‘There are some books that LIVE�, she mused. ‘They are young with us, and they grow old with us�.
Mrs. Hilbery, of course, is quite right about that. A‘There are some books that LIVE�, she mused. ‘They are young with us, and they grow old with us�.
Mrs. Hilbery, of course, is quite right about that. And this was one such book for me, I suspect. At least, I feel now, upon closing it, that it reached the span of my years and, quite unexpectedly, understood me.
The first half was a bit tame to me. There was no narrative to speak of. The characters seemed mere ideas, though with occasional meaningful conversations. This set the scene for the second half, however, and something happened about half way through for me. Suddenly much of the wisdom in the novel felt too close for comfort; many times one of the characters said or thought things that were disconcertingly close to my own life (now or previously), and I found myself exclaiming, ‘I’ve felt exactly that!� and ‘That’s been my dilemma, too!� Woolf has reached into the depths of her understanding of human beings in this novel, and once I realized that that was what this novel uniquely had to offer me, I submerged myself in her voice.
Unlike her more experimental novels, there is a (faint) storyline in this novel, along which Woolf has strewn her usual graceful words, which I obediently followed and cherished. I (mostly) listened to the novel, which is apparently (and clearly) the most autobiographical of her works, as I cycled through town, spring having finally decided to make an entrance in my northern country, and as I went about in my garden. The mellifluous, fragile voice of Juliet Stephenson was perfect for Woolf’s words - soothing when surrounded by urban noises, like gliding into a cool pool after a hot day; perfect for walking in a garden at dusk; an almost sensory experience.
Virginia Woolf explores the nature of work here, of human relationships � especially romantic ones but also the relation with oneself, of family, of all connections to things that we come to see as meaningful in our own lives. There was something between the pages of this novel which made me feel strangely seen, an experience that doesn’t occur often to me and which is of course entirely dependent on our own mental luggage.
Night and Day is that of Woolf’s novels which reminds me most of Forster’s books, who, as friend and fellow member of the Bloomsbury group, of course read all her books, and she his. There is, perhaps, even a tiny nod to Jane Austen, whom Woolf loved, in the storyline (who is to have whom?) and in the characters of Katherine Hilbery (who reminded me a bit of some of Austen’s most stubborn heroines (Elizabeth Bennett and Emma) and her delightful mother, Mrs. Hilbery (who, to me, was much more likeable than most of Austen’s mothers, but the caricature was there; she absolutely adores Shakespeare and is forever quoting or mentioning him, probably echoing Woolf’s own love of the Bard).
It was the first of Woolf’s novels that didn’t perplex me or frustrate me or make me feel inept at seeing her brilliance. Here I see it (as she sees my flaws), and I think that this, though her longest novel (which teeters on the brink of being long-winded), might be a good place to start for anyone who has yet to try reading her. It is, in some ways, a fictionalized version of the motif of ‘a room of one’s own�.
Strangely, some (incl. Katherine Mansfield) considered this novel a product of Woolf’s snobbery. I don’t see that. But I do see a sharp mind, a bookish mind, a mind which juxtaposes different characters and personalities and, thus, shows truths about human foibles. That, surely, is intelligence.
Words I have come to associate with Virginia Woolf and which cropped up multiple times in this novel: alternately, omnibus, lamentable/y, truth, waves, garden, lighthouse, embankment, the dome of St. Paul’s. Life. Apart from the adverbs, clearly these words make up the fabric of her novels and/or part of the (London) backdrop that many of her novels are set in.
‘It’s life that matters, nothing but life � the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process�, said Katherine (�), ‘not the discovery itself at all.� ...more
This was glorious. I’ve underlined great things on nearly every page. If this is what Virginia Woolf could produce when sitting in bed and simply writThis was glorious. I’ve underlined great things on nearly every page. If this is what Virginia Woolf could produce when sitting in bed and simply writing an expansive version of a ‘dear diary�, it tells us something about her genius (she calls it a dialogue of the soul with the soul). It is the best I’ve read by Woolf so far. It is more immediate, more intimate, more relatable than what I’ve read by her before. It is packed with thoughts and feelings and metaphors and meaning.
I’m slowly wading my way through Virginia Woolf’s body of work and, by extension, through the intricacies of her brain and her sensibilities. It is not an uncomplicated liaison; when I read her fiction, I occasionally glance around during the reading process, appreciating bits here, doubting other pieces there; marvelling at her imagery and insight, yet sometimes feeling frustrated at her refusal to throw me just a tiny bit of plot, just a small shard of a realistic character trait, a little something that induces me to invest in her stories. One reviewer, she admits, describes her style as ‘so fluent and fluid that it runs through the mind like water� � which is the closest I can come to a description of how her prose feels to me.
