Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

hile finishing The Waves, Woolf was called back to the public voice of A Room of One’s Own by an invitation to address the London/National Society for Women’s Service, a professional organization newly evolved from the first women’s suffrage committee. Scarcely two years after she had urged the Cambridge women whose invitation inspired A Room of One’s Own to earn their livings and so insure their freedom of mind—and only twelve years after the 1919 Sex Disqualification Removal Act had opened the professions to women—a society of professional Englishwomen had materialized. Addressing this unprecedented audience in a “Speech of January 21 1931,” Woolf launched a decade of experimental projects on the intersections of gender, power, and public speech that explored new directions for women’s private and public lives, the civilization their thought and labor might transform, and her own writing.

The emergence of this new audience initiated dynamic interactions with real and imagined publics as Woolf battled taboos on speech—and thought—about “the sexual life of women.” It was a subject ahead of its time, and Woolf’s negotiations with internal and external censorship produced a series of Portraits of the Artist with Her Publics in an array of genres: the “Speech of January 21 1931”; the experimental “essay-novel” The Pargiters (1932–33), which branched into the realist novel The Years (1937) and the epistolary essay Three Guineas (1938); the memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40); the pageant-within-a-novel Between the Acts (1941); the late essay “Professions for Women” (1942); and related notes, letters, and diary entries.¹ Building on earlier studies of The Years as a defensive “pargeting” (plastering-over, whitewashing) of sensitive autobiographical material—and, in Woolf’s judgment, a “deliberate” “failure”—this chapter explores the dialectical interdependence of artist and audience in public speech about women’s sexuality as Woolf strives to bring a female unconscious policed by internalized censors to public voice.²

Focusing on crucial textual sites in this unfolding project, I examine Woolf’s experiments with the address to her audience through what Bakhtin conceives as “speech genres”—diary entry, notes, speech, essay-novel, realist novel, epistolary essay, private letter, memoir/“sketch,” even a hypothetical police blotter. The “concept of the speech addressee (how the speaker or writer senses and imagines him) is of immense significance in literary history,” Bakhtin observes; every “epoch,” “literary trend,” “style,” and “literary genre within an epoch or trend” implies a particular concept of “the addressee,” “a special sense and understanding of its reader, listener, public, or people”:

When speaking I always take into account the apperceptive background of the addressee’s perception of my speech: the extent to which he is familiar with the situation, whether he has special knowledge of the given cultural area of communication, his views and convictions, his prejudices (from my viewpoint), his sympathies and antipathies—because all this will determine his active responsive understanding of my utterance. These considerations also determine my choice of a genre …, of compositional devices, and … the style of my utterance.³

Although Woolf first addressed a new audience of professional women and experimented with genres, publics, and external and internal censorship at what seemed an auspicious moment, she ultimately transformed The Pargiters’ collective “talking cure” into The Years’ talking symptoms. Hardly had she announced her subject than repression intervened in what she found “psychologically” the “oddest” of adventures: what begins as a history of women’s sexual life ends veiled in enigmatic allegory, as if in an involuntary hystericization of her text.⁴ Against the view that Woolf’s revisions betray a simple failure of courage, anger, or truth telling, I suggest that her actual and imagined audiences—and the gaps between them—were critical to this project’s successes and failures from the outset. In a sense, then, this chapter is about a book that does not exist: Woolf’s unwritten book about “the sexual life of women.” Yet in its very “failure,” this experiment illuminates gender as, for women, a realm of unconscious loss and forbidden or alienated desire.

“Lord how exciting!” cries Woolf in her bathtub as, on the eve of her Speech, she has a sudden epiphany of “an entire new book—a sequel to a Room of Ones Own—about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps.”⁵ Without a witness a cry vanishes; but even in the solitude of the diary, which mirrors the privacy of the bath, this cry is in dialogue with the social world that occasions it. Already it has witnesses: the diary’s documentary witness, its future readers, and in a sense the “population” of professional women whose invitation elicits it, and who will materialize next day in the Millicent Fawcett lecture hall as the newly empowered women whom The Pargiters hails as “explorers” setting out “in crazy cockle shells to discover new lands, and found new civilisations.” Each speech genre—invitation, the diarist’s epiphany, Speech, essay—“senses and imagines” its addressee in ways conditioned by the two-hundred-year epoch Woolf ranked with the Crusades and the Wars of the Roses: European women’s gradual entry into public speech (RO 65).

What has women’s sexual life to do with transforming public culture—with discovering new lands, new civilizations? Naked in her tub, Woolf conceives a book whose high-spirited title marks women’s historic transition from “the oldest profession,” prostitution—the then current connotation of “public women”—and marriage (continuous with prostitution in a socioeconomic system that excludes women from public life) into professions until recently restricted to men. This change challenges the political economy of gender that institutes, sanctions, and sustains the masculine appropriation of the public sphere. Sexuality is intimately implicated in this economy of dominance and submission. In a 1907–8 memoir (“Reminiscences”) she recalls her own experience of women’s systemic oppression during the “seven unhappy years” between her half sister Stella’s death in 1897 and Leslie Stephen’s in 1904, when she and Vanessa endured their father’s tyranny and their older, richer, “seducing half brother” George Duckworth’s social and sexual interference (MB 136, L 4:382, 18 September 1931). Dressed in white and amethysts at her first party, Vanessa seemed to Desmond MacCarthy “a Greek slave” (porne); had either their mother, Julia (d. 1895), or Stella lived, Woolf writes, “how different ‘coming out’ and those Greek slave years … would have been!” (MB 106). Quentin Bell wrote that “George had spoilt her life before it had fairly begun”; though his “public face was amiable, … to his half-sisters he stood for something horrible and obscene. … He came to pollute the most sacred springs, to defile their very dreams” (QB 1:44). At twenty-four Virginia took a “snub” from George’s new wife as occasion to proclaim their emancipation: “now we are free women! Any form of slavery is Degrading—and the damage done to the mind is worse than that done to the body!!” (L 1:228, 29 June 1906).

Besides playing with new senses of “public women,” Woolf’s bathtub epiphany broached, as she later put it, the problem of “how to find a public, a way of publishing, all the new ideas that are in me” (D 5:57, 19 February 1937). How to move from her self-selected private audience—the “two hundred … well dressed, keen, & often beautiful young women” who found the Speech a “delicious entertainment”—to the much wider, indeed international public she now enjoyed as England’s preeminent novelist?⁶ What speech genre, what “special sense and understanding” of her readers—men and women, some deeply invested in the system, others reformists or radicals—could take Woolf’s cry public? What could be said on the controversial, taboo-riddled matter of women’s sexual and socioeconomic lives, and how, and by whom, and to whom? This vital question animates Woolf’s portraits of the artist with her audience in the four texts related to the Speech.⁷ Following on the diary’s “Bathtub Epiphany, 20 January 1931,” these self-portraits depict reciprocal hailing, external censorship, conscious and unconscious self-censorship, and the experimental speech genre Woolf invents in response to the professional women’s question about what “obstacles” and “barriers” she has met in her “professional experiences” (P/MN 163).

Woolf’s preparatory Manuscript Notes for the Speech fall between the diary and the Speech on the private/public continuum. At first Woolf can recall no obstacles, especially compared with the composer Ethel Smyth, with whom she was to share the podium. Her forebears from Sappho to Austen have “broken down most of the barriers long ago,” and paper, ink, even publication come cheap compared to orchestras, concert halls, and assembled audiences (P/MN 163). Although she does not mention it here, Woolf had earlier pronounced herself, as co-owner of the Press, “the only woman in England free to write what I like” and famously declared that aspiring women writers need five hundred pounds a year and rooms of their own (D 3:43, 22 September 1925). Yet it now appears that not even owning the means of production, let alone mere personal economic independence, can ensure a woman artist’s freedom of speech, for obstacles—censorship, self-censorship—swim into view. As a reviewer, Woolf felt constrained by her editors and public to pay lip service to prevailing values. She “always knew what I was expected to say” and felt “pressure … to say what was agreeable. Dear old Henry James—he must be praised. One must not attack the crass stupidity of Carlyle. … To say what one thought—that was my little problem—against the prodigious Current; to find a sentence that could hold its own against the male flood.” A woman journalist can easily “make money”; her “excruciating difficulty,” Woolf warns, is “to say what you think—and make money”; “to stand up for your own point of view”: if, for example, one were to condemn war as “a stupid and violent and hateful and idiotic and trifling and ignoble and mean display. … Of course, none of this would be printed” (P/MN 163–64).

The author and publisher of A Room of One’s Own who has stood up for her values and made money falls outside the frame of this monitory self-portrait as Journalist Battling the Current.⁸ But in broaching the subject of gender, publics, and money, Woolf uncovers a far more treacherous obstacle: the unconscious self-censorship that constrains women writers, unlike “Mr. Joyce or Proust” with

their honesty, their openness, their determination to say everything. For women, the prudery of men is a terrible bugbear. Dr. Johnson said, “We were shocked to see a woman cross her legs.” So until the year 1850 (I daresay), women never crossed their legs. Now men are shocked if a woman said what she felt (as Joyce does). Yet literature which is always pulling down blinds is not literature. All that we have ought to be expressed—mind and body—a process of incredible difficulty and danger. … I found my angle incessantly obscured, quite unconsciously no doubt, by the desire of the editor and of the public that a woman should see things from the chary feminine angle. (P/MN 164–65)

Here a woman artist who desires “the naked contact of a mind” lapses “quite unconsciously” into decorous tea pouring while her male contemporaries defy the “conventions” and censorship of actual and imaginary “men.”⁹ Woolf’s tangled verbs evoke an audience of men who “are shocked” even though she has refrained from saying “what she felt,” in deference not to an actual public but to an imaginary internalized audience of censorious men. A part of her mind has gone over to the other side and performs the work of censorship from within. This unwitting self-censorship illuminates the “incredible difficulty and danger” she faces: not editors, publics, and conventions (whose power Woolf with her press can trump), nor even an imaginary public of censorious men, but a quite unconscious wall of repression that obscures “what she felt” even from herself.

Dropping Dr. Johnson, Proust, and Joyce, the Speech depicts the woman artist’s battle against repression in self-portraits as Angel-Slayer, Silenced Critic, and Ambivalent Fisherwoman. Woolf famously personifies female self-censorship as the internalized specter of Coventry Patmore’s Angel in the House, that watchdog of dependent femininity who tolerates only opinions “pleasing to men.” Although this ostensibly obsolete Victorian feminine ideal arose at a historical moment when “a real relationship” between the sexes was “unattainable” due to “the British Empire, our colonies, Queen Victoria, Lord Tennyson, the growth of the middle classes and so on,” Woolf still had to fight her to the death, a victory she justifies as self-defense (“If I had not killed her, she would have killed me”) and attributes not to any prowess but to a small independent income: “if one has five hundred a year there is no need to tell lies and it is much more amusing to tell the truth” (P/S xxx–xxxi).

Yet this Angel-Murderer who has ostensibly “rid herself of falsehood” and can now “be herself and write” still finds it hard to publish opinions that might offend men. For example, she writes, she came across a glowing review of a history of Clare College, Cambridge, by an unnamed “very celebrated economist”—her old friend John Maynard Keynes—while browsing in the Nation. It seemed to say that Clare’s fellows “had given in pious memory of their founder the lady of Clare six thousand pounds to a woman. ‘Clothed in the finest dress … armed with intellect and learning, adorned with curiosity and fancy’ … Who is this woman I asked myself; and … discovered that it was not a woman”; they had “spent six thousand pounds upon a history of their college.”¹⁰ On the next page, Vera Brittain writes of the poverty of Somerville, a women’s college at Oxford (P/S xxxvi). Had Woolf been the reviewer,

O you old humbugs. I should have begun. … who profess devotion to the lady of Clare … would it not be better to spend your six thousand pounds not upon a book, clothed in the finest dress of paper and buckram, but upon a girl, whose dress allowance is very meagre, and who tries to do her work, as you will read if you turn the very next page in the Nation, in one cold gloomy ground floor bedroom which faces due north and is overrun with mice. … If the members of Clare college handed over the six thousand pounds … to Girton … I am sure that the lady of Clare would rise from her grave and say Gentlemen you have done my will. (P/S xxxiv–v)

Woolf doubts that her opinion “would be printed,” since her “values” are not the celebrated economist’s; perhaps she could not easily utter it even in freethinking Bloomsbury, since Keynes owned the Nation, and Leonard had until recently been its literary editor (xxxvi). Yet in Three Guineas she eventually publishes more or less what she says here she cannot, even extrapolating from this Self-Portrait as Muzzled Critic a comic vision of the Lady of Clare, appearing over Cambridge as “a cloud in the sky” in “the shape of a woman; who, being supplicated for a sign, let fall in a shower of radiant hail the one word ‘Rats’” (TG 230 n. 18, P/S xxxiii–xxxv & n). Although women’s values will put them at “loggerheads with some respected chiefs” of their “innumerable professions,” she tells her audience, their “most amusing and exciting experiences will be” to bring their “ancient and privileged professions”—law, architecture, medicine, finance—“more in touch with human needs” and to “adapt” them to “your sense of values, your common sense, your moral sense[,] your sense of what is due to humanity and reason” (P/S xxxvi).

