On the back of her last letter to Leonard, written just before she walked out to die, Woolf added a few practicalities: there were some of Roger’s letters that he might need to find – they were in her desk. And, last of all, ‘Will you destroy all my papers.’1 It was a reasonable request, given the self-exposure of the diaries, the unguarded portraits of acquaintances, the unfinished memoirs, the journals and notebooks in which she sketched out her thoughts moment by moment. Literary bonfires included those of Thomas Hardy and Henry James.
The posthumous story of Virginia Woolf has been shaped by the fact that Leonard Woolf did not destroy her papers, but embarked instead on a project of editing and carefully timed publication which went on for the rest of his life. It was a way of keeping her memory alive. Every few years through the 1950s and 1960s Leonard made sure that there was a new book to refresh her image in her readers’ minds. There were collections of her essays and, in 1954, a selection of extracts from her diaries. Understandably, Leonard thought the public had more business with Virginia’s work than with any other part of her life, so his selection prioritized her exploration of her writing process, and he called it A Writer’s Diary. It is the diary of a woman who lives for her work, who is acutely conscious of her states of mind, and whose daily life is made up of struggles with form, triumphs over language. Never before had a writing life been so vividly and intimately narrated. The voice seemed very close, both formidable and familiar. Yes, we were there in the lonely study, and this was Virginia Woolf.
Vanessa Bell’s cover design for A Writer’s Diary. ‘What sort of diary should I like mine to be?’ Woolf asked herself in April 1919: ‘Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind.’ (Vanessa Bell, drawing for jacket of A Writer’s Diary, edited by Leonard Woolf, London 1953. Photo Eileen Tweedy © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
And then, later, another Woolf came in, laughing rather wildly, with a whole group of friends behind her. Between 1977 and 1984 the full diary appeared in five volumes, edited by Quentin Bell’s wife Anne Olivier Bell. Now the writing life was mixed up with the social life and the family life and with jokes, holidays, errands, annoyances, campaigns. There was so much of it: every lunch party and shopping trip seemed to be here, every shade of changing emotion, a mass of contradictions, far more experience than seemed feasible for a single human life, and a short one at that. Anyone who reads the diaries will find it hard not to feel that this is Virginia Woolf.
But at the same time as the diaries there were (as Woolf said of Orlando) several thousand more selves emerging. Nigel Nicolson and his assistant Joanne Trautmann sat in the ‘Virginia Room’ at Sissinghurst Castle each summer through the mid-1970s and sorted through thousands of Woolf’s letters. By 1980 there were six volumes of letters to place alongside the growing shelf of diaries. They revealed Woolf as one of the great letter-writers; and they revealed the character of her relationships with particular friends – especially when her side of a correspondence could be joined with its other half, as was the case for Lytton Strachey and Vita Sackville-West.2
The appearance of completeness has been one of the seductions for readers of Woolf, and one of the dangers. Feeling themselves to be in possession of all the evidence they need, commentators have often been bold in their judgments about very personal questions. Warier readers insert imaginary gaps where letters have not survived, or where weeks pass without a diary entry. We do not have Woolf’s correspondence with her brother Adrian, for example, and two of her closest friends, E. M. Forster and Roger Fry, were certainly more central to her life than the scant letters suggest. When you live with someone you don’t need to write to them, so we are not party to all those daily exchanges at Monk’s House and Tavistock Square and never will be. Whatever else emerges from the depths of archives and desk drawers (like the early journal that turned up in 2002), there will be no finished picture of Virginia Woolf.3
Her biographers have been aware that they are offering an interpretation and not a final reckoning. The first was her nephew Quentin Bell, who was invited by Leonard to write an authorized biography. (That this was thirty years after Woolf’s death suggests how anxious Leonard had been to wait for the right person and the right moment.) Bell’s two-volume life, published in 1972, represented a sustained feat of sensitive judgment. Biographies by family members are not always known for their objectivity, but this one made candour a badge of honour, dealing openly with Woolf’s illness, the question of abuse, the marriage, Vita, suicide. Bell’s chronologically arranged narrative revealed very strikingly a pattern of alternating crisis and recovery. Almost every chapter brought a family death or a period of illness, but there was no lingering in the gloom. A resilient Woolf emerged from one thing after the next, full of new ideas for starting life afresh.
