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The Novels of
Virginia Woolf

Hermione Lee

‘This edition includes a new

Me altcelelUcoat(e)ame)’mtal-m-lUltatele
PR 6045 .072 2774 2010
Lee, Hermione.
The novels of Virginia Woolf
 rary
American River College Lib
4700 College Oak Drive
Sacramento, CA 95841
 Routledge Revivals

The Novels of Virginia Woolf

This is a reissue of a critical introduction to the novels of Virginia

Woolf, first published in 1977. It makes close, illuminating
readings of her nine novels, placing Woolf in her literary context
and providing an accessible, clear and valuable guide for students
starting out on a study of Woolf as a novelist, and for general
readers seeking a fresh, helpful entry-point to the challenge of
reading Woolf. Twenty years later, Hermione Lee wrote a prize-
winning and acclaimed biography of Virginia Woolf: this critical
study represented an early stage in this biographer-critic’s life-long
interest and involvement with Woolf's life and work.
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2022 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/novelsofvirginiad000leeh_z1I7
 The Novels of
Virginia Woolf

Hermione Lee

This edition includes a new

Introduction by the author

| ) Routledge
te 9 Taylor
& Francis Group
VINE
 First published in 1977
by Methuen & Co. Ltd
This edition first published in 2010 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

Routledge 1s an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 1977 Hermione Lee
2010 Introduction © Hermione Lee

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced

or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

Publisher’s Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this
reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may
be apparent.

i Disclaimer
The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and
welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

ISBN 13: 978-0-415-56242-3 (hbk)

ISBN 10: 0-415-56242-2 (hbk)

 Foreword to 2010 edition

This was my first book. I wrote it — instead of writing a doctoral

thesis — in my late twenties, while teaching at Liverpool University
in the 1970s. It was commissioned by Helen Fraser at Methuen,
who was then, like me, at the beginning of her career. Personally,
it came out of a very early, private, intense and uncritical passion
for Woolf's work, which, during my time in the 1960s as an
undergraduate and graduate student at Oxford, had run up against
two ways of thinking about her, completely at odds with each
other, both of which I found difficult to deal with. One was a
haughty, rationalist dismissal of her work by male critics and teachers,
as over-sensitive, “feminine”, impressionistic, precious, and negligible.
This attitude, which I encountered in force at Oxford, had been
going strong since the 1930s. (It still thrives in Britain, and never
ceases to amaze her critics and readers in America or Europe). If
Woolf was praised at all by this camp, it would be for her essays,
which were often used as a tool for disparaging the novels.
The opposite way of thinking about her came out of the feminist
revolution of the late 1960s — which I was slow to understand or
learn from — which had begun to construct Woolf as a feminist
heroine, and the beginnings of Bloomsbury-mania, fuelled by the
on-going publication of her biography and her letters in the 1970s.
Both these schools of thought about Woolf inhibited me. I was
sufficiently under the influence of Oxford’s then very male-dominated
academic environment (as Woolf herself felt inhibited, at the start
of her writing life, in the company of her public-school educated,
Cambridge rationalist friends) to be anxious in this book not to
express my own strong feelings about her work, not to say “I”, and
not to relax into colloquial, simple prose from what I thought
should be the formal language of scholarly criticism. (I remember
being mortified when someone, meeting me soon after he had looked
at this book, said, “Oh, I thought you’d be much older, from your
prose style”.)
At the same time, I felt the need to resist what seemed to me a
sentimentalising or sensationalising of Woolfs life by her fans.
Foreword to 2010 edition

Hence the stiff, gloomy and puritanical tone of my first paragraph,

and my reluctance to grant her the status of a “major” novelist,
which now read to me as comical and embarrassing hostages to
fortune. On the other hand, the publisher’s need for a clear, useful
introduction to the novels for students and general readers, and
my own desire to look closely at the language and structure and
meanings of each novel and to try and see how they worked, freed
me up to write directly and carefully about the books, without
reference to other critics. The book got better as it went on, I
think, and it makes a few points which still seem fresh and original,
like the comparisons with Stevie Smith, or the account of the fairy-
tale in To the Lighthouse, or the analysis of speech patterns in The
Waves, or of language in Between the Acts.
Twenty years later, looking back on my literary relationship
with Virginia Woolf at the end of my 1996 biography of her, I
briefly traced her critical history. The paragraph is worth quoting
here, since this book plays a small part in the story it tells. “In the
mid-1960s ... she was not studied in my Oxford English
course. At graduate level, she was described to me by my tutor as a
minor modernist, not to be classed with Joyce, Eliot or Lawrence,
and this was how I thought of her for some years. While I was a
student, Leonard Woolf's collections of her essays began to come
out, but it was not until the 1970s that Quentin Bell’s biography
(1972), the edition of the Letters (beginning in 1975), the Diary
(beginning in 1977), Moments of Being (1975) and the first of
the edited manuscripts (The Pargiters, 1977) were being published.
The edited essays would not follow for another ten years ... I
published a short introduction to Virginia Woolfs novels, in
1977, which the publishers thought useful for novice readers
of difficult modernist works, “whose interest has been aroused
by the continuing publication of biographical material”. In the
twenty years since, I have been reading a Virginia Woolf who has
greatly changed. She has changed from the Virginia Woolf
who died in 1941, or the Virginia Woolf whose Writer's Diary in
1953 seemed so aesthetically intense, so painfully serious and
driven, or the Virginia Woolf of Quentin Bell’s biography, eccentric
genius, brilliant comic aunt, enchanting friend ... Posthumously,
it feels as if she has generously, abundantly opened herself up to
such retellings ... Virginia Woolf story is reformulated by each
generation.”
 Foreword to 2010 edition

