Miss Jan. Biographer Hermione Lee sees this as her first construction of herself as an author.111-12

The year of her birth was the first year of her father's work on the Dictionary of National Biography.72, 376

Inheritance, Ancestresses

VW was the daughter not only of an educated man, 10 but of one of the most influential intellectuals in late Victorian England. Her family on both sides was part of the intellectual ascendancy. 3 Though many of her forebears were Quakers or Evangelicals, both parents had become agnostic. In her own account of her class and intellectual inheritance, she wrote that she was born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents . . . into a very communicative, literate, letter-writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth-century world. 65 She was vividly aware of thousands of ancestresses in the past 69—Note ancestresses, 51 writes Hermione Lee—and her work is preoccupied by moments and figures that are unacknowledged by patriarchal culture and by exploration of states of mind so muted that they almost defied expression. 95

In her forties, after watching a village wedding, VW wrote: We dont belong to any class; we thinkers: might as well be French or German. Yet I am English in some way. 3: 198 Her calling herself an Outsider is famous, and so is her statement: in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world. 197 But this statement is set (into Three Guineas) as part of a less-known passage. It continues: And if, when reason has said its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child's ears by the cawing of rooks in an elm tree, by the splash of waves on a beach, or by English voices murmuring nursery rhymes, this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.197-8 VW's work is everywhere full of that obstinate emotion, whether in Clarissa Dalloway's morning lark, buying the flowers herself, or in Jacob Flanders at about twenty lying in a field of buttercups, or in the flight of the swallows—or martins were they?— in Between the Acts.213

VW's childhood sexual experience was painful, humiliating, and formative, and her adult sexuality has been much discussed since publication of A Sketch of the Past, 22 Hyde Park Gate, and Old Bloomsbury in Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, 1976. She later shared the principled objections of her Bloomsbury friends to the Victorian social management of sexuality, which they saw as based on possessiveness, jealousy, and exploitation. Her own erotic relationships were with individuals of both sexes.

Mother

VW's mother, née Julia Prinsep Jackson (1846-95), was born in India and brought to England as a toddler.267 She was a favourite niece (and subject) of photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, on whom she published an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. She grew up in Pre-Raphaelite circles and was admired by, among others, Elizabeth Robins, G. F. Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Holman Hunt (who proposed to her). 83, 86-7, 89 She married Herbert Duckworth in 1867, but was suddenly widowed in 1870, while pregnant with Gerald, their third child (whose birth followed those of George and Stella). After Herbert's death, Julia lost her faith and found much of interest in the essays of Leslie Stephen on religion and agnosticism. 267 She married Leslie Stephen eight years later (on 26 March 1878), and the four Stephen children (Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian) followed in quick succession. She taught the children herself, at the dining-room table.267 19, 21

Julia Stephen was known for her beauty, melancholy, and charitable good works. VW's biographer Hermione Lee remarks that she seems to have fully endorsed the Victorian models for female behaviour. 85 Like her husband, she had a sombre mien, and with him she shared a view of life as work. 94 She had a Victorian devotion to the ill and poor, and she was especially passionate about nursing. (She published an essay on it—Notes from Sick Rooms—in 1883.) In June 1889 she was a signatory (one of 103) to Mary Augusta Ward's An Appeal Against Female Suffrage in Nineteenth Century.83

Julia Stephen wrote stories—family tales with a message 83-4—for her children, and she was the most valued reader of their family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News.84

Julia's death plunged her husband into overwhelming grief.

Virginia was thirteen: this death ended her childhood and provoked her first nervous breakdown. She said later that her mother's death was the greatest disaster that could happen, 40 and she remained preoccupied by her lost mother until she wrote her into Mrs Ramsay of To the Lighthouse. Phyllis Rose observes that the natural adolescent process of detachment from her mother ended catastrophically, leaving her hungry for affection and mentally haunted by her mother,115 and Hermione Lee believes that coming to terms with Julia's death and laying this ghost to rest, is one of the secret plots of Virginia Woolf's existence. 79

Years later, looking back, VW attached to this time a shift in her creative development, the sharpening of her sensations and thoughts. She met her brother Thoby at Paddington Station when he came to Julia's funeral. Her view of the sunset there sparked her belief that my mother's death unveiled and intensified; made me suddenly develop perceptions, as if a burning glass had been laid over what was shaded and dormant. 93

Father

VW's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a Victorian philosopher and historian of ideas . . . literary historian and critic, and—perhaps most important—a biographer. 36 Mark Hussey writes that he was, after Matthew Arnold, the most important late-Victorian man of letters. 270 He was also a passionate walker and hiker. Educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he returned there as a junior tutor in 1856, after serving the Church first as a deacon, then as a parson. But like many contemporaries, Stephen lost his faith—rather painlessly . . . over the problem of evil, according to S. P. Rosenbaum, who quotes him: The potter has no right to be angry with his pots. . . . If he wanted them different, he should have made them different. The consistent theologian must choose between the Creator and the Judge. 36 As an agnostic, Stephen could no longer discharge his duties in good faith, so he resigned his tutorship in 1860, and finally left Cambridge (still officially an Anglican institution) in 1864. On 23 March 1875 he formally renounced his priesthood in the company of Thomas Hardy, whom he had asked to witness his signature.36 A passionate free-thinker, Stephen attacked religion as the breeding ground of intolerance and hypocrisy. 71

He was immensely influential. As editor of the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882, he published Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, and George Meredith, among others.34 He was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, for which he edited the first twenty-six volumes and wrote many entries himself, giving up this work in 1890 only because of exhaustion.

When it was completed, the original Dictionary of National Biography consisted of sixty-three volumes and 29,120 biographical entries.72

Notwithstanding his great intellectual influence and major achievements—the Dictionary of National Biography is a lasting monument—Stephen thought himself a failure. He was morose and needy, plagued by an obsession with his genius and his reputation. His friend Henry James referred to his ineffable and impossible taciturnity and dreariness. 72, 94

Stephen's sombre attitude was a consequence in part of his sad marital history. He married his first wife, Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (younger daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, sister of Anne Thackeray Ritchie) in 1867. She bore him a daughter, Laura, in 1870, but died in premature childbirth in 1875. Julia, whom he married in 1878, died in 1895.270

Quentin Bell writes that Stephen saw himself as a skinless man, so nothing was to touch him save [Julia's] soothing and healing hand. 1: 38 Julia's children felt that he wore her out with his demands for support. 93 After her death, he demanded that Stella step into Julia's role in the household. He was extortionate, melodramatic. 132 When Stella married Jack Hills, he transferred his expectation of support to his next daughter. This permanently alienated Vanessa, but Virginia's feelings for him survived the worst outrages of his performance as a widower. 146

Of Leslie Stephen's relations, Virginia was closest to the writer Anne Thackeray Ritchie (Minny Stephen's sister), and to Caroline Emelia Stephen (Leslie's sister).66-8, 75-8

Vanessa

Virginia and Vanessa (1879-1961, the eldest of Leslie and Julia Stephen's children), were close to one another throughout their lives. In A Sketch of the Past, VW recalls that after the death of their stepsister Stella in 1897 they became a very close conspiracy. In that world of many men, coming and going, we formed our private nucleus. 123 Growing up, both wished for independent artistic careers. In 1901 Vanessa was admitted to the Painting School of the Royal Academy of Arts; in 1905 she exhibited for the first time and also founded the Friday Club, a disparate group of artists, mainly women, for the purpose of discussion and exhibition of the members' work. 22 In 1906, two days after her brother Thoby's death from typhoid fever, she agreed to marry Clive Bell. Their first child, Julian Thoby Bell, was born in 1908, their second, Quentin, in 1910. In 1912 Vanessa exhibited at the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, and a year later became, with Roger Fry and Duncan Grant, a director of the Omega Workshops. In 1916 she moved to Charleston in Sussex to live with Duncan Grant and David Garnett. Angelica, her third child (with Grant, though her husband, Clive Bell, was represented as the father), was born in 1918.

The two sisters were artistic collaborators: Vanessa designed the dustjackets for all of Woolf's books after Jacob's Room in 1922 except Orlando and A Letter to a Young Poet, and for many other books besides.23

Though Virginia loved her sister deeply and longed for her acceptance and approval, she was at some level envious of Vanessa's marriage and motherhood. She began an intense flirtation with Clive Bell after Julian was born, beginning in February 1908.17, 23

Thoby

Virginia's elder brother, Thoby (1880-1906), was confident, talented, charming, and very important to her. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he developed a circle of friends who were to be the core of the Bloomsbury Group. These included Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia met through him. Thoby died of typhoid fever in November 1906. In Jacob's Room, 1922, VW movingly evokes his memory and merges her personal loss of her brother with the wider loss of thousands of young men in the First World War. Her memories of Thoby also went into the creation of Percival in The Waves, 1931. When Vanessa read this novel, she wrote to Virginia: if you wouldn't think me foolish I should say that you have found the lullaby capable of singing him to rest. 273

Adrian

Adrian (1883-1948) was the youngest Stephen child. After Vanessa's marriage he lived with Virginia at 29 Fitzroy Square, then moved with her to 38 Brunswick Square. Like Thoby, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read law. He later studied medicine and in 1926 qualified as a psychiatrist. It was he who, with Horace Cole, concocted the Dreadnought Hoax. During the First World War, he argued (unsuccessfully) on behalf of the conscientious objectors Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and David Garnett. He was a politically active pacifist who worked in the No-Conscription Fellowship and the National Council for Civil Liberties. Before the Second World War he was actively anti-fascist, and Hussey reports that he alerted the Woolfs to the savagery of the Nazis and provided them with enough morphine for suicide should the Nazis invade England. 263-4

Quentin Bell

Quentin Bell, VW's younger nephew, many years later became his aunt's biographer and editor. In a preface to a general-interest booklet, he wrote that among his fairly large collection of aunts and uncles, many of them a pleasure for him and his brother to visit, the Woolfs were special. Hogarth House was a treat for schoolboys, where Leonard's dry humour and Virginia's fantastic sallies, perfect foils to each other, provided enchantment of a more splendid kind than the cinema.3 Bell continued: The person who called Bloomsbury Gloomsbury cannot have known Virginia. Her laughter made a paradise of Richmond. 4

Step-siblings

Leslie Stephen's daughter from his previous marriage, Laura (1868-1934), suffered from some form of mental disability and lived most of her life in institutions.74 Julia Stephen had three children from her first marriage: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth. Both Duckworth brothers were educated at Eton and Cambridge.120-1

Stella

Virginia and Vanessa had deep affection for their half-sister Stella (1869-97), who seems not to have shared her brothers' fixation on society and who was closely attached to her mother. After Julia's death, Stella, then twenty-six, assumed the maternal role in relation to the Stephen children and faithfully looked after the extravagantly grieving Leslie. Lyndall Gordon calls her VW's half-sister and surrogate mother. When she accepted a proposal of marriage from John Waller Hills in 1896, Leslie made it clear that he felt abandoned. Stella died three months after her marriage.

The cause of her death is uncertain. She had been diagnosed with peritonitis, but other conditions have been suggested.139 Lyndall Gordon says she was pregnant.

George

The eldest of Julia's children from her first marriage, George Duckworth (1868-1934), was ten when his mother married VW's father. He grew into a conservative young man and a social climber. After Julia's death, when Leslie Stephen was enacting his pitiable histrionics,133 George became the Stephen girls' unofficial guardian,151 responsible for their social education.75 He insisted on bringing Virginia and Vanessa into his fashionable London society. Virginia in particular was forced to endure unpleasant and humiliating social occasions for which she had no taste. Lyndall Gordon writes that at these events she would know and speak to nobody all evening and would stand, crushed by the crowd, against the wall. On one occasion she managed to read Tennyson behind a curtain. Both Virginia and Vanessa bitterly resented George for forcing on them his own values and lifestyle, and for his insensitivity about the financial difference between them. (During this period he had an annual income of £1,000 while they had annual allowances of £50 each.) In A Sketch of the Past, VW calls this time the Greek slave years.106 131

George and his brother Gerald also abused Virginia sexually.

After Julia's and Stella's deaths, writes Lyndall Gordon, there was no controlling George . . . who would prowl by night, and pounce. At the same time: Shame and Victorian proprieties forbade mention of this. 158

VW described the incidents much later in 22 Hyde Park Gate, 1921, and Old Bloomsbury, 1922, both talks prepared for her friends in the Memoir Club. She also wrote about them to Vanessa.153-9

Mark Hussey writes that the incest that Woolf suffered has been variously euphemized by several of her biographers and other critics. 75 Hermione Lee, who sees George as one of the tyrants in VW's childhood, finds the evidence of sexual abuse both strong and ambiguous. Though the events remain hazy, Virginia Woolf herself thought that what had been done to her was very damaging. 158Critic Louise DeSalvo writes that VW was a sexually abused child; she was an incest survivor. 1

Gerald

Gerald Duckworth (1870-1937) established the firm that became Duckworth & Co., publishers. He published VW's first two novels, The Voyage Out, 1915, and Night and Day, 1919.

In A Sketch of the Past, VW describes Gerald molesting her as a very small child. He was, as Lee writes, the first culprit in the distressing and contentious matter of Virginia Stephen's abuse as a child. 124

VW did not discuss this incident specifically until the last years of her life. Hermione Lee, who considers the matter as fully as possible, argues that it would be rash to ignore or belittle the damage done to her sense of herself, at this moment, by the much older half-brother's predatory intrusion. She sees in VW's representations of childhood a recurrent moment of fear or shame or panic, the image of a safe private world being invaded, often with the strong sense of sexual threat. 127

First Places

VW's imagination attached richly to place. In a well-known passage of A Sketch of the Past, she identifies her earliest memory of Cornwall as the foundation of her consciousness. If life, she says, is a bowl that one fills and fills and fills—then my bowl without a doubt stands upon this memory, and with that memory of rich, sharp early consciousness, comes also the purest ecstasy I can conceive. 64-5 Leslie Stephen came upon Talland House at St Ives in Cornwall while he was on a walking tour in 1882. It had a perfect view across the sea to Godrevy lighthouse. He rented it, and the family spent summer holidays there until the early 1890s.1 The house, the sea, and the lighthouse provide the setting for VW's best-known novel, To the Lighthouse. VW returned to Cornwall, physically and imaginatively, many times in her life.

Virginia grew up in the house at 22 Hyde Park Gate. This is where the Stephen and Duckworth families lived together until Leslie Stephen's death. VW remembered the tall, narrow house of her childhood as tangled and matted with emotion. 35

First Interests

VW's early childhood was full of interests and activities, most shared with her siblings. They played cricket and charades, did photography, swam, went moth hunting. These childhood entertainments return in VW's imaginative writing, which is built so substantially on memory. Moth-hunting, which she associated with Thoby, most haunted her imagination, writes Hermione Lee.31, 32 At least equally important was Virginia's early story-telling and writing.

Early Breakdowns

This childhood suffered a series of heavy blows. Virginia's early sexual molestation was followed by a series of terrible deaths: her mother's, when she was thirteen; Stella's, when she was fifteen. These losses, suffered when she was moving from childhood to adolescence, were followed, when she was in her early twenties, by her father's and Thoby's deaths. After her mother's death, Virginia had, by her own account in Sketch made in summer 1939, my first breakdown.178 She was troubled by a racing pulse and complex feelings of numbness, confusion, and anger; she spent two years in (again her own words) a state of physical distress. 178

Later VW felt that this loss was in some ways worse than her mother's. Lee writes that her irritability in her 1897 journal, her nervousness and her attacks of the fidgets, can be read as symptoms of her illness. 177

Shortly after the death of her father in May 1904, Virginia Stephen experienced a second and more serious nervous breakdown. She was nursed for nearly three months at the home of her friend Violet Dickinson, where she attempted suicide. The suicide attempt, this time jumping out of a window, was the first of several.4 51 178

Education

Virginia Woolf was educated at home. As a very young girl, she was tutored by her mother in Latin, French, and history. When she was between thirteen and fifteen, her father gave her lessons for two hours every day. She learned some maths and German from him. Virginia and Vanessa also (unhappily) studied singing, dancing, piano, and graceful deportment with outside teachers. 33, 32 1: 26-8

Both Virginia and Vanessa felt that they were uneducated, and VW felt intellectually deprived, regretting all her life that she had never competed with other children. 32-3 She also, however, commented caustically on the advantage of the custom which allows the daughter to educate herself at home, while the son is educated by others abroad. 84

She wrote this in an unpublished review of Euphrosyne, privately printed in 1905, a collection of poems by her brother Thoby Stephen and various male friends. The review is printed in an appendix to the first volume of Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography.84 1: 205-6

Allowed uncensored access to her father's library, she made rich use of it. Leslie Stephen once commented to himself that Ginia is devouring books, almost faster than I like. 1: 51 Her habit of voracious reading, continued throughout her life, came from here, as did the foundation of an intellectual independence so powerful as to redefine not only modern fiction but also the conventions governing the literary representation of women. Lyndall Gordon observes that VW's bookishness drew her closer to her father than his other children were.

Between 1 January and 30 June 1897, her reading included but was not limited to the following: Charlotte Brontë, Lady Barlow (a commentator on Charles Darwin), Dinah Mulock Craik, George Eliot, Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Henry James, Thomas Macaulay, Samuel Pepys, William Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope.1-2 She was also absorbed in Richard Hakluyt's Elizabethan adventure texts this year: this work would be back in her consciousness when she wrote The Voyage Out.142, 404

Virginia read Aeschylus, Homer, Sophocles, and Plato, among others, with Clara Pater. In 1902, however, the Cambridge-educated Janet Case, who was a feminist as well as a classicist, took over as tutor, and with her Virginia learned to read difficult texts not only with great rigour but also with appreciation and pleasure.21 143-4

Nevertheless, Virginia continued to feel her educational isolation, especially after her brother Thoby had gone up to Cambridge. Theres nothing like talk as an educator I'm sure, she wrote to him.145

In handwriting Woolf often omits apostrophes.

