Like many readers, I was afraid of Virginia Woolf for many
years. I was finally assigned The Waves in a class and I got over my
fear, which is funny because The Waves is one of her more obtuse
novels -- the most Virginia Woolfesque of Virginia Woolf. I recommend it, but
not for the first one.Later I read To the Lighthouse and I was hooked, and then I read Mrs. Dalloway, which became my favorite.
The character Clarissa Dalloway appeared in Woolf's first published book, The Voyage Out, and Woolf liked her so much she (much later) gave her a book of her own. Clarissa Dalloway is supposedly modeled on her mother, who died when Virginia was thirteen years old.
There are so many stories about Virginia Woolf and you've probably heard of most of them. With her husband Leonard Woolf she founded Hogarth Press and presided over the "Bloomsbury group" (so named for the area of London where they lived) -- a group of writers, painters, intellectuals, and of course social climbers. Lytton Stratchey was part of this group, and in fact Woolf almost married him before she married Leonard. Woolf was terrified of having children. She was very likely abused as a child by her stepbrother. She was thin and angular and beautiful, and had a consummated or unconsummated affair with Vita Sackville-West. Woolf was interested in evoking the state of consciousness and its interplay with physical, external events or environments. Her writing reflects a more lyrical style rather than the Modern style of such contemporaries as D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, or Gertrude Stein (whom she reputedly disliked intensely).
One morning Virginia Woolf walked into the river with stones in her pockets, and left a note for Leonard propped up on the mantle. It is said that she felt another breakdown coming, and she did not feel she could go back to a mental hospital -- after nearly every book of hers was published, she went in one for a spell.
A fiction editor once told me his list of fiction "don'ts" -- don't have more than one point of view, don't have multiple degrees of past tense, don't have frames, don't shift back and forth between separate stories -- and I realized Virginia Woolf broke every rule he had. She self-published, which is a good thing, because we might not have read her books otherwise, or they might have been much more conventional. If she were resurrected today her work might be found on the Web.
First page of Mrs.
Dalloway
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