Virginia Woolf

Today is famously dedicated to the great Scots Poet Rabbie Burns (the Scottish in my necessitates that I mention that). However, today is also the birthday of a HEROINE of literature: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). Woolf was a hugely influential writer, best known for her novels and her critical essays. Even her letters make for beautiful reading.

“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”

TW: Suicide, Sexual Assault, Child Abuse, Anti-Semitism, Racist Language

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen, she was the child of Leslie Stephen (himself an eminent author) and his wife Julia Jackson. Julia was known as a great beauty, with a reputation for self-sacrifice, and an influential social circle. Both her parents had been married and widowed before meeting, so she had four half-siblings and 3 full siblings. The four later children formed a clique against their elder half-siblings, however within this group there were also rivalries and resentments. When she was just 9, Virginia created a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, that often teased her siblings. Her sister Vanessa played a motherly role in Virginia’s life, however their relationship sometimes manifested itself as rivalry between Virginia’s writing and Vanessa’s painting, for which both girls had a talent.  

Every year, the Stephens migrated for the summer to the rundown Talland House on the coast of Cornwall. Thus, Virginia’s years were marked by structured paradoxes: city vs country, winter vs summer, repression versus freedom. However, her world fell apart in 1895, when her mother died aged 49. The thirteen year old Virginia stopped writing, but was beginning to dust herself off from her depression when in 1897, her half-sister Stella died aged 28, a loss Virginia said was “impossible to write of”. Tragically, her father died just a few years later, in 1904, and somewhat unsurprisingly, Virginia had a nervous breakdown. 

“As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

While Virginia was recovering, Vanessa supervised the Stephen children’s move to the bohemian Bloomsbury area of London. There the siblings lived independent of their Duckworth half brothers. Virginia later revealed that she and her sisters had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of their half brothers throughout their childhood, abuse which would affect Virginia for the rest of her life. In London, the Stephen children were free to pursue their studies and artistic passions, and soon hosted weekly gatherings of radical youths.

However, tragedy struck the family once again when Virginia’s 26 year old brother Thoby died of typhoid fever following a family holiday to Greece in 1906. Shortly after, her beloved sister Vanessa was married to Clive Bell, which Virginia considered another “loss”. However, while she grieved, she did not slip into depression and rather sought solace in her writing. What became known as the Bloomsbury Group became a bawdy and liberal space through which Virginia was encouraged to publish her writing, although she kept her wistful “Reminiscences” (1908) about her mother and her childhood private.

Virginia Stephen decided to “re-form” the novel by creating a holistic form embracing aspects of life that were “fugitive” from the Victorian novel. While writing anonymous reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals, she experimented with such a novel, which she named Melymbrosia. After discovering her husband had been unfaithful, her sister Vanessa began an affair with Roger Fry, a close friend of the family and whose art triggered within Virginia a lifelong debate about the visual arts. 

“Why are women... so much more interesting to men than men are to women?”

The Bloomsbury Group held very progressive views regarding sexuality and shucked the austere strictness of Victorian society. The majority of its members could be placed in the LGBTQ+ community.

Virginia has largely been labelled as a lesbian, despite her marriage, owing to her numerous affairs with notable women of the day. Her longest and most notable affair was with Vita Sackville-West, an affair which lasted nearly a decade (and a friendship which lasted for their lifetime). In 1928, Vita wrote in her diary:

‘[Virginia] dislikes the possessiveness and love of domination in men. In fact she dislikes the quality of masculinity ; says that women stimulate her imagination, by their grace & their art of life’.

Virginia was averse to sex with them, which she attributed to the sexual abuse perpetrated upon her and her sister by their half-brothers when they were children. This is one of the reasons she initially declined marriage proposals from her future husband, Leonard. She wrote to him:

“I sometimes think that if I married you, I could have everything—and then—is it the sexual side of it that comes between us? As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you.” 

