‘I suppose I am happy merely because it is so pleasant to be well again.’1 This was in February 1916 after three years of illness. For two awful months Virginia had refused to see Leonard; the nursing costs had used up their savings (they had needed four live-in nurses at times); Leonard himself was exhausted. The forced feeding had added three stone to Virginia’s usual weight, though she could now start to have her normal body shape back. She could also start to enjoy Hogarth House in Richmond, the new home she and Leonard had found together in a hopeful reprieve between breakdowns.
Virginia wanted to live in the centre of London, but she accepted that the space and peace of Richmond was probably much better for her precarious state of health. And if she had to live in the suburbs, Hogarth House was an excellent place to settle. It was a smart Georgian brick house, with rows of sash windows, large, wood-panelled rooms, and, at the back, views across the rooftops to Kew Gardens. The train to London was only a short walk away. That spring Virginia rejoiced in the most ordinary aspects of life because she knew what it was like to lose touch with them. Her convalescence was slow and there would be more setbacks, but nothing so violent or protracted. Seizing every moment of vitality, she launched herself back into the world and back into her writing.
Between 1916 and 1922, Woolf completed two novels, Night and Day and Jacob’s Room, novels so different that you might not guess they are by the same writer. The first is packed with the material details of its characters’ lives and long conversations about complex feelings, all minutely recorded. The second is a series of moments, each sketched with a few acute lines, surrounded by gaps and ellipses. It is an experimental biography of a young man, and an elegy for him. Jacob’s Room established a new form for fiction, but it did not come out of nowhere: busy years of reading, writing, and living went into its making.
At first Woolf’s work on Night and Day was painfully slow. She was allowed to write for an hour in bed each day, and with a novel so solidly realized as this one, an hour did not go very far. She designed it purposely as a steadying, therapeutic book – in both content and form. There were to be no fevers or hallucinations like Rachel’s in The Voyage Out. This was not a tragedy but a comedy. It was again about a young woman choosing her destiny, but this time all would go well. And in its technical conservatism it was meant to keep Woolf well out of danger. Each character is carefully established against a background before joining the novel’s slow dance of pairings and triangles.
Later Woolf talked about Night and Day as her ‘exercise in the conventional style’, as if it were the grammar lesson that would allow her to break the rules in future.2 Certainly she was dealing in literary conventions (and manipulating them as knowingly as ever Jane Austen did when she married off her heroes just in time for the end). But there were things in this book that had nothing to do with ‘exercise’. Virginia Woolf had been exercising as a writer since the age of six. At thirty-four, with all her ambitions yet to be accomplished, she needed to get on with the main performance. Night and Day was part of it.
It deals with the question of ‘how to live’, the question Woolf had discussed so intently with her siblings as they set up their homes and which she still kept asking herself. Her heroine Katharine Hilbery is a young woman of twenty-seven gradually emerging from the shadow of her grandfather’s literary genius. She is on the verge of leaving the old Victorian house full of relics and memories, but what power does she have to choose a future? All her ideas about life converge on the one central question of whom to marry, so that the traditional courtship plot is also an elaborate, sensualized debate about how to be free.
The relationship between Katharine and Ralph Denham gleams with a sense of something new approaching. Chairs and tables are suddenly not so stable as once they seemed: ‘they were solid, for he grasped the back of the chair in which Katharine had sat; and yet they were unreal; the atmosphere was that of a dream’.3 The apparently unbending framework of English middle-class life looks more malleable when they face it together. The novel is drawn to moments of immanence, pausing on the thresholds of houses, or in the dusk just before the lights come on. And it is full of strange, uncertain things that have no place in the ‘conventional style’: runaway thoughts, inexplicable symbols, doodles on blotting paper that come unbidden and refuse precise interpretation. And then, near the close, the whole sprawling book is condensed into one simple yet visionary image as powerful as anything Woolf wrote. Katharine is walking with Ralph through the lamplit streets: ‘it seemed to her that the immense riddle was answered; the problem had been solved; she held in her hands for one brief moment the globe which we spend our lives in trying to shape, round, whole, and entire from the confusion of chaos’.4 It is the glimpse of clarity towards which all Woolf’s novels strive.