Woolf’s challenge to her friend Maynard’s complacent masculine privilege dramatizes her increasingly oppositional stance within Bloomsbury and the difference an audience makes.¹¹ The professional women called out more radical speech than even Bloomsbury did, or so Woolf’s observation that her Speech left Leonard “slightly exacerbated” (“interesting … if … true”) suggests (D 4:7, 23 January 1931). In the Speech’s third self-portrait, Woolf revisits Bloomsbury’s Cambridge origins and reworks Room’s “Portrait of the Artist Rebuked by a Beadle” into a drama of self-censorship. As in Room, the woman artist is lost in reverie, “letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in our unconscious being.” But now, with no beadle in sight, she wakes with a jolt from this deep world, this collective (“our”) unconscious, as her fish—women’s sexual life—gets away:

The imagination has rushed away … into what dark pool of extraordinary experience. The reason has to cry “Stop!” … The imagination comes to the top in a state of fury. … how dare you interfere with me! … And I—that is the reason—have to reply, “My dear you were going altogether too far. Men would be shocked.” Calm yourself, I say, as she sits panting on the bank … with rage and disappointment. … In fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge … But not now. … I cannot make use of what you tell me—about womens bodies for instance—their passions—and so on, because the conventions are still very strong. If I were to overcome the conventions I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero. … [T]here are conventions, even for men; and if a man like Lawrence … runs against convention he injures his imagination terribly. … you would not like to become shrivelled and distorted … It is your nature to understand and to create.

Very well says the imagination, dressing herself up again in her petticoat and skirts. … We will wait another fifty years. But it seems to me a pity. (P/S xxxviii–xxxix)

In this allegory of a woman’s imagination beleaguered by her reason in the guise of common sense, internal censorship forces that rapt explorer of the depths into Victorian petticoats. Loath to shock men, fearful that flouting convention will ruin her work, she discovers in herself a secret agent of the femininity she thought to have murdered. As her reason is found to be in bed with the public policing of women’s intellectual “chastity,” Woolf’s imaginary audience splits into a public that includes the Bloomsbury to whom she could once “say everything” and the professional women whose invitation unseals a female unconscious—a realm of “extraordinary experience” fraught with “fury,” “rage,” “disappointment.”¹²

In short, revising Room’s argument that a woman who earns her living buys freedom of speech, Woolf offers herself as evidence that a woman who lives by her pen must possess a finely calibrated if largely unconscious “special sense and understanding” of her public. At the same time, this dynamic self-portraiture performs a kind of divestiture, bringing unconscious constraints and censors to light. As in The Waves she set out to become the poet Room prophesies, so she no sooner pictures her bound and gagged imagination (“We will wait”) than she sallies forth on this hero’s adventure. As she does, she reconfigures her imaginary public in the image of professional women, and she appeals to them not just to constitute an alternative public for women artists’ uncensored speech but to liberalize the mainstream public: whether “men can be educated to stand free speech in women”—whether, that is, they can be “civilised”—“lies on the lap of the Gods, no … upon your laps, upon the laps of professional women.”¹³ Rather than trust “the future of fiction” to the public sphere’s masculinized gods, Woolf urges her immediate audience to form a radical public to whom women artists, like Joyce and Proust, can “say everything.”

The Speech ends with three pictures. In one, professional women encourage a paterfamilias struggling to reconcile his belief that “nature had meant women to be wives, mothers, housemaids, parlourmaids, and cooks” with the fact that they are “doctors, civil servants, meteorologists, dental surgeons, librarians, solicitors’ clerks, agricultural workers, analytical chemists,” and so on. In another, women “live in perfect freedom, without any fear,” with “civilised” men who have “triumphed over” a “very lopsided education” and are open to change (P/S xliv). In the third Woolf pictures women at work in their own rooms as a “situation of extraordinary interest and amazing possibilities” for new social and cultural scripts, exciting private and public “conversation”:

At once private and public, this unprecedented conversation figures a future for women, men, and fiction just short of utopian fantasy.¹⁴ The Speech that begins with censorship ends by playfully hailing adventurous, “civilised” women and men into exciting conversations that the artist leaves wordless in the air—anticipating La Trobe, who listens telepathically in the pub for Giles and Isa to speak next year’s play’s first words. Like La Trobe’s mirrors, the Speech calls its audience to a collaborative project, positing the revolutionary potential of women’s public speech. Like La Trobe herself, a “slave to her audience,” Woolf figures her freedom of speech as dependent on her public. Seeking to catch their desire as it breaks into words, she aligns her art’s future with their as yet unimagined conversations on modernity’s horizon (BA 94). If her public’s conventionality impedes her, their struggles toward freedom inspire her. The Speech, then, moves beyond Bloomsbury toward a newly imaginable public, a new collective freedom of speech. As the professional women hailed Woolf to the verge of new speech, she in turn hails them as a new public whose stories she will write as they live them.

The Speech’s momentum carried Woolf toward a striking experimental “speech genre”: the unfinished, posthumously published The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay based upon a paper read to the London/National Society for Women’s Service (October-December 1932). In this hybrid work six essays on the changing conditions of middle-class Englishwomen’s lives bracket five purported “short extracts” from a “faithful and detailed” historical novel about “a family called Pargiter,” which spans the generations from 1800 to 2032.¹⁵ The novel-essay not only depicts but enters into a progressive social history as Woolf, with “a certain sense and understanding” of her addressee, seeks to engage her reader’s “actively responsive understanding.” Bakhtin notes the role of the “familiar and intimate genres and styles” of the Renaissance in transforming “the official medieval picture of the world” and, more generally, the “very significant” power of such genres to dismantle “traditional official styles and world views” that have become “faded” and “conventional” (97). So in The Pargiters Woolf crosses realist narrative with the “familiar and intimate” essay to hail the new public the Speech envisions: “civilised,” civilizing, tolerant, independent-minded, politically conscious, adventurous, and creative.

The opening Essay, a revision of the Speech, preserves its familiar, intimate scenario (“When your Secretary asked me to come here tonight”) and evokes its original audience: women “trying to earn your livings in the professions,” whom the Essayist hails as comrade “explorers” in an “experiment” toward new lands and civilizations (P/E1 5–6). Professional women remain the Essayist’s explicit (albeit rhetorical) addressee as, speaking from within the work in a persuasive mode that anticipates, mirrors, and answers her imagined audience’s differences and objections, she models the “actively responsive understanding” she seeks. As the Novelist explores “the situation” in light of women’s “special knowledge,” the Essayist prods readers to reflect on their “views and convictions,” “prejudices,” “sympathies and antipathies.”

But something deeper is at stake in the dialogic essay-novel’s familiar and intimate scenario. Several of The Pargiters’ early titles—“The Open Door,” “Opening the Door” (23 & 26 January 1931), “The Knock on the Door” (28 May 1931, 20 July 1931), and “my Tap at the Door” (3 September 1931)—foreground the Speech’s portrait of a woman at work in a room she has paid for, the scene of that “most interesting” future conversation.¹⁶ But these rooms, doors, knocks, and taps echo certain more ominous taps and opening doors in Woolf’s autobiographical writings. In “22 Hyde Park Gate” (1920), Woolf recalls taking off her satin dress and climbing into bed in the “dark,” “silent” house after a tedious social evening with George, ready to “fall asleep and forget them all!”:

A year or two later, Woolf rewrote this scene in “Old Bloomsbury”: “There would be a tap at the door; the light would be turned out and George would fling himself on my bed, cuddling and kissing and otherwise embracing me in order, as he told Dr Savage later, to comfort me for the fatal illness of my father” (MB 182, my emphasis). Here Woolf drily notes that 46 Gordon Square “could never have meant what it did had not 22 Hyde Park Gate preceded it”; for there, in the Stephens’ first Bloomsbury house, she herself first had a “room with a lock on the door” that she makes a condition of a woman’s creative freedom (MB 182, RO 105). Displacing the bathtub epiphany’s title, “Professions for Women,” these titles transfigure the sexual trauma that, Woolf told Ottoline Morrell soon after beginning The Pargiters, had “sent me mad” as a world in which a woman can lock as well as open her door—the sine qua non of her independent work, thought, speech, and sexual life.¹⁷

Echoing (perhaps unconsciously) the personal history touched on in Woolf’s memoirs, The Pargiters’ early “Door” titles locate this experimental genre at a historic threshold where gender as an unconscious realm of deprivation, vulnerability, and loss gives way to gender as a visionary font of the “most interesting” conversation ever heard. But Woolf could scarcely explore the sexual life of women without reawakening her own, and these double-faced doors signal the perils of this adventure along with its great expectations. Woolf’s experimental speech genre seeks to bring women’s censored sexual life into public speech to make way for those unprecedented conversations between free, civilized women and men. But if, as Virginia proclaimed in 1906, “the damage done to the mind is worse than that done to the body,” the “incredible difficulty and danger” of transgressing censorship barriers gauges the power—and hidden costs—of repression in her own case as in women’s history.

In this light, The Pargiters’ experimental genre attempts something like a collective “talking cure.”¹⁸ In Studies on Hysteria Freud and Breuer emphasize the primacy of feeling in the talking cure: the analysand does not just recollect a trauma but relives the associated “psychical process” while giving “verbal utterance” to feelings “in the greatest possible detail” (57). Woolf did not use the term talking cure, but her remark that in writing To the Lighthouse she did for herself “what psycho-analysts do for their patients”—“expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion,” “explained it and then laid it to rest”—registers an artist’s working experience of unconscious symbolic process.¹⁹ The familiar, intimate essay-novel projects the analytic scenario into the public arena, where it engages its audience in a critique of the unconscious taboos that enforce the “traditional world view.” As the Novelist narrates the characters’ private experiences, the Essayist—or, as she once calls herself, “the analyst”—“examine[s]” them in light of socioeconomic forces to trace (1800-) and inspire (-2032) social change (P 108). Speaking what the characters cannot, Woolf’s dialogic novelist-analyst brings to light psychosocial forces behind the characters’ symptomatic strangulations, dissimulations, and “double conscience” in order to break their hold on social institutions and the future.²⁰

Woolf had many times confided her experiences with her “incestuous brother” George to Violet Dickinson, Janet Case, Vanessa, Vita, Ethel Smyth, Ottoline Morrell, and the Bloomsbury Memoir Club (L 6:56, 14 July 1936). But taking these revelations public was another story. In seeking to name the violence of gender for a resistant public, the novelist/analyst seeks public recognition not for a personal history but for an untold collective history. But if The Pargiters was to be a progressive and visionary history of the sexual life of women, how to document that history? And who is its addressee—the professional women to whom she appeals to authorize difficult, dangerous revelations about women’s private and public lives or the greater public whose resistance women must dismantle?

In The Pargiters’ very First Essay, Woolf’s fight against censorship, self-censorship, and repression runs aground on a crisis of verification that arises with these questions. Embarking with her imagined public upon a radical social critique leading toward “new civilizations,” the analyst soon finds herself defending the novelist’s “history,” and on somewhat peculiar terms. Rather than distinguish its truth claims from those of history by virtue of its genre (part fiction, part analysis), she asserts its basis in “fact” and “truth,” verifiable in memoirs:

If you object that fiction is not history, I reply that though it would be far easier to write history … that method of telling the truth seems to me so elementary, and so clumsy, that I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction. … ‘The Pargiters’ … is not a novel of vision, but a novel of fact … based upon some scores—I might boldly say thousands—of old memoirs. … [T]here is scarcely a statement in it that cannot be [traced to some biography, or] verified, if anybody should wish so to misuse their time. I hope that I am not making an empty boast if I say that there is not a statement in it that cannot be verified. (P/E1 9)

Even as she claims that her fiction captures a “truth” that eludes conventional histories, the analyst projects—and mirrors—an audience skeptical of that “truth.” Confronting the problem of how to ground a collective (hi)story of women’s sexual life, she hopes it is no empty boast to say that almost every statement could be verified in “memoirs” or “biography”—documents she boldly supposes exist in scores or even thousands, though she has not misused her time in research.