Virginia's tutor Janet Case became her lifelong friend.143-4 In her late teens she had an array of female friends of ten to twenty years older than herself: Violet Dickinson, philanthropic Quaker, Kitty Maxse, Kensington hostess, Nelly (Lady Eleanor) Cecil, aristocratic writer (officially known as Lady Robert Cecil), Virginia's cousin Emma Vaughan, and Emma's sister-in-law Madge Vaughan (who was daughter of the writer John Addington Symonds and mother of the college principal Janet Vaughan). Most were women of achievement, and with each the relationship was somewhat erotic. Generally, these friendships lapsed when the Bloomsbury years began, but they provided the developing author with crucial personal and intellectual nourishment in their time.160-9

Gordon Square

Because Virginia was recovering from her breakdown after her father's death, Vanessa took the primary responsibility for settling the family into their newly independent life. Virginia instead spent some time out of London, staying with a succession of people including her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen at Cambridge. She was deeply frustrated by the lingering restrictions imposed on her after her spell of illness, and by not having a room of her own.4 203-4 At Gordon Square permanently by December 1904, she began the street haunting (preferably at dusk in winter for the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets),4: 480 which she was to continue all her life and to publish an essay on in 1927.206-7

Work

This college, founded in 1885, offered evening classes to working women and men. VW lectured and led discussions on English Literature, English History, and Composition until December 1907.5, 13 222-3 Her work there began at a time when her professional career as a writer and reviewer was also just getting under way. Lyndall Gordon writes that she was at this time self-disciplined, professional, prolific, and courageous.

The Group

(Vanessa launched a parallel meeting for artists on Fridays: the Friday Club.) VW wrote that the Thursday evenings were the germ of all that has since come to be called—in newspapers, in novels, in Germany, in France—even, I daresay, in Turkey and Timbuktu—by the name of Bloomsbury. 164 Hermione Lee writes that the three words the Bloomsbury group have been so much used as to have become almost unusable—and, to some, almost unbearable. 262

Those who have discussed the Group include S. P. Rosenbaum in An Educated Man's Daughter, 1983, and Christine Froula in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde, 2005.

Scholar Mark Hussey, who offers a succinct account of the group's complexities and transformations, notes that its definition depends on whose account is consulted. 34 What is certain is that the group began as a cluster of friends—artists, writers, thinkers—and that they participated fully in the broader, accelerating social and cultural change of the years before and after the First World War and in many ways helped to define that change. Personal transitions in the lives of the group members coincided with change in the broader sphere, from the time Leslie Stephen's children began to live newly independent lives when he died in 1904.

Early members of what VW called Old Bloomsbury (to distinguish the original members of the group from later additions) included Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, John Maynard Keynes, Molly and Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, Adrian Stephen, and Saxon Sydney-Turner. Over time, the group expanded to include other friends and younger members (such as the Bell children, Julian Bell, Quentin and Angelica, and David Garnett), and, in what Quentin Bell called almost a second generation of Bloomsbury, Rupert Brooke, Katherine Cox, Jacques Raverat (husband of Gwen Raverat), Frances Darwin (later Cornford), and others.36 Other figures who though not of Bloomsbury are sometimes associated with it include: Carrington, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and T. S. Eliot.

The group's name, derived from the area of London in which several of its members lived (the area that includes the University of London) flags a key feature: it met in personal spaces and was drawn and held together over the years by personal relationships and shared interests. As time passed, Bloomsbury migrated to a variety of locations: after Vanessa married Clive Bell, in 1907, Adrian and Virginia moved to 29 Fitzroy Square, and continued the meetings there; during the war it met in a club in Soho;263 after the war outposts such as Charleston, where Vanessa, Grant and Garnett had moved in 1916, and the Woolfs' Sussex home, Monk's House, became new centers of Bloomsbury activity. 36

The cultural production of members of Bloomsbury was prodigious, embracing the imaginative, critical, and political writing of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E. M. Forster, and Lytton Strachey, the economic theories of Maynard Keynes, the painting of Vanessa Bell, and Clive Bell's art criticism (especially Art, 1914, which theorised modern painting). Roger Fry's Grafton Gallery exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, which opened on 6 November 1910, had major cultural impact, and so did his establishment with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant of the Omega Workshops, which opened at 33 Fitzroy Square on 8 July 1913.195

Bloomsbury came to designate a new sensibility in philosophy, literature, art, and politics, and its growth has been linked with the crucial break between the Edwardians and the Georgians, the point when human character changed 263 3: 421 (as VW wrote famously in her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown). In 1910 (the year Woolf named as representing the break with the past), political, social, and aesthetic change was everywhere. King Edward VII died (on 6 May); there was a constitutional crisis over the powers of the House of Lords in relation to financial decisions of the House of Commons; Women's Suffrage politics were at their most heated (with 119 suffragists arrested on Black Friday kgs: link to # 11956?, 18 November, for marching on the House of Commons); the Liberal Government of Prime Minister Asquith held shakily to its authority. In a book analysing the forces at work in this year of change, Peter Stansky writes that there was a sense of living in parlous times. 154

In an atmosphere of social, political, and artistic upheaval, art and politics merged in the public mind, and Bloomsbury was perceived as politically and aesthetically revolutionary. Stansky quotes a critic writing in the Daily Herald, a Labour paper: The Post-Impressionists are in the company of the Great Rebels of the World. In politics the only movements worth considering are Woman Suffrage and Socialism. They are both Post-Impressionist in their desire to scrap old decaying forms and find for themselves a new working ideal. 7

Later, however, Bloomsbury was attacked as an arrogant, self-regarding, immoral, upper-class clique. D. H. Lawrence said Keynes and his friends were black beetles, and in Women in Love he attacked the group's aesthetic in general and Lady Ottoline Morrelll in particular. Many other writers, some from inside, some from outside the group, published satiric portraits—Wyndham Lewis, Marjorie Strachey, Flora Mayor, Osbert Sitwell.266-7

Piecing together its intellectual family tree, scholars and critics have looked both forward and back from Bloomsbury. It has been seen as descending from the late eighteenth-century Clapham Sect (to which VW's great-grandfather James Stephen belonged) and from the Cambridge University secret society the Apostles (to which several members of the Bloomsbury group, including VW's husband, had been elected). It has also been seen as having given birth to later clusters of aesthetic and intellectual friends, including the Memoir Club founded by Molly MacCarthy in 1920. Lee writes that Bloomsbury persisted as an organism for over thirty or forty years in the form of little overlapping groups and clubs; these sprang up for the purposes of discussions or play-readings or exhibitions or domestic entertainment. 263

When it began, however, it was friends and it was talk. Talk, VW wrote in Old Bloomsbury (which she read as a paper to the Memoir Club near the end of 1921 or in 1922) even the talk which had such tremendous results upon the lives and characters of the two Miss Stephens . . . is as elusive as smoke. 165 But she remembered the excitement of the talk, which kept them still sitting in a circle at two or three in the morning. 168 To her and to Vanessa, she said, it gave the pleasure that undergraduates get when they meet friends of their own for the first time. 168 It challenged her mind as nothing had yet done: Never have I listened so intently to each step and half-step in an argument. Never have I been at such pains to sharpen and launch my little dart. And then what joy it was when one's contribution was accepted. 168 Another liberation was the group's absence of interest in conventional feminine self-presentation, a little later by its absence of restraint in conversation about sex. Sex permeated our conversation, she told the Memoir Club.173-4 Indeed the future of Bloomsbury was to prove that many variations can be played on the theme of sex. 174-5 This frankness and freedom about sex and gender roles, was a consequential fact in the lives of all of the members of the group, and it had great impact on VW's work, which, in one of its dimensions, reworks the conventions defining woman.

Family Milestones

This holiday was marred by sickness and ultimately by calamity. First Vanessa fell ill with appendicitis and forced them all to stop at Corinth, then to split into two groups. Vanessa was cared for in Athens for two weeks by Violet, then fell ill again on the way home. The party finally left for England on 29 October, Thoby having gone on ahead.229-30

On 1 November 1906, VW returned to London to find Thoby in bed with high fever and severe diarrhorea, which was ultimately identified as typhoid.

Virginia did not break down over this bereavement, but became a source of strength to others. Because Violet Dickinson was also ill with typhoid, it was thought necessary to conceal Thoby's death from her, and for nearly a month Virginia sent regular letters to Violet charting Thoby's fictional progress towards recovery.231

The household in Brunswick Square comprised Virginia and Adrian Stephen, John Maynard Keynes, and Duncan Grant. On 4 December 1911 Leonard Woolf joined it.23

Suffrage

Virginia's work consisted mainly of addressing envelopes, and she committed herself only to some weeks of this at the beginning and end of 1910. But she was also associated with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) and both she and Leonard worked for the Women's Cooperative Guild. (Leonard's sisters Clara and Flora were active in the suffrage movement.)370 Naomi Black writes that VW's memberships thus place her squarely in the middle of the organizational network of social feminism in Britain. 280 VW associated frequently with women who were passionately involved with suffragism, such as Marjorie, Pernel, and Pippa Strachey, Margaret Llewelyn Davies, and later Ethel Smyth. The women's movement appears frequently in her works, both fictional and polemical, including Night and Day, The Years and Three Guineas. Hermione Lee writes that the suffragists' tactics of battering on the doors of the excluding establishments worked their way lastingly into her imagination. Trespassing on forbidden ground is one of her favourite images. 281, 279-82 277-8

With the declaration of war, however, on 4 August, 1914, VW's politics and those of the NUWSS parted company. The NUWSS supported the government, and on August the sixth resolved to suspend political activity in favour of working to help those displaced and otherwise damaged by the war. A number of prominent members, including Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Maude Royden, resigned to form the Women's International League. On 9 October 1915 Christabel Pankhurst and others published the first number of Britannia, formerly known as The Suffragette.

Subversion and Satire

With Adrian Stephen, Duncan Grant, Guy Ridley, and Anthony Buxton, she toured the premier battleship HMS Dreadnought impersonating the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage. Virginia was disguised as Prince Mendax (Latin for liar). The story was subsequently leaked to the press and the issue raised in Parliament. As Hermione Lee observes, this was not a meaningless prank, but instead combin[ed] all possible forms of subversion: ridicule of empire, infiltration of the nation's defenses, mockery of bureaucratic procedures, cross-dressing and sexual ambiguity. 283 The consequences were mild, however: Virginia was chastised by relatives, and Cole and Grant received minor reprimands from the embarrassed Navy.282-7

Suitors

Virginia Stephen flirted mildly with and received proposals from a number of men, all Cambridge contemporaries of her brother Thoby.

Hilton Young proposed in mid-May 1909, and Walter Lamb on 20 July 1911.18, 23

Leonard Woolf

Leonard Woolf was a close Cambridge friend of Virginia's brother Thoby Stephen and a member of the Apostles. A Jew, with family roots in London and Amsterdam, he grew up in London, first comfortably in Lexham Gardens, then, after his father's death when he was eleven, in suburban Putney.299 He went as a scholarship boy to St Paul's School, then on a Classics scholarship to Cambridge. There he was deeply influenced by philosopher G. E. Moore, and became a close friend of Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Desmond MacCarthy, Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, and Saxon Sydney-Turner—all subsequently members of the Bloomsbury Group.

After Cambridge, he got a job with the Colonial Civil Service. In 1904 he left for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he served until 1911 as a colonial administrator. For this work he learned both Tamil and Sinhalese. He came to abhor the job, having become utterly disillusioned with the colonial system he administered so effectively. 298 He wrote his first novel, The Village in the Jungle, in 1911 while on leave, and published it in 1913. It is told from the point of view of its Sinhalese characters.370

Leonard had met Virginia and Vanessa in Thoby's rooms in 1901, and had fallen in love with Vanessa.370 On 17 November 1904 he dined at 46 Gordon Square just before leaving to take up his position in Ceylon.370 4 293 While he was away Vanessa married, and his attraction to Virginia was fostered by Lytton Strachey, who told his friend in a letter of February 1909: If you came & proposed she'ld accept you. She really would. 304, 808 Back in on leave in England in June 1911, Leonard saw Virginia socially—they went to the Russian Ballet together—and he became her tenant at 38 Brunswick Square in December. In January 1912 he dared to make a proposal.306

It is much remarked that VW referred to Leonard as a penniless Jew. Was she anti-semitic? She married a Jew in an anti-semitic culture, and she wrote to him candidly before they were married that his Jewishness was a difficulty for her: Possibly, your being a Jew comes in also at this point. You seem so foreign. 1: 496This is the outcome of her honest self-awareness, yet her attitude towards his family gave pain, and was offensive. Also offensive was her stance in the sketch Jews in her only recently rediscovered notebook from 1909. Lee writes that anti-semitism was quite usual among the English upper classes until well into the 1930s and that for VW "racial and class prejudice were indistinguishable. 313 Leonard's Jewishness was a powerful element in his consciousness, and in hers, and, writes Julia Briggs, he had many opportunities to see himself through the eyes of the anti-Semitic upper-class Englishmen whose cultural identity he had adopted at Cambridge.65 Of the first publication of the Hogarth Press—two stories, one by her, one by him—his was Three Jews. It was, however, only in part because of his Jewishness that they later had plans for suicide should Hitler invade England: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson had the same plans.

Leonard's lifetime's commitment in politics was to British socialism:327 a commitment with one of its original roots in an early identification with Jews as victims. 300 He was not a supporter of women's rights until he worked towards reforming the divorce laws with Margaret Llewelyn Davies (whom he saw as an exhiliarating Joan of Arc figure).328 After that he became an honorary feminist, although even afterwards, his blank spots over Virginia's work always centred on her politics. 304

On 1 May she wrote to Leonard explaining her warm but still ambivalent feelings for him; he found the letter encouraging and resigned from the Colonial Service.309-11

Hermione Lee considers two questions which remain unanswered: whether Vanessa and Lytton Strachey planned together to bring this marriage about so that Leonard would take on responsibility for Virginia, and whether Vanessa was candid enough with him about Virginia's condition. But in spite of the difficulties—his desire, his Jewishness, her instability—the Woolfs settled into a deeply satisfying relationship. Both came to think of their marriage as an opposing force to death. 311, 319

Both before their marriage and during its early months, Leonard consulted several doctors (and Vanessa) on the question whether VW ought to have children. They had mixed opinions. He decided that she should not. Frequently, and, sometimes bitterly, she regretted her childlessness.334-5

From the outset, there was much speculation among their friends about the sexual relationship between Virginia and Leonard, and wide belief that it was a failure. Stories of her sexual incompetence and Leonard's heroically restrained normal sexual appetites became commonplace. 331 Hermione Lee corrects over-simplification with a balanced account of a complicated issue which cannot be seen clearly on the available evidence.323, 331-7

On 18 August the couple left England for their honeymoon through France, Spain, and Italy, returning to London in early October.25-6

Leonard Woolf worked for Roger Fry as secretary of the second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, held at the Grafton Gallery from October 1912 to January 1913.324

VW and Vanessa had only recently secured Asheham, taking a joint lease on it in October 1911. It became Virginia's country home after she gave up Little Talland House (in Firle), which she had named after her childhood summer residence when she first rented it in December 1910.316 1: 199-201

In October 1913, VW stayed in George Duckworth's house, becoming once more the dependant of the man who, for her, epitomized sexual abuse and social power. She then continued her rest cure at Asheham and in Cornwall.330

VW refused to see Leonard for two months, sent disturbing letters to friends, and was reported to have attacked her nurses.330-1

Illness and its Interpretation

Information about VW's early breakdowns is scant. For those after 1912, however, Leonard provided the witness of his minutely kept diaries . . . coded in Tamil and Sinhalese, letters, and memoirs. Lee summarizes Leonard's view of Virginia's illness: that she was manic depressive . . . that her illness could be controlled by a regulated pattern of rest and food, and that it was related to her creative genius, to her intense work-levels and to the stress of finishing a book. This is, says Lee, like other contemporary views of the matter, a self-protecting narrative. 178, 180

Modern Woolf scholars are likely to reject the notion that VW was, as her family liked to joke, mad as a hatter, and to believe, as Lyndall Gordon does, that her instability had some biochemical base which was not understood. As a corrective to commentary which represents VW as insane and as a victim, Hermione Lee bases her analysis on the strong assertion that Virginia Woolf was a sane woman who had an illness . . . a person of exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism. She attributes VW's illness to genetic, environmental and biological factors. 175Asserting that VW's letters and diaries make hers perhaps the most fully documented literary life of the twentieth century 1, Stephen Trombley, examines the way in which those suspected of harbouring madness have been dealt with, especially if they happen to be women. 2 He analyses the assumptions of VW's doctors (Savage, Craig and Hyslop) and places them firmly within the history of the discourse of power. 241

VW was troubled by a range of intermittent mental and physical problems as an adult. They varied from mild to almost unbearably severe, and included anxiety attacks, hallucinations, fevers, headaches, and an extreme reluctance (or refusal) to eat. Critics have suggested many different causes, both genetic (mainly from the Stephen side) and situational (with pressures caused by family relations, sexual abuse, her writing, war, and other concerns).65-6, 175-6 Doctors responded by prescribing drugs, breaks from reading and writing, and rest cures at Jean Thomas's nursing home for women at Burley Park in Twickenham.182-3

VW's varying reactions to her own illnesses included guilt about what she saw as her lack of mental and moral control over her body; deep anger toward her physicians and the larger operational codes of the medical profession; and fascination with the great creative power she sometimes gained when she was ill.179-80, 187-92 She sensed this power after her mother's death in 1895, and in 1922 wrote: Once or twice I have felt that odd whirr of wings in the head which comes when I am ill so often . . . . Something happens in my mind. It refuses to go on registering impressions. It shuts itself up. It becomes chrysalis. I lie quite torpid, often with acute physical pain . . . Then suddenly something springs . . . ideas rush in me; often though this is before I can control my mind or pen.192

Hogarth House

In March Leonard had leased Hogarth House for five years at a rate of £150 per year. He thought that living just outside London would protect Virginia from the hazardous excitements and pressures of social life. They lived there until 1924 and named their printing press after the house. Though they came to this house early in the harsh wartime years, they flourished in it.352

VW declared [her]self a Fabian in January 1915.348

Each meeting consisted of dinner, followed by an address from a speaker, followed by discussion. Speakers included E. M. Forster, Virginia's brother Adrian, and Ray Strachey. About a dozen working-class women attended; class relations were not entirely easy.360-1

VW's feminist and socialist views went along with firm opposition to the war, and to the militaristic political structures that had produced the war, which is evident in many of her writings. Leonard was much occupied with his political work throughout his career. He wrote for (and sometimes edited) the New Statesman, the Nation and Athenæum, and International Review; he was heavily involved with suffragism, the Labour Party, the Fabian Society, and the League of Nations, among other affiliations. He stood (unsuccessfully) as a candidate for election to Parliament in 1920. 328, 347 373

On 2 October Affable Hawk had agreed with Bennett that women are innately inferior to men in intellectual power, and that women's indisputable desire to be dominated is . . . a proof of intellectual inferiority. 2: 339 VW challenges Bennett, who had said he could name fifty men to one woman of achievement, to name fifty male poets superior to Sappho. She leaves a barb: Thus, though women have every reason to hope that the intellect of the male sex is steadily diminishing, it would be unwise, until they have more evidence than the great war and the great peace supply, to announce it as a fact. 2: 339 The Affable Hawk returned to his point that in intellectual pursuits, in spite of education, women cannot equal men. VW's second letter cites Sappho and Ethel Smyth as women whose creativity had to overcome social and material obstacles and outlines the necessary conditions for creative work of genius: the conditions which make it possible for a Shakespeare to exist are that he shall have had predecessors in his art, shall make one of a group where art is freely discussed and practised, and shall himself have the utmost of freedom of action and experience. Perhaps in Lesbos, but never since, have these conditions been the lot of women. 2: 341

VW thrived on the energy of London, but the country was a quiet refuge for her. She served as secretary for the Rodmell Labour Party and helped the local Women's Institute produce a play.165

Daily Schedule

By the time the Woolfs were living at Hogarth House and Monk's House, Virginia had established a fairly routine schedule, which she recorded in her diary and called her work account. It was sometimes disrupted, but often consisted of creative or critical writing in the morning; revising around lunchtime; diary- or letter-writing after tea; and visiting or reading (sometimes for review) in the evenings.411-12

The Woolfs' first years in Hogarth House were war years. The war in the air astonished and terrified Londoners, most of whom had never seen an aeroplane. In the bitterly cold winter of 1917-18, they spent many nights waking up or interrupting their dinner parties, to go down to the basement with clothes, quilts, a watch and a torch, and sit on wooden boxes in the coal cellar, or lie on mattresses in the kitchen, during the bombardments. 353 The experience is written into The Years.