But Woolf does not end with that contained globe. She ends instead with a tribute to the life Katharine has rejected, but which, going on steadily in the background, has made her happiness possible. Katharine and Ralph look up together at the light glowing in the window of Mary Datchett’s flat – Mary Datchett who is a single, independent, working woman. They decide not to go in and disturb her: Mary has her work to do. She will be writing books and making plans far into the night. The lovers look up at the light, not with pity but with awe. It was part of Virginia Woolf’s farewell gesture to Virginia Stephen, though she would never quite leave this image behind. Often in future, as she compared her own hard-working, bare-seeming life with that of Vanessa, she would console herself with the image of ‘forging ahead, alone, through the night’.5
Night and Day was Woolf’s wartime book (and she finished it with the coming of peace in autumn 1918). Sometimes as she wrote she could hear the sound of guns carried on the wind from northern France. The low rumblings of death were faint, distant, difficult to reconcile with any kind of daily life. In To the Lighthouse she would announce the battlefield death of Andrew Ramsay in brackets, so that it seems unreal and remote. The remoteness only adds to the shock and senselessness. Woolf has sometimes been criticized for not facing directly enough the great conflicts of her time, but all her post-war novels are concerned with the indirections by which we come to understand our losses.
Woolf’s Great War was inseparable from her personal war against illness. When she writes about the darkness of blackout, the vulnerability of huddling in the basement through an air raid, the strangeness of an orderly world turned against itself, the horror of unknowable forces massed against one, she is writing about both public and private experience. In Mrs Dalloway she imagines the thoughts of a shell-shocked war veteran, Septimus Warren-Smith, who sits hallucinating in Regent’s Park, seeing, wherever he looks, the same recurring images of the trenches. His visions of war are also the hallucinations of madness, and there is no distinguishing between them.
Woolf wrote Night and Day in a protracted effort to kill off her own madness (Septimus in the end had to be killed off too) and her war became one of careful measurement and control. She submitted, on the whole, to quietness, rest, and monitored eating. Her writing was rationed in the same way that the butter was rationed. These were years of austerity lived one day at a time, and with anxiety never far away. Leonard was examined for military service and pronounced unfit, which was a relief but also a confirmation of the effect their troubles had had on his health.
The Woolfs stayed mostly at Asheham, trying to be as self-sufficient as they could. It was not for the faint-hearted, what with the daily round of weeding, herding geese, making bread, fending off mice, bats, and squirrels. This practical work and domestic worry brought Virginia closer and closer to Vanessa, who had leased a farmhouse called Charleston just a few miles away across the meadows. Vanessa had set up home with her new partner and fellow painter Duncan Grant, making room for Clive when he wanted to be there, and welcoming other friends to work on the land. The atmosphere at Charleston never ceased to amaze and inspire Virginia. ‘Nessa seems to have slipped civilisation off her back, and splashes about entirely nude’, she wrote to Violet (who disapproved), and she was proud to describe her sister as ‘an old hen wife, among ducks, chicken and children’.6 Virginia was in love with this idea of raucous family life; she admitted to Vanessa that she wept for it. But her own projects with Leonard were quite different.
They had been thinking for some time about buying a small printing press, but it was not until March 1917 that they finally scraped together enough money. They spent hours and hours teaching themselves how to use it; week after week they made mistakes and had to start pages again. But they both loved the sense of productive independence it gave them. Virginia was quickly established as the typesetter because Leonard’s hands were too shaky. It was fiddly, tedious work (none of Vanessa’s ‘splashing’), but she found it satisfying, a practical therapy that led somewhere.