But do memoirs and biographies support her truth claims? And what sort of “truth” do these forms of life writing offer? The analyst’s boast is not empty: after all, her own unpublished memoirs of 1907–8 and 1920–22 existed (no wonder she need not bother with research)—potential material, Woolf well knew, for biographers, who were already beginning to write her “life.”²¹ Further, as her notebooks, scrapbooks, diaries, letters, and Three Guineas show, she did read “scores” of memoirs during the thirties. Yet these did not document the “truths” about “women’s bodies” and “passions” that her essay-novel sought to explore.²² Within a month of embarking on the First Essay, the analyst complains that no novel of the 1880s treats subjects such as little Rose Pargiter’s fright on encountering an exhibitionist in the street and blames “biographers and autobiographers,” who “also ignore it, and thus reduce” the novelist’s “material.” For verification, she ironically directs readers to the “Police Court news”—as if this impersonal, objective record of alleged infractions of the law for a collective addressee, the community itself, might redress the omissions of memoirists and biographers and make up for the loss of subjective voice and testimony she deplores (P/E3 50–51).

The Pargiters fractures along this fault line; this crisis of verification is also a crisis of audience. To whom, for whom, with whom does Woolf speak? After three more essays Woolf drops the analyst, with her bold, insupportable claims, to develop the chapters into The Years and the essays (buttressed by extensive research) into Three Guineas. But the quest for verification did not end in 1932. Failing to document her fiction’s “truth” in published memoirs and biographies, Woolf urged women friends—Victoria Ocampo, Ottoline Morrell, Ethel Smyth, Violet Dickinson, Vanessa, and others—to write about their lives, as if willing the stories she sought into existence. Already in February 1932 she promised to send Ethel “22 Hyde Park Gate,” “an old memoir that tumbled out of a box when I was looking for something else that I wrote ten years ago about our doings with George Duckworth when we were so to speak virgins” (L 5:13). In July 1933 she was “writing memoirs” “to refresh my mind for P’s.”²³ By May 1934 Vanessa must have complied, for, Woolf wrote, reading her manuscript memoir of George “so flooded me with horror that I cant be pure minded on the subject.”²⁴ By late 1934 Woolf concludes, “Very few women yet have written truthful autobiographies”; and a year later, she seems resigned to constraints on women’s public speech, including her own: “one always lies when one speaks in public” (L 5:356, 451, 22 December 1934, 6 December 1935).

As for biography, in 1936 Woolf learns with distress that her old confidante Violet Dickinson has burned her memoir of the Stephen family: “Why, in Heavens name … Your view would have been fascinating—George, Gerald, Father—Hyde Park Gate. Cant you re-write it and send it me? … as a little defence against the flood.”²⁵ Some weeks later she is still lamenting this lost memoir, worth “£100 in gold” (by contrast with “Poor Miss Holtby”’s “wildly inaccurate” biography), and urges Violet to put down “a few plain facts” to “get a nib between the ribs”—signing her old convalescent’s moniker as if to jog Violet’s memory.²⁶ In 1939, as Roger Fry’s biographer, she is “thinking about Censors. How visionary figures admonish us”; “All books now seem to me surrounded by a circle of invisible censors” (D 5:229, 7 August). In 1939–40 she resumes her effort to fill the memoirists’ documentary gap by her own late memoir, “A Sketch of the Past.” Still, angels and beadles haunt her mind and materialize even in Bloomsbury, as when she recounts asking Maynard, “Can I mention erection?”—who replied, “No you can’t. I should mind your saying it. Such revelations have to be in key with their time”—and wonders, “Is he right, or only public school?” (D 5:256, 6 January 1940). Since The Pargiters positions memoir and biography as prior to fiction, let us consider, before turning to The Pargiters and The Years, what light “A Sketch of the Past” may shed on the problem of keeping revelations about women’s sexual life in key with the times.

Woolf began “A Sketch of the Past” on 18 April 1939, added to it intermittently eleven times over the next eighteen months, once retrieved it from her wastebasket, and left it unfinished at her death among the papers her last note asked Leonard to destroy. The “Sketch” begins with her first memories of her mother, St. Ives, and an infant self who exists as pure sensation, a “container” of “ecstasy” and “rapture” (MB 67). These first pages highlight her memoir’s two central themes: the importance of capturing feeling in life drawing and the question “how far I differ from other people” (MB 65). “I feel that strong emotion must leave its trace,” Woolf writes, “and it is only a question of discovering how we can get ourselves again attached to it, so that we shall be able to live our lives through from the start” (MB 67). Then, to show how feelings soon become “more complex … less isolated, less complete,” Woolf describes a feeling “about the looking-glass in the hall,” into which, at six or seven, she often looked, but only when alone, and with “a strong feeling of guilt” that makes her wonder whether she inherited her father’s puritanism along with her mother’s beauty (MB 67–68). Realizing that she could feel “ecstasies and raptures spontaneously and intensely and without any shame or the least sense of guilt, so long as they were disconnected with my own body,” brings her to the memory of her half brother Gerald Duckworth—twelve years older than she—“explor[ing] my private parts” before the mirror at Talland House when she was “very small”:

I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it—what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? … This seems to show that a feeling about certain parts of the body; … how it is wrong to allow them to be touched; must be instinctive. It proves that Virginia Stephen was not born on 25th January 1882, but was born many thousands of years ago; and had from the first to encounter instincts already acquired by thousands of ancestresses in the past. (MB 68–69 my emphases)

Within a few pages Woolf narrates an incident of molestation unmentioned in the 1920–22 memoirs, not half-hidden in a reticent paragraph (“Old Bloomsbury”) or imparted as a brief concluding flourish (“22 Hyde Park Gate”) but with a strong emphasis on feeling. Like the analyst, the memoirist values feeling’s “truth,” however partial and uncertain, over such “‘lives’ of other people” as merely “collect a number of events, and leave the person to whom it happened unknown” (MB 69). Moreover, the analyst’s anxious search for a collective history of women’s sexual life recurs in the memoirist’s emphases on an ancestral legacy of instinctive modesty and on “truth”: “Witness the incident of the looking-glass. Though I have done my best to explain” her feeling, “I have only been able to discover some possible reasons; there may be others; I do not suppose that I have got at the truth; yet this is a simple incident; and it happened to me personally; and I have no motive for lying about it” (MB 69).

Woolf now turns to a second memory—or perhaps dream—that “may refer” to the first:

Directly following the memory of Gerald’s invading hands, the beast in the mirror in this dream or memory has been read as expressing young Virginia’s fear of predatory male sexuality and her “horror” at being reduced herself to an “animal, a body without a self, a body that devours selves.”²⁷ The Self-Portrait with Beast, then, is also a Self-Portrait as Beast: a picture of the child’s fear of “my own body” as a vessel of animal desire, in all its susceptibility to others’ desires. Associative memories link the baby in the nursery who felt herself a “container” of the “ecstasy” and “rapture” that flowed in through her body’s senses with the same body’s unspoken potential for sexual desire, ecstasy, rapture—perverted, her memoir suggests, by a sentimental education to “shame,” “guilt,” and fear. The Self-Portrait with/as Beast pictures a traumatic break between that infant body and its animal desire, stolen, in effect, by Gerald’s hands and “all Georges malefactions”—rendered bestial, split off from the self and repudiated.²⁸ The looking-glass reflects a divided being whose split and doubled gaze confirms her alienated desire, its face no longer hers.

Reticently and sporadically, the “Sketch” pursues its author’s sexual life. On May 2, instead of taking up where she left off, Woolf disclaims any hope of wresting that slippery fish “truth” away from contingency: “this past is much affected by the present moment”; “What I write today I should not write in a year’s time”; what she writes she leaves to “chance,” having “no energy at the moment to spend upon the horrid labour” required “to make an orderly and expressed work of art; where one thing follows another and all are swept into a whole” (MB 75). The next three entries recall her mother’s life, especially her two marriages, and her death, which made her “unreal” and her children “hypocritical,” caught between “what we ought to be and what we were,” “immeshed in the conventions of sorrow,” in “foolish and sentimental ideas” (MB 95). Approaching the July 19 entry on Stella’s engagement to Jack Hills, Woolf pictures herself as “a child advancing with bare feet” to peer into the “depth” of memory’s “cold river” (MB 98). On 8 June 1940, after a ten-month lapse, she retrieves the “Sketch” from the wastebasket to recount how Jack “opened my eyes on purpose, as I think, to the part played by sex in the life of the ordinary man”—shocking her “wholesomely” (MB 103–4).

The July 1940 entry on 22 Hyde Park Gate revisits an important scene in The Years, as we shall see: “In the hall lay a dog, beside him a bowl of water with a chunk of yellow sulphur in it”; over the mantel hung the legend: “‘What is to be a gentleman? It is to be tender to women, chivalrous to servants’”; Woolf comments, “What innocence, what incredible simplicity of mind it showed—to keep this cardboard quotation—from Thackeray I think—perpetually displayed, as if it were a frontispiece to a book—nailed to the wall in the hall of the house” (MB 117). Then she describes her own room after Stella married and she and Vanessa “were promoted to separate bed sitting rooms” and recalls mistaking a mating cat for “an obscene old man gasping and croaking and muttering senile indecencies” as she lay in bed. Her room had a “living half” and a “sleeping half,” which “were always running together”:

How they fought each other; that is, how often I was in a rage in that room; and in despair; and in ecstasy; how I read myself into a trance of perfect bliss; then in came—Adrian, George, Gerald, Jack, my father; how it was there I retreated to when father enraged me; and paced up and down scarlet; and there Madge came one evening; and I could scarcely talk for happiness; and there I droned out those long solitary mornings reading Greek … And it was from that room Gerald fetched me when father died. There I first heard those horrible voices. … (MB 123)

Instead of fleshing out these scenes, Woolf imagines her old room revealing “its ghosts” to its current guesthouse lodgers—an imagined public for the memoir’s half-suppressed revelations—and their response: “amused; also pitiful; and perhaps one of them would say what an odd, what an unwholesome life for a girl of fifteen,” adding, “Such a life is quite impossible nowadays,” and if familiar with Lighthouse, Room, or The Common Reader, “This room explains a great deal” (MB 123–24). She led the “two lives that the two halves symbolized,” Woolf writes, with “the muffled intensity, which a butterfly or moth feels when with its sticky tremulous legs and antennae it pushes out of the chrysalis … and sits quivering beside the broken case … its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight” (MB 124). Too young at thirteen to take in her mother’s death, she remembers thinking, “‘But this is impossible; things aren’t, can’t be, like this’” when “the second blow”—Stella’s death—“struck on me … with my wings still creased, sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis” (MB 124). As much as this chapter of 22 Hyde Park Gate’s “book” censors of its inmate’s turbulent “two lives,” the lodgers’ bemused reception of its ghostly reenactments evokes a young woman as yet “incapable” of the flights of mind that created Rachel Vinrace, Rhoda, and The Waves.

The next entry, 18 August, focuses on the deep bond formed among the four young Stephens by these two deaths. Since, Woolf writes, she can describe herself only by describing her siblings, she begins by sketching Thoby. On 22 September, she decides to “write about St Ives” to “lead up to Thoby” (MB 126–28). On 11 October she finds in her previous entry only “one actual picture of Thoby; steering us round the point without letting the sail flap” and sketches herself hesitating at the threshold of her old room. Why, she wonders, should she

shirk the task, not so very hard to a professional … of wafting this boy from the boat to my bed sitting room at Hyde Park Gate? It is because I want to go on thinking about St Ives. … But it is true, I do not want to go into my room at Hyde Park Gate. I shrink from the years 1897–1904, the seven unhappy years [after] those two lashes of the random unheeding, unthinking flail that brutally and pointlessly killed the two people who should have made those years normal and natural, if not “happy.”