But when I read her non-fiction, well, I’m both in awe and a little bit in love. In this book, we are granted insight into, especially, her craft and her creative powers but also into her life, her friends and her demons, her gradual rise to fame, her own ambivalent attitude toward it, and into her final days.
She airs opinions that are sometimes unnuanced or that I humbly disagree with, e.g. that literature is not a matter of ‘development� but of prose and poetry. I deeply appreciate a deliberate take on form, but I also prefer deliberate content and development � of story, of people; otherwise it remains poetry to me. She does admit to learning that she could do scenes but not plots. No surprise there. In this book no plot is needed. At times her sentences are shockingly profound, at other times simply gorgeous. The list of examples of the latter is endless, but here are a few to savour:
Life piles up so fast that I have no time to write out the equally fast rising mound of reflections (�)
(�) the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in.
But to be well and use strength to get more out of life is, surely, the greatest fun in the world.
I am laboriously dredging my mind for Mrs. Dalloway and bringing up light buckets.
Joy’s life in the doing � I murder, as usual, a quotation; I mean it’s the writing, not the being read, that excites me.
I’m the hare, a long way ahead of the hounds my critics.
What a vast fertility of pleasure books hold for me.
I was a little taken aback by her blatant disparagement of other authors (Mansfield, Joyce, James, the list goes on), but she is also critical of her own ability from time to time. And as she never criticized Forster, I didn’t care so much. In fact, she mentions him with a certain fondness every time his name crops up (‘Morgan�), and as Forster was one of my first loves in English literature, I cannot help but appreciate that tendency of hers. Her best sentence about Forster may be the following:
Morgan has the artist’s mind; he says the simple things that clever people don’t say; I find him the best of critics for that reason.
On that note, she writes that intelligent criticism is to be encouraged. Yes, I thought. That ought to be a quote on the goodreads site. Perhaps it already is. Then it deserves to be read.
There are other authors whom she expresses something like love for. I savoured and wallowed in those parts. Shakespeare takes centre stage, but there’s also a wonderful scene where she and Leonard visit Thomas Hardy. A valuable aspect of the book, indeed, is when we hear about her own reading habits, her views on contemporary literature, her comparison of Turgenev and Dostoevsky etc.
Interestingly, as her books were published by Hogarth House, the Woolfs� own publishing house, her books never fell under the critical gaze of an editor. We hear of how she typed them up, how Leonard only read the books after she was completely done with them and how they themselves had x number of copies printed depending on how many were ordered.
As we progress into the second half of the book, Virginia Woolf is visited more and more by her incertitude, her ups and downs, her despair, while simultaneously being more and more in the public eye. It saddened me deeply when she muses on what exacerbated her depressions:
I think the effort to live in two spheres: the novel; and life; is a strain. (�) to have to behave with circumspection and decision to strangers wrenches me into another region; hence the collapse.
I wonder if the beginning of World War II also underlined to her some of life’s enormous sadness or if it was a complete coincidence that she committed suicide in the second year of the war. The war is like a desperate illness, she wrote. The Woolfs� home in London was bombed to smithereens, and so she spent the last days of her life in the country, at Monk’s House, where they could still hear the bombers and where, she wrote, we live without a future.
For readers who are interested in the writer Virginia Woolf, this is an absolute must-read. It was one of those books which made me impatient to read on and discover more and yet also stop and savour her words and her thoughts and not rush through it because there is only one first time for every book. ...more
A peculiar short story which is, sort of, about a group of girls who create a little society with the purpose of asking questions about things in lifeA peculiar short story which is, sort of, about a group of girls who create a little society with the purpose of asking questions about things in life in stead of taking the traditional route of getting married and having children, at least until they have some answers. When I write 'sort of' it's because that sounds as if there might be some logical story line, which there really isn't, or at least it's wrapped in various observations and comments of an almost non sequitur kind, which makes the 'story' seem more symbolic than real.
Their admirable object in life, they agree, is to create good people and good books. The story also revolves around the roles of men and women, but again in a kind of fuzzily polemical way. I liked the premise of the story, including the silly idea that one girl is trying to read her way through the London Library in order to get her inheritance, but I felt I was left on the outside more or less throughout the story....more
(3.5 stars) This was Virginia Woolf’s first novel and, apparently, the most linear and easy to follow of her novels. I haven’t read them all yet, but (3.5 stars) This was Virginia Woolf’s first novel and, apparently, the most linear and easy to follow of her novels. I haven’t read them all yet, but during the first half of The Voyage Out, it crept under my skin, and yet it’s difficult to say what it’s about, linear or not.
