Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

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A Room Of One's Own, Book Review, Feminism, Virginia Woolf, Woolfalong, Writing on Writing

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”

I read this many years ago, and always remembered it fondly, so it has been a real pleasure to re-read it. I had forgotten quite how sharply, precisely, creatively and wittily Woolf makes her points. And I had also forgotten quite how beautifully her ‘stream of consciousness’ style works in a non-fiction setting, where she is exploring the unequal opportunities afforded to women in terms of exploring and fostering their creativity, their education, their growth and development, in a world whose systems were designed to exclude them.

Her 1928 book, A Room Of One’s Own is a world away from the dry marshalling of facts, and a world away from hammer bludgeons of polemic too. Yes, there is anger – at discovering as a female, she is not allowed to walk on the hallowed grass – only College Fellows can do that, and, hey-ho, there are no female fellows. The chapter of ‘disallows’ on a quite ordinary day continues, locking her out of the library, the meaner endowment of colleges for women – because, until only some fifty years before the book was written, all a woman possessed was her husband’s. Changes were put in place after the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870. But it did mean that as, in the main, as she points out, most men were less interested in advancing the education of women than women were, until Married Women had the legal right to own the fruits of their own paid labour and to inherit property, the likelihood of generous endowments to colleges for the further education of females was less likely than the generous endowments to colleges for the further education of males.

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

The writing of this essay followed on an invitation Woolf received from a Cambridge college to give a lecture on ‘Women and Fiction’ and follows her musings on what this could possibly mean : A talk about women in fiction, as described by male and female writers; a talk about female authors; a talk about what women are like – or some combination of ‘all of the above’

Woolf’s ‘stream of consciousness’ writing perfectly serves this incisive, discursive account, examining women’s position in society, examining why the novel has proved to be a potent creative place for women, and mixing analysis of society, history, literature, and political structures in a wonderfully fertile, creative, juicy, living way. She refutes those who have undervalued women’s creativity, dedication, imagination and genius, in the creative arts or elsewhere, by showing how often it was a powerful, moneyed, privileged few who produced ‘geniuses’ – and how much of this was due to access to education. She points out that our dearly loved Shakespeare himself was some kind of rarity – he was not part of the aristocracy. And, to take another tack, over the last hundred or so years, there have been all those pathetic attempts to claim Shakespeare was not Shakespeare, but some cover for a lord.

a book is not made of sentences laid end to end, but of sentences built, if an image helps, into arcades or domes.

Given the wonderful, but dice-weighted-against-it, reality of Shakespeare, Woolf imagines a sister, equally rare in creativity, and unique imagination, born in the same fertile environment which did produce Shakespeare. And she traces the impossibility of ‘Judith’ to have had access to the chances and accidents, the opportunities seized, to produce our Bard of Avon, for the distaff side. Woolf gives us sharp, thoughtful analysis – but the packaging is delicious, playful, inventive and remarkably potent.

I re-read this simultaneously laughing in delight – and raging

Life for both sexes – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to one-self.

And, suddenly, my reading of Woolf came bang up to date, and I felt her going beyond the well known argument she makes, here, for the necessity for the creative artist to have ‘A Room of One’s Own’, some freedom from the demands of service to others, some independence of means – and I felt her talking about more than literature, and speaking about our divide-and-rule, and the myriad places we practice it

This is a wonderful laying out of thoughtful, philosophical, sparkling creative feminism. Delivered with wit, humour, inventiveness. Oh, she dazzled and she dazzles still.

This was read towards the end of last month, for the particular stage of HeavenAli’s Woolfalong, but, alas, a growing sense of alarm about what might be going to happen ‘across the pond’ rather took away the energy for the writing of reviews

A Room of One’s Own Amazon UK
A Room of One’s Own Amazon USA

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Virginia Woolf – Orlando

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Book Review, Orlando, Virginia Woolf, Woolfalong hosted by Heaven Ali

Woolf at her fizziest, dizziest, most glittering and playful

Because we know how Woolf met her end, and because we know that she suffered several breakdowns, it is easy to backward read her writing to find evidence of the intensity of her suffering, and forget that she also lived with an intense awareness of joy – and, perhaps more easily ignored, wit, playfulness and ordinary moments of satisfaction , gaiety and pleasure

All these – including suffering, ennui and so-so are to be found rolled up in Orlando – as well as evidence of her intellect, her research and her always questioning mind

Written as a kind of love-letter, game and amusement both for her own creative pleasure and as the same for her lover and friend Vita-Sackville West, Orlando is both a highly readable, accessible introduction to Woolf’s writing, easily enjoyed by a teenager – I was 14, 15 or 16 when I first devoured this – and repaying later, more nuanced and reflective study, after surrendering to her more complex ‘difficult’ work

                   Vita Sackville-West 1916

Why this is such a pleasurable read for a thoughtful teenager is that one of its major themes is the trying on of identity and the discovering both its fluidity and dizzying possibilities, and its kernel of ‘this is my true core’, inviolate from the influence of time, place, culture – and gender.