I am not thinking of mother and of Stella; I am thinking of the damage that their deaths inflicted. I will describe it more carefully later. … That is why I do not wish to bring Thoby out of the boat into my room. (MB 136, my emphasis)

In earlier memoirs, only Gerald and George transgress her bodily and psychic boundaries. Does this moment implicate Thoby too—omitted, like Vanessa, from the above list of visitors to her room? Deferring explanation, Woolf now describes how “genuinely, though dumbly, bound to us” Thoby became after the deaths, how their “numbing, mutilating” impact created “a passionate fumbling fellowship” among the Stephen children; and how she sought to redeem disaster by making living itself a daring, heroic feat: “a force” had “respected me sufficiently to make me feel myself ground between grindstones” (MB 137). After explaining that her relationship with Thoby became more “serious” and that they were “naturally attracted to each other,” Woolf does bring him into her room, where, she recalls, they argued “about Shakespeare; about many many things; and often lost our tempers; but were attracted by some common admiration,” though “reserved” in expressing it:

Beneath Thoby’s silence, she felt his “great pride in us whose photographs were always on his fireplace at Cambridge”; his tenderness toward women, “already distinctly sketched though so submerged”; how “astonishingly handsome” he looked, formally dressed, with his pipe and Cambridge friends (139–40). Woolf portrays him, in short, as a romantic, heroic youth idealized by his young sister; one who, far from having any part in such “doings” as George’s and Gerald’s, “had he been put on, would have proved most royally” (MB 139, 140).

The next entry illuminates the psychically incestuous life of 22 Hyde Park Gate. “Rushing too far ahead,” Woolf forces herself back “to the year that Stella died—1897”: “I could sum it all up in one scene”: “a leafless bush, a skeleton bush, in the dark of a summer’s night,” outside a garden house where she sits with Stella’s widower, Jack Hills, who grips her hand and moans that she cannot understand how “It tears one asunder.”

This skeletal tree that symbolized the young survivors’ “sterile” sexuality put forth “little red chill buds” when Jack and Vanessa fell in love and contemplated an “illegal” marriage, condemned by George because people would talk but not forbidden by Leslie (Vanessa “must do as she liked”). The memoirist describes how she “wobbled” between Vanessa and George, who took “my arm in his” and put “pressure on my hand” as he exhorted her to dissuade Vanessa (MB 141–142). Again Woolf flags this tree to exemplify her use of scenes to capture “reality.” As we shall see, she had earlier written of this tree and the incestuous desire it summed up in a 1903 essay, The Pargiters, and The Years.

Woolf’s next and final entry of mid-November 1940 returns to the seven unhappy years when the sisters in “close conspiracy” “did battle for that which was always being snatched from us, or distorted”: painting, writing, autonomy. “Explorers and revolutionists,” they fought for their lives against their tyrannical, explosive, self-pitying father, whose elaborate household they now had to manage, since “woman was then (though gilt with an angelic surface) the slave.” They fought a femininity imposed by their mother’s and Stella’s “dead hand”; by the jealous, controlling, sentimental gaze of the “almost brainless” George, with his strong “physical passions”; by the “patriarchal” world they were “asked to admire and applaud”; by the London society George attempted to force them to join (“a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine” in which a “girl had no chance”); and by the gulf between “convention” and “intellect” at 22 Hyde Park Gate (MB 143–59).

Although the “Sketch”’s inconclusive end suggests that Woolf meant to return to it, five months later she had swum to her death. Did she judge that even her own memoir failed to tell the truth about her body, her passions? On 24 December she seems to pass the torch to Ethel Smyth, who, urged on by Woolf, was writing her autobiography:

I’m interested that you cant write about masturbation. … But as so much of life is sexual—or so they say—it rather limits autobiography if this is blacked out. It must be, I suspect, for many generations, for women; for its like breaking the hymen … a painful operation, and I suppose connected with all sorts of subterranean instincts. I still shiver with shame at the memory of my half-brother, standing me on a ledge, aged about 6, and so exploring my private parts. Why should I have felt shame then? (L 6:459–60, 12 January 1941)

This private letter, a coda to her Self-Portrait with/as Beast that registers a vivid somatic “shiver” of “shame,” circles back to the “Sketch”’s first entry. Closer to the verbalized feeling of the talking cure than the earlier memoirs’ sang-froid, this letter invites dialogue: why should she have felt, and feel, shame? At the same time, as if expecting no answer, these letters sound a covert valediction to Woolf’s decade-long experiment with telling truths about women’s bodies and passions. Her child-self’s ancient “instinct” of privacy, chastity, modesty resurfaces as an impediment to truth, realigning publicity with violation, not cure. If a life like hers is “‘quite impossible nowadays,’” as the lodger murmurs of the ghosts at Hyde Park Gate, what is the point of publicity? As Woolf retreats from the intimate, familiar memoir genre to the still more intimate and familiar private letter, her public shrinks to the one old comrade with whom she had ten years earlier sailed out in crazy cockle shells toward new horizons for women’s lives.²⁹

Was it about this time that Woolf revised the Speech into “Professions for Women”?³⁰ So its retrospective, valedictory stance (like that of these letters) and echoes of the “Sketch” suggest. Angel and fisherwoman still figure the “two very genuine” challenges of her professional life, but now she looks not forward toward new adventures but backward, assessing her career (DM/PW 241). No longer does she “kill” the angel once and for all; now she emphasizes the prolonged struggle, the less than certain victory, the frustration of battling a “phantom,” “far harder to kill … than a reality” (DM/PW 238). The Angel “died” (as Three Guineas proves), but the fisherwoman failed to tell “the truth about my own experiences as a body.” Here Woolf generalizes her pessimistic forecast to Ethel:

I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define. … Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, … she still has many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

… Even when the path is nominally open—when there is nothing to prevent a woman from being a doctor, a lawyer, a civil servant—there are many phantoms and obstacles. … [I]t is necessary also to discuss the ends and the aims for which we are fighting, for which we are doing battle with these formidable obstacles. (DM/PW 241–42)

Abandoning the Speech’s new world vision, “Professions for Women” teems with unvanquished “obstacles” that defer and obscure that future. As before, Woolf enlists her audience in an ongoing “battle,” but no victory is in sight. Again she vests the future in them, but now the artist who awaits their words and acts vanishes. When Woolf confesses that she does “not think I solved” the problem of “telling the truth about my own experiences as a body,” she seems to foreclose any further attempt. Her own image drops out of her picture of the future, replaced by “a woman” writer and an audience who will “decide for yourselves” how to “furnish,” “decorate,” and “share” “rooms of your own in the house hitherto exclusively owned by men,” and how to answer the great questions “you” can ask for “the first time in history” (DM/PW 241–42). When she replaces the Speech’s playful closing prophecy of an “exciting” conversation that she won’t alarm them by talking about because “My time is up” with the stark “My time is up; and I must cease,” her voice seems to cross from the historic occasion of the Speech into real time, as if what is “up” were her lifetime, what “must cease” not the Speech but her speech (P/S xliv, DM/ PW 242). Did Woolf revise the Speech with her death in view? It almost seems so as she takes leave of the partly real, partly imaginary audience who inspired her last decade of work: “Willingly would I stay and discuss those questions and answers—but not tonight” (DM/PW 242). A subdued return to the bathtub epiphany that broached its title with such excitement, “Professions for Women” paints the artist as a battle-weary veteran who has “done my share, with pen & talk, for the human race” and hands on the fight for civilization to a future beyond her own (D 5:276, 29 March 1940).

“A Sketch of the Past” must have lain near Woolf’s writing table when she wrote her last words to Leonard on 28 March 1941: “Will you destroy all my papers” (L 6:487). Unfinished and somehow unfinishable, it survives its brushes with oblivion as a “sketch” not just of the past but of the “difficulty and danger” Woolf encountered in writing of women’s bodies and passions—not a completed picture but one last effort to tell “the truths about herself.” Woolf’s adventurous imagination could not keep her fifty-year bargain with her temporizing reason, yet she could devise no genre intimate and familiar enough to convey those “truths.” The late letters’ Self-Portrait with A Public of One—of Ethel alone—depicts a memoirist who has given up hope of calling out a public who will join in collaborative truth telling through “actively responsive understanding”; who will play, in Bart Oliver’s words, that “very important part” the audience (BA 58). Let us turn now to the interplay of speech genres, imagined audiences, and repression as Woolf reworks several key scenes of The Pargiters for The Years: Rose’s adventure, Elvira/Sara’s 1907 scene with the leafless tree, and scenes of siblings North (earlier George) and Peggy Pargiter.

In judging that she did not tell the truth about her bodily experiences but did publish an analysis of the sex/gender system that the Angel would have censored, Woolf echoes her views on the two works she continued to think of as “one book”: The Years, a “deliberate” “failure”; Three Guineas, “morally, a spine: the thing I wished to say, though futile” (D 5:65, 130, 148; 7 March 1937, 12 March, 3 June 1938). But how far was The Years’ “failure” deliberate, how far an involuntary function of repression? To what extent can we distinguish the art of The Years from the internalized censorship and repression that are, in a sense, its secret subject?

These questions foreground the enforcement of gender by language and silence in everyday life as in speech genres. Woolf anticipated public resistance as she sought to expose sexual and gender domination in the private house and public life; an even more formidable obstacle was the hidden force of repression.³¹ As Woolf turns the essay-novel’s chapters into The Years, the collective talking cure vanishes in the characters’ talking symptoms, rendered in a realist narrative shot through with allegorical moments that veil a deeper story. In the analyst’s absence, the audience is left to guess at the story behind these clues, which appeal to what Bakhtin calls the reader’s “apperceptive … knowledge.” With its characters’ stories submerged in somatic speech, The Years in its allegorical dimension addresses an audience whose recognition would confirm its “truth.” Putting aside memoirs and biographies, The Years draws its readers into its portrait of a society struggling toward self-transformation, so that they become at least passive witnesses of—at most active participants in—the novelist’s vision of society’s “old fabric insensibly changing without death or violence into the future.”³² As its realist dimension voices the characters’ longing for social transformation, its allegorical dimension calls readers to play an active role in that transformation by sensing its untold stories—in keeping with Bakhtin’s concept of the speech addressee in all its “immense significance in literary history.” As in The Voyage Out, “the special sense and understanding of its … public” solicited by The Years’ melding of modernist realism and allegory allows for a range of readers, some “familiar with the situation,” some with “special knowledge,” all with views, convictions, prejudices, sympathies and antipathies that shape their “active responsive understanding” of the book. The partly real, partly imaginary audience conjured by the Speech and First Essay now becomes an actual public cast as potential agents of historical change and creators of the future beyond the novel’s end.

The revision of The Pargiters’ opening sections reveals a certain tension between The Years’ realistic and allegorical dimensions. The novelist of The Pargiters depicts the fright and shame of a late-Victorian child, Rose Pargiter, on being accosted by an exhibitionist in the street; the analyst reflects on how the taboo against telling the truth about this experience engenders a specifically female unconscious.³³ Rose’s story dramatizes a child’s fall into a femininity that forces her to repress desire and give up freedom—to relinquish claims to autonomy, domestic space, educational resources, public streets, adventure, authority, creativity, full participation in public and private life; in short, to comply with the masculine appropriation of the private and public worlds.³⁴ Rose’s foreclosed speech illuminates the function of repression in instituting and maintaining gender while occluding its nature as loss.

The analyst first highlights the Victorian taboo against unaccompanied middle-class women’s freedom to walk in the public streets by noting the absurdity of “three healthy” Pargiter daughters “sitting round a tea table with nothing better to do” than manage the linens and peep through blinds at young men calling next door (P/E2 33, 38). This division of public spaces that men traverse freely from private spaces such as the Abercorn Terrace house—a very fortress of female chastity—effects a masculinization of public culture, policed by aggressive male sexuality, that constrains the daughters’ freedom of movement, association, earning power, and speech. The contradiction between their culturally imposed, ostensibly “passionless” femininity and their natural curiosity and desire forces them into guilty dissimulation. Instead of desiring freely, the analyst writes, they become “ashamed, indignant, confused”; their sexual “feeling, since it was never exposed, save by a blush, or a giggle, wriggled deep down into their minds, and sometimes woke them in the middle of the night with curious sensations, unpleasant dreams, that seemed all to come from this one fact—that Abercorn Terrace was besieged on all sides by what may be called street love” (P/E2 38).

In the Second Chapter, little Rose takes back the night. Brushed off by her brother Bobby whom she asks to accompany her, she sneaks out to buy toys, pretending that she is a hero—“Pargiter of Pargiter’s Horse”—carrying a secret message to English people “besieged in a fortress” (P/C2 42). When a man appears in the shadows, she incorporates him into her game: “the enemy!” Returning home, she sees him leaning against the pillar box “as if he were ill” and feels “the same terror again”; “There was nobody else anywhere in sight. As she ran past him, he gibbered some nonsense at her, sucking his lips in & out; & began to undo his clothes …” (P/C2 42–43). The analyst points to this ellipsis as a mark of censorship—a lie of omission, dictated by “a convention, supported by law, which forbids … any plain description of the sight that Rose, in common with many other little girls, saw”; “to illustrate this aspect of sexual life,” the novelist can only “state some of the facts; but not all” and then “imagine the impression on the nerves,” “the brain,” “the whole being, of a shock which the child instinctively conceals … and is also too ignorant, too childish, too frightened, to describe or explain even to herself” (P/E3 51).