Like many of her friends and associates, VW was staunchly anti-war. Her brother Adrian was an active pacifist and secretary of the No-Conscription Fellowship, and she and many friends were COs, or Conscientious Objectors. Moreover, the Women's Movement had split over whether or not to support the fighting, and Woolf's sympathies were with the women working for peace. 89 In a letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies VW called the war a preposterous masculine fiction (a description, she said, based on a daily reading of the Times, which made the male part of Britain, or perhaps Europe, seem like some curious tribe in Central Africa).2: 76

The Woolfs were planning to acquire a printing press as early as 22 February 1915, when Virginia wrote to Margaret Llewelyn Davies about their excitement over the prospect: there's a chance of damaging the Webb influence irretrievably, (which is my ambition in life). Presses only cost £17.17, and can be worked easily. 2: 76 When the dream became a reality the political motive became linked with an equally strong literary one, and the idea that it would all be easy simply faded.

Thus they founded the Hogarth Press. The Excelsior Printing and Supply Company charged £19.5s.5d. for a small hand press, some type, and an instruction booklet; but when the press arrived, on 24 April, it had not been properly packed for its great weight, and was broken (or in Woolf's words, smashed in half!).8 2: 150 The type came in great solid blocks that had to be broken up and sorted by letter and font. By 2 May they had set up the type for their first publication: not yet Two Stories, but a handbill advertising it. Virginia was finding the manual labour exciting, soothing, ennobling and satisfying, and although Leonard heaved a terrific sigh and said I wish to God we'd never bought the cursed thing! he explained this remark by adding that this was only because he would now never do anything else. 2: 151

Once the press was repaired they printed their handbill. Their first book (Two Stories, containing Virginia's The Mark on the Wall and Leonard's Three Jews) had to be set up and printed two pages at a time; after that they had to break up the type in order to set the next two pages, because their stock of type was so small. Nonetheless, after working almost every afternoon for two months, they published Two Stories in July that year. In October they embarked on a series of assistants, of whom the first on a commercial footing was Ralph Partridge, engaged in August 1920. They acquired more type, but also came to an arrangement with a local printer to print extra copies of their second publication, Katherine Mansfield's Prelude—a practice they repeated later with other works and other commercial printers. After the financial success of Virginia's Kew Gardens, Leonard bought the Press a brass nameplate costing half a guinea. In November 1921 they took delivery of a second-hand Minerva printing press worked by a heavy treadle which cost £70.10s, and 77 pounds weight of type at a price of £18.9s.5d. (This press, given by Virginia to Vita Sackville-West, is today on display at Sissinghurst.) In mid 1922 the Press reached another landmark with the engagement of Marjorie Thomson (or Joad).9-10, 12-15 Others who worked at the Press included George (Dadie) Rylands (who later recalled many happy hours setting up type with Virginia), Richard Kennedy (who published A Boy at the Hogarth Press in 1972), and from 1931 John Lehmann (who published Thrown to the Woolfs in 1978).17 The diary of the sixteen-year-old Kennedy (reconstructed later, and therefore inherently suspect) is nonetheless delightful in its sharpness and naivety. On first meeting, Leonard looked to him like an extremely intellectual wolf . . . a very Socrates of wolves. 6 In cutting pages and parcelling up review copies, Mrs W is a pretty fast worker considering she's not a professional like Miss Belcher and myself. 42 When asked at a party what he thought of her books and confessing that he found them heavy, he felt rather like Peter denying Christ. 47

The Press, which began as therapy and for the purpose of publishing the works of its owners, grew into a major engine of modern culture and thought.371-3 Its political interests were served by enlightened and clear thinking from well-informed persons on such . . . issues as disarmament, the League of Nations, imperialism, racial prejudice, education reform, labor conditions, socialism, etc. 4 It launched and maintained a number of specialised series, covering the new discipline of psychoanalysis as well as literature and politics. (One of its achievements was making available in England the papers of the International Psycho-Analytical Institute in Vienna.) It published creative works by Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood,4 and Vita Sackville-West (generally when these authors were still little known), non-fiction by Roger Fry, Gertrude Stein, Jane Harrison, and Viscountess Rhondda, and translations (mostly the first in English) of Chekhov, Gorky, and Freud.371-3 The list reflects some of the most significant strands in contemporary thought.24

The Hogarth Press bibliographer J. Howard Woolmer provides an appendix listing the various series: Hogarth Essays, Hogarth Lectures on Literature, Hogarth Living Poets, Hogarth Stories (two titles only), Hogarth Letters, Merttens Lectures on War and Peace, Day to Day Pamphlets, Biographies through the Eyes of Contemporaries (two titles only), World-Makers and World-Shakers, Psycho-Analytical Epitomes, and the International Psycho-Analytical Library.

VW was especially pleased with her new ability to publish her own texts. She later observed: I'm the only woman in England free to write what I like. 374-5, 818 The Press also allowed for collaboration with her sister: Vanessa Bell designed many covers for its books, including most of those written by Virginia.

VW herself did editorial work and some type-setting and binding, but Leonard took most of the daily decisions and did most of the administrative work, with the Press's gradually growing and often changing staff.363-9

During the previous fifteen years of its life it had earned an income of £814 per annum (an average which takes in the total of three pounds in 1924 and £2,442 in 1938, its most profitable year up to that point). In 1947 the Press became allied with Chatto and Windus.3, 5n3

E. M. Forster

She and Forster began to know one another this year and became lifelong friends. He reviewed her books, and she his, and in defence of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness they wrote jointly. Morgan's opinions mattered to her very much, yet in 1927 she offended him with her essay on his fiction. They saw one another frequently and over many years, with respect and affection, although mixed with some mutual wariness.271

Katherine Mansfield

They developed a relationship that was competitive yet sustaining and essential to both. In August 1920 Woolf commented on Mansfield in her diary: a woman caring as I care for writing is rare enough I suppose to give me the queerest sense of echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I've spoken. 2: 61 They discussed works by Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and T. S. Eliot, along with each other's ideas and writing. Mansfield reviewed Woolf's Night and Day and Kew Gardens, and the Hogarth Press published Mansfield's Prelude.390-3

Mansfield was still on VW's mind in July 1928, five years after her death: Woolf recalled a dream in which Mansfield was lying on a sofa in a room high up, & a great many sad faced women were round her. 3: 187

Ottoline Morrell

After this VW saw Ottoline Morrell many times at Garsington and at Ottoline's other salons, where guests included W. B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley, Mark Gertler, and Dorothy Brett, among many others.40 167-8 Relations between them were difficult, however, in large part because Lady Ottoline felt the sting of Bloomsbury's, and of Woolf's, mockery. When they first met, VW was all gush in a letter to her but satiric about her in conversation with others.276 Nevertheless, the two were linked by politics and the war. Phillip Morrell, Ottoline's husband, a Liberal Member of Parliament, took a stand in the House of Commons against war fever, and Ottoline herself took in conscientious objectors as labourers on her farm at Garsington. Though the two women were not close in the 1920s, they became more so in the 1930s, and they remained friends until Lady Ottoline's death in 1938. VW wrote her obituary for the Times.276-7

T. S. Eliot

Leonard Woolf wrote to Eliot, whose Prufrock and Other Observations he had read, to invite him to send some work to the Hogarth Press. The letter led to a meeting, and ultimately to the publication by the Press of Eliot's Poems, 1919, The Waste Land, 1923, and Homage to John Dryden, Three Essays on Poetry of the Seventeenth Century, 1924. In her diary entry for the day on which she and Eliot met, Woolf notes that beneath the surface it is fairly evident that he is very intellectual, intolerant, with strong views of his own, & a poetic creed. I'm sorry to say that this sets up Ezra Pound & Wyndham Lewis as great poets, or in the current phrase very interesting writers. He admires Mr Joyce immensely. 1: 218-19

Early in their friendship Woolf sensed Eliot's intellectual ambitions and strengths, but she also detected his reserve and playfully mocked him: as sharp, narrow & much of a stick, 1: 262 or as coming to dinner in a four-piece suit. 441 Their friendship became easier as it aged. He favourably reviewed Monday or Tuesday and published On Being Ill in the first number of his New Criterion (lately, and soon to be again, The Criterion). When he adopted British nationality, in 1927, Leonard Woolf was one of his sponsors.81 The conversation between Woolf and Eliot left its mark in her work, and she admired him enough to admonish herself not to try to be like him.

VW observed that the poem has great beauty & force of phrase: symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure. . . . One was left, however, with some strong emotion. 2: 178

James Joyce

Harriet Shaw Weaver had approached the Hogarth Press about publishing Ulysses in April 1918, but the Woolfs declined, mainly because they could not have printed so massive a work themselves and because Leonard could find no printer prepared to be liable in case of an obscenity charge. 391 VW gave serious attention to the novel, which obviously challenged and threatened her. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense. 2: 199 She took issue with Joyce's depictions of sex and bodily functions, and made mostly negative comments about Ulysses in general: it fails, she said, because of the comparative poverty of the writer's mind.3: 34 Her comment has prompted observers from Eliot onwards to question and criticise her literary judgment, and some to accuse her of snobbery. But Joyce, together with Dorothy Richardson, affected the way she wrestled with the relation between reality and consciousness. Recent critics have emphasized the complexity of her response to Joyce.390-1, 439-40

Jane Harrison

The classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison made a great impact on Woolf's views on women in scholarship and women in history. The Hogarth Press published her Reminiscences of a Student's Life, 1925.

Harrison is glimpsed in semi-fictionalized form as an emblem of greatness, J— H— herself, in A Room of One's Own (1929). Harrison died about two months after this meeting.108 16 26

Others

Since VW moved in a variety of social circles, her range of literary acquaintance was very wide. Her associates included such established, celebrated writers as Thomas Hardy and Henry James, popular authors such as Vita Sackville-West and Hugh Walpole, and lesser-known writers such as Hope Mirrlees and Julia Strachey.107, 130, 161, 246-7, 346 615

Vita Sackville-West

Woolf thought her [n]ot much to my severer taste—florid, moustached, parakeet coloured, with all the supple ease of the aristocracy, but not the wit of the artist. 2: 216 Often Virginia would figure Vita as her social and emotional superior, but intellectual inferior. Nevertheless, the women were interested in each other and this first meeting marked the beginning of a close, lasting relationship.

Woolf frequently returned to an observation she made on this trip of Vitakdc; no apostrophe in grocer's? img no shin[ing] in the grocers shop in Sevenoaks with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. 3: 52

She noted in her diary: All the centuries seemed lit up, the past expressive, articulate . . . & so we reach the days of Elizabeth quite easily. 3: 125

Vita gave [VW] the central relationship of her forties, a relationship VW celebrated in Orlando.522 In addition to their personal emotional relationship, the two were successfully involved professionally. From November 1926 Vita was one of the Hogarth Press's best-selling authors; her novel The Edwardians, for instance, was immensely popular. Though by 1935 VW felt that,they were no longer so close personally as they had once been, they remained on very good terms until Woolf's death.97 371, 519, 761

Virginia was keen to regain access to the amenities of London—music, the British Museum, social life (her delight in parties, she wrote, was a piece of jewellery I inherit from my mother)2: 250—but before leaving Richmond she recorded her thanks to this beautiful & lovable house, which has done us such a good turn for almost precisely nine years. 2: 297 Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant decorated the new house, and the Woolfs (with the Hogarth Press, which was stowed in the basement, and Marjorie Thomson, later Joad) moved in on 15 March.80 473-4 16

Thomson was living with C. E. M. Joad, the philosopher, and used his name. 2: 592n1

Hermione Lee notes that during this period [p]assionate celebrations of London filled the diaries and letters and spilled over into Mrs. Dalloway. 474

Social and Political Activity

By the time of the move to Tavistock Square, VW began to socialize more than she had in years. She circulated with Bloomsbury familiars and (re)acquainted herself with Rebecca West, Rose Macaulay, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Todd, Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward, Walter Sickert, and Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell Sitwell, among others.467-73

Beaton's character sketch indicates that the image of VW which persisted for several later decades—as ethereal, asexual, and feeble—was already growing at the height of her contemporary fame and influence. Beaton (who had a professional investment in a certain concept of feminine beauty, and at least a reason for being annoyed with Woolf) wrote that although she looked distinguished and powerful, she was actually fearful, uncertain, and frail (a viewpoint that he emphasized rhetorically with a clutch of descriptive metaphors).566

Lecturing, Broadcasting

VW broadcast again, on her own, in 1937. Part of her broadcast (a reading of her essay Craftsmanship) is in the National Sound Archive of the British Library (M7060). The only extant recording of her voice, it can be heard online in the BBC Archive. Mark Hussey reports Quentin Bell's remark that the recording does not give an accurate impression of Woolf's speech. 565, 843 63

In October 1928 VW addressed in turn the students of the two Cambridge women's colleges: first Newnham, then Girton. She developed these lectures on women and writing into A Room of One's Own (1929).3: 200-1 116 She was accompanied to Newnham by Leonard, Vanessa, and Vanessa's young daughter Angelica; she went to Girton with Vita Sackville-West. She recorded a mixed and now well-known response to the experience: Starved but valiant young women—that's my impression. Intelligent eager, poor; & destined to become schoolmistresses in shoals. I blandly told them to drink wine & have a room of their own. . . . I get such a sense of tingling & vitality from an evenings talk like tha . . . . I felt elderly & mature. And nobody respected me. They were very eager, egotistical, or rather not much impressed by age & repute.3: 200-1

Radclyffe Hall and The Well of Loneliness

Both Forster and VW had written their own homosexual texts: Forster's novel Maurice had circulated privately; and in the month after this VW published Orlando, her secret love-letter to Vita, of which she noted: Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note. 3: 131 Censorship, and in particular censorship of sexual subject matter, had long been on VW's mind. Indeed, Lee sees Orlando as a critique of sexual censorship, and of fixed notions of sexual difference, which is also cunningly self-censoring. 523

On 16 November, Sir Chartres Biron ruled The Well of Loneliness obscene, on grounds of its subject-matter, and ordered it destroyed. Though she joined others in condemning censorship of Hall's book, VW made it clear that she did not think highly of the novel itself, which she described in her diary as a meritorious dull book.527 3: 193 The experience of the trial, however, fed into her thinking about the linked issues of gender, sexuality, and freedom of expression.

Their meeting was prompted by a letter Smyth sent to Woolf expressing her great admiration for A Room of One's Own and for Woolf's creative genius more generally. She was a person of enormous definiteness and determination, and VW had already read several volumes of her autobiography. 255The friendship came to be strained by Smyth's unrestrained demands, but the two respected and enjoyed one another. Ethel influenced the shape and matter of Virginia's later texts, and helped her to think and write about her own life with increased clarity and force.585, 594-5 Virginia described to Ethel (and thereby reviewed for herself) the difficult process of writing The Waves, which she was finishing when they me; and. Ethel's experience and personality also provided material for Woolf's construction of the characters of Rose Pargiter in The Years and Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts. In her letters to Ethel VW was often more candid about her personal history, including her childhood abuse, than in letters to other friends.5: 13; 6: 459-60

In her speech to the London and National Society for Women's Service in 1931, VW described Ethel Smyth as of the race of pioneers, of pathmakers. She has gone before and felled trees and blasted rocks and built bridges and thus made a way for those who come after her. . . . In my own profession . . . I have no doubt that I owe a great deal to some mute and inglorious Ethel Smyth.600

VW's political voice grew more articulate and emphatic during the last decade of her life.

The event was organized in part by Pippa Strachey; other guests included Vanessa Bell, Cicely Hamilton, Laura Knight, Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, and T. S. Eliot. Here Woolf gave a landmark talk, Speech of January 21 1931, later revised and published as Professions for Women.213 218-19 From this she developed the core of both The Years and Three Guineas.601-3

Through the 1930s, Woolf struggled to define herself and her work against the rise of Fascism in Europe, to chart the relationship between artistic and political tasks. She and her Bloomsbury friends began to be seen as politically ineffectual, as pacifism was rejected by both established and younger generations of writers and thinkers—including W. H. Auden, Julian Bell (Virginia's nephew), John Lehmann, Wyndham Lewis, and Stephen Spender, most of whom Woolf knew and published through the Hogarth Press.

But Woolf recorded in her diary in May 1940: Thinking is my fighting. 694 Her thinking manifested itself in various ways. She was involved to varying degrees with a number of leftist associations: the Labour Party, the International Association of Writers for the Defence of Culture, the National Peace Council, the FIL (For Intellectual Liberty); the Artists International Association; and the Council for Civil Liberties.178

However, she grew to be strongly opposed to most political and cultural institutions in their current form, regardless of their expressed ideologies. Public response to the British monarchy, which on the occasion of the funeral of George V combined a curious survival of barbarism, emotionalism, heraldry, ecclesiasticalism, sheer sentimentality, snobbery, and fellow-feeling for a commonplace man . . . so like ourselves, filled her with fascinated curiosity.669 In her writing, especially Three Guineas, Woolf turn[s] on its head the common belief that [Western] civilisation had to defend itself against the barbarities of Fascism. Standing on the edge of the debate as an outsider, a self-educated woman reader and writer, she constructed a critical version of British social history. 680 On principle she refused to accept official honours or awards.