What a very surprising and modern book this must have been on its publication, in 1928, for those who looked behind its playful inventions and fantasies

For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand with one foot on the top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. A poet is lion and Atlantic in one. While one drowns us the other gnaws us. If we survive the teeth, we succumb to the waves. A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our fett, By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life – (and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).

Orlando is a beautiful young man, son of an aristocratic family, aged 16, with spectacularly attractive legs, shown to perfection in the costume of the times – the latter years of the sixteenth century. He is a moody, sullen and open-hearted, candid young man. Lest that sound contradictory, people are, and Woolf always reminds us of that. The elderly Queen Elizabeth, who always took a shine to comely young men, makes him an Order of the Garter.

However, there is something strangely androgyne about Orlando and this is not the full extent of his strangeness. He has something, which Woolf does not waste time on trying to explain, which makes him able to jump time as easily as space. She is not interested, as an SF writer might be, in explaining this : her interest is in identity in time, in history, in geography, so we follow Orlando, who not only jumps time – and various of his acquaintances similarly do so – but jumps gender.

Falling into a deep sleep and melancholy following the failure of a love affair with a similarly androgynous young woman in 1608, and after making one of his seamless time jumps to the Restoration, and becoming an Ambassador in Turkey, another sleep follows, and he wakens as a woman. The Lady Orlando is no different in many ways to Lord Orlando – his/her core nature is the same, though gender allows, encourages, forbids – in time and in place, certain manifestations of nature. Woolf has great fun with this, but also, she is offering delicious possibilities to readers who come to her in that time where they are exploring identity, discovering who they are, who they might be, who they won’t be

Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando’s skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, been cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return

Woolf of course was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, himself an author, a critic, an historian and biographer – and all of these strands are woven into this book, which is an once a history and a ‘biography’ of Orlando, and a meditation upon writing, reading and literary criticism. In fact, the final joke is Woolf’s presentation of this as a non-fiction by the inclusion of an index. Within which we will find Shakespeare, Pope, Dryden and others referenced, alongside such marvellous inventions as Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, and the Archduchess Harriet of Finster-Aarhorn (see Archduke Harry) – who, with a physiognomy remarkably like a startled hare must surely be a little dig at Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Though I did find the final section of the book, bringing it to the ‘now’ of her writing in 1928, dragged a little, this was such a pleasure to read again. And was spurred to this by HeavenAli’s year long Woolfalong, just squeaking into August’s Biography section.

Orlando was of course filmed, with the magnificent Tilda Swinton, intelligent, spirited, mercurial and very much a person out of her own mould, as the central character. The film was directed by Sally Potter.

Orlando Amazon UK
Orlando Amazon USA

Virginia Woolf – The Voyage Out

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Book Review, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf

Unbound consciousness seeping through

It was a sure delight to read Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915, when she was 33. She had spent two years, from 1910-1912 writing it, and then heavily revised it. By all accounts, some of the themes which had been more fully explored in the first submitted version, had been scaled back, in order to achieve publications. These themes – homosexuality, women’s suffrage and attitudes to colonialism are still within the book.

The outward narrative drive follows Rachel Vinrace, the 24 year old daughter of a business man and ship owner. Rachel’s mother died when she was young, and she has been brought up by her aunts. Her upbringing has been educationally lacking, in that no-one directed or disciplined her learning. Here is of course a theme that Virginia was passionate about – the education of women. Rachel is intelligent, highly musical, but knows little about life. Although she has had the freedom to develop her intellect, read where her interest listed, the lack of focus and encouragement to persist where she found something difficult, has been a hindrance. She is socially unsophisticated, and particularly ignorant about the relationships between men and women. Crucially, she has not learned how to play the game demanded of women of her class and time, in a man’s world:

those habits of unselfishness and amiability founded upon insincerity which are put at so high a value in mixed households of men and women