A group of English travellers are brought together on a sea voyage to South America where they meet a number of other English expatriates � and that’s basically it. We hear about their small troubles and foibles, listen in on their conversations and witness the formation of new attachments, with a young woman called Rachel more or less at the centre. There were times when the set-up and the texture reminded me of a Room with a View, though the characters at heart did not.
I felt myself sliding out of the novel as it progressed and neared its end. It partly has to do with the characters. I didn’t much care about them. I felt them to be a bit faceless, as if composed of ideas only, and I could hardly distinguish Mrs. Thornbury from Mrs. Elliot etc. I was delighted to meet some ‘old� acquaintances, who take centre stage in a later novel, namely Mr. and Mrs. Dalloway. That bit added some interesting background about those two characters. For instance, Mrs. Dalloway tells someone that her favourite Shakespeare play is Henry V, and Mr. Dalloway � bless him � says that Jane Austen is the �best author we’ve got�. Rachel, to my annoyance, doesn’t think much of Austen and calls her a ‘tight plait�. Mrs. Dalloway later offers her her copy of Persuasion, to bring her round, presumably, but Mrs. Dalloway’s literary tastes are ultimately better than Rachel’s, and the couple fade out of the story again.
I have complex feelings about this novel, as about most of Woolf’s fiction. I rather enjoy the biting tongue she sometimes employs (a bit of Austen?), and I love her insistence on characters� interior lives. But just when something in a conversation strikes me as profound or meaningful, the next line is often either completely obscure of the non sequitur kind (�Doesn’t everyone have an imaginary uncle?�) or slightly banal or obvious (�Women can have their own opinions�), but of course they were not banal at the time. A mix of the mundane and the meaningful came to be one of her trademarks.
Her poetic style is quite wonderful of course (‘It was as though a blue shadow had fallen across a pool�- for someone who suddenly looked sad), and if I vacillate between frustration and admiration of her writing, I never seem to land on indifference, which in itself makes it a rewarding reading experience. ...more
I wanted to like this book more than I did. It was a curious experience to read this novel, apparently the first in which Woolf tries her new style ofI wanted to like this book more than I did. It was a curious experience to read this novel, apparently the first in which Woolf tries her new style of experimentation.
There isn’t much in the way of plot, which I can live with, indeed sometimes seek out, as long as there are interesting characters or ideas. The characters here were none of them interesting to me, which apparently was part of her intention � the idea being to describe someone, Jacob, as seen through everyone else’s eyes. Any ideas hinted at here were likewise none too obvious to me, but possibly I’m a little dense here. (As I’ve noted before, I seem to prefer her intelligent and polemic essays).
I greatly admire Woolf’s command of the English language, obscure though it sometimes is, and there can be no doubt that there is some beautiful prose here and there. But I often felt that the beautiful phrases described dull trivialities; things I couldn’t care less about. The dialogues, to me, felt as though they had been cut from ten different stories and then put together in some higgledy-piggledy manner for the sake of experiment.
In short, as much as I admire Woolf and will continue to read her because she had a brilliant mind and I don’t mind feeling challenged in my reading, I fear I am a traditional reader. Call me old-fashioned, but I do like some overall coherence, characters I can relate to, story. ...more
Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of the Some weeks added a century to his age, others no more than three seconds at most. Altogether, the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals� we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity, for directly we say that it is ages long, we are reminded that it is briefer than the fall of a rose leaf to the ground.
High-spirited, poetic and fun, Orlando is Virginia Woolf’s one-off satirical romp of a novel, which she herself didn’t really take seriously (as she notes in A Writer’s Diary) but which ended up being one of her most accessible works. A tribute to Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s author-lover-gardener-friend, it is the story of a young man whose life not only spans four centuries but who also changes sex along the way and ends up a woman. This opens up for multiple philosophizing musings along the way:
’I am growing up�, she thought (�). ‘I am losing some illusions (�), perhaps to acquire others.�
Slowly there had opened within her something intricate and many-chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse.
This was the first time I giggled to a Virginia Woolf book: what a sense of humour, what playfulness:
’Madam�, the man cried, leaping to the ground, ‘you’re hurt.�
‘I’m dead, sir!� she replied.
A few minutes later, they became engaged.
The morning after, as they sat at breakfast, he told her his name. It was Marmaduke Bonthrop Sherlmerdine, Esquire.