Uncomfortable with marks of public recognition, VW developed a theory of the artistic and political benefits of anonymity. She expressed some measure of dissatisfaction, for instance, first with Stephen Tomlin's 1931 bust of her, and then with Winifred Holtby's 1932 study, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (the first monograph on her).622-3 As early as December 1927, she wrote in her diary: The dream is too often about myself. To correct this, & to forget one's own sharp absurd little personality, reputation & the rest of it, one should read; see outsiders; think more; write more logically; above all, be full of work; & practise anonymity. 3: 168-9

They met and talked, stayed at each other's homes, and discussed each other's writing. Bowen's work (especially The Hotel) shows Woolf's influence, and she often approached Woolf with awe and alarm; Woolf saw Bowen as sterling & sharp edged, and expressed interest in her texts, particularly The House in Paris.652-3

At Bowen's London home, Woolf met May Sarton, but their brief association did not develop beyond the superficial.700-1

Thinking of their mutual creative influence and of Fry's place in her family, Woolf surprised herself by grieving even more deeply for Fry than she had for another great friend, Lytton Strachey, who had died in January 1932. Roger's sister Margery Fry and his mistress Helen Anrep both asked Woolf to write his biography. She agreed, but found as time went on that it became a complicated, taxing responsibility.656, 709-11

In March and April 1936 VW had a period of threatened breakdown. This was a time of overwork against the clock (not uncommon in her professional life), of the visible political threat of Hitler (who had just invaded the Rhineland), and the consequent immersion of Leonard Woolf in political work which Virginia found disturbing. She began to re-hear the guns of the First World War in her head, and to entertain suicidal feelings.670-1

Julian Bell

As when her brother Thoby died in 1906, Virginia became a source of strength during the family crisis, concentrating especially on the needs of her bereaved sister, Vanessa Bell.702-3

Sigmund Freud

The Hogarth Press began publishing Freud in 1922, and continued through the following years, mainly through their highly successful production of the International Psycho-Analytical Library.72, 82 372 Freud's theories circulated around VW for years, but she did not begin to read him seriously until after the outbreak of World War Two. (She was reading Darwin and Gide at the same time.) She read Moses and Monotheism, Civilisation and its Discontents, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Thoughts for the Time on War & Death, and Why War? Hermione Lee observes that [r]eading Freud shocked and disturbed, as well as inspired her. She feared being reduced to a whirlpool, losing her power as an individual with choices to make. 725 Woolf engaged particularly with Freud's ideas about the persistence of primitive mindsets in modern society, the impact of infantile and childhood experience, and changing forms of patriarchal authority. Her interpretations of his work are found in such texts as Three Guineas, Between the Acts, and, most directly, her essay The Leaning Tower. In April 1939 she began to write her autobiography, A Sketch of the Past.722-6

The month before the outbreak of the war that everyone had been expecting, Leonard and Virginia Woolf moved from 52 Tavistock Square to 37 Mecklenburgh Square. The new address was also in Bloomsbury.

Three days into the war, and the day of her first air-raid warning, Woolf wrote: This is the worst of all my life's experiences. 5: 234 She was soon occupied with several pressing themes (artistic and social): the loss of individuality in the communal life; the regression into barbarism; and the feeling (as in the last war) of blackness and strain, of waiting in the dark. 718

On 10 May Germany had invaded Holland and Belgium. In the event of an invasion of England, they could indeed expect a terrible personal fate, on account of their anti-war politics, Leonard's anti-war career and his Jewish heritage. Though they did not have certain knowledge of this at the time, the Woolfs were on Hitler's 350-page Arrest List for Britain.212 730 Others (unknowingly) on this list included Nancy Cunard, Margery Fry, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Naomi Mitchison, Harold Nicolson, Sylvia Pankhurst, Bertrand Russell, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Beatrice Webb, and Rebecca West.863

VW was especially devastated by the effects of Nazi air raids on London. She had been inspired by her street haunting for many years, but was now deeply troubled by her views of the wrecked city. She recorded her observations in a shocked, rapid, jagged, intensely observant language. 741 Woolf wrote about the bombing mainly in her diary, but in a letter to Ethel Smyth she suggests that what touched and indeed raked what I call my heart in London was the grimy old women at the lodging house at the back, all dirty after the raid, & preparing to sit out another . . . And then the passion of my life, that is the city of London—to see London all blasted, that too raked my heart. 2: 218

The Woolfs suffered in most of the ways that many civilians suffered from the early phases of the war. Their house at Rodmell lay (like Vita Sackville-West's) beneath the flight-paths of German and Allied planes duelling in the Battle of Britain. They endured shortages of petrol and of food as well as the expectation of invasion.2: 221-3

Last Occupations

Despite the often major disturbances of war, VW continued to work.

In her audience at Brighton were Elizabeth Robins (feminist writer, actress, and Hogarth Press author) and her companion Octavia Wilberforce, a pioneering physician who was soon to become Woolf's doctor.733

Woolf continued at this time to write and to think carefully about the implications of her writing.

Forster had told Woolf In April 1935 that the library was retaining this policy.

In considering the various issues which prepared the ground for VW's suicide, critics have noted her feelings of horror about the war, her writing, her past, and most particularly the prospect of another mental and physical breakdown. She was eating little by the end of 1940: Octavia Wilberforce observed that she was as thin as a razor. 753 She felt she was losing the ability to write, and much of the work she did produce at the beginning of 1941 shows a vivid discomfort about daily living and about humanity.752-3

But it is difficult to mark precisely when she moved to a depressed and then to a suicidal state. Elizabeth Bowen last visited VW on 13 and 14 February, and later recalled: I remember her kneeling back on the floor—we were tacking away, mending a torn Spanish curtain in the house—and she sat back on her heels and put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun. Then she laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful, hooting way. And that is what has remained with me. So I get a curious shock when I see people regarding her entirely as a martyred . . . or definitely tragic sort of person, claimed by the darkness.2: 224

Commentary and analysis on her death does not abate. Maureen E. Mulvihill argues in a recent essay that Woolf 's suicide had a larger logic as response to a combination of external factors, apart from her own mental state.

VW's body was recovered three weeks later and cremated on 21 April 1941; her ashes are under the Stephen Tomlin bust of her in the garden of Monk's House.

Virginia Stephen was from the beginning a story-teller, a collector of words, an explorer of their impacts. At five she was able to tell her father a story every night. Two letters to her mother survive which were written when she was five or six.106-7

It continued weekly until April 1895 (the year Virginia's mother died). Two of its stories (A Cockney's Farming Experiences and The Experiences of a Paterfamilias) were published in the late twentieth century.781n64 1: 25, 28-9 Recently six issues from 1891, forty-eight from 1892, and thirteen from January to March 1895, have been published as Hyde Park Gate News. The Stephen Family Newspaper, edited by Gillian Lowe, 2005.xix These numbers, contained in two bound volumes survived, sitting for years in the British Library's Department of Manuscripts, waiting to be published. vii Inscribed with Virginia's initials, most issues are in Vanessa's handwriting; Virginia is said to have written most of it.xix-xx

Intended to amuse and impress a mother and father with very high standards, vii the magazine is composed of letters, news items, stories, advice, and a correspondence column.viii It parodies the styles of all these genres with a sure hand, and satirises those it reports on. It is parodic and satirical, ruthlessly anti-emotional. 108

The court and social items often deploy the first person plural or else the passive tense: We are sorry to say that Master Adrian Leslie Stephen has had a little cold. 29 Or again: A beautiful black but tailless cat has lately made its appearance a 22 Hyde Park Gate. Though their elders disagree, the juniors think it is a Manx 29—perhaps the very Manx cat which later walks across a quadrangle in A Room of One's Own. Miss Virginia Stephen becomes on her ex-birthday (so called because the celebration is not on the day itself) the happy possessor of a list of presents which are almost all writing implements of one kind or another.27 In a story called A Midnight Ride by A. V. S., a boy called Percy, the delicate one of the family, is supported at school by the combined labour and hard scraping of his widowed mother and three brothers.28

Hermione Lee likens the extraordinary impact of this juvenile work to that of an archaeological dig which reveals the rooms and furnishings and small ordinary objects of a legendary monarch, all as fresh as on the day they were new.vii

For six years from 1923, during the lifetime of Quentin and Julian Bell's handwritten The Charleston Bulletin (on the model of their mother and aunt's Hyde Park Gate News), VW contributed Christmas supplements by invitation. The supplements, which took the form of spoof biographies like Scenes in the Life of Mrs Bell, were edited by Claudia Olk in 2013.

Alexandra Harris noted a continuity between the young, exuberant, formidably ambitious journalist of Hyde Park Gate and the grown-up aunt of the 1920s who was still a natural satirist, still addicted to the social comedy of families, and still making jokes as an expression of love.

She was soon filling it with exercises in writing: descriptions of places, people, or events (mood pictures like a storm, a dance, or a funeral).169 At about the same age she also wrote a long picturesque essay upon the Christian religion . . . proving that man has need of God; but the God was described in process of change; & I also wrote a but shldn't this be cap H? chck. img: no, Kevin says right history of Women; & a history of my own family. These writings do not survive. 170

A newspaper rejected this piece, but Thoby Stephen felt it showed that Virginia might be a bit of a genius. 21

Hermione Lee reads the story as an imagined meeting between the Stephen sisters of Bloomsbury and their alternative selves (as they would have been if their lives had remained in the track mapped out for them by their parents). The conventional sisters envy and fear the liberated ones; the latter despise and pity the former.149-50 For Lyndall Gordon, the story is a defining moment: Here, in the unseen space of consciousness, the young writer found a prime subject for future work.

It was first published in 1979.

This is a story about the recovery of a lost woman writer. Of its two parts, the first concerns the forty-five-year-old historian Rosamond Merridew, a medievalist respected in her field, who nevertheless feels that she has exchanged a husband and a family and a house in which I may grow old for certain fragments of yellow parchment; which only a few people can read and still fewer would care to read if they could. 33 She cherishes maternal feelings, not for her own scholarly writings but for the scraps of manuscript which she collects. Miss Merridew comes on an ancient, modest hall in Norfolk, home of the Martyn family, and she carries away from it, on loan and wrapped in brown paper, the journal of the unmarried Joan Martyn, writing at the end of the fifteenth century (the period when the Paston letters recorded for modern readers the highly articulate voices of several ordinary, gentry-class Englishwomen, and when Chaucer was writing with insight of human subjectivity).

The second part of the story gives excerpts of the diary, which makes heard the voice of an earlier Judith Shakespeare, a woman's writing (like that of Margaret Paston) which also seeks to capture the feeling and thinking self (like that of Geoffrey Chaucer).

The 1909 Notebook

In June 2003 news first reached the general public of the re-emergence of a notebook that VW kept during February, March, and November 1909. Leonard Woolf sent this out for typing in 1968, and when he died the following year the typist put it away and forgot it. It reached print in July 2003 as Carlyle's House and Other Sketches. 3 6 and n

This work is not so much a diary as a working notebook: its seven sketches take events or issues from VW' life as grist to (in Doris Lessing's words) five-finger exercises for future excellence. 4 Some, like Carlyle's House and A Modern Salon (that of Lady Ottoline Morrell), deal with literary relationships. Of a confrontation with James Strachey and his Cambridge friends, VW writes: They wished for the truth, and doubted whether a woman could speak it or be it. 5 Some pieces, like Miss Reeves and Jews, are character-sketches only. The last registers physical revulsion as well as the unsparing moral dissection found in others as well. Of the fat Jewess who is ostentatiously kind to poor relations and bullies young people about getting married, VW concludes: It seemed very elementary, very little disguised, and very unpleasant. 4

Most immediate comment on the appearance of this writing focussed, predictably, on accusations and defences about anti-Semitism. Lessing, however, produced a thoughtful piece which touches on Woolf's wider achievements and influence (particularly on women, including Lessing herself). She concluded that idols and exemplars have to be loved warts and all.5

Memoirs of a Novelist

VW wrote it to give herself a break during the long composition of The Voyage Out 20 She had intended it as the first in a series of imaginary portraits.290

This brilliant comic fiction inspired by her experience as a reviewer 20 is a story about writing biography and about the tenuous relationship between a retrospective narrative and the evanescent truth of the life it attempts to capture. It is also about the frustrated lives of women. Miss Willatt, romantic novelist, has her life written after her death by her friend Miss Linsett, but the biographer likes things to be neat and tidy and unthreatening, and the most interesting event in Miss Willatt's life, owing to the nervous prudery and the dreary literary conventions of her friend, is thus a blank. 67

This modestly undertaken professional exercise ix was her first appearance in print (though not her first submission to this paper), and she wrote it in a half-hour on 30 November. 1: 5 xi From this time onwards she did a great deal of reviewing.

Editor Andrew McNeillie remarks that this review for a forgotten journal of a forgotten book by a forgotten author is a characteristic debut for her extraordinarily fastidious, self-effacing apprenticeship in . . . the art of letters.ix

The Times Literary Supplement

Virginia Stephen began reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement (where at that time all reviews appeared anonymously) in 1905. She commented, tongue in cheek, my real delight in reviewing is to say nasty things. 11

Whatever the truth of that, she wrote in full consciousness of outsider status, both delight[ing] in the patriarchal anonymity of the TLS and simultaneously tilt[ing] at it. 11 She used the conventional one for I in contexts that mocked the idea of universality. Apart from some great manifestoes like How It Strikes a Contemporary, she maintained that her ordinary, week-by-week role was like that of a beater at a shoot, poking into startled flight the gamey old captains who sat on their institutional haunches coddling their endless dreary books. (In a review not for the Times Literary Supplement she wrote that in order fully to appreciate A. C. Benson's memoirs one should have been educated at Eton and Cambridge. One should have a settled income. One should have an armchair. One should have dined well. In this mood, and in these circumstances, nothing can be pleasanter than to hear old stories of old dons.)11

Virginia Stephen grew up with the first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography, and her interest in life-writing dates from her very early years. Though she saw almost insuperable difficulties in biography, about which she was insistently explicit, life-writing was central to her achievement. In her essays and diaries and fiction, writes Hermione Lee, in her reading of history, in her feminism, in her politics, life-writing, as she herself called it, was a perpetual preoccupation. 4 She wrote several autobiographical sketches (which remained unpublished until decades after her death), and much biographical material, from her earliest writing years to the latest. Her life of Roger Fry appeared the year before her death, and she contemplated other biographical projects after that. While at Cambridge some months after her father's death and soon after her own breakdown, she assisted F. W. Maitland with his The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (published in 1906), by going through old letters and producing a contribution to the book as by one of his daughters. 19 She found this work therapeutic even though she did it unwillingly, impatient to get back to her own writing. 13, 19, 204 Between 1907 and 1911 she wrote a series of biographical reviews in which she developed a theory crucial to her development as a novelist—that is, her sense of the importance of hidden moments and obscure formative experiences in a life.

Thirty years later she maintained that because of [c]hastity and modesty there had never been an autobiography by a woman (not one to match, for instance, Rousseau's), but she often encouraged other women to write their own memoirs, and she told Victoria Ocampo in December 1934: Very few women have written truthful autobiographies. It is my favourite form of reading. 13 In different ways, both Orlando and Flush spoof the biographical enterprise. In much of her thinking and writing, she shows a great interest in moments and figures unacknowledged by patriarchal culture, exploring states of mind so muted that they almost defied expression. 95

It was re-issued as a pamphlet with the Hogarth Press in November 1930, in a limited edition of 250 numbered and signed copies.3: 306n2

VW mentions illness as a subject seldom treated by writers, and discusses the changes it makes in the outlook, personality, and desires of the sick person.

Though he had accepted it for publication, Eliot had initially expressed little enthusiasm for this essay.3: 49 Hilary Mantel, reading this essay while very ill herself, indignantly rejected what she saw as Woolf's seemliness and decorousness as well as her complaint of failure of language: what of the whole vocabulary . . . the gouging pain, the drilling pain, the prickling and pinching, the throbbing, burning, stinging, smarting, flaying? All good words. All old words. No one's pain is so special that the devil's dictionary of anguish has not anticipated it.42

VW's first two published novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, both work in the mode of social comedy to explore the experiences of a young woman coming to grips with her place in the world. Each presents its protagonist's emotional examination of sexuality, and each subjects patriarchy and marriage to close and not comforting scrutiny. Both novels are at the same time VW's early attempts to create a new, non-traditional form. Yet the two are very different. In its shocking conclusion, and in its management of narrative, The Voyage Out frustrates the expectations of the conventional romantic plot. Though in its working out of plot Night and Day liberates its protagonist from the patriarchal roar of her father to let her marry whom she chooses, it is in form less experimental, a Mozartian comedy. 34

The Voyage Out

The date on which VW began this work has been the subject of much scholarly discussion. Some critics believe she began it soon after the death of her father in 1904. In his autobiography Leonard Woolf gives the date as 1909, though he also reports that VW burned several drafts of the novel when she found them in a closet. 158 Hermione Lee suggests that manuscript material which VW sent to Violet Dickinson in August, 1906, may have been the start of this novel.219

The word VW created for the working title of her first novel—melymbrosia—brings together the Greek words for honey and ambrosia, and in so doing powerfully links this text to VW's recent trip to Greece in September 1906, a trip which ended with the catastrophe of Thoby's death. These events create an informing context for this first novel.

Several scholarly reflections on the possible meanings of melymbrosia, including Isobel Grundy's suggestion that it evokes a dark inspiration, are detailed by Mark Hussey.157

Composition of The Voyage Out stretched over nine years, and VW produced several versions of the text, including those she burned. Scholars Louise DeSalvo and Elizabeth Heine, working separately on materials in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library, reconstructed two different versions of the novel, each significantly different from the published version. DeSalvo edited and published Melymbrosia: An early version of The Voyage Out, 1982; Heine edited The Voyage Out for Hogarth's definitive edition in 1990 with full textual apparatus and editorial discussion.