Rachel ‘Voyages Out’ on her father’s ship, in the company of older, more worldly people. Helen and Ridley Ambrose, related through marriage to Rachel’s father, are free-thinking artistic people. Richard Dalloway and his wife Clarissa represent the world of social reform and politics. Mrs Dalloway, of course, is further explored in a later novel where she is central. Here, she too provides a focus for Rachel, as she makes a journey discovering who she is, who and what influences and steers her, towards her route from becoming to being. Rachel is of course making this journey quite late; it is a journey which usually starts earlier, in the teens. Rachel, like Virginia herself, has in some ways been retarded in development , and in others has had a kind of unconfinement which allowed growth.

The novel has exotic and powerful settings, firstly the dreamy, limitless horizons of the ocean, coupled with the confinement of being within a ship upon that ocean, and secondly, a South American setting, country unnamed, where Rachel and the Ambroses are holidaying. A nearby hotel will bring a whole pack of people from middle and upper middle class society into Rachel’s life.

Though this novel is certainly more conventional in narrative structure than some of her later books, what I can only think of as a fluidity of consciousness, a kind of watery dissemination and flowingness from one point of view to another, is already evident. In fact, it is not immediately clear, in the on board ship section, whose story we are following Rachel’s, Helen’s or Clarissa’s. In fact, where Woolf is taking us is ‘life itself’. This excerpt from Clarissa Dalloway’s thoughts, illustrates some kind of place where thought and feeling forms blend, in an oceanic way and identities shift and blur.

She then fell into a sleep….visited by fantastic dreams of great Greek letters stalking round the room…she woke up and laughed to herself, remembering where she was and that the Greek letters were real people, lying asleep not many yards away….The dreams were not confined to her indeed, but went from one brain to another. They all dreamt of each other that night, as was natural, considering how thin the partitions were between them, and how strangely they had been lifted off the earth to sit next each other in mid-ocean, and see every detail of each others’ faces, and hear whatever they chanced to say

The South American hotel also brings other characters whose visions and aspirations add further possibilities to female experiences. Susan Warrington is a rather put-upon companion to an elderly aunt. Marriage would be the only escape. Evelyn Murgatroyd is a woman who chafes at the curtailed opportunities offered to her gender and class. She yearns to be an active, revolutionary hero. There are women of an older generation, some in the shadows of their husbands, some freed in widowhood to explore being selfish and unamiable.

The male world features academics and intellectuals quite heavily, which was of course Woolf’s own background.

Two young academic men also have major focus within the novel. John Hirst (reputedly this character is based on Lytton Strachey) is highly intellectual. He forms a strong relationship with Helen (based on Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell). Helen is a ‘safe’ wise, strong, beautiful married woman, and she is the only woman whom Hirst can really relate to, freely talk to. His friend is Terence Hewet, a man altogether more at ease with women. Hewet has never been in love, but he has had physical relationships with women.

Caught in the hot-house of succulence and danger within the exotic South American landscape and under the amused, watchful or jaded eyes of those who are either already married or have moved beyond such considerations, those who are unmarried explore the relationships between men and women and the differences between the sexes. Woolf’s swings between raptures and despairs, the high glories of livingness, the potency of the natural world, and the pain and suffering of life, are also engaged with.

He had never realised before that underneath every action, underneath the life of every day, pain lies, quiescent, but ready to devour; he seemed to be able to see suffering, as if it were a fire, curling up over the edges of all action, eating away the lives of men an women. He thought for the first time with understanding of words which had before seemed to him empty: the struggle of life; the hardness of life

I have carefully avoided spoilers. Which is more than the second hand Penguin Modern Classics version which I picked up did. Reading the blurb on the back gave me all the details of what Rachel’s story would be about.

A major gripe – why do those who write forewords or, even worse, write the jacket information for classics, arrogantly assume everyone has already read something and major plot arcs can be spelt out. Someone is always coming to a book for the first time, and those people should be able to experience a book as the author intended. I couldn’t ‘un-know’ what the blurb writer had spoiled, and this made the book a more difficult read, as events Woolf meant her reader to be shocked by could not have their full effect. I sometimes wonder whether blurb writers hate reading, or hate the books they write the jackets for, when I find that major parts of the reader’s journey have been described with full details. Of course a book is about much more than story, but story, the ‘what happens next’ is a major strand

I do think this is a wonderful first novel, and particularly interesting in the light of my recent re-read of To The Lighthouse, as themes and styles more fully realised in that later novel are developing here.

