At Christmas 1922 Woolf wrote a long, reflective letter to her friend Gerald Brenan in Spain, looking back on the year, taking stock, and trying to express what was now driving her onwards. Such moments of summing up, often coming at the end of a year or before the publication of a new book, were important to her. She wanted her life to have form in the way that her novels had form. Now, at the end of 1922, she could feel herself being tugged in different directions and making the choices that would determine who she was in middle age. ‘I was wondering to myself why it is that though I try sometimes to limit myself to the thing I do well, I am always drawn on and on, by human beings, I think, out of the little circle of safety, on and on, to the whirlpools; when I go under.’1 She had worked hard and established herself; she had a successful, devoted husband, a great many friends, and a large house in Richmond. The ‘little circle of safety’ had about it a magical coherence that she would never stop describing; and yet through the next ten years she would keep going out beyond it. She wrote very quickly, one after the next, four major novels, each completely different from the last, each taking a huge gamble by adopting untried methods. She made new friends and fell in love. She got into the whirlpools, went under, and survived to do it all again.
The most immediate and practical result of Woolf’s determination to go beyond safe limits was her conviction that she and Leonard must move back into central London. Leonard was against it: Richmond was meant to be good for Virginia’s health. He imagined what would happen if they lived in the middle of things: late dinners, hundreds of visitors, exhaustion, illness – the dangerous spiral they had known before. For himself, he loved Hogarth House and felt no great need of nightly parties. As he dug his heels in, Virginia felt more trapped. She began to conceive this as a battle for life. She had a painful sense of waste: a sense that if she couldn’t get back to London after nine years in the suburbs, life would irrevocably pass her by. She wanted to go ‘adventuring among human beings’ and was ‘inclined for a plunge’.2 In the novel she was writing, she went on that adventure, and she thought out the relationship between the ecstasy of it and the danger. Clarissa Dalloway walks out into the streets of London one bright morning and though she is only going to the flower shop, and though she knows the way by heart, she thrills to the excitement of ‘life; London; this moment of June’.3
Vanessa Bell, A Conversation (Three Women), 1913–16. ‘Not a word sounds and yet the room is full of conversations’ wrote Virginia Woolf, introducing an exhibition of her sister’s paintings in 1934. (Vanessa Bell, A Conversation, 1913–16. Courtauld Institute Gallery, London © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
Mrs Dalloway is about a society woman giving a party – a strange subject, perhaps, for someone who dreaded smart society parties. In writing Clarissa, Woolf was thinking partly of the Stephens’ family friend Kitty Maxse, who had symbolized in youth what it meant to be a social success. Kitty had seemed grand and imperturbable, and coolly distanced herself from the Stephen girls when they went off to shabby Bloomsbury. But then in 1922, unaccountably, perhaps purposely, she fell over her banisters and died. The image of her returned very powerfully to Woolf: ‘her white hair – pink cheeks – how she sat upright – her voice’.4 Woolf was at that point writing a series of stories about Mrs Dalloway, but a few days after Kitty’s death she found that the stories were turning into a novel.
Woolf worried about her central character. She faltered and almost abandoned the book when Clarissa seemed ‘too stiff, too glittering & tinsely’.5 The problem was solved when she found a way to dig what she called ‘tunnels’ back behind the surface, leading into memories and underground caves of feeling.6 Woolf still disliked her a little, but she nevertheless gave Clarissa – who was so different from herself – her own feelings about moulding the world, for a moment, to a meaningful design. In Clarissa’s house, where things are so cushioned and civilized, all the mixed and violent things of life had somehow to be suggested. She laid out the challenge in a letter to Brenan: ‘how does one make people talk about everything in the whole of life, so that one’s hair stands on end, in a drawing room?’7
Though Woolf’s own art form was writing and not the hosting of people in drawing rooms, she generally wanted to be at the centre of the crowd. If she wasn’t there she invented it (as she did with resigned good humour when she missed one of her own parties in 1925), thereby eliminating all risk of disappointment: ‘I lay in bed and imagined it. Never shall I go to a party in any other way. One is so brilliant; so happy; so beautiful.’8 She loved the gossip and the web of human relations. She loved the element of disguise involved, whether it was putting on a flirtatious social manner or cross-dressing for one of Duncan Grant’s risqué ballets. Dramatic conversation was part of the performance.