It appeared the day after she had been taken to a nursing home because of symptoms of madness: manic this time rather than depressive.2: 25 The novel took fifteen years to sell 2,000 copies and in those years earned less than £120. 325-6

Hermione Lee sees VW's first novel as about the death of childhood and the confused awakening of adult sexuality. 154 Julia Briggs writes: Death and love lie beneath the surface of life like monsters on the sea-bed, mysterious forces that at any moment may rise and explode. 6 It focuses on Rachel Vinrace, who, having lost her mother when she was eleven, has been brought up in London by her aunts. As the novel begins, she is preoccupied by issues of growing up—by self-definition, relationships, marriage and sex, and by exploration both of the world of books and of the real world of experience. Her unfolding discovery of her own sexuality is central, as is the social question of her gender role: will she develop into the social hostess her father wishes, or will she define her own future? The action opens on the London Embankment, as Rachel joins her aunt and uncle Helen and Ridley Ambrose for a trip to an imaginary South American country, on board the Euphrosyne, a ship captained by Rachel's father, Willoughby Vinrace. (The name of the ship is in part a private joke, since this was the title of a book of poems by Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Walter Lamb, Thoby Stephen, Leonard Woolf, and others, which had moved VW to satirical comment on the self-satisfaction of literary young men. But it is also an allusion to the exclusion of women from formal education, about which she wrote in her review of it. Education and books figure largely in this novel.) 83-4 20-1

Rachel voyages first to Lisbon, where the passengers are joined by Richard and Clarissa Dalloway (a couple not much like those of the later novel Mrs. Dalloway). Richard provokes a crisis when he kisses Rachel: at first excited by his touch, she later has a grotesque nightmare about entrapment. At the end of the ship's voyage, at a place called Santa Marina in a remote, unidentified, non-existent South American country, Rachel meets a company of English tourists including two young men, St John Hirst and Terence Hewet. She falls in love with Terence, and, on a further stage of the voyage out, travels with him up-river to a native village. While they are there, they become engaged: for Rachel a step towards, or perhaps away from, freedom and fulfilment. Back at the hotel her growing ambivalence and anxiety tip over into medical symptoms. She has picked up an infection and becomes fevered and hallucinatory; the book ends shockingly on her death.

Woolf's wide experience not only of English literature, but also of the classics and of French and Russian writing, together with her familiarity with any number of other studies (in natural history, for instance), is always present in her own work. From first to last her works are richly allusive. Her references, widely suffused memories, imitations, and spoofs of other writers, other texts, other genres make her the most intertextual of writers. This is an important dynamic of her texts, a means of making her prose carry an exceptional freight of meaning.

Several critics have observed the influence of Joseph Conrad in The Voyage Out: in Heart of Darkness (published in 1899) the voyage into the unknown represents a dark and unspeakable self-discovery. The structure of The Voyage Out links the horror at the end of Marlowe's quest with Rachel's sexual fears. Gillian Beer examines Woolf's intertextual conversation with Charles Darwin: she argues that it is profound and shaping in several works, including The Voyage Out, where it provides not only local colour but also an awareness of the survival of prehistory, and of the simultaneity of the prehistoric in our present moment. This awareness, Beer claims, absolves [VW] from the causal forms she associates with nineteenth-century narratives.15, 17 Suzette Henke, who points out that the Spanish (not Portuguese) name of Santa Marina suggests the mouth of the River Oroonoko rather than the Amazon, thinks Woolf may have chosen South America for its Darwinian associations.

Rachel leaves home on her voyage hoping to broaden her experience and come to understand herself and the world, but finds herself in a physical space and a society that are constricting. Although it seemed possible that each new person might remove the mystery which burdened her, the mystery remains, and the new people are presented with a delicate balance of satire and respect.308 Several male characters try to shape Rachel's mind by giving her books to read. (Books are everywhere; even the indomitable spinster Miss Allan is writing a history of English literature.) Hirst is amazed to hear that Rachel has lived to twenty-four without reading Gibbon: can one really talk to you? Have you got a mind, or are you like the rest of your sex? 180 And her sympathetic uncle Ambrose exclaims: what's the use of reading if you don't read Greek? 202 Rachel cannot talk to Hirst without feeling stupid, but she can freely confide in Hewet that Gibbon's style goes round, round, round, like a roll of oil-cloth. 237 Hewet, unlike the self-complacent Hirst, is a seeker and wonderer, an unfixed bundle of potential like herself, with feminine as well as masculine attributes. He finds that Rachel's face becomes less attractive as her brain began to work, 251 yet he has thought hard about relations between the sexes, and feels that men are bullies to women, and that women are indoctrinated to see us three times as big as we are or they'd never obey us. 252 Until the tragic ending Rachel seems in danger of being stranded in a funny but sterile comedy of manners, which offers no purchase to her questioning mind or her sensitive heart, or else of dwindling into a romance-style happy ending that would leave all her questions unanswered. On the one hand she seems to die because no other ending offers itself; on the other hand, the ending drives home a message about the contingency of life, the shocking arbitrariness of death. Death is also ironically presented. Terence Hewet, who has been in anguish for days, separated from Rachel by her illness, is sitting with her as she dies, and feels restored, ecstatic. (He thinks or speaks some words which were to recur, little changed, in VW's suicide note almost thirty years later: No two people have ever been so happy as we have been.)431 He begins shrieking and struggling only when people come to lead him out of the room, and the book closes not on him but on the other lives re-forming themselves.

An Abandoned Novel

Its war imagery, however, is amply present elsewhere. The Great War overshadows VW's work. Her books are full of images of war: armies, battles, guns, bombs, air-raids, battleships, shell-shock victims, war reports, photographs of war-victims, voices of dictators. 341

Night and Day

VW may have begun work on her second novel in 1913; from summer 1913 to autumn 1915, she suffered her worst breakdown ever, Years afterwards, she wrote to Ethel Smyth that when she composed Night and Day she was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that she wrote it in bed (during the rationed half-hours of writing time that she was allowed, and copying life like an art student copying plaster casts) to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground. At this date (in October 1930) she felt that Night and Day was a bad book, though she added that some people thought it her best.4: 231 Julia Briggs writes: If the completion of The Voyage Out through all its various drafts and difficulties had been an amazing achievement . . . the writing of Night and Day, a long, complex and carefully orchestrated comedy of love, was little short of a miracle. 34-5 Briggs further considers that the novel reworks The Wise Virgins, 1914, Leonard Woolf's second novel, a bitterly painful and personal roman à clef, to create a fable of reconciliation and integration. 31

The acceptance was, she said, perhaps with irony, almost a disappointment: she meant that the alternative would have been for her and Leonard to take the plunge and publish this long novel themselves through the Hogarth Press.2: 353

She and Leonard took over the sheets from the original publisher, her half-brother Gerald Duckworth.

Sales of the novel were slow until it was published in 1969 by Penguin, when things changed. Julia Briggs observes that with VW's popularity still growing, even a neglected novel now commands substantial sales. 57

This is the first of Woolf's a London novels, and is set unambiguously in the recent past, in the period of the suffrage struggle before the first world war. It is a story of courtship, designed to have the tone of Shakespearean comedy. Katharine Hilbery gets engaged to William Rodney (whom Lyndall Gordon calls effete): he is scholarly, a little pompous, and the kind of person that Katharine's parents would like her to marry. She disengages herself, however, in order to marry Ralph Denham (whom Gordon calls ungentlemanly but life-giving). The early scene of Denham's rage and despair when he discovers her engagement to Rodney exemplifies the way this novel manages to combine the ordeal of consciousness, as developed by George Eliot and Henry James with the comedy provided by the faintly amused narrator: Katharine was engaged, and she had deceived him, too. He felt for corners of his being untouched by his disaster; but there was no limit to the flood of damage; not one of his possessions was safe now. Katharine had deceived him. 162 William Rodney meanwhile realises that he loves and wants to marry Cassandra Otway, a musician, who looks up to him with more conviction than Katharine ever did. The couples re-sort themselves, to the bafflement of onlookers. When William Rodney changes his mind and chooses Cassandra, she expects Katharine to react conventionally, that is to be deeply wounded and jealous. Katharine has no difficulty in accepting Rodney's rethinking, though her aunts feel him to be a villain. Her father, as Julia Briggs writes, the gentle, musical Mr Hilbery, is transformed by fatherly possessiveness, 50 first enraged at the insult to his daughter, then enraged afresh when he realises that she actually loves Denham, which gives him a greater pang than he had ever felt over Rodney. He uttered perfunctory congratulations, but he never looked at his daughter, and strode out of the room, leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized male, outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair. 530 But the young people are trying to cut loose from stereotypes and be honest about what they feel: Katharine and Ralph both alternate moments of delighted love with what they call lapses, when one or the other withdraws emotionally and cannot remember how they felt before.

Lyndal Gordon observes that biographically, the novel offers a rationale for the Woolf marriage, while it circles the unknown and unused potentialities of women in the context of their struggle for the vote. The one among the young people who stands out at the end, unpaired, is Mary Datchet, a suffragist and women's-rights activist. Mary is lonely, but she has stimulating work and a compelling goal.

Julia Briggs writes that her comic depiction of the suffrage office, with its absurd and self-important voluntary workers, seemed something of a betrayal to her feminist friends . . . neither Janet [Case] nor Margaret Llewelyn Davies had cared for it. Briggs also notes that the character of Mary Datchet had been inspired by Margaret Llewelyn Davies. 53-4

Quentin Bell reports that [a]s always, [Woolf] found publication an agitating business, and that when she received her own six copies, on 20 October, she immediately dispatched one to each of Vanessa, Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Morgan Forster, and Violet Dickinson. While Clive immediately declared it a work of the highest genius, Forster liked this novel less than The Voyage Out.2: 68 In private—writing to John Middleton Murry—Katherine Mansfield sounded irritated and almost insulted: the novel perpetrated a lie in the soul, she said, by delivering the message that [t]he war never has been, and it was intellectually snobbish: so long and so tahsome. In public—her review of the novel in the Athenaeum—she pronounced it backward-looking, non-modernist or even anti-modernist: a novel in the tradition of the English novel. In the midst of our admiration it makes us feel old and chill. We had not thought to look upon its like again.2: 69 Quentin Bell concurs: he writes that Night and Daywas a very orthodox performance.2: 69Mark Hussey writes that Mansfield's opinion of the novel dominated critical responses to it for a considerable time.189 And, indeed, VW herself reflected about this novel that the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one 1: 259—her admission, says Briggs, that she had failed to solve her riddle of how a modern novel should be written. 51 More recently, however, this novel has been revalued in terms of its critique of the patriarchal family—a kind of prototype of The Years—and its examination of the question of women and work in the modern world. 2: 69 189, 190

A Brilliant and Robust Art

VW, says Andrew McNeillie, editor of her essays, is arguably the last of the great English essayists. Her brilliant and robust art made the form her own in the course of more than a million words of fluent, witty and unwaveringly demotic prose. ix

The earliest published piece among VW's essays which is not a book-review is On a Faithful Friend, the obituary of a family dog named Shag. It mines the vein of biography, and explores character, all this with an irony pitched not to undermine authenticity of feeling but gently to spoof the features of the form: As he advanced in middle life he became certainly rather autocratic, not only with his own kind, but with us, his masters and mistresses. 1: 13 This was published in the Guardian, a weekly newspaper for the clergy, xi on 18 January 1905. 1: 15

VW continued to write personal essays on a range of subjects, some weighty, some witty, but her literary and critical essays are the centre of her work in this genre. In these she wrote about a lifetime of wide, reflective, joyful reading. She also explored in her literary essays the writerly issues she was dealing with in her own fiction. Her essays had great impact. Lyndall Gordon writes that although VW may have failed to break the traditional form in Night and Day, the essays she wrote from 1919 onwards shaped the modern novel. Julia Briggs notes that a few days after criticising herself for failing to solve the problems of the modern novel in Night and Day, VW reworked these self-criticisms into an article for the Times Literary Supplement on Modern Novels. She says that this essay, later revised as Modern Fiction, became a manifesto for modernism as well as a programme for her own future as a writer. 51 Gordon believes that together, the essays Modern Novels (1919) and Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927) introduce a principle that writers have no need of sensational events: any day can suffice. She rejects the narrative coherence of Victorian fiction in favour of an ordinary mind on an ordinary day, often several minds. Hermione Lee shapes the matter a little differently: although Modern Novels, she writes (later Modern Fiction), is always cited as [Woolf's] manifesto for the new kind of novel she is now going to write, it is as much about reading as writing. . . . in fact it mostly talks about the present in terms of our relation to the past. 405 To these observations, all surely accurate, a third should be added here: that Modern Fiction is also about the mind in the world and the ways life is experienced. Its famous observations on perception, experience and the chief task of the novelist come as part of this discussion: The mind, exposed to the ordinary course of life, receives upon its surface a myriad impressions. . . . From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, composing in their sum what we might venture to call life itself. . . . Is it not perhaps the chief task of the novelist to convey this incessantly varying spirit with whatever stress or sudden deviation it may display . . .?3: 33 Students of modernism will note a very great difference between this as a point of departure for fiction and the mythic method which T. S. Eliot identified in Joyce.

Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, Character in Fiction

It was reprinted in The Nation and Athenæum (of which Leonard Woolf was then literary editor) on 1 December 1923 and in the Living Age (Boston) on 2 February 1924.157 This essay was a riposte to Arnold Bennett's assertion in his review of Jacob's Room that Woolf could not draw character.124-5 Her radically new novel had provoked Arnold Bennett in March 1923 to make what proved to be a rash criticism, says Andrew McNeillie. Stung by his criticism, Woolf declared war; not at once, but after some months' rumination. 3: xiii

The article formed the basis 168 of a paper titled Character in Fiction that VW read to the Heretics Society in Cambridge on 18 May 1924. The paper was published, as Character in Fiction, in the Criterion in July 1924. 54, 168 159 T. S. Eliot told VW that the essay was important; it expresses for me what I have always been very sensible of, the absence of any masters in the previous generation whose work one could carry on. 445

Character in Fiction, the further essay which emerged from Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, is reflective, philosophical, fictional, its tone assertive, witty, ironical, and serious. It ranges 3: 421 living writers into two camps, the Edwardians (Wells, Bennett and Galsworty) and the Georgians (Forster, Lawrence, Strachey, Joyce, Eliot), and it asserts, famously, that on or about December 1910 human character changed, 3: 421 illustrating this assertion with the story of the very ordinary woman Mrs Brown, encountered in a railway carriage travelling through suburban London. She is the will-o'-the-wisp who challenges the novelist: Come and catch me if you can. 3: 420 She proves elusive to Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, whose idea of describing her is to relate various aspects of her material and financial situation and her ability to pay her rent, with no concern for her consciousness, her memories, or her being. The Edwardian tools are the wrong ones for us to use, VW asserts, since they fail to catch the character, and so the Georgian writer had to begin by throwing away the method that was in use at the moment. 3: 432 She sees great promise, however, in Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr. Prufrock—to give Mrs. Brown some of the names she has made famous lately, 3: 435 and she concludes that if Mrs. Brown can be captured, we will enter one of the great ages of English literature. 3: 436

Women and Literary History

By 1912 VW had published on Margaret Cavendish (as Duchess of Newcastle), Ann, Lady Fanshawe, Elizabeth Carter, Anna Seward, Elizabeth, Lady Holland, Maria Edgeworth, Lady Hester Stanhope, the Brontë sisters, Lady Charlotte Bury (her diary not her novels), Jane Welsh Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, Vernon Lee, Lady Dorothy Nevill (in a piece which VW later classified as a heartless, though clever, youthful spree),6: 320 her own aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen, Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth Robins, and Beatrice Harraden.1: passim Though the texts she reviewed by these women included novels and other genres, the greatest number were memoirs and other life-writing.

Ordinary Lives

Eighteen months later she was planning to develop this project further: to read voraciously & gather material for the Lives of the Obscure—which is to tell the whole history of England in one obscure life after another. 3: 37

Mary Wollstonecraft

VW's presentation of Wollstonecraft's struggles and experiments, the high-handed and quick-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, 103 is warm, admiring, and touched with amused irony. She sees some naivety in the hope of changing the world that characterised that earlier Bloomsbury group of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and their friends. She notes that the immense originality of Wollstonecraft's ideas no longer strikes people because they are accepted and have come to seem commonplace. Wollstonecraft, however, has achieved immortality in that she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living. 103

VW's interest in the writing of women of earlier generations is often fused with interest in their historical predicament and their personal achievements. In the late essay Anon. she returned to Lady Anne Clifford (whom she had written of before) and, by identifying her as the first person in England known to have read for pleasure, succeeded in building women into the early development of literature as it exists today.31-2

On Walter Sickert

She classed Sickert as a literary painter, even while admitting that words could not touch or grasp the core of his paintings. Hermione Lee sees Sickert's paintings of squalid London interiors as a major influence on The Years. 643

Two Stories

Writing this story, she said later, was like flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. 4: 231

The unidentifiable mark in The Mark on the Wall propels the apparently female narrator into all kinds of musings, each train of thought based on something that the mark might be: a nailhead, a hole left by a nail, a scrap of dirt? How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it. 77 In the end: Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? . . . The fields of asphodel? . . . There is a vast upheaval of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying— This unnamed person, apparently the narrator's male partner, is in a rage about the ongoing war and is going to buy a newspaper. All the same, he says, I don't see why we should have a snail on our wall. 83

Lytton Strachey told Leonard Woolf that Virginia's story was a work of genius. The liquidity of the style fills me with envy . . . . How on earth does she make the English language float and float? And then the wonderful way in which the modern point of view is suggested. Tiens!2: 43nClive Bell and David Garnett each wrote expressing admiration. To the latter, VW replied that in a way it was easier to do a short thing, all in one flight than to tackle the frightfully clumsy and overpowering form of the novel. Again here she expressed her desire for a completely new form. 2: 167

Kew Gardens

The press issued this little book on the same day as Eliot's Poems and John Middleton Murry's The Critic in Judgment.

Kew Gardens was enthusiastically reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, and the first edition sold out in less than a month. 2: 353n3, 264

Monday or Tuesday

This was a collection of eight stories, including the title story, a revision of The Mark on the Wall, An Unwritten Novel, and Kew Gardens.

These experimental fictions are sometimes seen as the bridge between VW's Victorian early novels and her modernist work.

VW wrote to Ethel Smyth that the stories were diversions or treats I allowed myself when I had done my exercise in the conventional style. 4: 231 An Unwritten Novel, she said, showed her how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it—not that I have ever reached that end; but anyhow I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacobs Room, Mrs. Dalloway etc—How I trembled with excitement; and then Leonard came in, and I drank my milk, and concealed my excitement.4: 231 Lyndall Gordon sees these stories as theoretical expositions of the new form of fiction that she had come upon, back in 1905, in the course of tramps in Cornwall. Her aim was to find in the moment of being a climactic inward event, parallel to what her friend T. S. Eliot termed unattended moments and what James Joyce termed epiphany. Eliot and Woolf, says Gordon here, sought to cross the frontiers of consciousness where words fail.

Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street

Quentin Bell later believed that she had written this story largely in order to protect herself against expected hostile criticism directed at the highly experimental Jacob's Room.2: 87 In any case, she later developed it into the novel Mrs. Dalloway.

