Virginia Woolf / By Claudia Roth Pierpont
The Voyage In
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.
"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 boldest
novels ever
written about the effects of World War I. Virginia Woolf was not without
politics or
fierce worldly
concerns. The diaries and letters spanning both world wars are filled with
bulletins and
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.
Recently, however,
Woolf has been granted a new role in the all 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.
Suppose one
thing should open out of another ... only not for 10 pages but for 200
or so - doesn't
that give the
looseness and lightness I want; doesn't that get closer and yet keep form
and speed,
and enclose
everything, everything?"
Claudia Roth Pierpont is a contributor to The New Yorker.
Copyright 1996 The New York Times