I'm glad, looking back, that I ended this little book by quoting
the vaguely prophetic words of Mrs Swithin in Between the Acts —
“but we have other lives, I think, I hope” — as suggesting “the
impersonal achievement of the writer, whose immortality is
words”, and whose posthumous life continues to change and evolve
as those words are re-read.
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The Novels of
VIRGINIA
W OOLF
9
 HERMIONE LEE

The Novels of
VIRGINIA
WOOLF
9

Methuen & Co Ltd

LONDON
 First published in 1977
by Methuen & Co Lid
11 New Fetter Lane London EC4P 4EE
Printed in Great Britain
by Butler & Tanner Ltd
Frome and London
© 1977 Hermione Lee

ISBN © 416 8 28604 (hardbound)

ISBN O 416 8 28701 (paperback)

This title is available in both

hardbound and paperback editions.
The paperback edition is sold subject to
the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold,
hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent
in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published
and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser.
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 Contents

Acknowledgements + ix
A note on the text: x
Introduction : 1
1: The Voyage Out 1915: 31
2: Night and Day 1919: 53
3: Jacob’s Room 1922: 71
4: Mrs Dalloway 1925: g1
5: To the Lighthouse 1927 : 116
6: Orlando 1928 : 138
7: The Waves 1931 : 158
Ba Lhe Years i937 180
g : Between the Acts 1941 : 203
Select bibliography : 226
Index : 2.30
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 Acknowledgements

My thanks are due to Joan Welford, Secretary in the Department

of English at Liverpool, for typing the manuscript. I am also
grateful to students, colleagues and friends for inspiration, en-
couragement and advice, in particular to Nick Grene and Nick
Shrimpton in the Department of English at Liverpool, Tom
Heacox in the Department of English at the College of William
and Mary, Williamsburg, and Jenny Uglow.

The author and publishers wish to thank the Virginia Woolf

Literary Estate, the Hogarth Press and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
Inc., for permission to reproduce extracts from Virginia Woolf?’s
writings; Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to reproduce an
extract from The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin; Alfred
A. Knopf, Inc., and Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to repro-
duce extracts from The Palm at the End of the Mind; and James Mac-
Gibbon, the Stevie Smith Estate executor, for permission to repro-
duce an extract from The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith (Allen
Lane).

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 A note on the text

EFERENCES to Virginia Woolf’s novels and short stories,

and to 4 Room Of One’s Own, are to the Penguin Modern
Classics editions. References to Flush, Roger Fry and
Three Guineas are to the Hogarth Press editions.
In Chapters 1-9 page references to the novel under discussion
are found in brackets after the quotations. All other references are
in the footnotes.
Omissions I have made in quotations from Virginia Woolf are
indicated thus, [...], to distinguish them from Virginia Woolf?’s
own use of a series of periods, which are indicated thus,...

The following abbreviations have been used:

AWD A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of
Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, Hogarth
Press, 1953)
Bell Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography (London,
Hogarth Press, 1972)
i: Volume I: Virginia Stephen 1882-1912
Il: Volume II: Mrs Woolf 1912-1941
CEJI-IV_ Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf,
4 vols (London, Chatto and Windus, 1966-7)
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The Novels of
VIRGINIA
WOOLF
Aerie “it~
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“STJOOW
 Introduction
HIs is not a book about Bloomsbury, lesbianism, madness
or suicide. It does not deal with Virginia Woolf as a
feminist, as an owner of the Hogarth Press, as a critic and
essayist, or as a biographer. It is a literary criticism of her nine
novels, written in the hope of turning attention back from the life
to the fictional work, but in the belief that the interest which has
been aroused by Quentin Bell’s biography, and which continues to
be serviced by the publication of Virginia Woolf’s letters and by
an aggregation of Bloomsburiana, makes this an appropriate time
for another study of her achievement as a novelist.
The criticism of Virginia Woolf has gone through several
phases. The enthusiasm and admiration she aroused in the twenties
(in France as much as in England) was offset in the thirties by
hostile attacks from the ‘Scrutineers’, J. F. Holms, Muriel Brad-
brook, Q. D. Leavis and W. H. Mellers, and from American
critics such as William Troy and J. W. Beach. Wyndham Lewis,
an enemy of Bloomsbury, struck the most aggressive note in Aen
without Art (1934), where he accused Virginia Woolf of inheriting
the worst of the Paterian ‘reaction against Victorian manners’, and
of perpetuating the ‘suffocating atmosphere’ of ‘a very dim Venus-
berg indeed: but Venus has become an introverted matriarch,