Vanessa Bell with Duncan Grant at Asheham, 1912. They painted together and shared the excitement of the Post-Impressionist exhibitions; gradually they fell in love and began a partnership which would last the rest of their lives. (Tate Archives, London)
The press led in fact to a whole new autonomy in her writing. She felt exhilarated by the freedom to publish for herself whatever she chose to write, and the exhilaration showed itself in a series of whirling, somersaulting short stories, which spring up from almost nothing and make patterns in the air. What is there to say about an indistinct mark on a wall? ‘Everything’, comes the answer, as Woolf spins fantasies about how the mark got there. The mark itself scarcely matters (in the end it turns out to be a snail): the important thing is what the mind can do with it.7 In these short stories Woolf makes her decisive shift from external facts to inner lives. Thoughts become the facts that matter. The narrator of ‘An Unwritten Novel’, for example, sits opposite a woman on a train and dreams up her biography, inventing all the details of a disappointed, lonely existence that might explain the sadness in her face.8 And then the same woman meets her son on the platform at Eastbourne and they go off happily together. The narrator does not know her, cannot know her. People cannot be explained from the outside, and all we can do is to keep on guessing.
It is no coincidence that the transitional years in which Woolf found new fictional forms were the years when she established the daily rhythm of writing her diary. Like many people, she had often started with good intentions in January or written travel journals on holiday. But the diary Woolf began in October 1917 carried on for the rest of her life. At first it was terse and factual, but it quickly filled out. Descriptions of people took on lives of their own, sentences doubled and multiplied as if getting free of rationing. For a while she wrote it daily before tea, but this proved problematic: she wanted to write up the people who came to tea. So she took up her pen as soon as they had gone.
Clive Bell with Julian, Quentin, and Angelica, painted by Vanessa Bell. Vanessa married Clive Bell, an art critic, in 1907. They both had relationships with other people, but they never divorced and Clive had a room at Charleston where he stayed regularly. They brought up the three children as their own, though Angelica was the daughter of Duncan Grant. (Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell and Family, Leicester Museum © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
Woolf did not conceive her diary as a place of guarded privacy: in fact she kept asking Leonard to make contributions, though his own brief, practical diary gives a sense of why a joint book was never going to work. She started to write for her older self, imagining conversations with Virginia Woolf at fifty. And she was fully aware, especially as she became more famous, that her diary might well be read by others. Reading her accounts of meetings with Yeats or T. S. Eliot, for example, one feels her shaping the moment for posterity. There is surprisingly little about the boredoms, humiliations, and terrors of illness. As usual, she bothered to think through the reasons for this: ‘I want to appear a success even to myself.’9 The diary feels so full and expansive that it is tempting to imagine that all her life is here. It is not, but here is the version of life she wanted to remember.
She tried to include those things that didn’t seem important but which, with hindsight, might turn out to be ‘the diamonds of the dustheap’.10 This was closely connected to the development of her fictional writing, where she was feeling for the significance of unremarkable things, knowing that emotion accrues in places you might not at first suspect. Like her fiction, Woolf’s diary was one of her ways of countering life’s transience. The thought of days slipping by unrecorded filled her with a sense of loss. She hated to think of ‘life allowed to waste like a tap left running’.11
Some of what she wanted to record was not outwardly eventful at all. Her happiest days were often the quietest. She and Leonard took great joy in a well-organized day that is productive because each activity has its allotted space. Generally they would both work from ten until one: this was the inviolable time when Virginia did her writing, going to her room every morning straight after breakfast, perhaps ‘tuning up’ with a cigarette and trying out the first words. After lunch she would usually go for a walk, thinking over the morning’s writing as she went. Later there would be printing or reading manuscripts, often a visitor for tea. And the evening was the time for that deep, absorbed reading of history and literature that made her ready for the next day’s writing. One routine Thursday in 1922, Virginia observed that the day had been ‘like a perfect piece of cabinet making – beautifully fitted with beautiful compartments’.12 It was, to her, profoundly satisfying.
These ordered days belonged mostly to the weeks spent in the country, away from all the interruptions of London. It was a blow when the Woolfs were given six months’ notice by their landlord that they would have to leave Asheham. But at an auction in July 1919 they bid in great excitement for a weather-boarded cottage on the very edge of Rodmell village, not far away. It was bought (for £700), and they trundled their furniture across from Asheham in two horse-drawn carts. ‘Monk’s House’, wrote Virginia with satisfaction. ‘That will be our address for ever and ever; indeed I’ve already marked out our graves in the yard which joins our meadow.’13 It was not morbidity which made her say this: it was a deep sense of peace, continuity, and possession. When they first married, she and Leonard had wanted to be nomadic, but their love of their London and Sussex houses became one of the defining facts of their lives. They found the freedom of nomads in other ways, but they were not wanderers. Their Sussex home, its big garden, and the countryside around it rooted them always.