The story begins with a just-slightly-different version of the novel's famous opening: Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself. 130

From about this time VW frequently expressed dissatisfaction with the term novel, suggesting that she might stop using it. Her preference for a new term was elegy.

Jacob's Room departs sharply from her two earlier novels in both its method and its subject. Leonard Woolf felt on first reading it that Virginia's characters were ghosts or puppets. It is fragmentary, like Eliot's Waste Land; and Jacob's portrait is a collage of broken impressions made up of the quick glances of a large cast of character who see him and comment on him, often questioningly. Most of these flash past the reader's consciousness without imprinting anything of their personality or circumstances. 2: 186 This method is rich in suggestion: it conveys a sense of the inwardness and unreadability of human personality. (The interrogative attitude of so many of its characters underlines this powerful sense of the unknowability of character.) And, once Jacob has vanished, disappeared into death with all of the unknown others of his generation, it powerfully evokes an awareness of the inevitable erasure of death. What did he expect? Did he think he would come back? muses his friend Bonamy with a hint of exasperation.176 In this experimental novel VW expresses her anti-war convictions, but she does so with modernist indirection. The war could seem to be almost as absent from this book as Katherine Mansfield had complained it was from Night and Day, but in fact in this novel the war is a dreadful, though largely undescribed, presence. We hear nothing of Jacob's joining up, nothing of his life in the army, only of distant guns which sound like nocturnal women . . . beating great carpets and of the folly of expecting to come back from the Front.175 Jacob Flanders is the unknown warrior, writes Julia Briggs. There is nothing military about him, for this was a war fought largely by civilians in uniform. 93 His death, when it is understood, casts the pall of loss backwards over the whole fractured narrative of his life. This is the first novel in which VW represents the impact of war on ordinary people: the First World War was to be similarly present in the air in Mrs Dalloway—in the largely unspoken consciousness of characters, and in the unendurable pain of Septimus Smith— and the darkly impending Second World War in the fighter planes raking the sky of Between the Acts. In Jacob's Room, VW presents the pompousness and destructiveness of old men in the military establishment whose decisions direct the course of history and cause the deaths of young men.

Jacob's Room is often said to be the first of VW's fictional recreations of her brother Thoby (the others being The Waves and A Sketch of the Past). Hermione Lee calls the work a fictional biography which aroused and composed her feelings about Thoby and her memories of Greece, pre-war London, Cambridge, and the early days of Bloomsbury.436 Yet she gives Jacob an individuality which makes him a significant participant in the anonymity of the thousands of dead in the war—almost a million British and Commonwealth soldiers killed, not to mention civilians nor soldiers and civilians on the other side.92 He is a little boy when the novel begins, in 1905, with his widowed mother, Betty Flanders, at the seaside, writing a letter which reflects as her thoughts usually do on the death of her husband, Seabrook. Jacob is a generation younger than Thoby, and grows up as one of the genteel poor before his charm and talents bring him the generalised prospect of a distinguished future. He leaves a number of women to mourn him besides his mother: Florinda, the working-class prostitute who now faces the catastrophe of pregnancy, Fanny Elmer, who loves and idealises him, Clara, the marriageable young lady who had had hopes of him, and Sandra, the dissatisfied wife. These women's voices, writes Lee, speak loudly but unheard at the edges of his story 437

Lee follows this comment with a reading of the scene in the British Museum Round Reading Room as a summary of the exclusion of women from his story.

As a manifesto for modernism, Jacob's Room divided the critics. T. S. Eliot wrote in a letter that VW had now succeeded in freeing her original gift from compromise with the traditional novel.444 Arnold Bennett, taking the book as characteristic of the new novelists, praised its cleverness, originality, and exquisite style (in print), but only to pronounce them outweighed by the damning fact that the characters do not vitally survive in the mind.108 The creation of character, he insisted, was the foundation of good fiction, while cleverness was perhaps the lowest of all artistic qualities.123 For her part Rebecca West took Jacob's Room as a demonstration that Woolf was at once a negligible novelist and a supremely important writer.101 It was authentic poetry, cognisant of the soul.102

Hermione Lee points out that in this year—a typical one, though broken by illness—Woolf's productivity included making final pre-publication revisions to a novel and an essay collection, beginning work on another novel, writing eight short stories, and publishing thirty-seven review articles, besides her regular output of diary and letters, and of course large amounts of reading.4

Later reprints often appeared as The Common Reader, First Series. VW took her title from a formulation of Samuel Johnson's, meaning that non-specialist, non-academic reader to whose taste, said Johnson, he was always willing as a professional man of letters to defer. Hermione Lee notes that VW's comparatively random (and also topical) reading facilitated her thinking about the common reader.142-3

The book's contents consisted largely of already published journalism, carefully revised for the collection.x Woolf had put detailed consideration into the idea of making a structure for the book, but she ended by rejecting ideas for a frame.x-xi Falling back largely on chronological order, she supplied three new, as opposed to reprinted, essays to head the volume and to block in the early period of English literature: The Pastons and Chaucer, On Not Knowing Greek, and The Elizabethan Lumber Room. She gestured away from chronology in setting Modern Fiction only a little past the centre of the book (far ahead of The Modern Essay), between Jane Austen and the Brontë essay 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights'. The book also prints Joseph Conrad, How It Strikes a Contemporary , and Modern Fiction (which is discussed above). The latter, which ranks among her famous enunciations of revolutionary intent, contains one of VW's best-known statements about what a new generation of novelists might attempt to do. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit . . . ? 150 In writing of earlier periods, VW is often at pains to emphasize their otherness, which may be obscured by reading only the great landmarks of literature—Shakespeare, for instance—and ignoring his contemporaries. But it is a whole body of literature, she says, which will not suffer itself to be read passively, but takes us and reads us; flouts our preconceptions; questions principles which we had got in the habit of taking for granted. 48

VW waited more than a week for comment of any kind on this publication, and was driven to dismiss her own disappointment as something she had now put behind her, writing the book off as a failure. Then came a batch of mixed responses.3: 12, 15-16, 17 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson pronounced it the best criticism in English—humorous, witty & profound.3: 17 T. S. Eliot's friend John Hayward thought the essay on the Elizabethansextraordinarily good,3: 16 though a review in Country Life sneered at VWand another in the Star sneered at Vanessa Bell's dustjacket.3: 16 That in the Times Literary Supplement offered sober & sensible praise, though VW remained a little disappointed that it did not rise to enthusiasm.3: 17 When she re-read her own essays years later she was sorry for their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach, which she blamed on her tea-table training.xiii

There's no doubt in my mind that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice, VW wrote after finishing Jacob's Room, three months before publication. 2: 186 That voice was strikingly her own, quite unlike those of key male contemporaries.

Yet, though her voice (and her social and political views) were and would remain quite different from theirs, she was keenly attentive to the works of male contemporaries who were, like her, working to create a literature for their time. T. S. Eliot, for instance, was a spur to her modernist development. Both had an acute and learned consciousness of tradition and its value, and they also shared a common cause in breaking with the past, finding a voice for their own time, and creating what would become literary modernism. The Hogarth Press published his Poems, May 1919; in June 1922 he visited Woolf at Hogarth House and read her his new poem, The Waste Land. This too the Hogarth Press published, in 1923, and while she was working on Mrs. Dalloway Woolf was setting type for The Waste Land.440, 442-3 Eliot himself has been pointed to as the model for Louis in The Waves, and fragments of his poetry appear in Woolf's texts. She did not share his admiration for Ezra Pound or Wyndham Lewis (whom she thought misogynist and detestable), but Eliot made her think about their writing.439 He also kept her in touch with what Joyce was doing, even though his enthusiasm for Ulysses may have dampened rather than encouraged her own. In her always intertextual texts these voices surface, reshaped. Although Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, the character, is the very antithesis of Joyce's Leopold Bloom, the fictions they inhabit and the means of their making have key elements in common. Though Woolf had used the structuring metaphor of the sea voyage in her first novel, Clarissa's mermaid voyages in London (which provide structure for the representation of her complex consciousness) establish an intertextual dialogue with Bloom's Dublin odyssey. Of course VW creates a voyage with a very great difference: her fiction is of a woman's voyage and episodes in a woman's experience.

The idea for VW's fourth novel, Julia Briggs observes, goes back to a plan she had thought of twenty years earlier, for a play about a man and a woman—show them growing up—never meeting—not knowing each other—but all the time you'll feel them coming nearer and nearer. 130 She worked first on this new project under the title of The Hours: by August 1922 she was writing hard, laboriously dredging my mind . . . & bringing up light buckets. 2: 189 At first, Clarissa was the only character; Septimus emerged later.172 A whole year later it was proving one of my most tantalising & refractory of books. Parts are so bad, parts so good; I'm much interested, can't stop making it up yet—yet. What is the matter with it? 2: 262 As she worked on the novel, in 1922, she was reading Proust and Joyce, and, as Hussey points out, [a]s she struggled with the creation of one of the most famous of her characters, she also wrote the first version of her essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, published in 1924. 173 Under the next day's date (but with an incompatible day of the week, signalling confusion) she wrote triumphantly of her discovery; how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters; I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect, & each comes to daylight at the present moment. 2: 263

The first edition sold about 1,550 copies in the first two months. A second impression, of 1,000 copies, was issued in September.3: 32 25

Briggs observes that in this novel, as in the short stories preceding it, VW aimed to write about what, in Modern Fiction, she had called an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. Here, as in Jacob's Room, she set out to obey her own injunction and to correct the devaluation of the ordinary flow of life which is brought about by the concentration of traditional fiction on the significant or highly charged moment: readers of Woolf's new fiction were to be left without maps or signposts and brought face to face with everyday life, in all its confusion, mystery and uncertainty. 130 In the writing, however, this novel turned into something quite unordinary, both in the action and the characters it represents and in the interior monologue in which it represents them.

The man and woman who never meet but whose lives are drawn together are the politician's wife Clarissa Dalloway, who loves to give parties not out of restlessness or social ambition but as an offering to life, and Septimus Smith, who has returned from the First World War physically unharmed but shell shocked.

The term shell shock itself became familiar in the autumn of 1922 (as Woolf began work on the novel) with the publication of a government report on its deferred effects. 133

Critic David Bradshaw, emphasizing the centrality in the novel of the First World War, has noted that Lady Bruton's obsession with Canada in the early text is largely due to the slaughter of Canadian troops at Vimy Ridge in April 1917 (obscured in a recent edition by the printing of Vimy as Virny) and that VW moved the war service of Septimus Smith and his commanding officer, Evans, to the Italian front because this was the forgotten front.Canada also had a second significance for Lady Bruton: that of the linked topics of eugenics and emigration.

Meanwhile Clarissa's own intermittent sense of disaster, the wavering in her conviction of the value of life, is intensified by the reader's awareness of Septimus and his pain—and yet, when he finally kills himself and the news is brought to her party by the Bradshaws, Clarissa is overcome by a heightened feeling for life. He has, she feels, had the courage to fling away something of infinite value and by so doing has preserved the value which other people let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. 202

Around Clarissa and Septimus clusters a wealth of people and activity. Richard Dalloway, who loves his wife, spends a long time mustering his courage to tell her so, but fails to do it. (Here he was walking across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved her. Which one never does say, he thought. Partly one's lazy; partly one's shy.)127 Peter Walsh, whom Clarissa might once have married, comes back from India and renews his ancient connection with her, on the verge of his marriage (for motives of grasping love) to a younger woman. Sally Seton, who inspired the earliest and possibly the strongest passion of Clarissa's life, is still handsome and laughing if no longer aglow with daring and recklessness.199

Clarissa's seventeen-year-old daughter Elizabeth stands on the verge of an independent life, though she is pursued with possessive hunger by the bigotedly religious, university-graduate teacher Doris Kilman. For Clarissa and Elizabeth, as for their creator, a foray across London becomes an excursion into the scenes of a history which moves them powerfully. In Elizabeth's jaunt through the city on an omnibus, VW writes into her novel a difference in generational attitudes about what women can do. Clarissa has become a wife and a hostess; Elizabeth, joyfully on her own in London, immersed in the activity and work of the city, decides that she would like to have a profession: She would become a doctor, a farmer, possibly go into Parliament if she found it necessary.150-51

Attached to Septimus is a different cluster of characters that includes his anxious young Italian wife and his doctors, the bluff Dr Holmes, who tells him to pull himself together, and the dogmatic and unfeeling Sir William Bradshaw, who proposes to incarcerate him in a rest-cure establishment. The idea of the mystery of the human personality, which pervades the novel, reaches its extreme in Septimus, who is utterly alienated from the present, absorbed in his past, which included, before the war, the works of Shakespeare and a woman in a green dress, and, in the war, his dead friend Evans.

The first reviews of Mrs. Dalloway came out in the same month as those of The Common Reader (first series). Both the Western Mail and the Scotsman dismissed the novel as beyond the general reader: the former thought it not interesting to any but readers of preternaturally nimble intellect and the latter similarly designated it as suitable for [n]one but the mentally fit—adding: It may be said such is life, but is it art?3: 21n24 A journal of more intellectual pretensions, the Calendar of Modern Letters, pronounced that Mrs. Dalloway was sentimental in conception and texture, and is accordingly aesthetically worthless.3: 35n4 VW said it was a weight off her mind when E. M. Forster registered his approbation, briefly but persuasively, saying he had liked the style being simpler, more like other peoples this time.3: 24Lytton Strachey sounds as if, like the provincial newspapers, he had missed the point when he said the writing was beautiful but that what happens in the book was rather ordinary—or unimportant. Paradoxically, Woolf found his picking of holes more stimulating that having her novel called a masterpiece by others such as Clive Bell.3: 32 Julia Briggs in her book on Woolf singles out the review by Richard Hughes as the most perceptive, in praising Woolf for touch[ing] all the time the verge of the problem of reality. 157 Briggs also enumerates some recent incarnations of this novel, which has fascinated the late twentieth-century imagination: its use in an opera by Libby Larsen (libretto by Bonnie Grice), in Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours and Stephen Daldry's film of that, and in Robin Lippincott's Mr. Dalloway.157-8 Considering these works, says Briggs, reinforces her sense of how astonishingly easy and uncontrived, but at the same time how inward, experimental and still startlingly modern is Woolf's novel.158

A stage adaptation by Hal Coase opened in London in September 2018.

In the early stages, nearly two years before publication, she wrote, the sea is to be heard all through it. 3: 34 In February 1926: Never never have I written so easily, imagined so profusely. 3: 58

The centre section, Time Passes, had already appeared in French the previous winter, in a Paris journal called Commerce, translated by Roger Fry's friend Charles Mauron.3: 127n5 The volume sold 1,690 copies before publication: twice the analogous sales of Mrs. Dalloway.3: 134 Eighteen months after it was published, VW wrote in her diary how she used to think about both her parents daily, but writing The Lighthouse laid them in my mind. By writing of them, she then felt, she had performed a necessary cure for an unhealthy obsession.3: 208 Susan Dick has transcribed and edited the original manuscript of this novel, showing interlineations, marginal additions, and the pen-strokes with which Woolf crossed out rejected passages.

To the Lighthouse consists of three parts, The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse. In the first, the Ramsay family and their guests at their holiday home in the Isle of Skye (a fictional version of Woolf's remembered Cornwall) plan to visit the lighthouse, but, to the intense disappointment of James, the youngest, the weather makes it impossible. In the last, after the intervention of the First World War and the deaths of Mrs Ramsay and two of her children, the two youngest, the now grown-up Cam (Camilla) and James, make the trip to the lighthouse with their father: a little voyage no longer of ecstasy, but of remembrance.

The book, particularly the centre section, makes some use of an omniscient narrating voice (including the parenthetical relation of the sudden deaths of Mrs Ramsay, of the recently-married Prue Ramsay in some illness connected with childbirth, and of Andrew Ramsay in the First World War).205 But almost always both narrative and description are filtered through the minds of one or other of the characters.

This book sets out a transfigured version of the Victorian family, modelled on Woolf's own. The matriarch Mrs Ramsay had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance, and because of their trustful and reverential attitude towards women.15 Mr Ramsay is a great scholar, battling his way through the deserts of abstract thought like explorers through the Arctic wastes; he is petty, selfish, vain, egotistical; he is spoilt; he is a tyrant, but he has also a fiery unworldliness and he loves dogs and his eight children.43 This character of him comes from the mind of Lily Briscoe, the woman who got away from Mrs Ramsay's match-making projects because of her lack of coventional beauty and her vocation as an artist. Lily, the most memorable among the Ramsays' guests, is without delusions of grandeur. She knows people will not cherish her paintings (she expects them to remain rolled up in attics) but she faces down Charles Tansley's sneering: Women can't paint, women can't write, 247 and struggles to get just right a painting of Mrs Ramsay and James which has a three-cornered form parallel to that of the novel itself. She finally completes her work with a line down the centre, as the novel is completed by the break between its two major sections. Whereas in the first section of the novel Mrs Ramsay drew together all the disparate and jarring personalities round the evening meal of her famous boeuf en daube, in the final section Lily feels uncomfortably the pressure on her to take up the mantle of Mrs Ramsay and to minister to Mr Ramsay's colossal need for feminine sympathy, while Cam, the youngest Ramsay girl, feels the pressure to break her pact with her brother James of resistance to their father. Opposition lies closer to the surface in this section of the novel, to be dissolved in the double ending, as Mr Ramsay leaps ashore like a young man at the lighthouse, after giving James the praise he thirsts for, while Lily completes her painting and provides the closing words: I have had my vision. 320

VW found the Times Literary Supplement notice depressingly similar to the same journal's views of Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway: that is, in her summary, gentlemanly, kindly, timid & praising beauty, doubting character.3: 134 Again E. M. Forster delivered thoughtful approbation: awfully sad, very beautiful . . . it stirs me much more to questions of whether & why than anything else you have written. . . . I am inclined to think it your best work.3: 137 Woolf herself was provoked to careful self-scrutiny. I am now almost an established figure—as a writer. They dont laugh at me any longer. Soon they will take me for granted. Possibly I shall be a celebrated writer. Anyhow, The Lighthouse is much more nearly a success, in the usual sense of the word, than any other book of mine. 3: 137

Woolf's attitude to this honour (which, however, was unusual in that she did not decline it) remained deprecating and satirical. She called it the most insignificant and ridiculous of prizes 3: 479 and my dog show prize.3: 491 She sounded scornful of Stella Benson (who came second and took the evaluation seriously). The prospect of being given a cheque for forty pounds by Hugh Walpole provoked the comment: My god! Is it worth it? Echo answers no. But not all of this can be taken at face value: much of it was addressed to her student nephew Julian Bell, and in the same breath she called Orlando, then in progress, an extremely foolish book. 3: 491 She felt the occasion of the award to be of a horror indescribable;3: 498 Walpole concurred in thinking it frightful.3: 492 It took place in a South Kensington drawing room full of elderly fur bearing women, 3: 495 some of them novelists of an earlier generation, like Elizabeth Robins and Beatrice Harraden.3: 498 Apparently for Woolf the formal atmosphere was at odds with her sense of what it was (or what she had made it) to be a writer.