I’m of course very grateful to HeavenAli, whose Woolfalong Challenge for this year is bringing me to Woolfs new to me and Woolfs to reacquaint myself with, and this voyage out in the good ship Woolf is most satisfying. This should have been read and reviewed for the March/April beginnings and endings strand, but, Hey-Ho, life, not to mention other reads, intervened.

The Voyage Out Amazon UK
The Voyage Out Amazon USA

Virginia Woolf – To The Lighthouse

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Book Review, To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, Woolfalong hosted by Heaven Ali

Surrendering to the stream of consciousness

In my teens and twenties I loved Virginia Woolf’s writing, both fiction and factual, and books about the Bloomsbury set. Orlando, the first Woolf I read, and To The Lighthouse, were particular favourites, and I read both across the years several times. So it was with a feeling of pleasure that HeavenAli’s ‘Woolfalong’ beckoned, and January/February Ali invited us to read Mrs Dalloway or To The Lighthouse. So, as the bookshelves contained To The Lighthouse, in a copy I see I bought in 1994, at a time when I was travelling a fair amount, and used to record where/when I bought a book, it was with even more pleasure that I opened a book I haven’t read in twenty years, and found, used as a bookmark, a ticket for Charleston Farmhouse ‘the former home of the Bloomsbury Artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’ which I visited. I was looking forward to re-acquainting myself with a familiar friend……………………

Charleston, the home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant

And, I have to say, the intervening years have been truthful and kind to how well I remember this book, and to how strongly Woolf’s vision resonated. It is a most potent book. The craft of her writing is stunning. What struck me this time is how very much her writing is almost crossing art forms. To The Lighthouse is both astonishingly painterly and astonishingly musical. She uses arresting images, both images ‘in real’ which people observe, and images rising up out of emotion, to convey telling information. For example, a repeating image detailing one of the central themes – the portrait of a particular marriage – there is the suffering, succouring, Mrs Ramsay, holding it seems the world of nurturing wifehood and motherhood together, expanding into a kind of rapturous bliss of givingness, struck, again and again by the extraordinary image of a brass-beaked scimitar, as her husband, Mr Ramsay, demanded, and got, sympathy, importance, validity

Mrs Ramsay , who had been sitting loosely, holding her son in her arm, braced herself, and half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into force, burning and illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare.

We know that Woolf suffered mental illness, that she took her life, that she was subject to swings of mood of at times unbearable intensity, and that this informed her curious vision, her own swings between visionary rapture and meaning, and dark pain and terror – the moments, both of rapture and of bleakness remind me of the equally blazing intensity of Blake’s paintings and poetry.

     Whirlwind of Lovers, illustration by Blake to Dante’s Inferno

The central ‘happenings’ in the narrative structure of this three section book, seem small – the outside centre stage story is thus :

The Ramsays, an upper middle class Victorian couple he an academic, she ‘artistic’ are on a family holiday in Skye, with their eight children. They open their holiday home to a group of academic and artistic friends. Part One, ‘The Window’ consists of one day. The youngest child, James who adores his mother and hates his father has been half-promised a trip to the Lighthouse on the following day. Mr Ramsay, and another of the guests contemptuously and realistically state that the weather will be poor, and they will be unable to go. Mrs Ramsay cannot bear her child to suffer the pain of disappointment and tries to hold out hope

In Part Two, Time Passes, a scant twenty pages, the most dramatic personal and world stage events are recounted, almost as an aside – the First World War, as a couple of local women are engaged in beating and brushing and dusting the holiday home, which some of the Ramsay Family, and some of the guests from last time, will return to, for the first time for ten years.

In Part Three, The Lighthouse, which also takes place over one day, the two youngest children, James, now in his teens and the youngest daughter, Cam, also in her teens, make that promised trip to the lighthouse with their father.

Was there no safety? No learning by heart of the ways of the world? No guide, no shelter, but all was miracle, and leaping from the pinnacle of a tower into the air? Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life? – startling, unexpected, unknown?