It was a luxury to have town and country houses, of course, but Monk’s House was not luxurious. Rainwater washed from the garden through the house and out of the kitchen door. Nights were frequently disturbed by mice jumping into – or out of – the beds. Potential visitors were warned about the primitive conditions: it wasn’t easy to imagine stately Ottoline Morrell, for instance, going to the earth closet in the garden. The gradual improvements at Rodmell, each paid for with the earnings from some particular piece of work, were a continuing source of pride. They had the kitchen redone. They made a writing lodge in the garden. And Virginia’s joy in the country was unwavering. In the afternoons she would ‘walk out over the flats’ thinking over the morning’s work, watching the light change on the green slopes of the Downs. She wanted to hold it close and write it down. ‘I am so anxious to keep every scrap, you see.’14
So the ‘tap of life’ went streaming into Woolf’s diary and into her letters. Often she wrote up the same event in letters for three different people and then for the diary, but rarely is a single phrase repeated. The stream often glittered with gossip, which Woolf treated as a kind of precious currency to be banked and wisely spent. A good piece should elicit something similarly good in return. ‘I always keep a sort of pouch of gossip for you in my mind’, she told Vanessa, and the pouch got very full.15
Much of it was about the friends who congregated at the 1917 Club in London, named for the Russian Revolution. There were afternoons when the older people sat at one end of the room listening in on the gossip of the young. Woolf was now on the ‘older’ side and feeling, as she got near forty, distinctly middle-aged. She sized up the young people, with their trousers and cropped hair, in ways that were alternately generous and critical. Barbara Hiles, for example, looked bright and modern and ready to get going. But going on what exactly? Woolf was a little sceptical: ‘action there is none’.16 Sometimes the generations fell in love across the gap. Woolf got very caught up in Saxon Sydney-Turner’s doomed affair with Barbara; and everyone was embroiled in the strained dynamics between Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and the young Ralph Partridge. Woolf liked to see how other people, other generations, decided to do things. Watching Vanessa’s children, she wondered what kind of society they would build. As she talked to Julian she felt she was handing over ‘the old things to the new brains’.17
While she looked to the future, she remained loyal to old allegiances. Her intimacy with Violet Dickinson had long run its course, but they never stopped corresponding and Virginia never forgot what Violet had done for her. ‘It was certainly your doing that I ever survived to write at all’, she replied tenderly when Violet praised Night and Day.18 She had survived and she had changed. Whenever Woolf thought about her past – which was often and intensely – she paused to assess how far she had come. What had she to show for her forty years? She was always storing up their riches so that she could be ready with the answer. Going down to Cornwall in the spring of 1921, she felt herself returning to the place from which she had set out: ‘I go back “bringing my sheaves”.’19
She was aware that she was now admired and followed. With two novels out, another one on its way, an American publisher, a growing readership, and fifteen years’ worth of regular reviewing behind her, Virginia Woolf was a significant force. Leonard’s career too was flourishing: he was busier than ever with editing, lecturing, and politics. Between them they had established a fulfilling way of life. Woolf laughingly imagined herself and Leonard as flowers around which all their buzzing friends would cluster: ‘our seductive sweetness appears still to be drawing bees from all quarters’.20 For both of them, middle age had its rewards. Virginia felt she could at last stride into a milliner’s shop, meet the assistant’s eye, and get what she wanted. There were plenty of grand nights out: the ballet followed by a party with the Sitwells perhaps, or a weekend at Garsington, with Ottoline ‘precisely like the Spanish Armada in full sail’.21 Virginia liked the feeling of being at the centre of things. ‘At a party now I feel a little famous’, she noted.22 People knew her name.