Of course, amidst all the seeming nonsense, it is clearly the poetess Woolf who is at play. I don’t read much poetry, but I suspect I enjoyed this so thoroughly because the lyricism of her language carried forward a (kind of) story and development of character. There is, too, a wonderful indirect feministic rant when Orlando becomes a woman and realizes that life as a man was so much easier. (This is a tiny extract:)
She tossed her foot impatiently, and showed an inch or two of calf. A sailor on the mast, who happened to look down at the moment, started so violently that he missed his footing and only saved himself by the skin of his teeth. ‘If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered�, Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head.
There is a little nod to Jane Austen (whom Woolf loved) in this sentence: But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can. Austen’s sentence, when defending her insistence on happy endings, began: Let other pens dwell on misery�
I first tried reading the novel many years ago after I’d seen the movie with the fabulous Tilda Swinton, but I wasn’t ready for Woolf in print back then. She still challenges my understanding of literature, and we don’t always see eye to eye, but I welcome the challenge. Story and style merge here into something occasionally sublime but earthy, too. In lesser hands the story might have been too fanciful, or forgettable, but in Woolf’s imaginative and capable hands, it is a joy.
And wouldn’t it be just like Woolf to know the feeling when, for instance, one expresses admiration for a beloved book (or something else), and others fail to meet us in that admiration?
No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. ...more
’Leonard and Virginia had no children: their books and their garden were their children� (foreword, by Cecil Woolf, the Woolfs� nephew).
More accuratel’Leonard and Virginia had no children: their books and their garden were their children� (foreword, by Cecil Woolf, the Woolfs� nephew).
More accurately perhaps, it was Leonard Woolf’s garden. Virginia would help pick pears or apples sometimes, or make jam and feed the goldfish, play bowls with Leonard in it or simply walk through it every morning when she went to her writing lodge. She used the garden. Leonard created it.
This book is a gorgeous garden book full of beautiful photos and descriptions of the garden. It is not the kind of garden(ing) book that gives you any practical advice. I don’t often read this sort of book from cover to cover but tend to browse in them, looking at the pictures (because the visual side of it is crucial in a gardening book) and studying practical suggestions when needed. This one I did read from one end to the other because there is a good balance between pictures and text and because it is a kind of garden biography, with lots of biographical details about the Woolfs as well.
I have quite a few garden books and have seen gardens that are more spectacular than this one, and so die-hard gardening experts might find the book a bit light. The same might be the case for die-hard fans of Virginia Woolf since there is quite a bit about the garden as it looks today and as Leonard cared for it for 18 years after Virginia’s death. However, as a lover of both gardens and Virginia Woolf, the book is wonderful. There are pictures of her green bedroom, of her and Leonard positioned around the garden, of her and Vita, of the view of the garden from their upstairs balcony (a stunning view!), of a couple of Vanessa’s pictures (Virginia’s sister, who was an artist), drawings of garden plans � and even embroidered garden plans (created by the author) as well as numerous photos of various trees, shrubs, flowers and paths around the garden. Inspiring despite the fact that Leonard’s tastes in colours and plants were often more exotic than mine.
It is a loving and respectful portrait of the Woolfs and a detailed and aesthetically pleasing book about the garden at Monk’s House near the village of Rodmell, Sussex, where I am definitely going on my next trip to Britain. (I have studied the map and realize I drove right past it a few years ago, not knowing what hidden treasures lay beyond the downs we passed. Oh well, I don’t need an excuse to return to England). ...more
It was with some trepidation that I approached this novel. I’m in complete awe of Virginia Woolf’s mind and her use of the English language, but as muIt was with some trepidation that I approached this novel. I’m in complete awe of Virginia Woolf’s mind and her use of the English language, but as much as I’ve enjoyed many of her essays and other short pieces of writing over the years, I’ve never really managed to love her novels � or at least To the Lighthouse, which I read some time ago in the previous millennium. I was hoping that I’d somehow grown into a more mature reader and could appreciate her unique style, given that I absolutely love the movie The Hours, for which Mrs. Dalloway is the original inspiration.
The story, insofar as one can even talk about a story here, is essentially about a day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway, a day when she is giving a party and, prior to this party, makes preparations, buys flowers (as the famous introductory line tells us) and reviews her life � what is and what might have been. It is often compared to Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, both thematically and stylistically. I’ve yet to read the former (but am, frankly, in no hurry, having read The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), and the latter I read at uni decades ago, so I read the novel on its own premise � an intriguing if sometimes labourious journey.
As in her essays, she explored, through Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith (Mrs. Dalloway’s alter ego and stunt double?) and a few other key characters, an abundance of quirky, human, mundane ideas in her usual insightful, meditative fashion, which reveals the inner life of someone who is just slightly other-worldly and off kilter and therefore fascinating and rather wonderful. The characters were interesting, the threads woven between them being a core theme, but one that seemed fragile, both deliberately, I suspect, and in the way it was executed, to me.
