It is to my great shame that only in the last couple of months that I have started reading Virginia Woolf except for Orlando that I read in the mid-nineties after the Sally Potter film with Tilda Swinton had captivated me.
I’m not sure why I hadn’t read Woolf before now. Her works were never on the syllabus at either school or university, or perhaps they were at uni, and I just didn’t take the appropriate seminar strands in second-and third-year English (for the record, I have a double major in English and Drama).
I’ve always enjoyed modernist literature with a particular liking for TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. James Joyce is probably one of my favourite writers of all time. There is one glaring consistency in this list and that is the absence of female authors.
My feminist friends would probably say that this is telling, and they would be right, and it probably says as much about the academy as it does about me.
Why Virginia Woolf Matters Even More
The period in which Virginia Woolf was writing was one of enormous change, but she was not necessarily elegiac about those changes – the horrors of the First World War were still so strong in many minds, and it informs a lot of Woolf’s writing.
Many of her characters are haunted by the war and, in her later years, Woolf was disturbed by the prospect of the Second World War and the destruction in London during the Blitz, including the bombing of Bloomsbury, had a significant impact on her own mental health and may well have been factors in her suicide in 1941.
Those of us in my generation have never experienced such things and I am too young to remember the anxieties of the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.
For some people, particularly those who live in areas with long periods of lock-down, COVID-19 has also had an anxiety-inducing effect and it will be interesting to see, in years to come, the impact of the pandemic on literature.
Standout characters and themes
Clarissa Dalloway is probably the best-known character of Woolf and a lot of people got to know something of her through the film The Hours with Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore and how the story arc of the Meryl Streep character follows that of Clarissa of the book in a contemporary setting.
There is a view of Clarissa Dalloway, busy arranging a soiree, a party, as being somewhat shallow or frivolous but to hold that view is to read the book shallowly and frivolously. A theme of the book is that the life of Mrs Dalloway is socially defined, and the clue is very much in the title.
Some critics have pointed out that there is a distinction between Joyce giving his great novel with its too male protagonists the title of the name of a hero from a Greek epic when he could have called it Stephen Dedalus or even Mr Bloom. The wonderful end of Ulysses is always referred to as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy and not Mrs Bloom’s.
The other two themes that emerge strongly in Mrs Dalloway that resonate with our contemporary lives is an obsession with death and an obsession with memory that are both linked and influenced by what at the time were the relatively new, ideas from psychoanalysis and the works of Freud. The novel is set in the years immediately following the First World War and was written in 1925.
The term ‘The Lost Generation’ is often applied to a group of male writers from the period, Hemingway, and Dos Passos to name two but there was also a strong sense of loss amongst woman, none more so than Woolf. Many, many women lost husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers to the war and for those whose lives were defined, as Mrs Dalloway’s is by marriage, there was the loss of those social roles, the wife, and the mother and a need to forge new identities, to become oneself.
Virginia Woolf’s themes can still be related to even today
I read a lot about the impact of the pandemic, the daily death tolls and the impact that has on people and the need for people to try and remember a different time, a time before lockdowns and travel restrictions and it may be that we will come out of this time a little like those generations that survived the wars.
There will be those who will be scarred and haunted by their experiences and those who have lost something, whether it be a loved one or a business or lifestyle and there will be those who will want to remember the time before the pandemic and those who want to forget.
Dissecting Woolf’s best works
Where Mrs Dalloway and Between the Acts are set over the course of a single day where the events are shaped by the past and memories, other books by Woolf such as To the Lighthouse and The Waves are set over much longer time frames and show both subtle and major changes to people over decades.
The Waves is striking in the way the story is entirely constructed with the interior monologues of the characters journeying from childhood to middle age where To the Lighthouse is much more conventional in its structure. There are three sections to the book.
The first section is set in a holiday house in Skye where there is much discussion about whether the family and their friends will be able to travel by boat to a lighthouse visible from the home, the second smaller section moves the novel through several years in time in which a number of the family members die and the last section is set ten years after the first and is concerned with the family friend, Lily Briscoe, an artist who was told in the first part by another guest that women can neither write nor paint and this observation torments her over the years until she realises that she can paint and the importance of her work is achieving some sort of vision or truth.
The perspective of To the Lighthouse is different to many of Woolf’s other voices in that it employs an omnipresent narrator who has insight into the inner thoughts of the characters and there is a jarring effect where the thoughts of one character jump to another and this is interspersed with both dialogue and description as opposed to The Waves where the entire narrative is comprised of the thoughts of the characters with clear separation of paragraphs and an indicator of who is thinking the thoughts with a line that such and such said when, in fact, it was that they thought.
Virginia Woolf – an innovative writer, that generations adore.
If you’ve read this far, you’ll know that I am no scholar of Virginia Woolf just an enthusiastic reader and my writing this is to share the enthusiasm I have found late in life for Woolf.
She was an innovative writer who was very much of her time, with her progressive literature and yet her insights into her characters and their motivations, their stresses and the impact of a less than perfect world, times of uncertainty and our attempts to try and find our place in the world makes her very much our contemporary.