The ellipsis that protects the masculine aggression that makes public space dangerous to middle-class women by complying with the “unspeakability” of women’s sexual experiences does not prevent the novelist from calling attention to a gender perversion that dissimulates “a primitive, vengeful aggression” behind an “erotic” scenario.³⁵ The novelist’s public self-censorship is writ small in Rose’s private muteness. The frightened child hopes someone will catch her out so that she will be forced to tell; but no one notices her absence, and her guilt for disobeying is compounded with fear and shame. Her nurse is strategically inattentive: since no one must know that Rose escaped her unwatchful eye, she overlooks the new toys and, when Rose wakes from a nightmare about a man in her room, blames “rich cake for tea” and tells her to go to sleep, “dream of fairies,” and, in a surfeit of pargetings, not to lie on her back (“Thats what gives you bad dreams”) (P/C2 45–46).

As Rose’s caretakers silently urge her to repress “what she had seen,” her experience engenders an unconscious populated by nightmare phantoms and hallucinations. When Eleanor finds her disturbed and sleepless, counting sheep that leer with the man’s face, Rose’s fear keeps her silent: “It was not only that she had been very naughty, running out alone. It was that she was terrified”; “somehow, it was horrid, nasty”; “she could not tell anyone: not even Eleanor. He had undressed …” (P/C2 48, ellipsis Woolf’s). Despite her fear that they “would be very angry with her” if they knew “what she had seen,” Rose ventures a half-truth—“I thought I saw a man in the room”—which their parting injunctions against rich cake ignore (P/C2 48). No sooner does she act out an adventure of freedom and desire in the public street than Rose involuntarily learns her vulnerability not just to dangers that court publicity such as her brother might encounter but to a sexual danger that harms her most by its unspeakability.³⁶ The taboo inculcates femininity as a loss of speech, voice, witness, never acknowledged as such and never mourned.

If talk makes for cure, repression makes for disease. Telling lies diminishes Rose mentally and morally and “distorts the relationship between the liar and the lied to, even if the lie is justified” (P/E3 52). Repressed, femininity-as-loss resurfaces masked as chastity, passionlessness, “virtue,” which, by crippling women’s freedom, sustains a system in which men control law, wealth, professions, policy, the public streets, children, and the future. The Pargiter daughters are given to understand

that some convention was absolutely necessary for them, and not for their brothers; since plainly it was unthinkable for a middle- or upper-middle class woman to have a relation with a man which might lead to her bearing an illegitimate child—a disgrace which a woman could scarcely survive, socially, or practically either; for the whole cost of the child’s upbringing (in 1880) would fall solely upon her; and she was disabled by law from earning enough money to provide for herself, let alone for another human being.

The question of chastity was therefore complicated in the extreme, since it was influenced by so many feelings that could not be discussed and by so many facts that might be resented but could not possibly be altered. Had not the demand for the vote, which might ultimately lead to some right to earn one’s living, been again dismissed in the House of Commons? (P/E3 52–53)

In the analyst’s materialist account, chastity maintains women’s social, legal, political, economic, and sexual subjection. In 1880, decades before women’s suffrage, there was little hope of altering the conditions and laws that barred women from public schools and professions, enforcing their economic dependence. Not just law and economics but the very categories of the thinkable and speakable militated against an unwed woman’s bearing a child—“illegitimate” by virtue of belonging to a mother, not a father. A powerful agent in the repression of “feelings that could not be discussed,” middle-class femininity works against social change.

Women’s loss is men’s gain. When Rose’s brother Bobby—Martin in The Years—is accosted on the street by a woman his friend tells him is a prostitute, he finds “nothing frightening … in her jeers and laughter” but feels “secure, and rather scornful, and … proud” that his friend “should, by using the word ‘prostitute,’ initiate” him into “a great fellowship” that grants him a “great many rights and privileges” in exchange for “certain loyalties and assertions; for example, it was essential to make it plain that the school room was his room”; “Rose should be kept out of it”—though “privately” Bobby prefers playing with Rose and compromises by casting her as “his assistant” or “the audience,” fighting when she resists (P/E3 54). A “public woman” whose sexual services any man may rent, the prostitute confirms Bobby’s effortless inheritance at his sisters’ expense, reinforcing his autonomy, sexual superiority, and entitlement in the private/public continuum.

Grace Radin’s view that Woolf judged the essays “a clumsy device that impeded the narrative flow” is surely right, but what do we lose with the analyst’s talk?³⁷ In The Pargiters, the analyst speaks what Rose cannot, dissecting the everyday censorship that turns her adventure into a formative lesson in femininity. In The Years, the characters are no longer case studies but suffer unanalyzed private pain. Whereas the analyst frames Rose’s experience as “a very imperfect illustration” of the “actual fact” that children “are frequently assaulted, and sometimes far more brutally than she was,” The Years leaves Rose alone with her experience (P/E3 50). As Rose grows up, unconscious guilt, shame, rage, and fear fuel her distinguished career as a militant suffragist who survives imprisonment and force-feeding (while Martin dines on roast beef in the City) to gain, finally, the vote, a “decoration” from the state for her war work, and a toast from her cousin Sara (Y 359). Yet she never speaks of her private experiences. A childhood suicide attempt, her outrage when she is blamed for a microscope broken by Martin’s friend, her secret misery at “a certain engagement”—all, barely glimpsed in the narrative, resonate in her sudden intense wish, while visiting her cousins Sara and Maggie, “to talk about her past; to tell them something about herself that she had never told anybody—something hidden” (Y 359, 161, 166–67). As no one listens, Rose says nothing. The reader is left to puzzle over a story that, absent an audience within the text, Rose herself hardly knows.

In the analyst’s absence, the characters’ talking symptoms grow more pronounced. Whereas The Pargiters moves from Rose’s nursery to the Third Essay, The Years’ narrative follows Eleanor out of the nursery and downstairs to ebb and pool in her surreal mindscape:

“I saw,” Eleanor repeated, as she shut the nursery door. “I saw …” What had she seen? Something horrible, something hidden. But what? There it was, hidden behind her strained eyes. She held the candle slightly slanting in her hand. Three drops of grease fell on the polished skirting before she noticed them. She straightened the candle and walked down the stairs. She listened as she went. There was silence. Martin was asleep. Her mother was asleep. As she passed the doors and went downstairs a weight seemed to descend on her. … A blankness came over her. Where am I? she asked herself, staring at a heavy frame. What is that? She seemed to be alone in the midst of nothingness; yet must descend, must carry her burden—she raised her arms slightly, as if she were carrying a pitcher, an earthenware pitcher on her head. Again she stopped. The rim of a bowl outlined itself upon her eyeballs; there was water in it; and something yellow. It was the dog’s bowl, she realised; that was the sulphur … the dog was lying … at the bottom of the stairs. She stepped carefully over the body of the sleeping dog and went into the drawing-room. (Y 42–43)

Asking herself the question she failed to ask Rose, Eleanor struggles to see “something horrible, something hidden” behind her own “strained eyes,” as if Rose’s fear has stirred some buried memory. A weighty blankness descends on her, the “burden” of an unconscious past, now slightly deranged by her temporary escape from her culture’s “heavy frame.”³⁸ For a moment her mind is suspended—out of body—between existential nothingness and her accustomed place in the human caravan.³⁹ Then, resealing the repression beneath her “pargeting” questions to Rose, the ordinary world reasserts itself: illegible shapes slowly resolve into familiar objects as Eleanor in this mute little allegory lets sleeping dogs lie.

Or is it allegory? Is it not simply realism? Everyone steps over this dog in The Years; other characters enter trancelike states. What would the analyst say of this passage that supersedes her? If the retreat from talking cure to talking symptom is a retreat from social criticism to realism, Eleanor’s trance still captures her alienation from her experience, memories, and feelings and makes the working of repression visible as the force that keeps her from seeing what she sees, knowing what she knows. If this is realism, and surely it is, it dramatizes what is lost with the analyst as the new risk that Eleanor’s dissociation may be read as “natural”; that it may normalize the systemic violence of gender rather than provoke critique.

Insofar as the sleeping dog becomes allegory, it marks not just Eleanor’s halt on the threshold of memory but the novelist’s, for the autobiographical “Sketch,” as we saw, recalls the dog by his water bowl in the hall at 22 Hyde Park Gate, near the legend on gentlemanliness, with its astonishing “innocence” and “incredible simplicity of mind” (MB 117). Without actually telling the characters’ “hidden” stories, The Years unsettles this “simplicity” with such details as Eleanor’s trance, Rose’s “thin white scar just above the wrist joint” (sign of an inarticulate loss that overflows mourning’s channels into self-mutilation or suicide), and other intimations of dashed hopes, thwarted ambitions, and unspeakable knowledge. Such signs also intimate the “immense difficulty and danger” that the novelist faced in attempting to transform memory and “truth” into narrative. Whether the retreat from talking cure to talking symptoms aggravated or averted the risk, the novelist sacrifices the analyst to frame the sleeping dogs of a Victorian childhood Rose’s sister Delia sums up at the party: “It was Hell!” (Y 158, 417).

Instead of mourning losses they cannot see, feel, speak of, or remember, the characters of The Years found their adult lives on repression, as if to say that it is not the wounds and burdens of the past that matter but creativity in the present and hope for the future. Rose channels her unspoken grief into political activism, enduring imprisonment and force-feeding in the suffrage battle, and wants to live to be eighty “to see what’s going to happen”; Eleanor, freed after almost thirty years of caring for her father, experiences a paradisal “feeling, not a dream,” of happiness at the party—its price the sealing over of painful memories: “I do not want to go back into my past. … I want the present.”⁴⁰ In a passage excised in galleys, Eleanor steps with a thrill of pleasure into a steaming tub in her pristine white-tiled bathroom under a moonlit skylight.⁴¹ Successor to the cold, dank, dark Abercorn Terrace bathroom, the room mutely celebrates advances in the sexual life of women from that unspeakable past.

If a trauma is a psychic wound for which the words are lost, The Pargiters explores the ways gender is, for women, a loss of language imposed by the everyday censorship that thwarts hope of change or “cure.” In The Years, the Pargiter daughters’ tiled-over past parallels Woolf’s public speech on the sexual life of women: as Rose threw a brick for suffrage, Woolf tossed that “revolutionary bomb of a book,” Three Guineas; as Eleanor halts on the brink of memory, Woolf leaves it to her readers to divine their dramas of desire, speech, and loss, or not; to naturalize her realist rendering of gender’s symptoms or to “read” them (VW:CH 402). As the novel-essay becomes modernist-realist narrative, gender as loss recedes into a sealed-off past, mourning into unconscious sadness, grief into a vision of society “insensibly changing without death or violence into the future.” As talk gives way to hystericized silence, symptoms, allegory, The Years overwrites the Speech’s visionary artist and audience with a realist portrait of a society whose painful truths remain choked in somatic speech, even as the characters transcend pain and isolation to affirm their lives, each other, and the future. Considered as realism, it is not failure, deliberate or not. Considered as an effort to tell truths about women’s bodies and passions, its reticence attests to a losing battle against repression, as the Elvira/Sara scenes show.

It is an utterly corrupt society I have just remarked, speaking in the person of Elvira Pargiter, & I will take nothing that it can give me &c &c. … now, as Virginia Woolf, I have to … say that I refuse to be made a Doctor of Letters. … I hardly know which I am, or where: Virginia or Elvira; in the Pargiters or outside.

—Woolf, Diary, 25 March 1933

And, even today, when I’m desperate, almost in tears looking at the chapter, unable to add to it, I feel I’ve only got to fumble & find the end of the ball of string. … Isn’t it odd that this was the scene I had almost a fit to prevent myself writing? This will be the most exciting thing I ever wrote, I kept saying. And now its the stumbling block. I wonder why? too personal, is that it? Out of key? But I wont think.

—Woolf, Diary, 5, 6 September 1935, on The Years’ 1907 scene

The things one does not remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.

—Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past”

As Radin observes, The Pargiters’ Elvira—Sara in The Years—originates as an autobiographical artist-figure. The “turn of the book” was to hinge on a scene, based on Virginia’s 1903 diary-essay “A Dance in Queens Gate,” in which the crippled Elvira/Sara discovers writing as a way to “authenticate” her existence as she lies in bed on a summer night while a dance goes on beneath her window.⁴² Imagining this scene in 1933, Woolf veered between exhilaration and paralysis.⁴³ Her “bold,” “venturous” plan was to make Elvira a prophetic consciousness in a society riding a wave of change, a switch point for “millions of ideas but no preaching—history, politics, feminism, art, literature—in short a summing up of all I know, feel, laugh at, despise, like, admire hate & so on” (D 4:152, 161, 25 April, 31 May 1933). But the scene’s successive versions move the opposite way, from a critical modernist realism toward speechless allegory. Again Woolf posed the problem of genre: what could “hold together” “satire, comedy, poetry, narrative, … a play, letters, poems”? She thought that it “tend[ed] to a play” (D 4:151–52, 162, 25 April, 13 June 1933). As a “feeling of having to repress; control” came to dominate her long labor, taking her nearer the dangerous “precipice to my own feeling” than she had been since 1913, she channeled ideas, analysis, prophecy, and “preaching” into Three Guineas and rewrote Elvira as The Years’ eccentric, ineffectual Sara who drugs her pain with wine.⁴⁴ Ambitious in concept and baffling in execution, this self-portrait shows prophecy (intrinsically bound to history) yielding to allegory, which signals loss while suppressing its history.

At the heart of that scene Woolf envisioned as the book’s “turn” stands a tree rather like the one that symbolizes the young Stephens’ crisis of sexuality after Stella’s death in the “Sketch.” In all versions from 1903 to 1937, this tree figures an existential crisis that screens a crisis of sexuality and engenders a crisis of genre: a contest between thought and reality, vision and fact, symbol and story, allegory and history; a contest too between elegy and prophecy as genres to mediate the integration of past and future, loss and hope. In Elvira’s scenes the losses and grief of women temporarily consoled in Mrs. Dalloway resurface.⁴⁵ Time has passed, more change has come; but if the leafless tree evokes the pastoral elegy’s vegetation myth and the sexual crises attendant on loss, this project on the sexual life of women questions the adequacy of symbolic consolation. A symbol at once of blight and of potential rebirth, the leafless tree is a site of struggle between realism and allegory, a struggle that finally evades tragedy and elegy to end in the repression of history, the loss of loss.

With the leafless tree of the 1940 “Sketch” in mind, let us turn to the diary-essay of 29 June 1903, “A Dance in Queens Gate,” composed the spring before Leslie died, when George was squiring Virginia to parties and embracing her at night in her room “to comfort me for the fatal illness of my father.”⁴⁶ Alone in this room at the top of the house, Virginia hears waltz music from the mews below and looks down at “the leaves of a tree” against the bright skylight: “this incongruity—the artificial lights, the music—the talk—& then the quiet tree standing out there, is fantastic & attracts me considerably.”⁴⁷ Aligning her gaze with the tree above the dancers, she observes that they seem “no longer masters of the dance—it has taken possession of them. And all joy & life has left it, & it is diabolical, a twisting livid serpent, writhing in cold sweat & agony, & crushing the frail dancers in its contortions” (PA 167). In the next entry (30 June), “A Garden Dance,” Virginia has “just come back from a real dance” where, dressed in “fine clothes,” she has watched dancers looking “like flies struggling in a dish of sticky liquid” while talking with a “Director of the Bank of England” “about the floor & the weather & other frivolities, which I consider platitudes in my nightgown”: “Honestly, I enjoyed my window dance [of 29 June] the most” (PA 169–71). Having pressed her half brothers to depart at one and written this little essay, she placidly concludes, “Now I open my book of astronomy, dream of the stars a little, & so to sleep.”⁴⁸

These contrasting self-portraits as Contemplative Tree and Dubious Debutante say nothing of a tap at the door, the phrase that recurs in Woolf’s memoirs of George’s nocturnal visits and as an early title for The Pargiters. But in the First Holograph, dated 3 April 1933—the first sketch of the scene that was to be “the turn of the book”—a cryptic proto-tap, immediately suppressed, marks the place where the hinge was to be. Elvira lies in bed imagining herself “not a girl of 17 but the tree in the garden,” surging with life beneath its “apparently iron-bound wood”:

Behold—now it shakes! … She pulled herself up to look out of the window at the tree. Although it was the end of June, the tree was shadowed by the house opposite. She had imagined it pale green: it was black.

She lit the candle by her bedside. It was a quarter past twelve. On the table [stood a great] there was a litter of books, one open, full of pencil marks

She wrote the date. 25th June 1902.

And added At this moment of writing … the tree in the garden is like a flood of silver fish passing through black water. [I am waiting for Maggie to come home.] She looked at the time—it was 20 past midnight. She added the [date] hour to her observation. With her candle beside her she lay back again. Twenty minutes past twelve on the 26 of [July] June: here she was, ?writing so, in bed, lying alone. {[But what about somebody] The thought ?as ?best she could make it had something ?stabilizing & yet terrifying. Here she was: a body with eyes in its ?head. Laughing she sat up & noted everything in the room as if it were necessary to authenticate the moment with the greatest precision. “Now” she wrote. The candle is casting a ?little ?flower over the ceiling. There is nothing. She drew made a little square picture in pencil of the room.

At the same time, she added, under her drawing, nothing This is perfectly, exactly true to the best of my belief. She felt that she had made a mark, which in years to come she would still find there: that she had asserted once and for all the fact of her existence. Everything became extremely close, & solemn. She could hear a thousand things, very slight sounds that had been inaudible. It was extremely exciting. Her cheeks flushed. And yet owing to this slight hump that showed itself under her nightgown she would never look very young. Her face [never] had that curious twist which makes the face of [cripples] the deformed seem to ripple slightly. She would never be The long hands, hanging out far from the sleeves, [would]}⁴⁹

When Elvira finds her tree/self not green but “black,” she writes to affirm her existence against a world that threatens to negate it. Noting the date and hour as she waits for her sister Maggie to return from the dance, and likening her tree/self to silver fish in black water (echoing the underwater realm of “our unconscious being” in the fisherwoman image), Elvira laughingly asserts art’s powers and consolations. But why should she need thus to “mark,” “authenticate,” and “assert” her existence? When she flushes with excitement, how is it that her “slight hump” contravenes (“And yet”) this moment? Something seems to be missing; and Woolf’s lament three days later—“I cant write it now”—flags the broken words that seem to mark a “turn,” a crux or crossing, within this draft: the half-formed “terrifying” “thought” of “somebody.”⁵⁰ Almost immediately repressed, this fleeting thought leaves another, nearly illegible “mark” of Elvira’s existence, a textual scar of a crisis perhaps historical as well as existential, or so Woolf’s memoirs and the vicissitudes of this project on women’s sexual life suggest. Elvira’s writing exerts a counterforce against the annihilation that this repressed “thought,” like the black tree, threatens. Yet it does so not by witness (talking cure) but by repression (symptom). Hastening across this break, pushing under the “terrifying” thought, the narrator moves on to Elvira’s flushed face and disfiguring “hump.” It is as if the Woolf of 3 April 1933, recalling the Virginia of 29 June 1903, elaborates allegorically a “mark” of a history that she didn’t write then and “cant” write now. Veiling something unthinkable, she paints Elvira (subject, seer, artist) as “Laughing Survivor, a Body with Eyes, Mysteriously Deformed”—but leaves what she has survived just outside the frame.

Elvira’s deformity positions her outside the human mating dance she observes below. Protecting her from the invisibly crippling femininity imposed by the dance world—the desiring, sexualizing gaze, and the future it entails—her crooked spine preserves her as a subject, not object, of vision. As Teiresias is a seer who cannot see, Elvira is a seer “with eyes” who, as it were, cannot be seen. Her affliction removes her from conventional women’s time (“never … [never] … never”); it transfigures a suppressed historical wound into a physical condition with no past or future. In rewriting a psychic trauma as a physical injury (Sara is said to have been “dropped” as a baby, Y 122), the passage buries history beneath allegory: the black tree, the crippled body, disguise historical loss as ontological lack, to be redeemed by art. Like the black tree, Elvira’s crooked back condenses the mourner’s loss, the victim’s violation, the hysteric’s symptom, the survivor’s scar, and the sign of the prophet who—though she will never never never—affirms the gift and consolation of her art (MB 136). As Elvira’s first portrait parlays the victim’s mark into the prophet’s stigma, the suppression of her history begins a hystericization that proceeds from draft to draft.

The 1932 manuscript carries a trace of Elvira’s lost history in the Pargiters’ family tree, where Elvira and her sister, the significantly named Magdalena, are the youngest of seven children, including several brothers (P [2]). Was Elvira to have brothers like the Duckworths? If so (oddly, in a family chronicle), Woolf never wrote them in; except for two brief mentions they are absent from The Years and from all versions of this scene, the book’s intended “turn.”⁵¹ Or are they? In her 1903 essay Virginia describes a sky “dark & tragic before,” now “more terrible”: “deathly pale—but alive: … very chaste, & very pure, & the breeze is ice cold” as the dawn “fold[s] the world in its pure morning kiss”—a white “radiance” that puts out lamps, an “awful silence” in which “no music can sound” (PA 167). This virginal aubade embraces a morning world that extinguishes dances, sexuality, the acquiescent femininity into which the “barbaric” waltz inducts women, taps at the door in the night, and possibly a “terrifying” thought of “somebody.” In the Second Holograph, like a “wizard” uttering an “imprecation,” Elvira takes poetic flight on this frigid breeze—“Oh if I could freeze the wind into ice and wear it next my heart”—within a realist prose shot through with poetry, art, myth, allusion.⁵² As the brothers drop out of her family tree, magic spells, crying nightingales, and the Antigone, with its unburied brothers and sister buried alive by a father-tyrant, intimate what the realist narrator does not say.

The Second Holograph purges the frightening “thought” and translates any hint that a sexual crisis engenders Elvira’s writing into allegorical trees and nightingales. Again, her arboreal sexuality—“iron-bound winter wood” hiding a vital core—is a site of conflict between desire and a reality that threatens to negate it. Lying in her room with arms upraised, Elvira first imagines her body as roots, branches, “gummy, glistening” sap, and unfurling leaves “now that the spring had come,” then

hauled herself up in bed to verify the picture. She was wrong. The tree was there, but since it stood in shadow, the leaves … were [black] completely black. It was after midnight. … the tree might have been made of shadow. … She lit the candle [by her bedside & saw that it was] [twenty minutes past twelve]. … [open now on the table] was a copybook … the pages … written across with pencilled lines. She [wrote], or drew here … & wrote “25th June 1901.” … twenty minutes past twelve on the 26th June ?1931 I am at the moment [sitting up in bed writing.] [The tree is black.”] She looked up “I am sitting up in my room writing. … My stockings have fallen on to the floor. There are four books on the table beside me: also my watch: [also … four walls. She verified each statement] [also] two chairs & a X. This is the present moment. It was then she thought that one might stabilize the moment:⁵³

Is Elvira’s tree/self “black” and dead, insubstantial as a shadow, or sentient and alive, verified by her writing? Now the waltz, signaling the sexual initiation she escapes, intrudes: “She stopped writing, as if … the music made it impossible. … Under its influence the moment was no longer … to be pinned down satisfactorily by cataloguing chairs and tables. It was full of [sadness] grey, of [melancholy] other emotions: pleasure, yes: sadness: yes: and what else?” (Holograph M42, 348–49). Antagonized by the dance world of “strange passion” and “barbaric instinct” (PA 165), Elvira deflects her irritation into fantasies of being “not herself but something remote,” like this “shadowcrossed sky” under a moon where “nothing” is heard “but the two nightingales who sang to each other night after [night], calling and answers … the voices came brokenly … her poems. Then replies. The mountains separated them. But [the question was of course … ] at what intervals?” (Holograph M42, 350).

This “other tune, with its pauses and replies,” evokes Ovid’s nightingale and Philomela’s broken-voiced song of violated sexuality.⁵⁴ As Elvira listens in the quiet between waltzes, another “horrible” waltz begins, “enrag[ing]” her, and “completely destroy[ing] her vision.” To gain “power … over the … disturbance” she flings words “mangled from something she had read” against “its mechanical accuracy, its machinelike quality”; and with a sudden gesture spills milk over her books: Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, Timon of Athens, Afloat in the Pacific, and her cousin’s translation of “Sophocles”—presumably the Antigone of later drafts.⁵⁵ Alongside the nightingales, the spilled milk (like the sleeping dog) heightens mundane accident into hyperreal allegory. An effect of anger and violence in a battle over the airwaves—a contest between waltz and poem and their conflicting stories of women’s sexual life—the spilled milk parodies the circumlocutory distance at which allegory holds “terrifying” thought—as if to admonish against crying over spilled milk, inalterable events, lost maternal figures whose presence would have changed everything.