Woolf liked her power to intimidate people, and her power to inspire them. She even liked the occasional sign that she was herself in danger of becoming fashionable. She took advice on make-up from Clive’s partner, the showy Mary Hutchinson (together they were called in Woolf’s private zoo-language ‘the parakeets’); Dorothy Todd, the editor of Vogue, wanted to take her shopping; the dauntless Sibyl Colefax wanted her at the table. But it was the old foundations beneath it all that moved her most. Woolf marvelled at the invisible ties that kept bringing her old friends back together, however different and distant the lives they now led. Waking up after a party to have breakfast on a grey morning with the Bells and the Partridges, she had a profound sense of belonging to a community. It seemed that ‘Bloomsbury’ after all, had meant something. ‘If six people, with no special start except what their wits give them, can so dominate, there must be some reason in it’, she wrote to Gwen Raverat. ‘Where they seem to me to triumph is in having worked out a view of life […] which still holds, and keeps them dining together, and staying together, after 20 years.’9 It is a remark that points forward to The Waves, the novel in which she drew on these deep feelings for the circle of much-loved people in whose company she chose to live.
By the autumn of 1923 Virginia had won her battle for London, and after some excited house-hunting, she and Leonard took a ten-year lease on 52 Tavistock Square. It was an 1820s town house on five floors, with the ground and first floors already let to a firm of solicitors. So the Woolfs arranged two separate but connecting spaces. Down in the basement there was a maze of rooms for the ever-expanding Hogarth Press, leading to a former billiards room at the back which Virginia took as her study. She worked in a dishevelled armchair, surrounded by piles of Hogarth manuscripts among which, every so often, an apprehensive editorial assistant would come foraging while trying not to disturb the hunched figure by the gas fire with the writing board on her knees. In the basement it was all industry, but upstairs, on the second and third floors, the reception rooms were decorated with painted panels by Grant and Bell, the armchairs were in a better state, and from the windows there was a view towards the ‘pale tower’ of St Pancras Church.
Virginia was immediately writing odes to London, wondering at her own romanticism. Even the moon looked more like the real thing here than in Richmond. She felt she had stored up a whole decade of talking that would now be released, night after night, with her friends around her fire. Tavistock Square was right in the middle of her old territory, with Gordon Square just next door and the probability of bumping into people she knew whenever she left the house. She could dip into the outdoor world at any moment and then return to work.
She was back, and the time away from London now seemed merely an interruption. She felt as if she were ‘going on with a story’ that had been started in 1904, when the Stephens moved out of Hyde Park Gate.10 Her past now felt very close, so that any odd sound could set off memories. Just the squeak of a door hinge takes Clarissa Dalloway back to the house of her youth, where the doors were flung open and the same feeling of starting out fills her all over again: ‘What a lark, what a plunge!’11
There was something else that made Woolf feel young again in the spring of 1924, and filled her with anticipation. Among those who increasingly came to visit was an aristocratic writer of thirty, admiring her novels and exuding patrician style. Vita Sackville-West seemed to stride expansively through the world. She brought with her the spirit of Knole, the great house in which she had grown up; and in her trail came stories of elopement with the cross-dressing Violet Trefusis. And here she was on Virginia’s doorstep.
