Virginia Woolf

“Virginia Woolf – A Life of Struggle and Affliction” The literary
critic Queenie Leavis, who had been born into the British lower middle class and
reared three children while writing and editing and teaching, thought Virginia
Woolf a preposterous representative of real women’s lives: “There is no
reason to suppose Mrs. Woolf would know which end of the cradle to stir.”
Yet no one was more aware of the price of unworldliness than Virginia Woolf. Her
imaginative voyages into the waveringly lighted depths of “Mrs.

Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse” were partly owed to a freedom
from the literal daily need of voyaging out – to the shop or the office or even
the nursery. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, believed that without the aid of her
inheritance his wife would probably not have written a novel at all. For money
guaranteed not just time but intellectual liberty. “I’m the only woman in
England free to write what I like,” she exulted in her diary in 1925, after
the publication of “Mrs. Dalloway” by the Hogarth Press, which she and
Leonard had set up to free her from the demands of publishers and editors. What
she liked to write turned out to be, of course, books that gave voice to much
that had gone unheard in the previous history of writing things down: the
dartings and weavings of the human mind in the fleet elaborations of thought
itself (Malcomi, 4). “Mrs. Dalloway” is a finespun tribute to the
complexities of social interaction on a single day in London in 1923, ending
with a shallow society hostess’s glittering party; it is also one of the Patton
2 written about the effects of World War I. Virginia Woolf was not without
politics or fierce worldly concerns (4-5). The diaries and letters spanning both
world wars are filled with bulletins arguments, terrors of distant armies and
next-door bombs and the precariousness of the entire civilization of which she
knew herself to be a late, probably too exquisite bloom. Her art is less direct.

In her novels the resonance of great events sounds from deep within individual
lives. More than any other writer, Woolf has shown us how the most far-off
tragedies become a part of the way we think about our daily expectations, our
friends, the colors of a park, the weather, the possibility of going on or the
decision not to. The old image of Virginia Woolf the snob has largely given way
to various loftier characterizations: Virginia Woolf the literary priestess, or
the Queen of ever-titillating Bloomsbury, or – most influentially – the vital
feminist whose requisite “room of her own” came to seem the very
workshop in which such books as “The Second Sex” and “The
Feminine Mystique” were later produced (Reinhart, 27). Recently, however,
Woolf has been granted a too modern female pantheon: the victim. The discovered
molestations of her childhood, the bouts of madness that led to her suicide,
seem now to commend rather than to qualify her right to speak for women. But
Woolf’s personal example is in the strength and the steady professionalism that
kept her constantly at work – the overambitious failures as sweated over as the
lyric triumphs. For all her fragility as a woman, she was a writer of gargantuan
appetite, and she knew full well how much she intended to enclose in her fine
but prodigious, spreading, unbreakable webs. “Happier today than I was
yesterday,” she wrote in her diary in January 1920, “having this
afternoon arrived at some idea of new form for a new novel (Reinhart, 36).

Suppose one thing of another … only not for 10 pages but for 200 or so –
doesn’t that give the looseness and Patton 3 lightness I want; doesn’t that get
closer and yet keep form and speed, and enclose everything, everything?”
She not only said that she was depressed, but that she was going ‘mad’ again,
and beginning to hear voices. She could not concentrate, and believed she could
not read or write. She was hopeless and self-critical, and to the end maintained
that her suicide was justified and that she would not recover. Her suicide was
planned and determined, and despite a possible failed attempt a week earlier
cannot be seen as an impulsive gesture that went wrong. When she wrote at the
end of her life that she was going mad ‘again’, she spoke the truth and from
lengthy experience. She had her first breakdown at the age of thirteen, and
others when she was twenty-two, twenty-eight, and