Is the Second Holograph’s deepened allegory a “deliberate” solution to the problem of sexual violation, speech genres, and publics or a symptom of unthinkable historical truth (like the incoherent “thought” of the First Holograph and the Milly Brush passage in The Hours)? If the Second Holograph was composed later in April 1933—when Woolf was finding the book “fun,” “a terrific affair”—its allegorical turn may have provided a refuge from translating painful memory into realist narrative (“I cant write it now”); from vulnerability not only to an actual public but to inward threats of annihilation, madness, suicide. Is the turn to allegory “deliberate” or simply necessary—a middle way between “terrifying” memory and repression, an averted mode of testimony?

Without judging these allegorical moments a failure of courage or truth telling, we can register their cost. As Elvira’s sexual history vanishes into her crippled body, what is at stake in the black tree’s contradiction of her fantasy of green, leafy sexuality and voice becomes abstract and obscure. The antipathetic waltz—full of “melancholy,” “pleasure,” “sadness,” “what else?”—does not adequately motivate her impulse toward prophecy and the sublime. Although the Ovid allusion suggests sexual violation transformed into wordless song, Elvira’s poetic “power” floats free of any such narrative as illuminates Ovid’s nightingales; and its figural mode seems complicit with the repression that blocks Woolf’s realist storytelling and banishes the brothers, symptoms of the incestuous history that blighted her budding sexuality and (in this book) voice. Confining violent fathers and brothers between the covers of Sophocles and Ovid, the Second Holograph registers “the damage done to the mind,” “worse than that done to the body,” by transgressions not just of the room’s and body’s boundaries but of desire’s psychic boundaries. It intimates a sexual history drowned in “the world that lies submerged in our unconscious being” that disables witness, testimony, truth-telling, historical voice—Elvira’s human tongue.

Both Antigone and Philomela seem treacherous models for Elvira/Sara. Antigone’s familial loyalty in burying her dead brothers leads to her own fate of being buried alive by decree of vengeful Creon. In her rage at the brother-in-law who raped and mutilated her, Philomela embraces symbolic art—the speechless tapestry in which her sister reads her story—not as a consoling end in itself but as an instrument to visit on her destroyer a violence as horrific as his own. Borrowed from Ovid’s narrative of sisters transfigured into unintelligible voices, Elvira’s nightingales are a mute memorial to loss, a history frozen into image, speech transmuted into song without words. Counterposed to the terror of memory, the draft’s allegorical speech at once sustains and betrays the realist project of bearing witness to a pervasive violence against women in a world where gender is enforced by psychic and social barriers that immure history in the unconscious.

The Third Holograph—thirty-nine pages, 2–18 June 1933—ends with Elvira’s hope of redeeming her deformity by prophetic speech.⁵⁶ This version throws out the spilled milk, keeps the nightingales, aligns Elvira with Antigone, buried alive on a moonlit night, and (as the scene’s first full version) definitively lops the fraternal branches off the family tree.⁵⁷ Here Elvira longs for words “beautiful, passionate enough!” for the white and black shapes in the garden below (356), then contemplates her cousin Edward’s cloistered life while browsing in his Antigone until Maggie and their mother, Eugénie, come in after the dance. Eugénie rebukes Maggie for calling her dinner partner a “bore,” Maggie envies Elvira’s freedom from the dance world with its mechanical music “full of sadness, defiance, splendour” (375, 355), and Elvira teases Eugénie to tell stories about ancestresses “falling passionately in love with gardeners, with stable boys; … shaking their bouquets when they got home at night” to find “a heart pierced with an arrow; or again nothing but a word of assignation” (383). When their father interrupts, Elvira sees Eugénie become suddenly “beautiful, insincere” and wants to ask, “Why did you marry him?” (385). Their mother is “a liar,” she tells Maggie, speaking with “extraordinary bitterness, neither like a girl nor a woman but aged, drawn, sexless. And why can’t she tell the truth? Because of that little man,” she continues (386). Alone, Elvira reflects that “She was only 17”; perhaps at seventy, by “following with extreme daring each indication … she would have set free … the complete truth” (390).⁵⁸

Revisiting Elvira—now “Sally in bed”—in September 1935 (the year after George’s death), Woolf recorded her own hysterical symptoms in what had become “psychologically the oddest” of her “adventures” (D 4:338–39, 5, 6 September). She could not write the “turn of the book” in 1933 or since, and she cannot write it now. Worse, as she turns Elvira/Sally’s scene into the “1907” chapter of The Years, she defaces the Third Holograph’s self-portrait as the ambitious young Elvira by turning her into the cryptic, inconsequent Sara. Nightingales on an icy, virginal moon hint at the history condensed in her deformed body; a sister, not a brother, taps at her door; Eugénie’s stories of pleasure vanish. More ominously, reality countermands prophetic desire as the “1907” scene restages the crisis of verification that interrupted the first Essay. Lying “straight and still” as the dance proceeds below, Sara muses on a philosopher’s idea that “‘the world is nothing but … thought.’” She imagines her body as “thought,” then “a root,” a “tree” putting forth branches with leaves; looking out to “verify the sun on the leaves,” she is “contradicted” by a tree with “no leaves at all”; “the tree was black, dead black” (Y 133). As the black tree moves Elvira to write in order to assert her existence as a “body with eyes,” Sara surveys the garden scene, imagines the nightingales, and, seeing a man pick up something from the grass, makes up a story: “And as he picks it up,” she murmured, looking out, “he says to the lady … Behold, Miss Smith, what I have found on the grass—a fragment of my heart. … I have found it on the grass; and I wear it on my breast”—she hummed the words in time to the melancholy waltz music—“my broken heart, this broken glass, for love … is best” (Y 134–35). Then Sara reads, seeing Antigone whirl “out of the dust-cloud to where the vultures were reeling” to fling “white sand over the blackened foot” and be “buried alive” by Creon; soon Sara too has “laid herself out” to sleep like a living corpse (Y 136). The narrator reports a mundane conversation in the garden below; then Maggie comes in and Sara tests whether indeed “the world is nothing but thought,” asking whether anyone gave her “a piece of glass … saying to you, Miss Pargiter … my broken heart?”; “No,” Maggie replies, “why should they?” (Y 138).

As memoirs failed to verify the novelist’s “truth,” Maggie’s experience contradicts and trivializes Sara’s experiment with prophetic “thought.” Elvira’s existential crisis becomes an idle play of questions as Sara and Maggie ask, “Would there be trees if we didn’t see them?”; “‘what’s “I”? … “I” … ‘ She stopped” (Y 140). Where Elvira affirms her existence, Sara questions hers; in the contest between thought and reality, reality seems the victor: the crippled prophet in search of “the complete truth,” becomes in effect a tree falling unheard, making no sound; a hysteric defined by her lack of an audience. “Hush!” Martin admonishes over lunch as Sara tries to respond to his query as to what she makes of religion (“‘The father incomprehensible, the son incomprehensible’”); “Somebody’s listening.” Later, atop a bus, he says, “now, Sally, you can say whatever you like. Nobody’s listening. Say something … very profound”; she is silent (Y 229, 236, my emphasis). Eugénie, rumored to have had an affair with her brother-in-law Abel, plays into Sara’s frustrated desire for reality, history, truth: she puts a flower to her lips and promises to tell “the true story one of these days”—but Sara insists she never will (Y 143–44). Elvira’s hope to “set free … the complete truth” is lost as Sara falls asleep, wrapped in her sheet “like a chrysalis”—anticipating “Woolf’s portrait of her young self emerging from the chrysalis, “its eyes dazzled, incapable of flight” (Y 144, MB 124). Her abstract, seemingly arbitrary, singularity unredeemed by prophetic speech, Sara does not so much critique her culture as secede from it, in company with her homosexual friend Nicholas (Y 322, 324).

If Sara’s reality test reclaims the narrative from allegory, it also spells disaster for the artist-figure Woolf meant to be the hinge of the book. The black tree/disfigured body that was to burst into leafy speech is muted in Sara, nor did Woolf add “someone to look at” her who might have salvaged something of her revelations (as Peter remembers Clarissa’s).⁵⁹ Woolf’s misery on confronting the scene in 1935 suggests that the unexpected direction the book’s “turn” took was less “deliberate” failure, conscious pargetting, than unconscious, involuntary symptom. Is there relief as well as anguish as she buries not only the brothers but Elvira’s prophetic ambition in Sara—who, although entombed alive like Antigone, embodies truths she can neither speak nor write? No less than Ovid’s Philomela, Antigone seems an awkward model for Sara, her effort to honor her brothers at cross-purposes with Woolf’s brother burying, her own live burial a parody of “the damage done to the mind” by brothers contingently associated with Antigone’s.⁶⁰ By contrast with Three Guineas’ courageous Antigone, who acts out of love and seeks not to break but to “find” the law, the Antigone of The Years highlights what appears to be the daughter’s involuntary silencing by repression.

This textual history thus signals much more than “a failure of courage, a disappointing retreat.”⁶¹ Seemingly helpless against repression, Woolf expressed not fear but baffled desperation at having lost what she planned with such excitement to say. As late as 21 June 1936, she was still urging herself to revise “strongly daringly,” with “immense courage & buoyancy,” at the same time suffering “complete despair & failure[,] … living so constrainedly; so repressedly … Always with a feeling of having to repress; control” (D 5:24–25). As The Years foundered on repression, writing lapsed from remembering to repeating; from the visionary, liberating project Woolf envisioned in her bath to an ordeal that threatened to reawaken a “terrifying” past. It is perhaps no accident that the project came to resemble an “aggressive,” unkillable reptile—an image to which Woolf made frequent recourse to describe the “unspeakably conventional” George and Gerald.⁶² When Woolf gestured toward memoirs as touchstones of truth, she could not have foreseen that the fish the “conventions” forbade her to pursue would prove a “monster[] of the lower waters,” as difficult to escape as George apparently was in the scenes that made Virginia’s Greek tutor gasp “like a benevolent gudgeon.”⁶³ Woolf’s judgment—“I myself know why its a failure, & that its failure is deliberate”—belies the immense effort, courage, and will to “truth” against the force of repression that the genetic text makes visible (D 5:65, 7 March 1937).

“The leafless tree was behind our ostensible lives for many months,” Woolf wrote in 1940. “But trees do not remain leafless. They begin to grow little red chill buds” of desire, as in the “illegal” marriage with her brother-in-law that Vanessa contemplated (MB 141). Budding only briefly in that incestuous house, Vanessa’s desire changed direction to issue in children—her first arriving shortly before Virginia and her brother-in-law, Clive, began a flirtation. In a manuscript passage, Elvira speculates that her cousin Rose’s “powers of expression have obviously been atrophied by some early & painful I should venture to say hideous experience [which she doesn’t want to talk about] Just as a tree … if you put a ring round its root all the apples on one side are bitter [small] wrinkled … but on the other side dipped in golden lustre.”⁶⁴ In Elvira’s portrait of Rose we glimpse yet another authorial self-portrait as a tree partly blighted by a root unnaturally bound.

Woolf could not wrestle the alligator of women’s sexual life to the ground, but the aura of Elvira’s unwritten history clings to The Years, broken into cryptic images, dispersed among the characters, and passed on, as we shall see, to the next generation.⁶⁵ At the same time, the party in the “Present Day” chapter circles back to Elvira/Sara’s 1907 scene and finesses the loss of history by founding the characters’ hope for the future not on an arduous, elegiac working through of memories but on the repression of loss and the abnegation of violence.⁶⁶ At a crossroads that points one way toward reality, mourning, rage, submission, consolation, and the other toward murder, suicide, tragedy, repression takes a shortcut via oblivion to the Pargiters’ final family portrait as people who have given up trying to speak, not because somebody’s listening but because almost nobody is.

In The Pargiters there is a brother named George who is renamed North in The Years. The 1932 family tree stops short of this next generation, but George/North and his sister, Peggy, are children of Morris Pargiter, nephew and niece of Eleanor, Rose, Martin, and the rest, and first cousins once removed of Sara and Maggie. As in the original plan, this younger generation is an index of historical change. North returns from twenty years on an African farm, an “outsider” to English civilization (prefiguring Three Guineas’ Outsider). Peggy, an unmarried physician and the novel’s only professional woman, longs to “live differently” (Y 317, 323, 403). True to the adage that one generation’s sins are laid on the next, the narrative hints at incest between North and Peggy, who seems to embody a symptomatic “truth” about women’s bodies and passions.