The life of Bloomsbury, with its serious talk, its scorn of glitter, its ‘slippers, smoke, buns, chocolate’, was very different from what Vita was used to. She would later call it ‘Gloomsbury’.12 When she went down to Rodmell her very presence made Monk’s House look like a ‘ruined barn’.13 But there was no mistaking the fact that Vita was paying court to Virginia Woolf. She finished a novel for the Hogarth Press and dedicated it to Virginia, who was seized with ‘childlike dazzled affection’ when she found her name on the flyleaf under the exotic title Seducers in Ecuador.14
This growing mid-life relationship began to make Woolf too feel exotic. She immediately made capital out of it with her sister, dropping casual erotic references into her letters after years in the shadow of Vanessa’s sexual adventurousness. Fantasizing to her friends about Vita as the embodiment of all English history ‘from 1300 to the present day’, she teasingly slipped between fiction and seriousness in a way that gave her licence to say anything at all.15 ‘To tell you a secret,’ she wrote to Jacques Raverat in France, ‘I want to incite my lady to elope with me next.’16 She was going to do no such thing, except in imagination and language; her attachment to her old friends and above all to her life with Leonard was unshakeable. But ‘Oh yes, I do like her’, she wrote in her diary one evening in September as she simultaneously looked forward to Leonard’s return from work, hoping every minute that he would appear, and watching their dog Grizzle prick up his ears hopefully at any approaching sound.17
The Hogarth Press autumn announcements of 1924, with a drawing by Vanessa Bell. The Woolfs were professional publishers running an admired and influential business. That year saw Hogarth issuing the first two volumes of Collected Papers by Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf’s Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown for the Hogarth Essays, and Vita Sackville-West’s Seducers in Ecuador. (Vanessa Bell, Autumn Announcements, 1924, for Hogarth Press © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)
Woolf’s new confidence buoyed up her novel, which had to be confident. Choosing to follow characters through a city on one day in June, she was explicitly mounting her riposte to Ulysses. And even as she did this she was setting – letter by letter – the type for the Hogarth Press edition of The Waste Land. She needed to respond to the challenge of her contemporaries, and at the same time she wanted to consolidate her reputation as a critic – not just a journalist now, but an essayist with a distinctive voice. She collected some of her longer review articles and started to ‘refurbish’ them for publication in a book she called ‘Reading’ and which became The Common Reader. The bits and pieces of her critical work were now to form some kind of whole, a sustained exploration of what literature can do.
Already Woolf had plenty of material for this book, but to keep herself fresh, and because she was alive with energy, she embarked on formidably ambitious new essays. Two years’ worth of reading Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles went into a piece called ‘On Not Knowing Greek’. The title sounded like a defensive reference to Woolf’s lack of formal education, but this was a purposeful red herring. The classics don and the common reader were in the same boat since neither really knew Greek and neither was there in the theatre at Athens. It is imagination more than scholarship that will take the reader back into that world.
The Common Reader moves easily from Chaucer’s bare, chilly, muddy medieval England to the polished surface of Addison’s prose; from lives of the great to ‘Lives of the Obscure’.18 Woolf conjures a background for her subjects, evoking a particular texture and temperature of life, taking us close to the writing of the past, but at the same time exposing the gaps and doubts that show us how far away we are. In each essay, Woolf’s attempt to convey the character of literature is like her attempt to convey character in fiction. ‘How did she differ?’ Lily Briscoe will ask about Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse: ‘What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, by its twisted finger, hers indisputably?’19 This is what Woolf wants to know about every book she opens. If you found a few pages of Tolstoy, or Defoe, or Euripides on the sofa, how would you know the writing to be theirs, indisputably?
For much of the time she was working on The Common Reader and Mrs Dalloway, Woolf felt more intensely happy than ever before, but she felt the fragility of this happiness. The disorientating highs and lows of January 1923 seemed to set a rhythm. The year began with a Twelfth Night party at Gordon Square, given by Maynard Keynes. By all accounts it was the sort of party of which mythologies are made. There was Lydia Lopokova dancing and Walter Sickert acting Hamlet; everyone seemed glowing and gifted. Virginia felt her blood prickling like champagne with the pleasure of it all. Dressed in her ‘mother’s laces’, she thought of her parents and all that had changed for her generation, and wondered, did their fathers ever enjoy themselves like this?20 But while Woolf was at the party Katherine Mansfield was dying. The news came mid-month and Woolf immediately felt an emptiness in her writing. ‘Katherine won’t read it’, she thought.21 She kept seeing an image of Katherine putting on a white wreath.