There were things that Bell purposely did not try to cover. He felt he should not set himself up as a literary critic, so the fine interplay between life and work was left to later interpreters. More controversially he did not see Woolf as a political thinker and left Three Guineas as a mistake best forgotten. This made the image of the mad aunt more discernible in Bell’s account: she is repeatedly ‘odd’ in contrast to Leonard’s practical commonsense. And this oddness in daily life is inseparable from her aesthetics. ‘Her gift was for the pursuit of shadows, for the ghostly whispers of the mind and Pythian incomprehensibility’, Bell wrote.4 In reading her as a priestess of sensibility, he was making his sense of her limitations clear.
The fiercest opposition to this portrait came from feminist academics in America. Jane Marcus took Three Guineas and The Years as the central texts in her long campaign to reveal Woolf as an angry, highly politicized woman condemning a patriarchy that had kept her caged.5 Inspired by Marcus, another academic, Louise DeSalvo, set out to show that every aspect of Woolf’s life and work was shaped by her experience of abuse at the hands of the male inhabitants of Hyde Park Gate.6 DeSalvo’s book sold in its thousands in America and has been extremely influential, but for many readers it has been a source of frustration. Though she was studying one of the century’s greatest intellects, DeSalvo chose a psychoanalytic method that privileged the work of the unconscious. In making Woolf so unrelentingly a victim and a sufferer, DeSalvo reinforced the existing image of fragility and in the process recast the novels as the products of a damaged mind.
Politicized, feminized, romanticized, sexualized, castigated, vindicated – the posthumous Virginia Woolf was the figurehead of opposing causes. She was a potent sign and symbol, even for people with no idea what she wrote. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Edward Albee’s play had asked in 1962, using her name as shorthand for ‘diffcult’ high culture. Was that what the author of The Common Reader stood for? The debates coalesced around questions of elitism and feminism. Was it alright for women to claim a heroine who refused to call herself a feminist? As issues of women’s sexuality hit the headlines in the 1970s, Woolf’s relationships came under scrutiny. Lyndall Gordon countered Marcus with a much more sympathetic account of the Woolf marriage in her fluid and imaginative 1984 biography, while opening a new controversy by downplaying the relationship with Vita.7 What then of the lesbian icon? In the late twentieth century, Woolf’s life became a battleground.8
All the more strange, then, that she was so often presented as being incapable of any battle at all. The melancholy, silent, white-laced Beresford portrait from 1902 was the one that people remembered: the one that was printed on posters and sent up in caricatures.9 The idea of Woolf as a delicate aesthete was established early on in her life and persisted. When she wrote about Katherine Mansfield as ‘A Terribly Sensitive Mind’, she was partly getting even with a competitor, knowing she would be filed under that heading too. Some of the reports of her death implied that she was too fragile to cope with the war.
It is telling that when E. M. Forster paid tribute to Woolf in 1941, what he most wanted to do was to challenge that image. He pointed out how good she was at writing food. When the boeuf en daube comes in, says Forster, ‘we peer down the shiny walls of the great casserole and get one of the best bits’.10 He evoked a writer who was greedy, bodily, and sensuous. Speaking in the 1970s, Elizabeth Bowen remembered Woolf’s huge vivacity. ‘So I get a curious shock when I see people regarding her as a martyred […] or definitely tragic sort of person, claimed by the darkness.’11
When Hermione Lee started work on a new authorized biography in 1991, she wanted to get away from the idea of Woolf as a mad genius and as the doomed victim of early abuse. She was interested in Woolf as a professional woman whose achievements came through extraordinary self-motivation and hard work. She was interested in what Woolf did, consciously, to get herself through periods of illness and to take control of her experiences. Lee’s biography, when it came out in 1996, presented a woman of determination, self-knowledge, subtle eroticism, political insight, energy, good sense, and glittering wit.12 She was a confident ‘subversive’ in her life and her writing; she was the co-director of a successful publishing company; she was a partner in a long, loving marriage. Her physical presence and the material texture of her world became tangible, from the close rooms of Hyde Park Gate to the meetings of Rodmell Women’s Institute. Lee’s description of the General Strike was carefully filtered into her reading of the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse as an emphatic reminder of the outward engagement that shaped even the most apparently ethereal parts of Woolf’s writing. There was no covering over Woolf’s less appealing sides: yes, she was a snob, she was instinctively anti-Semitic, she could be extremely spiteful and jealous. But she had the nerve to acknowledge these things and to examine them. She knew her limitations and her fears (of egotism, madness, exposure) and made them one of her great fictional subjects. ‘Virginia Woolf and Fear’ was the title of one of Lee’s university lectures in the late 1990s, but it ended as an affirmation of Woolf’s courage, from which a new generation of readers could take heart.
