In 1907 Virginia Stephen was twenty-five and not yet a published novelist. Each week’s living and each new piece of writing had a make-or-break quality to it. She did not know whether she would marry and have a family. It was not at all clear whether she would prove herself a genius, or merely quite good. Writing to Violet Dickinson, the first real love of her life, she laid out her position at the crossroads: ‘I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.’1 Four years later, her dreams had eluded her. She sent her sister Vanessa a simple, desolate summing up: ‘to be 29 and unmarried – to be a failure – childless – insane too, no writer’.2 But she had not given up. In that same letter she saw her pages burning. It was June and there had been a thunderstorm. She was full of fire and eroticism. Even as she announced her failure, she felt her language flaring up: ‘every word glows like a horseshoe on the anvil with passion’.3
She went on to become one of the greatest writers of all time. Today she is celebrated not only for her novels but for her essays, her social polemics, her memoirs, her experiments in biography, her glittering and moving diaries, and her many, many letters. The story of her life is one of determination, hard work, and untiring interest in the world around her. She took nothing for granted, from her doubts in 1907 about whether she would be a novelist at all to her conviction that Between the Acts was a failure. She could never bank on her own success because she never did the same thing twice.
Her imagery of burning and glowing is romantic, and there was much that was romantic about Virginia Woolf. Sometimes, in a kind of vision, she would suddenly see the whole shape of a novel. But novels are not written in visions. They are written hour after hour, deleted, despaired of, corrected, and typed out all over again. Reading chronologically through Woolf’s diaries and letters, it is possible to put hindsight temporarily on hold and appreciate the decisions she made day by day. Should she stay in Richmond or go back to London? Should she let Vita Sackville-West into her life? She buys a house in the south of France and nearly moves there; she revels in her writing of The Years before she falters near the end and it becomes a nightmare. We can flick ahead and see that she will recover from a breakdown and finish a masterpiece, but Woolf’s remarkable toughness and tenacity become more apparent when we remember that she, of course, could not.
In this short book I have tried to present in a concise form the outline of Woolf’s life and some of the most distinctive patterns of her thought. It is meant as a first port of call for those new to Woolf and as an enticement to read more. I hope it will also set off a few fresh ideas (or arguments) in readers long familiar with the material I present. The body of specialist Woolf scholarship grows ever richer. With every passing year there appear more superb soundings of the archives, exegeses of particular themes, and excavations of historical context. But the telescope as well as the microscope has its role. The short survey can allow new things to stand clear. Its demands on the writer and reader are different but no less intense.
Every reading of Woolf will vary in its emphases; in Woolf’s phrase ‘the accent falls differently from of old’.4 My own accents here are provisional, and I expect in future I shall want to move them. Last year I would have said more about art and about Roger Fry. This year, rereading To the Lighthouse, I could not stop thinking about its religious iconography and atheism. Reading Woolf’s novels in quick succession, I saw more clearly than before the spirit of Orlando in all of them and watched the fun and fantasy getting into some of the darkest corners. Woolf noted once that she missed ‘the glow & the flattery & the festival’ of Vita.5 Through much of the reading for this book, it seemed to me that Woolf was her own festival, and her work an extraordinary celebration of life. There is much that is controversial about Woolf, much that one may want to criticize and debate. But, whatever else she does, she makes one want to live more consciously and fully.
Soon after my first encounter with To the Lighthouse as a teenager, I read Hermione Lee’s biography of Woolf. It was the book that showed me what literature can do and sent me off to study English. Lee shaped my responses to Woolf very early on and continues to do so, which means that this short study is indebted to her Virginia Woolf in too many ways to number. I can only record my deepest thanks and hope that I have not trespassed too far. I would also like to thank the many other writers on Woolf whose work appears in the ‘Notes’ and ‘Suggestions for Further Reading’ and from whom I have learned what I know. My warmest thanks to Lara Feigel and Felicity James for their acute comments on my text, and to my agent Caroline Dawnay for her conviction. I am deeply grateful to Jamie Camplin, and to everyone at Thames & Hudson who has worked on this book. Special thanks must go to my editor Amanda Vinnicombe, copy-editor Richard Dawes, picture editor Mary-Jane Gibson, and to Andrew Brown for the index. I very much appreciate the support of those who have allowed me to quote work in copyright, details of which are given at the end of the book. Lastly, thanks to Robert Harris as ever, to Jane Lewis who first took me to Monk’s House as a student, and to my own students at the University of Liverpool who got more Woolf than they had bargained for and then chose to read even more.
Virginia Stephen at twenty, photographed by George Beresford in 1902. (Photo George Beresford. National Portrait Gallery, London)
Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world […]
Virginia Woolf, ‘Sketch of the Past’, 18 April 1939