Virginia Woolf

Between the Acts

Adeline Virginia Stephen, born in London in 1882, was bi-polar. She never attended school, but instead largely educated herself by reading in her father’s extensive library. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, who provided her with the stability she needed to write. Together they founded the Hogarth Press and published work by T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield, among others. A prolific writer of exquisite prose, Virginia wrote six volumes of diaries, six volumes of letters, and many essays. Three of her novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931) constitute her claim to fame as a modernist writer.

From Between the Acts:

“A grain fell and spiraled down; a petal fell, filled and sank. At that the fleet of boat-shaped bodies paused; poised; equipped; mailed; then with a waver of undulation off they flashed. It was in that deep centre, in that black heart, that the lady had drowned herself.”

In 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse, near Rodmell in Sussex, by putting rocks in her coat pockets. Her suicide note read:

“Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again…And I shan’t recover this time…I am doing what seems the best thing to do…I can’t fight any longer…Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer…I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”

Before she died, she was working on a manuscript called Between the Acts in which, it seems, she might have been rehearsing her own demise.

ALSO RECOMMENDED:

Orlando: A Biography. An influential, semi-biographical novel published in 1928, considered one of Woolf’s most accessible novels.

Fitzroy Fizz

Virginia Woolf lived at 29 Fitzroy Square, which is marked with a blue plaque, from 1907–1911. The square, named after Charles Fitzroy, fourth Duke of Grafton, dates back to 1794, and was a film location for the 2009 BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma.

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Champagne

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