However, she was persuaded and the pair married in 1912. She continued to work on her first novel, while he wrote the anti-colonialist novel The Village in the Jungle (1913) and The Wise Virgins (1914), a Bloomsbury exposé. Leonard went on to become a political writer and an advocate for peace and justice, inspiring Virginia’s own activism and talents throughout their lives.

Leonard became the love of her life and even though their sexual relationship was questionable, they loved each other deeply and formed a strong, supportive and prolific marriage which led to the formation of their publishing house as well as several of her writings. Neither was faithful to the other sexually, but they were faithful in their love and respect for each other. 

“Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money.”

Between 1910 and 1915, Virginia’s mental health was unstable. Nevertheless, she rebranded  Melymbrosia as The Voyage Out in 1913. She based many of her novel’s characters on friends and family members, giving her novels a distinctly biological overtone.

Woolf’s manic-depressive thoughts (that she was an unloved failure) continued to haunt her, and in September 1913 she attempted to take her own life. While thankfully her attempt failed, the publication of The Voyage Out was delayed until early 1915. She fell into a state of distress in which she suffered hallucinations which she called “vile imaginations”. However, she recovered and her health remained relatively stable for the foreseeable future.

In 1917, the Woolfs bought a printing press and founded the Hogarth Press (named after their home) and began publishing their own writing.

Virginia had kept a diary, off and on, since 1897. In 1919 she envisioned “the shadow of some kind of form which a diary might attain to”. Her diary, as she wrote in 1924, would reveal people as “splinters & mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.” Such terms later inspired critical distinctions, based on anatomy and culture, between the feminine and the masculine, the feminine being a varied but all-embracing way of experiencing the world and the masculine a monolithic or linear way. Critics have thus credited Woolf with creating a distinctly feminine diary form, one that ‘explores, with perception, honesty, and humour, her own ever-changing, mosaic self’.

Proving that she could master the traditional form of the novel before breaking it, she plotted her next novel Night and Day (1919), which partnered her husband’s The Wise Virgins, in which his Leonard-like protagonist loses the Virginia-like lover. In Night and Day, the protagonist Katharine fights (as Virginia had) class and familial prejudices to marry the good and intelligent Ralph. Here, Virginia addressed issues that she had been forced to remove from her last previous novels, including class, politics, and suffrage – themes she would build on throughout her career. 

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?”

By 1918, Woolf was writing nearly a review a week for the Times Literary Supplement. Her essay “Modern Novels” (1919; revised in 1925 as “Modern Fiction”) attacked the “materialists” who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or “luminous” experiences. The Woolfs also printed by hand, with Vanessa Bell’s illustrations, Virginia’s Kew Gardens (1919). As their Hogarth Press’s blossomed into a major publishing house, the Woolfs gradually stopped printing their own material.

In 1919 they bought “Monk’s House”, a cottage in Rodmell village overlooking the Sussex Downs  from which Virginia could walk or cycle to visit Vanessa and her children, and the guests that often clustered around her – before returning to Monk’s house to write. In early 1920, a group of friends, evolved from the early Bloomsbury group, began a “Memoir Club,” which met to read passages from their autobiographies. Her second presentation was an exposé of Victorian hypocrisy, especially that of George Duckworth, who masked inappropriate, unwanted caresses as affection honouring their mother’s memory.

In Jacob’s Room (1922) she embodied what she meant when she said that a novel should be “felt” rather than read, transforming personal grief over the death of her brother into a “spiritual shape.” Though she takes Jacob from childhood to his early death in war, she leaves out plot, conflict, even character. The emptiness of Jacob’s room and the irrelevance of his belongings convey in their minimalism the profound emptiness of loss. 

“Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

At the start of 1924, the Woolfs moved back to Bloomsbury, where they were less isolated from London society. Virginia soon began an affair with the aristocrat Vita Sackville-West . Woolfe was inspired by this affair to write a romance that would unite a highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim, a Mr. Smith, so that “the sane and the insane” would exist “side by side”. Also in 1924 Woolf gave a talk at Cambridge called “Character in Fiction,” revised later that year as the Hogarth Press pamphlet Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, celebrating what she perceived as the breakdown in recent decades of patriarchal values (lol, hon, I wish).