Fabulously dressed and presiding with gusto over parties at Garsington, Ottoline Morrell struck Woolf as being ‘precisely like the Spanish Armada’. Woolf joked about Ottoline but also admired her and deeply valued their friendship. (Getty Images)
Mark Gertler, The Pond at Garsington, 1916. (Leeds Art Galleries)
Part of this getting older was the enjoyment of shared memories, hence the founding of a Memoir Club where friends gathered to hear accounts of one another’s pasts. There would be dinner and conversation before one or two members stepped up to read a memoir specially composed for the pleasure of the rest. The note of nostalgia linked these friends back to their Victorian parents, who had been so inclined to reminiscence. But the Memoir Club was thoroughly modern in its retrospect, as far from the Mausoleum Book as could be. Scandal and laughter set the tone; risqué revelations were always the toast of the evening. Around the table were the people Woolf had first met in Thoby’s rooms, and who had been her most lasting and loyal friends.
Her fondness for Saxon Sydney-Turner and Lytton Strachey was always connected with her love for Thoby, but also grew of its own accord. Woolf treated Saxon gently, wanting to be his confidante and waiting patiently for him to say what he meant. With Lytton there was more competition and flair. He was a literary rival: his Eminent Victorians had made him a household name in 1918, long before people had heard of Virginia Woolf. And the rivalry spurred them both on. When Lytton dedicated his biography of Queen Victoria to Virginia she was delighted, but she wanted to match his success. Her own short stories, when they came out in 1921, seemed a ‘damp firework’ next to the sensational sparkling of Strachey: they didn’t quite take off.23 Posterity (for now, at least) has taken a different view of the firework display. Queen Victoria looks elegant and accomplished; Virginia Woolf’s short stories look to have opened a new chapter in the history of literature.
Lytton was not the only writer with whom she was competing. As she worked on Jacob’s Room, the book that grew out of her experimental stories, Woolf felt newly aware of her literary contemporaries. She had formed a prickly, awkward, intense friendship with Katherine Mansfield, whose short stories had challenged Woolf to be all the more ambitious in her own. She set the type for Mansfield’s long story Prelude, one of the earliest publications from the Hogarth Press. ‘My God I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend’, wrote Mansfield, offering herself up in a rare moment of self-surrender, wanting to give Woolf ‘the freedom of the city without any reserve at all’.24 But the relationship would be full of reserve, defensiveness, offences given and inferred. Mansfield lashed out with criticism, giving Night and Day a cold review. They felt they were working for the same things, but that made them all the more guarded with each other. Their battle had a haunting intimacy about it. When they talked, Woolf had ‘the queerest sense of echo coming back to me from her mind the second after I’ve spoken’.25
T. S. Eliot started to visit, but he remained ‘Mr Eliot’ and it took a long time for the two writers to relax together. Though Woolf wanted them to become friends, it was a delicate operation. ‘What happens with friendships undertaken at the age of 40?’ she wondered.26 She felt slighted by him and not taken seriously when (especially as she was the elder and more established writer) it should have been the other way round. But under the aloofness they were allying themselves. Woolf went to enormous trouble to raise the money that would allow Eliot to leave his bank job. And they started to use the word ‘we’ when they talked about their writing. ‘We’re not as good as Keats’, Woolf said to him in the back of a taxi to Hammersmith. ‘Yes we are’, he replied.27 The following June, Eliot read The Waste Land to them at Hogarth House. ‘He sang it & chanted it rhythmed it’, Virginia recorded, not sure of its meaning as yet but feeling its obscure power beginning to work upon her.28
Virginia Woolf with her niece Angelica Bell. (Photo Ramsey & Muspratt, Cambridge)