Erich Auerbach chose a passage from early in To the Lighthouse, which he calls The Brown Stocking, to close his influential work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 1946 (which begins with Homer, and spends so long with what used to be called the Dark and the Middle Ages that Rabelais comes just past the half-way mark). In Woolf's writing, Auerbach justly observes, the objective narrator almost entirely vanishes, giving way to narration through multiple consciousness; the treatment of time approximates more closely to the workings of a remembering consciousness than to literal sequence; the events related are minor, random, unimpressive, whereas turning-points and catastrophes occur offstage if at all. In this way, he suggests, something new and elemental appeared: nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice.552

Woolf's diary records almost a year of her love-affair with this book. On 22 October 1927 she was launched somewhat furtively but with all the more passion on writing it, and expected it to be a small book, finished by Christmas. I walk making up phrases; sit, contriving scenes; am in short of the thick of the greatest rapture known to me. 3: 161 She felt happier than for months; as if put in the sun, or laid on cushions; & after two days entirely gave up my time chart & abandoned myself to the pure delight of this farce. She said she was writing it half in a mock style very clear & plain, so that people will understand every word, holding a careful balance between truth and fantasy.3: 162 In December (having given up any idea of publishing by Christmas) she wrote: How extraordinarily unwilled by me but potent in its own right by the way Orlando was! as if it shoved everything aside to come into existence. Yet she realised that even before she thought of its central idea she had been hoping to write something of this kind: the spirit to be satiric, the structure wild. 3: 168 Writing the last chapter, in February, she felt that pleasure and excitement had given way to boredom and anxiety,3: 175 yet the next month, having finished the first draft, she felt she had written more quickly than ever before, and that it is all a joke, & yet gay & quick reading, I think; a writers holiday. 3: 177

This she imagined as a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change from one sex to another. 3: 161

It its first six months it sold 8,104 copies in England (twice as many as To the Lighthouse) and 13,031 from Harcourt Brace in the USA.205 The Hogarth office boy, Richard Kennedy, later recalled it selling like hot cakes. His job was to ensure they did not run out of stock, by counting the packages as they came from the binders. I count them several times a day, but there are always fewer than I expect. 42 This made it a high point in VW's earnings.205 VW gave the beautifully bound manuscript of Orlando to Vita, who kept it as a treasure.207 It is still regularly on display in the Great Hall at Knole House.

The protagonist of Orlando notoriously begins as a sixteen-year-old romantic boy in the attic of a palatial great house in the late sixteenth century, practising sword-thrusts at the shrunken head of a Moor killed by one of his ancestors on the Crusades, and working at his Æthelbert, A Tragedy in Five Acts.18 Orlando charms Queen Elizabeth and engages in innumerable affairs culminating in his love for the Russian princess Sasha, whom he loses at the conclusion of the book's first great set piece from this period, the frost fair on the frozen Thames. Orlando retires to his estate after this, and turns from his forty-seven plays, histories, romances, poems concerning mythological personages, all romantic, and all long, 72 to the only slim manuscript among them, his poem The Oak Tree (the only monosyllabic title among the lot) about the spot on his estate which is his constant musing-place in time of difficulty.73 He now confirms his central identity as a writer and seeks advice from the disreputable but successful poet Nick Greene. Greene, however, first snubs and then satirises him, so that Orlando, at the age of thirty, or thereabouts . . . . burnt in a great conflagration fifty-seven poetical works, only retaining The Oak Tree. 90 He turns his attention to breeding hounds, thinking, and furnishing his great house. Meanwhile he outlives his Elizabethan beginnings, and during the reign of Charles II is sent as British Ambassador to Constantinople. There, in a masque-like metamorphosis featuring (on one side) Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, and on the other side our Lady of Purity, our Lady of Chastity, 123 and our Lady of Modesty, 124 the awful truth is revealed that he was a woman. 126

The new, female Orlando (though his gender has always been subject to hints and dubious suggestions) is essentially unchanged—in identity if not in future. After an interlude among the gipsies, Orlando's new status as an English gentlewoman provides scope for some finely contradictory musings on the topic of gender. She has no sooner concluded it better to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex; better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others, and to be left free for the enjoyment of contemplation, solitude, love, 146 than she realises that making a woman's life in England meant conventionality, meant slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue. 149 She is offered courtship and worship by the Archduke Harry (formerly masquerading as the Archduchess Harriet) and forced to get rid of him by humiliating him. She tries to associate herself with literary men, and thinks that future ages will envy her the honour of pouring tea for Alexander Pope, till she unwittingly insults him and realises he is willing, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body with his pen. 194 She sees the eighteenth century out, and the nineteenth encroaches like a cloud spreading across the sky. Damp now began to make its way into every house. 205 Shrubberies and beards sprouted, sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied . . . and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. 207 In due course Orlando meets the love of her life, Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire, and nearly thirty pages before the end of the book the narrative reaches the present moment (meticulously dated): a present interlayered with memories of the past, in which the rush of modern life is conveyed by shopping and driving in a car, and ecstasy is conveyed by the flight of a kingfisher.

Though the story is sprinkled throughout with cleverly tailored allusions to the specifics of Vita Sackville-West's life (such as the lawsuit about the inheritance of Knole), Woolf does not lose sight of the element of mock history of literature and of English culture.

Orlando set a new level in VW's public reputation. The usual polarization of reviews was represented by J. C. Squire in The Observer calling it a very pleasant trifle that would entertain the drawing-rooms for an hour and Rebecca West in the Morning Post calling it a poetic masterpiece of the first rank.3: 200n3 At the end of November the Daily Chronicle pronounced: The book in Bloomsbury is a joke, in Mayfair a necessity, and in America a classic.205 Lady Sackville (Vita's mother) waged a campaign against it, defacing her own copy, writing letters to influential friends to vilify it, and visiting bookshops to hide their copies. She also publicised her suspicion that it was actually written by Vita. 206 In a letter to D. H. Lawrence on 12 December 1928, Aldous Huxley described the text as so terribly literary and fantaisiste that nothing is left in it at all. It's almost the most highly exhausted vacuum I've ever known.305

Orlando continues to arouse strong positive and negative feeling. Jeanette Winterson's celebration of it in July 2002 (on a BBC2 programme entitled Art That Shook the World) as one of the great turning points in literature, evoked almost vituperative response from the Sunday Times television critic A. A. Gill. He undermined Winterson with demeaning praise (intuitive, smart, self-assured) and accused Woolf of equal and opposite crimes (cerebral and excessive in feeling, elitist and shallowly socialist).13

Sally Potter directed a highly successful film of Orlando in 1992 with Tilda Swinton playing the lead.under Orlando In 2010 Sarah Ruhl directed for Classic Stage Company, New York, a stage version which stayed remarkably close to the feminist and the fabulist qualities of the original, including the sex-change scene.

She travelled with Vanessa and Angelica Bell to Cambridge, where she stayed with Pernel Strachey, Principal of Newnham.

A small, limited edition had appeared four days before this in the USA. Before it appeared, VW, anticipating in effect antifeminist response (of the evasive jocular kind), noted: I wrote it with ardour & conviction. 3: 262

During the year of A Room of One's Own, VW's literary earnings amounted to about £3,020—which she equated to the salary of a civil servant. 3: 285

This long essay, evolved from two lectures under the title Women and Fiction, asks what conditions need to be met before women can realise their creative potential. The answers (a room of one's own and five hundred pounds a year) demonstrate a firm grasp on materialist-feminist principles, with money and personal space standing in for autonomy, independence of body and mind. Woolf couches her argument in the form of the case-histories of three women, Mary Beton (narrator for much of the work), Mary Seton (the aunt who left Mary Beton enough money to be independent), and Mary Carmichael (a promising young novelist). These names belong to a traditional ballad, Mary Hamilton, which is sometimes called The Queen's Maries or The Four Maries. In the ballad these are the Scots maids of honour who survive, while the protagonist, Mary Hamilton, is hanged for the murder of the bastard child she has borne to the king. In Woolf's essay; the silent, unmentionable Mary Hamilton, victim to her sexuality and to the class hierarchy, haunts the essay as does Woolf's posited Judith Shakespeare, sister of the poet-dramatist and born with equal genius, whom she supposes to have killed herself when she became pregnant by the theatre manager.215-16 Only through such ahistorical myths of history does VW suggest that the bar to women's creativity has been the exploitation of female sexuality by men.

She writes more directly of money, of the riches lavished through the ages on masculine institutions like the ancient universities, but here too her clinching example is one of the imagination: her contrast of the two meals, the spare, high-minded, sustaining prunes and custard at the women's college and the celebratory gourmet's feast (every course a work of art, conspiring to create a sense of shared brilliance among those who consume it) at the men's college. She reflects a strong sense of women's presence, despite everything, in literary history. Though she writes that Jane Austen ought to have laid a wreath on the grave of Fanny Burney (who in fact died more than twenty years later than Austen), this is excusable. Burney did belong to an earlier writing generation, and the chronology of women's lives was hardly common knowledge.

The original audience included Q. D. Roth (later Leavis) and Kathleen Raine. Women writers who later counted it an important influence on them included such disparate figures as Muriel Box and Rumer Godden. It seems quite possible that during the time of the women's movement that began in the 1970s, A Room of One's Own was better known and more often read than any of Woolf's novels. Immediate responses were, of course, mixed, and full of hidden agendas. Arnold Bennett took this book as proof that a woman, unlike a man, cannot refrain from straying from her way to gather irrelevant flowers, that Woolf was the victim of her extraordinary gift of fancy (not imagination).259Vita Sackville-West, on the contrary, who urged all men and all women to read A Room of One's Own, wrote that it demonstrated the common sense for which Woolf was seldom given credit by those who called her brilliant or fantastical.257-8

VW's professional reputation began to shift at about this time. From the early 1920s, she developed an increasingly strong self-image as an adult woman and writer. More and more, her novels both won praise from critics and reached sizeable audiences.517, 558-9 She contributed articles to international journals including Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar, the New Republic, the New York Herald Tribune and Vogue (which, under the direction of Dorothy Todd, was beginning to print pieces by and on Constantin Brancusi, Clive Bell, Jean Cocteau, Aldous Huxley, and Man Ray).470-1, 559

The following year, for the first time in her career, she was earning more by her novels than by her essays and reviews. Her earned income grew markedly during this period, and she took much pleasure and a sense of empowerment from it. Not including the income which came to her and Leonard from inheritances, investments, and their publishing business, VW had been earning £500 a year (the sum she makes the mark of independence in A Room of One's Own) only since 1926. But two years later her profits jumped dramatically, owing in significant part to the successes, domestic and international, of To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and the Hogarth Press Uniform Edition of all her books.556-8 She was intensely conscious of her value in the market-place, 558 and of the emotional, intellectual, and political meanings of her financial success. In February 1929 she declined a £2,000 commission from Doubleday Doran to write a biography of James Boswell (exactly the kind of job her father would have wanted her to do).561 128 Instead, she writes, I have bought my freedom. A queer thought that I have actually paid for the power to leave London and to think only of The Waves, by refusing this offer.3: 295 In June 1929 (as noted above), she recorded that her income was nearly equivalent to a Cabinet Minister's salary: an indication of rising status as well as of freedom.556

This was printed in the Listener on 5 May, and then in The Death of the Moth. It is now available in audio form over the internet. 6: 108n2

Craft, says Woolf, in the sense either of technique or of cunning, cannot be applied to words, which live their own lives, which flatly refuse to be useful or to mean only one thing, which hate to be separated from each other, and which have meaning only in groups. She spoke of the autonomy and independence of words, of the promiscuous past of our mother the English language, of the poverty of words which are ranged in alphabetical order or memorised for exams. The talk is a virtuoso debunking of lexical or logical approaches to words.

Her nephew Quentin Bell felt that the recording did not accurately capture the quality of her voice.6: 108n2 But critic Patricia Clements wrote decades later that the voice, with wide musical range and changing tempo, sometimes serious, sometimes playful, often ironic, gave a sense of the temporal woman in the enduring words.xxxiv

Case, a Cambridge-trained classicist with whom VW began to study Greek in 1900 and who became a lasting friend, had died on 15 July.

Woolf praised Case's working outside the institution, teaching more dilettante pupils as well as those working for exams. Somehow the masterpieces of Greek drama were stormed, without grammar, without accents . . . out they shone, if inaccessible still supremely desirable. (22 July 1937): 16

VW's last work completed for publication was her essay on Hester Thrale Piozzi, in the form of a review of James Clifford's recent biography of her. The review appeared on 8 March 1941. For Clifford, a young academic, the several revisions of the essay, retrieved for him by Leonard Woolf from here and there (some from the wastepaper-basket) were a dazzling proof of VW's professionalism even at the end of her tether.767

This anecdote comes from personal acquaintance with James Clifford.

The essay is a tribute to Piozzi's vigour, energy, and prodigious appetite for life, even into old age.751

The germ of this novel (which was known during its early composition as The Moths) is often traced to a passage VW wrote in her diary on 30 September 1926 about the mystical side of solitude. One sees a fin passing far out. She recorded a curious state of mind. I hazard the guess that it may be the impulse behind another book. Although, she said, her mind was so far totally blank & virgin of books, she wanted to watch & see how the idea at first occurs. I want to trace my own process. 3: 113 A few days after this she wrote to Gerald Brenan of the helplessness of beginning a new work: What do all the books I have written avail me? Nothing. 4: 97 Three years later, yet at a comparatively early stage, she wrote, never, in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. 3: 259 A few months before publication she cheerfully referred to it, in a letter to her nephew Quentin, as the worst novel in the language. 4: 309

It sold about 6,500 copies by the end of the month and was translated into French by Marguerite Yourcenar in 1937.3: 285 6: 109n1 The manuscripts were beautifully reproduced by J. W. Graham in 1976.

The Waves (which has never been filmed, though in 2005 a film was under discussion) was transmuted into physical theatre in December 2001 by Theatre Rusticle of Toronto. The characters (renamed with descriptors, The Woman from the Country, The Woman from the City, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, etc.) danced as well as spoke. Reviewer Paula Citron called the production a triumph.R11

Hermione Lee calls this VW's novel of friendships, her Bloomsbury novel, 269 and in the context of its six characters she recalls Woolf's tracing Bloomsbury to six people who were remarkable for nothing but their wits.268 Actually the characters are arguably seven. The three women and three men who play together as children and meet regularly during the course of their lives (most notably for a reunion at Hampton Court) voice the novel as their separate monologues, separate discourses, chime in turn throughout it. But they all remember another character: Percival the revered, who was a big boy when the novel's male characters were little boys. Percival has no voice in the novel and plays no active part in the stories of the other characters, except—since he goes to India and dies there—that it is through him that death becomes a real part of their lives. Their experience begins tentatively, with small children's perception of shapes, colours, sounds. I see a ring, said Bernard, hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light. . . . The leaves are gathered round the window like pointed ears, said Susan. 6 But their first perceptions follow on the first of the link passages describing the passage of a day, a sequence through which the waves keep breaking. In the first of these The sun had not yet risen. . . . As they neared the shore each bar rose, heaped itself, broke and swept a thin veil of white water across the sand. 5 The final speaker in the book is Bernard, the writer among the six, and his final words, about the enemy whom he now observes advancing: Death is the enemy. It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched and my hair flying back like a young man's, like Percival's, when he galloped in India. I strike spurs into my horse. Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! After this comes the shortest of all the link or background passages: The waves broke on the shore. 211

The six central characters present carefully discriminated and different ways of experiencing life. Jinny loves parties and excitement; Rhoda is full of anxiety; Susan, with deep connection to nature, becomes a nurturing mother of children, almost a fertility goddess; Louis, prim, suspicious and able, ineradicably an outsider; Neville, solitary, a scholar, a lover; Bernard with his novelist's negative capability for entering the minds of others and looking through their eyes. But these different dispositions share a great deal as each in turn looks out at the world and at the others; the book traces their differences and their shared development and ageing, as well as, through the link passages, representing them as representative of their kind, the human race.

Ethel Smyth sent her responses to this book by telegram on publication day: Book astounding so far. Agitatingly increases value of life. Two days later she sent: Final paragraph almost smashes machine of life with its terrible duty.4: 388n1Vanessa Bell, reading the death of Percival as that of their brother Thoby, wrote, I think you have made one's human feelings into something less personal.4: 390n1E. M. Forster wrote that he had read it with the excitement that comes from encountering a classic.4: 402n2 Oddly enough, VW reported, most of the low-brow reviewers (whose sense I respect) liked the novel and made nothing of its presumed difficulty.4: 389 Eight years later, in the first month of the Second World War, VW reported that The Waves was the only one of my books that I can sometimes read with pleasure. 6: 365 In November 2006 a multi-media production based on this novel and entitled Waves opened at the National Theatre, devised Katie Mitchell and the company.

VW conceived her book about Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel as a little escapade, light relief after the hard slog of writing The Waves. No doubt with memories of Sackville portraits for Orlando, she wrote to Vita Sackville-West to request a photo of a dog named Henry.4: 380 She had already written, perhaps as early as 1904, a brief canine mock-biography, On a Faithful Friend. She was, too, almost certainly familiar with Catherine Gore's The Story of a Royal Favourite, 1845, though critics seem not to have picked up on this.img and agh between them have checked everywhere they cd think of.

The three remaining parts followed serially in the same publication in August, September, and October 1933. 159-60

The Hogarth Press was publishing work by Mussolini at the same time as this work, in which an idealised Italy, site of freedom and escape, plays an important role.

Flush is both the life-story of a dog and the life-story, obliquely told, of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Woolf accepts the version of the poet's life that was current at the time—of her as imprisoned by her father, liberated by Robert Browning, by love, and by courage—and she accepts the story of Flush's near-human capacity for sympathy from poems that Barrett Browning wrote about her dog. She adds various spoof biographical elements: Flush's pride of birth and his youthful love-life, in both of which he resembles Orlando; his moral victory over his own jealousy when the Brownings' baby is born; his achievement of ideal liberty when he exchanges a stuffy sick-room in Wimpole Street, London, for the convention-free and richly smelling land of Italy. Barrett Browning learns courage by rescuing Flush from the Whitechapel dog-stealing gang, and in return he rescues her.