When we first meet these children during Eleanor’s visit to her brother Morris’s family at Wittering in 1911, North is a “brown eyed cricketing boy” and Peggy, in a stiff blue dress, “sixteen or seventeen” (Y 202, 205). Summoned by her mother at bedtime, Peggy lingers “whispering with her brother in the hall.” She comes “reluctantly” and kisses her mother “obediently; but she did not look in the least sleepy. She looked extremely pretty and rather flushed. She did not mean to go to bed, Eleanor felt sure” (Y 210). In bed, Eleanor hears a sound: “Peggy, was it, escaping, to join her brother? She felt sure there was some scheme on foot” (Y 212). At the party in the “Present Day” chapter, Peggy and North reminisce about “the night of the row” when she climbed down a rope and they “picnicked in the Roman camp”; a “pink-eyed boy” spied them “coming home that morning” and “told on them” (Y 395). Innocent as this escapade seems, Peggy’s feelings point to more than a picnic:

North remembers that “he used to read her his poetry in the apple-loft” and “as they walked up and down by the rose bushes. And now they had nothing to say to each other,” though “She still knew certain things about him”; “they still had something very profound in common” (Y 395). Peggy masters her jealousy enough to ask North to bring a girl he has met to see her. Putting her hand on his arm, she feels “something hard and taut beneath the sleeve. … [T]he touch of his flesh, bringing back to her the nearness of human beings and their distance, so that if one meant to help one hurt, yet they depended on each other, produced in her such a tumult of sensation that she could scarcely keep herself from crying out, North! North! North!” (Y 397).

Does Woolf parget her past in George/North, or does she rehabilitate her half brother as a figure of healing change, a comrade in the quest for new civilizations? Unable to tell the “complete truth,” does she overleap trauma to envision a future in which brothers might be allies and friends? In any case, what seems crucial here is that Peggy’s desire is fully in play.⁶⁷ She is no victim nor North an abuser; they hatch their “scheme” together. It is her own desire for which she feels guilt and must “pay” by renouncing sexual and procreative pleasure. As if displaced from Elvira/Sara to Peggy, a history of a woman’s sexual life subtly surfaces as Peggy’s memories cast a gleam upon her present misery. Although she earns her living, her work is an escape from pain, a way “not to live; not to feel”; in her sexual life she fares no better than Sara or Eleanor and—for no apparent reason, unless that night in the Roman camp—is less happy, free, and fulfilled than Eugénie, Kitty, and Maggie (Y 355). The sight of her father Morris’s “rather worn shoes” gives Peggy a “sudden warm spurt” of feeling, “Part sex; part pity. … Can one call it ‘love’?”⁶⁸ Talking at cross-purposes with her hard-of-hearing uncle Patrick, she wonders whether, since “Pleasure is increased by sharing it,” “the same hold[s] good of pain?” (Y 351–52). As Elvira/Sara stands at a tangent to the mating game, Peggy, “marooned” at the dance, picks up a book “to cover her loneliness,” predicting, “He’ll say what I’m thinking, … Books opened at random always did” and reads “‘La mediocrité de l’univers m’étonne et me révolte’. … Precisely, she said” (Y 383).

At the 1937 party, no prophet, male, female, or “sexless,” looks upon the scene. Sara is part of the common life, which includes conformists and outsiders, pillars of the system and rebels against the “conspiracy” that, in North’s eyes, links family life to economic striving, class and gender oppression, war, and imperialism (Y 341). Several characters voice the longing for change that has sounded since the war: “to live differently—differently.”⁶⁹ In the 1917 chapter, as they dine in Maggie’s cellar during an air raid, Eleanor has wondered, “when will this New World come? When shall we be free? When shall we live adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?” (Y 297). Now, at seventy-nine, she enjoys travel, family, and new friends—a life salvaged from the wreck of her dutiful Victorian femininity; in Peggy’s eyes “a fine old prophetess, a queer old bird, venerable and funny at one and the same time,” Eleanor has visited India and wants before she dies to experience “another kind of civilisation. Tibet, for instance” (Y 328, 335). Meanwhile, she has moments of inexplicable joy: “She laughed. Her feeling of happiness returned to her, her unreasonable exaltation. It seemed to her that they were all young. … Nothing was fixed; nothing was known; life was open and free before them” (Y 382).

North returns from Africa with an ethnographic perspective on his native culture and joins the chorus in quest of new civilizations (Y 317, 323, 403). The English, he finds, talk of nothing but “money and politics”; of the class oppression that underwrites middle-class English domesticity he thinks, “Could nothing be done about it? … Nothing short of revolution.” The ruling-class “conspiracy” forcibly strikes him: “they’re not interested in other people’s children … Only in their own; their own property; their own flesh and blood, which they would protect with the unsheathed claws of the primeval swamp. … How then can we be civilised …?” (Y 318, 375, 378). That dark continent Europe entangles him in “a jungle; in the heart of darkness”; he tries “cutting his way towards the light” but has only “broken sentences, single words, with which to break through the briarbush of human bodies, human wills and voices, that bent over him, binding him, blinding him” (Y 411). When Peggy challenges him to reject the “conspiracy,” he feels momentary hostility, then recognizes something “true” in “her feeling, not her words. He felt her feeling now; it was not about him; it was about other people; about another world, a new world” (Y 413, 422). Peggy, he realizes, expresses their generation’s longing for “a different life. Not halls and reverberating megaphones; not marching in step after leaders, in herds, groups, societies caparisoned. … But what do I mean, he wondered—I, to whom ceremonies are suspect, and religion’s dead; who don’t fit” (Y 410). Like Rachel Vinrace, North seeks a new script, “a new word that was no word”—“the sweet nut. The fruit, the fountain that’s in all of us” (Y 412).

The First Essay’s vision of new civilizations recurs in North’s dream of an antifascist “new word” to oppose to Europe’s corrupt, barbaric heart, uncovered by Conrad at modernism’s origin and gaining sway in the militant authoritarian regimes of the 1930s. Nicholas’s attempted speech at the end of the evening—in which he tries to thank the house “which has sheltered the lovers, the creators, the men and women of goodwill” and to toast “the human race … now in its infancy, may it grow to maturity!”—at once founders and elicits this new word as the company cries him down and prophecy yields to polyphony. At Kitty’s invitation (“Tell me, privately”), he modulates from oratory back to conversation’s sweet nut: “It was to have been a miracle! … A masterpiece! But how can one speak when one is always interrupted?” (Y 425–26). Likewise, Edward, don and translator of Greek drama, declines to expatiate upon “the chorus” even as a chorus of the future materializes in the caretaker’s children (as close as the novel gets to 2032), who sing for their cake in words their listeners find hideously unintelligible yet weirdly beautiful. Meanwhile, North longs for “someone, infinitely wise and good,” to “think for him, … answer for him,” and finds this desire met when Maggie laughs as if “possessed by some genial spirit … that made her bend and rise,” like a “a tree … tossed and bent by the wind. No idols, no idols, no idols, her laughter seemed to chime as if the tree were hung with innumerable bells, and he laughed too” (Y 423, 425). The vital speech of Elvira’s black tree bursts forth transfigured in polyphonic voices, the little choristers, and Maggie’s wordless laughter. Heralded by these new words that are no word, the unforeknowable “new world” dawns.

Even though The Years scales back The Pargiters’ historical ambitions to a meliorative realism shadowed by the Present Day political scene, hope for the future survives in its characters’ private consciousness of being “happier … freer” than in the past and in their longing to “live differently” (Y 422–23). In the closing tableau the seven elderly Pargiters stand against the window, observed by Sara and Maggie, while “God Save the King” drifts from the gramophone, departing guests hear pigeons coo, and Eleanor sees a couple alight from a taxi and enter a house, as if to recall the exciting conversation prophesied by the Speech. As Eleanor holds out her hands to Morris—“And now?”—these survivors seem to shelter in the only possible paradise, the present, which Eleanor, Kitty, Delia and Rose insist has improved on the past and which breaks like a wave toward a future “open and free” (Y 435). On the other hand, there is a terrible disjunction between this dawn’s illusory “peace” and the threat of war on the horizon; between the transformative energy that impelled Woolf’s new speech genre, the essay-novel, and the impotence of any “new word” against the economic and political engines of fascism and war. Like Pound’s radio speeches, Eliot’s religious incantations, and Joyce’s laminate dream-language, Maggie’s laughter sounds at a moment of impending violence no word will forestall.

In this sense The Years almost seems to parget the very future it heralds—to strand us at the limit of modernism, beyond the agency of speech and vision, even as it clings to hope of a more civilized and humane future. For, in a way, Woolf’s epiphany still echoes in this new word that is no word. Addressing its audience intimately, as Nicholas does Kitty; humbly, as Edward does North; with spontaneous joy, like Maggie’s free-floating laughter; unintelligibly yet enchantingly, like the singing children; without prophecy, polemic, or preaching, The Years distills Woolf’s experiment with speech genres into the freedom and surprise of everyday social practices. Insofar as its new word that is no word marks the place of a longing to “tell someone,” it signals speech that would free the future from the wounds, scars, and losses of the past.

In the absence of The Pargiters’ psychosocial analysis, the ground of that hope shifts from shared witness of the past to its repudiation. Eleanor ventriloquizes the flight to the Present Day for lack of an audience: “I do not want to go back into my past. … I want the present”; “‘My life … ’ she said aloud, but half to herself. … But no, she thought, I can’t find words; I can’t tell anybody” (Y 336, 367). So Kitty sums up “the old days” as “bad days, wicked days, cruel days” (Y 350). As her essay-novel yielded to a leap of faith in the future, Woolf felt she had laid a heavy “paving stone of a book” over her “old fountains”; to Ethel Smyth she dismissed her effort at a historical narrative, saying the “Present day, the last chapter, has as much as one wants. And its all very bad, but well meant—morally” (D 5:31, 9, 10 November 1936, L 6:113, 17 March 1937).

If The Years’ new dawn gives up the struggle to integrate past and present in hope of a future founded (in Freud’s words) on firmer ground and more lastingly, its “failure” fed new hope as Woolf’s unfulfilled vision became the impetus of new projects. She suffered through its publication, taking solace in Leonard’s praise without changing her own opinion; she felt relief that, though not the book she had planned, it seemed “to come off at the end,” and looked forward to Three Guineas: “even if The Years is a failure, I’ve thought considerably; & collected a little hoard of ideas.”⁷⁰ When she sent off the last proofs, her mind “sprung up like a tree shaking off a load” (D 5:44, 30 December 1936). Publication day loomed like a “head lamp on my poor little rabbits body”: she saw her own “positively terrified” eyes in the glass and felt “I’m going to be beaten, I’m going to be laughed at, I’m going to be held up to scorn & ridicule” (D 5:63–64, 1–2 March 1937). In the event, The Years was favorably reviewed on the whole and triumphed in the marketplace. As if reversing the black tree’s negation of Elvira/Sara’s leafy speech, her public heaped praise and pots of money upon the book she had feared would leave her “little reputation” “an old cigarette end”: it outsold all her other books, was a bestseller in America, and brought her annual earnings to an all-time high.⁷¹ As the reviews appeared, her dread diminished but her private opinion held: “to think then its not nonsense; it does make an effect. Yet of course not in the least the effect I meant” (D 5:67, 12 March 1937). Only Basil de Selincourt’s review gave her hope that it would be not taken as a “death song of the middle classes” but “debated” as “a creative, a constructive book,” so that “3 Gs. will strike very sharp & clear on a hot iron” and “my immensely careful planning won’t be baulked.”⁷²

Woolf continued her quest toward new civilizations by means of new engagements with her public in Three Guineas and in Between the Acts, which grew from the seed of the village pageant in the 1911 chapter. With The Years’ worldly success creating a wind at her back, she plunged ahead with the unfinished business of the 1931 Speech, reviving the idea of Elvira in the prophetic “St. Virginia” who answers St. Paul’s epistle in Three Guineas and in Miss La Trobe, the visionary village playwright who stages a new revision of English history in Between the Acts. As Woolf began rethinking the analyst’s essays for Three Guineas, she continued to experiment with finding “a public” for “all the new ideas that are in me,” a genre and style to disarm her readers’ probable resistance: “if I say what I mean … I must expect considerable hostility. Yet I so slaver & silver my tongue that its sharpness takes some time to be felt” (D 5:84, 30 April 1937). If her 1931 project of bringing the sexual life of women into public discourse was “too ambitious,” Three Guineas’ critique of the sex/gender system in modern England and Between the Acts’ experimental pageantry are no less so (L 6:116, 7 April 1937). It’s just that they stand at a safer distance from Woolf’s own untold “experiences as a body.”