Some story, you might think, with all the major, events of world and family dramas happening off stage, in twenty pages. What Woolf is interested in is the inner life of character, the ceaseless running commentary inside our heads, which no one hears, no one sees. This is the hidden part of life. At the time I was ferociously first reading Woolf I was also as ferociously reading another writer, Doris Lessing, one who in some ways wrote the politics meets the personal history of twentieth century philosophising. In the first novel of Lessing’s 5 volume ‘Children of Violence’ series, Martha Quest, set in what was Rhodesia, Lessing tells us that if you asked Martha’s mother to describe her day, she would have talked about the activities she engaged in, the undramatic part of daily life. But, as Lessing reminds us what is really going on is the seething inner dialogue, the clash between hidden thoughts, unconscious and conscious feeling, the stray images, words, familiar phrases which pop-up out of unconsciousness, the threads of memory which suddenly bob up, carried along on that conscious stream of inner babble, before sinking down again. THIS, Lessing suggests is as much (if not more) of a life as that in which we ‘do’ in the world, and the world sees

This is what Woolf is exploring.

Virginia painted by Vanessa Bell

I mentioned the book is painterly, that she paints shapes, colours, a canvas in her writing. Art, particularly painting, but creative endeavour, the purpose and drive of creativity, is another major theme of this book. The other central theme is the relationship between men’s worlds and women’s worlds, and the difficulties at that time for a female to have an identity outside the expected marriage and motherhood. This is illustrated by the specific examination of one particular family, Woolf’s own. Mr Ramsay, like her father, Sir Leslie Stephens, is an academic, doing important ‘work of the mind’ Mrs Ramsay, both in character, description, personality and ‘life events’ in the novel, mirrors Virginia’s mother Julia. There is another kind of female possibility for destiny explored in the novel – the woman with her own ‘vocation’ and place to make in the world, the woman who has her own place in history to carve, whose choice may be art, not marriage or motherhood. The first part of the book is held together by Mrs Ramsey, it is the creation of her charisma, the personification of the female role to nurture others. Lily Briscoe is an artist, Mrs Ramsay’s friend, pitied by her, for Lily is not beloved by men, Lily ‘with her little puckered face and her little Chinese eyes’. Lily Briscoe though has her own purpose. Lily paints her picture. Work gives meaning. Interestingly this dichotomy : Children and Art, givers of meaning was also explored in Stephen Sondheim’s wonderful Sunday In The Park With George, which also turned me back to thinking about Woolf’s exploration here

The musical structure of the novel struck me forcibly this time. Part of the ‘inner dialogue’ is the voice of remembered phrases, which might stick forcibly in the mind – words and phrases uttered by others, which stick in the mind. These may serve like a little musical coda, a recognisable theme, and just as in a classical symphony themes and variations on themes repeat, vanish, and teasingly surface again as part of the overall forward journey of a piece, so do words and phrases bob up in the minds of Woolf’s characters.

A chance comment by Charles Tansley, one of the guests in the first part, to Lily Briscoe:

Women can’t paint, women can’t write

is part of the ‘Lily motif’ , if this were a piece of music. But so is the resolution of that particular discordant melody –

I must move the tree to the middle

What I had forgotten, or perhaps not been aware of, last time I read this book, is that it is also funny – there is an kind of surprising humour, under the intensity. And, in this, there are connections to Chekhov’s plays, often performed with deep intensity, but also, like in life, the absurdity of it all, the little flashes of a sometimes spiteful amusement which also exist in our own hidden dialogues, as we observe those around us.

A short excerpt from a TV film of the book. I’m not convinced it would encourage me to read the book though.

In the end, it is going to be Woolf’s voice which works, or doesn’t, for the reader. The reading is certainly different – something she engages in is a kind of subterranean connection of flowing inner dialogues, so the ‘stream of consciousness – or perhaps, most correctly stream of consciousness and unconsciousness’ starts in one person’s mind and suddenly the thinking the feeling, the words and the images are in another person’s inner dialogue. It is the images, it is the phrases, repeated, which negotiate the reader so that it is clear who we are ‘inner with’

For me, I can only say that I surrender willingly to Woolf. This reading after twenty years has been incredibly potent, and thank you, HeavenAli, for your Woolfalong challenge! – just snuck in with this on the Jan/Feb suggested Woolf book!

I couldn’t resist this weird and, personally, not particularly meaningful ‘musical tribute’ to the book. I have no doubt that those who DON’T gel with Woolf might find their distaste for her reinforced. It made me giggle a bit though. Not the book I re-read so happily at all

To The Lighthouse Amazon UK
To The Lighthouse Amazon USA