Flush was Woolf's best-selling novel in England. Some reviewers commented on her facility, which they found damaging. She feared it might harm her reputation, and called it a silly joke.

She repeated her request on 8 November. On 20 June 1935 Margery Fry, Roger's sister, also asked VW to write his life. Woolf felt acutely the difficulty of trying to please, or not to offend, so many different constituencies: Fry's Quaker relations, Helen Anrep and his other lovers, including her own sister ([h]ow does one euphemise 20 different mistresses?),6: 104 his children (by his wife, who had died insane), their many mutual friends. Biography involved on the one hand submission to the tyranny of fact, on the other hand the mitigation of fact that might give pain or offence. At a low point in composition she found that the genre that was her favourite reading was a grind, even a barren nightmare to write.6: 262 How on earth, she demanded, does one explain madness and love in sober prose, with dates attached? 6: 267 Or as she put it to her sister, how to deal with love so that we're not all blushing. But she found, Roger himself is so magnificent, I'm so in love with him; and see dimly such a masterpiece thatkdc; no apostrophe in cant? img: nope cant be painted, that I go on. 6: 285

VW feared this would be thought a dull meticulous book. She declined to send Ethel Smyth a copy, supposing that it would be puzzling and frustrating to someone who had not known its subject. She was then delighted when Smyth, she said, pounce[d] upon the heart and centre of the book, perceiving that the author had performed an experiment in self-suppression; a gamble in R's power to transmit himself.6: 417 Good reviews included one by Desmond MacCarthy in the Sunday Times.6: 410

It was published in an edition by Lucio Ruotolo in 1976 as Freshwater, A Comedy.869

Freshwater was the name of Julia Margaret Cameron's estate on the Isle of Wight, where Anne Thackeray Ritchie had a cottage. The Stephen children had stayed there.75-6 This farcical presentation of Victorian life is very much a family affair. It works by means of persons as icons—Julia Margaret Cameron, Queen Victoria, Ellen Terry, Tennyson, G. F. Watts—and a style of life overloaded with material objects. Hermione Lee quotes the exuberant props list: Copy of Maud. . . . Beard for Tennyson. Beard for Watts. . . . Cape for Tennyson. Smock for Watts. Reticule for Mrs Cameron. . . . Donkey to bray. . . . Clock to strike. . . . Order of Merit. Brandy bottle. . . . Whiskers. 46

Professions for Women

VW worked long and hard on the lengthy novel which finally became The Years. Its genesis goes back to her speech of 21 January 1931 at the London and National Society for Women's Service (later the Fawcett Society), which was rewritten as Professions for Women. The delivery of that speech is identified by Hermione Lee as a public performance of great significance in the history of twentieth-century feminism and in the story of Virginia Woolf's political thinking.598Telling a story about the phantom she calls (after Coventry Patmore), the Angel in the House, Woolf speaks of self-censorship and deference.

Patmore's The Angel in the House had appeared in October 1854.

The Years, then, descends with The Pargiters from Professions for Women. VW was writing this book in the mid 1930s at a time when her now established reputation came violently under attack, often in transparently gendered terms. Wyndham Lewis in Men Without Art, 1934, attacked her as a feeble and insecure feminine principle in literature.658 Next year Frank Swinnerton in The Georgian Literary Scene called her very clever . . . but . . . creatively unimportant while Prince Dmitry Mirsky in The Intelligentsia of Great Britain accused her of voicing only the sufferings of the parasitic cream of the bourgeois.853-4n2 Her diary records in acute form her usual struggles with her material. On 25 April 1933 she wrote, I think this will be a terrific affair. I must be bold & adventurous. I want to give the whole of the present society—nothing less: facts, as well as the vision. And then on 5 September 1935: Absolutely floored. She was suddenly blocked, after feeling sure she was working on the most exciting thing I ever wrote. 4: 151, 338-9

As it stands this shapely book gives no hint of the chunks cut out. It runs from the year 1880, and the lingering death of the matriarch Rose Pargiter, in the dark, crowded Victorian household where most of Rose's grown-up or almost grown-up children are engaged in hiding their real thoughts and feelings beneath a decorous surface. The family home in Abercorn Terrace (a fictional address typical of the substantial town houses of Bayswater or Kensington) knows nothing of other parts of London, like the patriarch Abel Pargiter's club, or the smaller, scruffier street where his mistress lives. The youngest, also Rose, has had her imaginative life as Pargiter of Pargiter's Horse . . . riding to the rescue 27 rudely interrupted by a man exposing himself to her in the street, leaving her frightened, ashamed, and unable to tell anybody. The action swoops forward from one year-date to another—eleven years on, then sixteen more—to the present day, seeking to envelop the whole in a changing temporal atmosphere. 6: 116 In the present day the young sisters and brothers of the opening section are old, and a family party gathers them and their offspring, mixing several generations, many viewpoints, many jumbled ideals for a future in which some see hope and some, like Eleanor Pargiter (the eldest of the original family), see the threat of a fascist future in a casual newspaper headline. Eleanor (who had had perforce to take her mother's place in the family for a while, but whose dream had been the quintessential Victorian one of devoting herself to social work and social progress) is an object of almost anthropological interest to her niece Peggy, a doctor, who is compiling her picture of a Victorian spinster to share with a contemporary at work. Rose, unable to be a cavalryman, has grown up to become a militant suffragist, to smash windows and in the end to receive a medal for public service. The final section holds a large, disparate cast (one vast, many-sided group) in balance, in desultory party exchanges and constant cross-purposes.6: 116

VW had been ill while she was writing this book and was acutely anxious about its quality: she gave the manuscript to Leonard to read with the brief of pronouncing whether or not it was publishable. Putting down the last sheet at midnight, he could not speak. He was in tears. He says it is a most remarkable book . . . & has not a spark of doubt that it must be published.5: 30 His autobiography years later suggested that his tears had been those of relief after fears of his own: To Virginia I praised the book more than I should have done if she had been well. 6: 84n2 Among reviewers, Edwin Muir was woundingly disappointed,386-8 but Pamela Hansford Johnson (who called the book a biography of Time) found it written with deliberate, fluid skill . . . boundless vision . . . sudden, startling perception.388 She noted how it subordinated individual characters to the events marked in their very being, the scent exhaled by the years as they dropped and fell into the earth of memory itself.388

This book was long in producing. She had first thought of it in 1931, as a sequel to A Room of One's Own. By the following year she felt the material she was amassing for it (newspaper cuttings, etc.) constituted enough powder to blow up St Paul's. She sat on this material for years, hoping to digest and solidify her angry feelings before writing; but when she began drafting the book in 1936 she wrote that the prose pressed & spurted out of me like a physical volcano. 31

Three Guineas is sometimes read as suggesting that tyranny, both petty and serious, is exercised exclusively by men. In the view of Christine Froula, it breaks through The Years' silences and evasions to expose the scapegoating of women as the structural act of barbarism that founds the masculine public sphere.260 Women's excluded status has given them, in Woolf's argument, four powerful teachers to open their eyes to the nature of institutional power: for the poverty, chastity, and obedience of the old religious life they have substituted poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from false loyalties.

Many habitual admirers of VW (often those who respected her rationally socialist and feminist views) could not stomach this book—either rejecting as whimsy the framework of three fund-raisers each soliciting a guinea, or jibbing at what they saw as giving disproportionate attention to the wrongs of women, or complaining that this was no longer a time for the anti-war feeling which they would have supported a few years before. Hermione Lee reproduces a very funny cartoon from Time and Tide in the month after publication, whose caption records the dreadful kind of internal conflict giving nervous breakdowns to reviewers who had the highest respect for Woolf's standing but found her current theme not merely disturbing . . . but revolting. 710 John Maynard Keynes complained that Woolf's mock-scholarly notes made a mockery of our history.31 Her family continued after her death to decline the award of the kind of honours that are mocked in Three Guineas. Leonard declined to become a Companion of Honour in 1966, and Quentin Bell turned down a CBE in 1974.5 Critic Alison Light remarks that this book's irony protects the reader from the violence of its polemic.31

It opens: The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. 154

Writing as a female body, weaponless and sleepless, whose mind stops dead when a bomb seems imminent but grasps at pleasant memories as soon as the terror is lifted, she considers mental fight, the absence of women from war councils, the need for young men to be re-educated not to desire military glory, the need for radical change in the postwar world.155

Projects

Throughout her writing VW had the usual experience of planning literary projects which then did not come to fruition. Late in her life, combining fragments of anthropology, sociology, and psychology with literary history, she began a collection of critical essays on the social elements that build a national identity and shape the production of literature. Titled Reading at Random, her (ultimately unfinished) text begins with the closing image of Between the Acts, with the prehistory of Britain, swamp and forest and wilderness, out of which came sounds, songs, rhythm, folk-tune, and an art whose key word was anonymity. 750 She also planned to write a biographical sketch of her physician and confidante Octavia Wilberforce, possibly titled English Youth, to be published anonymously.755-6

Between the Acts

VW seems to have had the first idea for this novel on 2 April 1938, with publication of Three Guineas imminent and having just begun work on her life of Roger Fry, as something random & tentative . . . but I rejected: We substituted. 5: 135 The new novel's working title was Pointz Hall. In 1982 Mitchell A. Leaska published Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of 'Between the Acts'. The historical pageant written by Miss La Trobe, which is so central to the structure of the novel, may owe its origin to an invitation which Woolf received from the Rodmell Women's Institute in April 1940 to write and produce a play for the village.869 6: 391

Her letter of withdrawal, written very soon before her suicide, dismissed her own work as silly and trivial (which, however, was not very different from the dismissive judgements she was accustomed to deliver on her own works when first completed) and declared her intention of revising it.6: 486 Leonard Woolf was always careful to refer to the published novel as unfinished work, bearing in mind that it was her habit to make significant changes in revision.

This slim novel is set in and around a modest English historic house in the lull before the Second World War. The most immediate we of the novel is the family who inhabit the house. In the older generation the patriarch Bart Oliver (who tries to communicate with his small grandson but only succeeds in terrifying him) is constantly at odds with his sister Lucy Swithin, whose imagination is Christian, humanitarian, and possessed by a sense that the prehistoric past is only a moment away. These two can be relied on to be always on opposite sides of any question. In the next generation a young mother, Isa, and her husband, Giles, have a marriage which is a private combat; the visiting outsiders, Jewish Mrs Manresa and homosexual William Dodge, exemplify non-married lives. But the household is, for the day, almost engulfed in the communal effort of the pageant staged by villagers and the audience entertained to refreshments in the tithe barn: all these people enlarge the we, and among them the vulnerable quality of traditional Englishness is a debated issue, enlarging the we still further. (Giles is angrily certain that war will come and will leave nothing the same.) Miss La Trobe, author of the pageant, is an artist-outsider: a lesbian who lodges in the village and whose lover has abandoned her. Caught up in the passion of creation, the delight of pastiching the styles of the past and the frustration of attempting to grasp the present moment (which she does by having her actors flash mirrors at the audience, who thereby see themselves reflected), she too represents Englishness, but less through history than through literature. Miss La Trobe knows the fear of failure (Blood seemed to pour from her shoes), and she hardly hears the applause, so pre-occupied is she with planning her next work, needing to get away from the crowd to the anonymous dark of the pub.178

The many individual voices in Between the Acts sound in counterpoint with quotations and misquotations, rhymes, proverbs, and with newspaper headlines and slogans. Isa, who has a head full of quotations, is also haunted by a newspaper report of soldiers (the guardians of security) raping a fourteen-year-old girl.

Leonard Woolf, reading the typescript of this novel at the end of February 1941, judged it to be more vigorous and pulled together than most of her other books, to have more depth and to be very moving. I also thought that the strange symbolism gave it an almost terrifying profundity and beauty.390 The press reception of the novel was much influenced by recognition of it as VW's final novel. Reviewers tended to see it as culmination or a falling-off, though Elizabeth Bowen stoutly denied that it held any touch of finality, and although the form and the combination of elements are, as always, new; she never used any combination or form twice.394 Julia Briggs feels that this novel's complexities and contradictions, its mixture of genres, its parody and pastiche, its several levels of action have been illuminated by the advent of the critical language of postmodernism.394

Collections Posthumously Edited by Leonard Woolf

This series of publications, begun with Between the Acts, represented Leonard's careful, deliberate campaign to keep Virginia Woolf in the public's eye. He arranged to spread publication over a number of years, to put out the essays without annotation, in the same form as those published in VW's lifetime, and to have Quentin Bell write the first biography.766-7

Novelist Angus Wilson, in the course of an otherwise notably fair and sensitive review for The Observer, said that VW's her reputation had been overestimated.220 On this Ivy Compton-Burnett commented: Ugly behaviour. I trust it will do him some harm.220

Later Posthumous Collectons: Letters

Five more volumes followed, each with its subtitle: The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1912-1922, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1923-1928, A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1929-1931, The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1932-1935, and Leave the Letters till We're Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1936-1941. The final volume appeared in 1980.

Diaries

Quentin Bell wrote an introduction to the diaries.

Autobiographical Writings

This collection includes A Sketch of the Past in which Woolf describes her half-brother's sexual interest in her. Two other essays, 22 Hyde Park Gate and Old Bloomsbury describe his attempt to assault her sexually.

Critic Louise DeSalvo calls A Sketch of the Pastthe bravest writing task that she had ever set out to accomplish.99VW is, she says, a pioneer in exploring the effects of her abuse at a time well before incest survivors reported their experiences.101 In 2005 biographer Julia Briggs has called for a fuller, more informative and more flexible edition of these texts than has yet appeared—one that will reveal the several paths Woolf followed in this, her frankest exploration of memory, her boldest journey into the interior. 369

Anon. and The Reader

One late story entitled The Symbol, whose themes are familiar to readers of Woolf, remained unpublished until June 1985, when it was printed in the London Review of Books.

An English lady, whose Anglo-Indian family produced explorers as well as colonial administrators, sits in a resort in Switzerland writing to her sister in Birmingham about the mountain above the town. She feels that the mountain must be a symbol of something. She recalls her mother's death and watches a roped line of climbers on the mountain, until suddenly they disappear.

Essays and Shorter Fiction

A selection of Woolf's essays was edited by Michèle Barrett for the Women's Press of London in 1979, and a scholarly, comprehensive edition of her essays by Andrew McNeillie was completed by Stuart N. Clarke with its sixth volume in 2011. Reprintings continue: of six essays that Woolf wrote for Good Housekeeping in spring 1931, the first five were re-issued in 1975, then all six as The London Scene in 2007.18

Manuscripts

VW left a mass of manuscript material, now mostly housed at the University of Sussex in Brighton (Monks House Papers) and in the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library. Both these collections have been filmed by Primary Source Microfilm (published by Gale).

Fictionalized Treatments

Versions of VW appeared in many writings by other authors both during and after her own lifetime. On 8 March 1928, Vita Sackville-West informed her that Phyllis Bottome (a popular author and great Woolf fan) had written a short story about meeting Woolf, whom she fictionalized as the character Avery Fleming (published in her collection Strange Fruit, 1928).275, 277 245-53 Hugh Walpole's Hans Frost, 1929, features Jane Rose, an author who has recently published a novel featuring a lighthouse, and who looked like the wife of a Pre-Raphaelite painter, her dark hair brushed back in waves from her forehead, her grey dress cut in simple fashion, her thin pale face quiet and remote. She was . . . the best living novelist in England. 567, 844 In Michael Cunningham's novel The Hours, 1998, two women whose lives, with VW's, span the twentieth century have their own experience touched and altered by its perceived relationship with hers. This novel commanded a wide audience when it was made into a film (script by David Hare, directed by Stephen Daldry) under the same title, which was nominated for nine Oscars. Daldry said his handling of Woolf's suicide was influenced by memories of that of playwright Sarah Kane, of whom he was a friend. Maggie Gee's imaginative and ingenious Virginia Woolf in Manhattan, 2014, is another fictional treatment.

A Good Day, a play by Brian M. Clarke and Tom Elliott that engages with Woolf's final hours, had its first performance in April 2011 at the RNCM Studio Theatre in Manchester. US vocalist-composer Joan La Barbara is at work on an opera inspired by VW's life and work, from which she has already performed excerpts. The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, presented in May 2015, and later revived, a ballet triptych by choreographer Wayne McGregor, with music by Max Richter, titled Woolf Works. This sets out to create through modern dance an experience of granite and rainbow based on the synaesthetic aims of her fiction.

Indicators

The first study of VW was that of Winifred Holtby in October 1932. Those future writers who did work on VW during their student days have included Mary Lavin and Michèle Barrett. In 1992 John Mepham introduced a survey of the secondary material available on Woolf and dated the rush of commentary on her from the mid-1970s (after, that is, the life by her nephew Quentin Bell, 1972, first in a procession of biographical studies which shows no sign of ending). Mepham then wrote: There is, fortunately, no critical orthodoxy in Woolf criticism. 1 That is putting it mildly. VW's literary reputation has been so much fought over politically, with acrimonious struggles over gender, class, and specialized brands of feminism, that it is reassuring to see her name being used as the obvious marker for the modern period by such large-scale projects as the one initiated by the British Academy and in progress under the title The Reception of British Authors in Europe, ranging from Francis Bacon to Virginia Woolf. 439 Her reputation has generated an international society, an annual conference, a London memorial, and a series of pamphlets issued by the family-connected Cecil Woolf publishing firm as the Bloomsbury Heritage series, as well as the definitive collected edition of her novels published by the Hogarth Press in the 1990s. An exhibition on Woolf and the Bloomsbury group entitled This Perpetual Flight was held at the Grolier Club in New York in 2008.

After the Femina Vie Heureuse prize for To the Lighthouse, VW refused in principle to accept any honour from an institution. She declined to give the Clark Lectures at Cambridge University, as well as several offers of honorary degrees, and in 1935 the culminating award of becoming a Companion of Honour. An attempt during the 1980s to get her commemorated in Westminster Abbey foundered on the opinion of the then Dean of Westminster that as a convinced agnostic, if not an atheist, and as a scorner of honours, she would not have wished for this.

This information comes from personal knowledge.

Copyright

During the interim Woolf's overall sales went up by at least half, and a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics set of her works (taking a feminist approach) was commissioned, along with several other new editions. Publishers were faced with a dilemma when the works went back into copyright again through the harmonisation of British with European copyright law, and its extension to seventy years after an author's death. In the end the Penguin edition went ahead, but had to pay royalties to Woolf's estate. 36