Woolf wished to build on her achievement in Mrs. Dalloway by merging the novelistic and elegiac forms. As an elegy, To the Lighthouse—published on May 5, 1927, the 32nd anniversary of Julia Stephen’s death—evoked childhood summers at Talland House. This became one of her most famous novels, both for its content and its form. In two 1927 essays, “The Art of Fiction” and “The New Biography,” she wrote that fiction writers should be less concerned with naive notions of reality and more with language and design. Through To the Lighthouse and The Waves, another of her famous novels, Woolf became, with James Joyce and William Faulkner, one of the three major English-language Modernist experimenters in stream-of-consciousness writing. 

“As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.”

By 1927, Virginia’s dwindling affair with Sackville-West had inspired her to write a “biography” which would explore the history of the entire Sackville family. Woolf explored biographical, historical, and personal dilemmas with the story of Orlando, who lives from Elizabethan times through the entire 18th century; he then becomes female, experiences debilitating gender constraints, and lives into the 20th century. Orlando begins writing poetry during the Renaissance, using history and mythology as models, and over the ensuing centuries returns to the poem “The Oak Tree,” revising it according to shifting poetic conventions. Woolf herself writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of time. Thus, Orlando: A Biography (1928) exposes the artificiality of both gender and genre binaries.

Woolfe was increasingly angered by masculine condescension towards female talent. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf blamed women’s absence from history not on their lack of brains and talent but on their poverty (preaaaaach). For her 1931 talk “Professions for Women,” Woolf studied the history of women’s education and employment and argued that unequal opportunities for women negatively affect all of society (ameeeen). She urged women to destroy the “angel in the house,” a reference to Coventry Patmore’s poem of that title, the quintessential Victorian eulogy to women who sacrifice themselves to men. 

“The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.” – A Room of One’s Own

While we may think of the idea of rejecting binaries as a radical “woke” one, Virginia long fought against binary oppositions both in her work and in wider society. The “perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow” Woolf described in her essay “The New Biography” typified her approach during the 1930s to individual works and to a balance between writing works of fact and of imagination. Alongside her fiction, she made a scrapbook illustrating the horrors of war, the threat of fascism, and the oppression of women – all of which she then drew on for her fictional work.  The discrimination against women that Woolf had discussed in A Room of One’s Own and “Professions for Women” inspired her to plan a book that would trace the story of a fictional family named Pargiter and explain the social conditions affecting family members over time, drawing from the experience of family and friends from the Victorian Age to the 1930s and researching the social history from those fifty years.

However, this proved to be an overwhelming task and in the end she abandoned the essay section and redrafted it into a purely fictional narrative named The Years. However, while “fictional”, this was an informed social history of the decline of class and patriarchal systems, the rise of feminism, and the threat of another war. However, she also tried to make the book more light-hearted by adding poems and colours, and she cut powerful monologues and graphic descriptions of women’s bodies. Nonetheless, the novel illustrates the damage done to women and society over the years by sexual repression, ignorance, and discrimination. And perhaps because the book was watered down, it became a best seller when it was released in 1937. 

“What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark”

A self-professed atheist, Woolf was an outspoken critic of Christianity. In a letter to Ethel Smyth, she gave a scathing denunciation of the religion, seeing it as self-righteous "egotism" and stating "my Jew [Leonard] has more religion in one toenail—more human love, in one hair". 

However, Virginia has been accused of antisemitism. Although happily married to a Jewish man, the Jews in her writings were often negative stereotypes. For example, the Jewish characters in her work were portrayed as ugly and dirty.  At other times, she criticised her own past views: "How I hated marrying a Jew — how I hated their nasal voices and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles — what a snob I was: for they have immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all" (Letter to Ethel Smyth 1930). Thus, others have argued that Woolf was guilty not of antisemitism, but rather tribalism:  she married outside of her social group – he was a pauper by their standards, and her husband too expressed reluctance to Leonard Woolf, too, expressed misgivings about marrying a gentile.  