The prose was beautiful, but for my tastes it was sometimes too poetic (Eliot’s influence?) for a novel in the sense that the meanings were convoluted, sketched like ideas in poems strung together to form a sort of unified whole, which tells me that she loved words more than stories. It was sometimes difficult to distill her meaning from the sea of words surrounding an idea. And yet there were many sentences I read and re-read because there was something there that resonated, something that simply rang true, as in the following:
“For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying--what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.�
Considering why she wants to give parties, Clarissa Dalloway, who is not simply an upper-class social butterfly, reflects that what she liked was life:
“’That’s what I do it for,� she said, speaking aloud, to life.�
Ultimately, I am a fan of Woolf’s themes, her language, her mind � but not of the stream-of-consciousness narration. And much as I admire her and will keep on reading her, I found it difficult to stay on track with this novel (and make a mental note of the fact that it took me two months to finish it, absolutely unheard of for me, but other books succeeded in luring me away).
(As a little ahem: there were way too many semicolons, and even though Austen was sometimes guilty of that, the rules of punctuation changed dramatically from Austen’s time to Woolf’s, and Forster, Woolf’s contemporary, was never guilty of this; a detail one has to overlook. Also there were too many exclamation points!) ...more
“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print�.
I think I may have a minor literary crush on Virginia Wo“We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print�.
I think I may have a minor literary crush on Virginia Woolf. She’s so damn erudite (in absolutely her own, self-made style), witty (drily and almost unconsciously so), brazen and yet also sometimes so frustratingly elusive.
The Common Reader is Woolf’s own version of literary history, mainly English, but with a few Greeks and Russians thrown into the pile.� The common reader�, a term first coined by Dr Johnson, is not the critic or the scholar but ordinary readers like you and me, although to be honest not many ordinary people are as encyclopedically well-read as Woolf. 70 years after she died by her own hand, she could still never be called ordinary; she merely addresses us common souls.
The first three chapters I didn’t really care for. I read a few Greek authors back in high school and haven’t found reason to re-read them since, so much of the first three chapters was simply lost on me. Then she ventured into more familiar territory, and I was once again an attentive audience, taking in her peculiar yet apt musings on Austen, Brontë, Eliot.
And then she deliberately moved into obscure corners of English literature that I suspect only the most well-read Englishmen with a penchant for long-forgotten authors could relate to, and once again I was a little lost, though not uninterested. She had no qualms about signing some authors off as unfit for posterity, and amid a sea of fabulous quotes I found the above particularly fabulous.
One always learns something when reading Virginia Woolf’s essays (and I enjoy them more than her novels), but it is also clear that this was written many years ago and that even she, as opinionated as she was, would include different names today and perhaps let some of the authors she chose to mention slide further into oblivion. ...more
”A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write� � that is Virginia Woolf’s main contention in this book, and she makes a convincing”A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write� � that is Virginia Woolf’s main contention in this book, and she makes a convincing case of it in this essay.
After the first 30 pages, however, I felt frustrated, and I felt that this quote, which is printed on the cover of my edition, was the best the book had to offer: Her droning on in her trademark stream-of-consciousness style, visible on the printed page through her obvious dislike of paragraphs, made it tiring to read, and, as in the other works I’ve read by her that are written in the same vein, it was never my thing.
For a long time she seemed to be skirting around her topic, women and fiction, but she ultimately dove in, naming the most well-known women in Shakespeare’s plays, and in the Greek classics, and setting them up against the rather less heroic circumstances of real women’s lives at the times of these literary works.
From then on, she kept up the pace and turned her musings into real and valid, if sometimes idiosyncratically feministic (but then, I live in the 21st century in a country where women are highly emancipated, so maybe that’s not fair) literary criticism, including some highly interesting points concerning Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot, which I thoroughly enjoyed.
Towards the end, I felt as though her musings and ramblings, which weren’t really going anywhere new, took over a bit again, but it doesn’t detract from the valid points she makes about the conspicuous lack of women in the world of literature in her own time and obviously in the centuries before and the reasons behind this. Also, apart from just making causal links between history as described by men and women’s serf-like roles, which gained less than no recognition, she ends by reaching out to women, asking them to take up the pen and start writing, hoping that they do have 500 a year (apparently the magic necessary amount of British pounds to be in possession of at the time in order to be liberated as a woman) and a room of their own.
Virginia Woolf’s polemic style in this essay, her eloquence and not least her intelligence made this an important and often engrossing read, and I also have a suspicion that I would appreciate her work, in general, more now than when I last gave it a try some 15 years ago. ...more
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