Not surprisingly, Lee wondered why the Woolf of Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, played by Nicole Kidman with the famous addition of a prosthetic nose, had to be so very humourless and unworldly.13 But the film as a whole, like the novel by Michael Cunningham on which it was based, is a gutsy revision of Mrs Dalloway with the acuity to take on Woolf at her sharpest. The Hours is a story about afterlives. It describes a series of people who have read Mrs Dalloway and whose lives, in their different ways, echo the patterns of experience traced in Woolf’s novel. A young wife, trapped in a pristine suburban house in 1950s America, keeps up an immaculate smile for the benefit of her young son while trying to decide whether to kill herself; a dashing lesbian publisher in present-day New York hosts a party for a writer dying of aids, her fate linked with his as Clarissa is mysteriously linked with Septimus. It was apt that Cunningham chose for this novel the working title that Woolf used as she wrote Mrs Dalloway: it is as if Woolf’s book is being opened up again, as if it is still being made.
This sense of an ongoing process was important too for Katie Mitchell, who directed a play based on The Waves in 2006.14 Perhaps ‘play’ is not the right name, just as ‘novel’ seemed to Woolf a misleading word for some of her genre-shifting books. What Mitchell made was more a series of moments emerging from darkness, as actors filmed the tiny spotlit cameos they were constantly making and dismantling: a face in a mirror, a basin of water that suddenly seems like an ocean, bread rolls on a table laid sacramentally for a last supper. They were small works of art, with the qualities of a Chardin or a Hammershøi. Projected on to a screen above the stage, these images were immune from the clutter of props and cameras below. They came to feel like Woolf’s ‘moments of being’, crystallizing one by one.
Like Katie Mitchell’s white spotlight throwing details unexpectedly into relief, and as in Woolf’s own idea of the biographer ‘hanging up looking glasses at odd corners’, contemporary critics keep bringing new facets of Woolf’s life into view.15 In the last few years there has been a book about her servants, and a biography of Leonard Woolf which asks that we see her from his point of view.16 Olivia Laing has published a lyric account of a journey along the River Ouse, weaving the story of the Woolfs with the history of the landscape they loved.17 The last volume of the superbly annotated six-volume edition of her collected essays appeared in 2011, making clear the range and volume of her critical writing as never before. Woolf’s novels keep changing too. Our contemporary concerns teach us new ways of reading, so that some previously unnoticed image will suddenly stand out. And yet Woolf still arouses suspicion. Words like ‘difficult’, ‘elitist’, ‘mad’, ‘unworldly’ hover around her. East Sussex is not signposted ‘Woolf Country’ as Warwickshire is Shakespeare’s country or Dorset is Hardy’s. There is no Woolf theme park to match ‘Dickens World’ in Kent. Woolf’s novels inspire experimental films rather than Sunday evening costume dramas.
Perhaps this will change as she comes to be more and more taught in schools and read for pleasure. But we’d better not settle down with her too comfortably. ‘I’m the hare, a long way ahead of the hounds my critics’, Woolf wrote as she taught herself not to mind what people said about The Waves.18 It is a violent image, reminding us how violently she minded. But it is also an image of a writer’s leaping confidence and agility, eluding capture, getting away. We are still in pursuit of Woolf, though we need not be like hounds. And seventy years after her death she is still a long way ahead, drawing us on. Like Daphne, the girl who runs like a hare in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Virginia Woolf has a habit of changing shape to stay alive.
Virginia Woolf reading, June 1926. (Lady Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf (née Stephen), 1926. National Portrait Gallery, London.)