Yet Woolf and her husband Leonard came to despise and fear the 1930s fascism and antisemitism. Her 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism and what Woolf described as a recurring propensity among patriarchal societies to enforce repressive societal norms by violence. Thus, perhaps it can be argued that Woolf grew to regret her antisemitism and seek to inform others against it, although this does not of course condone her earlier sentiments or the stereotypes and language used in some of her work. 

“I feel so intensely the delights of shutting oneself up in a little world of one’s own, with pictures and music and everything beautiful.”

In 1934, Roger Fry died, and 3 years later, Vanessa’s eldest son was killed when serving as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. These losses destroyed Vanessa, and Virgina took time off from writing and dedicated time to consoling her sister. As an ode to Julian, she wrote Three Guineas (1938) which asks how war can be prevented. In Woolf’s writings, masculinity was associated with militarism and misogyny, and thus with aggression, fascism and war.

Virginia decided to write a novelistic biography of Roger Fry in order to give Vanessa back “her Roger”. At the same time, she wrote of her own childhood in “A Sketch of the Past”, a memoir about her mixed feelings toward her parents and her past and about memoir writing itself. In this, she first revealed the sexual abuse she had suffered from her half brother when she was only four or five years old.

Writing became Virginia’s antidote against Adolf Hitler, World War II, and her own despair. However, the war continued to plague her thoughts and she worried that writing was a waste of time when civilisation was about to collapse around her. These thoughts became so powerful that she was no longer able to write at all, and the demons which she had fought her entire life returned with a vengeance. After completing the manuscript of her last novel (posthumously published), Between the Acts (1941), Woolf fell into a deep depression, worsened by the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry. When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held fast to her pacifism and criticised her husband for wearing what she considered to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard". Thus, even her closest partner became a source of conflict in her final days. 

“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.”

Following the start of WW2, her diaries reveal an increasing obsession with death. Tragically, on 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

In her suicide note, addressed to her husband, she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. 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.

 

As well as her novels, she left behind her: six volumes of diaries (including her early journals), six volumes of letters, and numerous volumes of collected essays which demonstrate her deep engagement with major 20th-century issues. Though many of her essays began as reviews, written anonymously to deadlines for money, and many include imaginative settings and whimsical speculations, they are serious inquiries into reading and writing, the novel and the arts, perception and essence, war and peace, gender and history, class and politics, privilege and discrimination, and the need to reform society. Many were collected after her death in volumes edited by Leonard Woolf, and continued to be treasured by readers today. 

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

Virginia’s work has faced much homophobic and misogynistic criticism, and some that is more valid. As with many of her contemporaries, her writings are now considered offensive by some.

Hermione Lee cites a number of extracts from Woolf's writings that many, including Lee, would consider offensive, and these criticisms can be traced back to the 1920s and 1930s, so are not just a product of “woke culture”. Examples include the following: "The fact is the lower classes are detestable”, "imbeciles should certainly be killed"; "Jews" are greasy; a "crowd" is both an ontological "mass" and is, again, "detestable"; "Germans" are akin to vermin; some "baboon faced intellectuals" mix with "sad green dressed negroes and negresses, looking like chimpanzees" at a peace conference; Kensington High St. revolts one's stomach with its innumerable "women of incredible mediocrity, drab as dishwater".

However, other authors stress the need to see her in the context of her time and the complexity of her character. In her lifetime, Woolf was outspoken on many topics that were considered controversial, some of which are today considered progressive, others regressive. She was an ardent feminist at a time when women's rights were barely recognised, and anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and a pacifist when chauvinism was rife.

Works such as A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are frequently taught as icons of feminist literature in courses that would be very critical of some of her views expressed elsewhere.  

Thus debate continues on whether she should be considered a feminist hero or a bigoted snob. Or maybe, both.