More challenging even than this was the way Eliot talked about James Joyce as the great writer of their age. Woolf couldn’t see it. She read Ulysses carefully as it came out in instalments, and she acknowledged its technical achievement. But it seemed to her full of stunts and show-off vulgarity. Ulysses was much concerned with bodies, but it did not move her sensually. Joyce gave her none of the ‘physical pleasure’ that she got from reading Proust, and indeed the contrast between her reading of Joyce and Proust in the early 1920s helped to shape her own evolving sense of what she wanted to do. Proust could rouse her every nerve, achieving an ‘astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification’: ‘O if I could write like that!’29 Her response to Ulysses was physical in a different way. Notoriously, she likened its author to a ‘queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’.30 The image seeped out from her most angry feelings about the exclusivities and irrelevancies of the male educational establishment; Ulysses was connected for her with a world of male arrogance and aggressive sexuality. More importantly she found little rhythm or beauty in Joyce’s language. Nevertheless, she knew he mattered. When she got stuck with Jacob’s Room she admitted to herself that ‘what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce’.31 It is perhaps revealing that, while she paused, she thought through an article on ‘Women’, as if needing to rally her forces against these very powerful men.32
She had a firm sense of purpose, but Woolf still imagined life as a narrow pavement over an abyss. She had to walk along it without falling in. When life was good, the pavement was wider. There was less chance of falling, but the abyss was always there. A visit from Vanessa – all life and talk and children – could leave her, alone at her writing desk, in tears. Her health during 1921 was precarious and, as was now usual for her, the prospect of publishing a novel made it worse. Each month the doctors came up with a different diagnosis, so she went from having influenza to heart disease to tuberculosis. She had three teeth extracted and the ‘microbes’ from their roots injected into her arm. Nobody knew (and we cannot now say with any certainty) what was really wrong. She felt, justifiably, that she had lost in total at least five years to the limbo of her illnesses. The tap of life had been running on and she had not been part of it. ‘You must call me 35 – not 40 – and expect rather less from me’ she instructed E. M. Forster just before her birthday.33 But her tally was extraordinary for forty, let alone thirty-five. She finished her novel in November 1921, and saw it through to publication, on her own press, in October 1922. It is one of literary history’s magical dates, 1922. It was the year of The Waste Land and of Ulysses’ publication in book form – and of Jacob’s Room.
Woolf’s novel began with its hero out of sight; ‘Ja-cob! Ja-cob!’ shouts his brother, running across the beach in search of him.34 We do find him – briefly – but all through the novel, as Jacob grows up, goes to university, and falls in love, he keeps eluding the narrator who tries to tell his story. There can be no steady, definitive portrait of Jacob, but we glimpse him through the crowd or in a queue, and we hear people talking about him. Like the woman on the train in ‘An Unwritten Novel’, he is studied and made up by other people. In another very funny and moving train scene, Jacob climbs in opposite old Mrs Norman, who looks round anxiously for the communication cord because ‘it is a fact that men are dangerous’; as she ‘reads’ the appearance of this young man, however, she finds he is ‘grave, unconscious’, perhaps a little like her own son, someone she wants to talk with – but he gets out at Cambridge and goes on his way.35
Jacob’s Room fills up with these little shards of experience, but it remains a ghostly book in which a pre-war world is evoked by a detached, lyric voice which seems half to know that it is singing a eulogy. Cheerful bustling sounds keep dying away to silence. The clatter of plates and the hum of talk comes through the night air as dinner is served in Cambridge, but Jacob’s room meanwhile is empty and the iron gates in the moonlight are ‘lace upon pale green’.36 When night falls over London, the dome of the British Museum lies pale and still ‘as bone lies cool over the visions and heat of the brain’.37 In Greece, where Jacob goes on his travels, ‘darkness drops like a knife’.38 His mother, in England, thinks she hears the sound of guns. In the next chapter she is holding a pair of her dead son’s shoes.
E. M. Forster by Roger Fry. Forster and Woolf were friends for thirty years, and though Woolf expressed reservations about Forster’s writing, she cared a great deal what he thought of hers. (Roger Fry, E.M. Forster, Private Collection)
With Jacob’s Room Woolf felt she had got close to what she wanted to say. It was only an experiment, she kept telling people, an experiment that opened the way for what came next. She was already hard at work on the new novel, pushing on towards a new form. As she pushed forward she also wanted to hold still in the present: ‘[I] am really very busy, very happy, & only want to say Time, stand still here.’39