The pleasures and the pains continued in tandem. Woolf’s mind was racing with plans, but she kept being held back by flu and temperatures. She watched, sad and disturbed, as her brother Adrian’s marriage fell apart. And beneath everything, despite her success, Woolf still envied her sister’s family life and felt – as always – an outsider wheeling beyond that particular circle of light. She kept being aware of life and death as competing forces. On the anniversary of her mother’s death she spent a few moments remembering (‘how I laughed, for instance, behind the hand which was meant to hide my tears’) and then she shut it out, using a phrase from her recent essay on Montaigne: ‘enough of death – its life that matters’.22 She wanted to keep ‘pressing forward, thinking, planning, imagining’.23
So Virginia Woolf in her early forties felt both at the very centre of things and on the periphery; she was well and buoyant, but aware of illness in the sidelines. She felt old and established, but also very young, as if she were just beginning. She was holding together different versions of herself and those differences gave her the framework for her novel. Woolf knew that the structure of Mrs Dalloway was more original than anything she had done so far. It was a design that allowed for incongruous things to go along side by side. There is Clarissa Dalloway, going through her day and having her party. And there is also Septimus Warren-Smith, a war veteran, in London on the same day and haunted by visions of the trenches.
In writing Septimus, Woolf was imaginatively re-entering her own experiences of illness. This was exactly what she had needed to avoid while writing Night and Day, but now she felt able to do it. There were times when her work on ‘the mad part’ was extremely disturbing, as when she went out in the rain one evening in the hope of meeting Leonard from the train. Not finding him, she was overcome by loneliness and felt her battle with the ‘old devil’ rising up. When Leonard finally appeared in his mackintosh, talking about his day at the office, her relief was ecstatic. She was safe, and yet ‘there was something terrible behind it’.24 A year later, in October 1924, she could congratulate herself on finishing the book in good health. It was a triumph over the illness she had been writing about.
Bloomsbury performances: Lydia Lopokova came to London with Diaghilev’s celebrated Ballets Russes, danced at parties in Gordon Square, and married Maynard Keynes in 1925. (Sasha/Getty Images)
Virginia Woolf wearing her mother’s dress, photographed by Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor for Vogue in 1924. She wore one of Julia’s dresses in higher spirits for a Twelfth Night party in 1923 and wondered whether her parents had ever enjoyed themselves like this. (Maurice Beck/Vogue)
Clarissa and Septimus do not know each other and they do not meet. Their lives are linked by being alive at the same time in the same city, looking up at the same aeroplane and feeling the same sunshine. The novel is a diptych, and though the panels are not hinged by anything solid or definable, invisible lines run between them. Leading their separate lives, Clarissa and Septimus are held together by the design of the novel. This was a high-risk strategy. Another writer would have brought them into contact: they might be long-lost cousins, or at the very least they would have a conversation. Woolf refuses those easy options. In the middle of the party Clarissa hears that a young man has killed himself. She vividly imagines his death and then, in a kind of resurrection, she goes back to her guests. They see her standing there: ‘for there she was’.25 This book about the strangely entwined fates of two people bears the name of only one of them and it is she, the survivor, who stands there at the end.
While she was revising Mrs Dalloway, Woolf was writing long, warm letters to her old friend the painter Jacques Raverat. He was living in France with his wife, the engraver Gwen Raverat, and he was crippled by multiple sclerosis. Unable to hold a pen, he would dictate to Gwen his letters for Virginia, and in return she would send vivid round-ups of Bloomsbury gossip. She sent him the proofs of her novel, something she did for no one else except Leonard. When Gwen read it aloud to him she edited out the death of Septimus, finding it too upsetting. Woolf wanted to dedicate the book to Jacques, but wasn’t able to ask: the news of Jacques’s death reached Tavistock Square in March. The Common Reader was published in April, followed three weeks later by Mrs Dalloway (fulfilling precisely the ambitious timetable Woolf had set herself a year before). She was very much at the party during these months and she was conscious of banishing death in order to keep going. But she kept on writing to Gwen and thinking about Jacques, feeling that it was ‘merely a break in the talk’,26 and knowing how very closely the living are connected to the dead.
Vanessa Bell’s jacket design for her sister’s fourth novel Mrs Dalloway. (Vanessa Bell jacket design for Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, c.1925. Photo Eileen Tweedy © Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy Henrietta Garnett)