1 Details of the critical books and articles referred to in this Introduction will
be found in the Bibliography.
2 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
brooding over a subterraneous “stream of consciousness” — a femi-
nine phenomenon after all...’ 4 Lewis’s attack has since been
supported by, among others, F. R. Leavis, who summed up the
‘Scrutineers’ ’ position with his dismissal in 1942 of her ‘sophisti-
cated aestheticism’; by D. S. Savage, who complained of the lack
of any ‘positively dynamic spiritual affirmation’ in her work; by
Graham Greene in his expression of dislike for Mrs Dalloway’s
whimsical subjectivity; and by Barbara Hardy in her attack on Mrs
Ramsay for being too like Mrs Dale and not enough like The
Wife of Bath or Molly Bloom. More sympathetic English criticism
reached a high level in the forties with David Daiches’s and Joan
Bennett’s excellent books, and the fifties produced two very dif-
ferent studies which have both had considerable influence. One
was the chapter in Auerbach’s A@imesis (translated into English in
1953), which arrived at an understanding of Virginia Woolf’s
significance through the analysis of a passage from To the Light-
house, and the other was J. K. Johnstone’s book The Bloomsbury
Group (1954), in which a close relationship is established between
the philosophy of G. E. Moore and the work of Virginia Woolf,
E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. But, although the publication
of 4 Writer’s Diary in 1953 enlarged the perspective of Virginia
Woolf’s critics, interest seemed to lapse in the late fifties and early
sixties, apart from a short but impressive reappraisal by A. D.
Moody in 1963 (which contains, in its final chapter, a splendid
demolition of the ‘Scrutineers’ ’ critical line). It was not until the
latter part of the sixties, well after the publication of Leonard
Woolt’s Autobiography, that the fascination with Bloomsbury and
with Virginia Woolf began to grow, in America as well as in
England. It was fed by the publication of Holroyd’s biography of
Lytton Strachey (1967-8), E. M. Forster’s Maurice (1971) and
Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf (1972). The spate of bio-
graphical and critical works culminated, in 1973, in the publication
of four full-length studies of Virginia Woolf (three of them Ameri-
can), a new collection of her short stories, and Nigel Nicolson’s
Portrait of a Marriage.
The activities of biography and criticism are reciprocal: Virginia
+ Wyndham Lewis, Men without Art (London, Cassell, 1934), Ch. V,
pp. 158-71.
 Introduction 2
Woolf’s novels seem to have become more interesting, and are more
widely read, because of the vogue for Bloomsbury. But what makes
Bloomsbury intriguing has not, perhaps, really very much to do with
what makes Virginia Woolf an important novelist.
Bloomsbury follows the tendency of many English intellectuals
and artists to form themselves, however loosely, into groups. In the
last century alone, the Lake Poets, the Oxford Movement, the
Clapham Sect and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood provide widely
differing examples of the same process. Interest in such groups is
usually partly historical, partly intellectual and partly sexual. There
is obviously a comparison to be drawn between the vogue for the
PRB and for Bloomsbury, which is the latest of such groups to
have become sufficiently distant in time to bear analysis and com-
mentary. It is entertaining to discover who was sleeping with whom
and what they said about it, in a group of more or less talented,
intelligent and malicious people, which ranged (taking ‘Blooms-
bury’ in its very widest sense) from the aristocratic goings-on of
Ottoline Morrell and Vita Sackville-West to the bohemian life of
the Slade. The perspective of the seventies on the interbellum years
has the advantage of a recently acquired historical aloofness. ‘Those
sexual permutations out of which Michael Holroyd, Nigel Nicolson
and others make such lively capital win our interest (and even our
applause) as particularly clear manifestations of a reaction against
Victorian manners, in a circle which largely drew its antecedents
from the intellectual artistocracy of the nineteenth century. Blooms-
bury’s selfconscious ideal of a sexual revolution (perhaps more talked
about than practised) is summed up by Lytton Strachey (of course),
in a characteristic piece of Bloomsburian bravado:

Obviously Victorianism had incapacitated him [Henry Sidg-

wick]. ‘What an appalling time to have lived!’ Lytton
exclaimed in horror. ‘It was the Glass Case Age. Themselves
as well as their ornaments, were left under glass cases. Their
refusal to face any fundamental question fairly — either about
people or God — looks at first sight like cowardice; but I
believe it was simply the result of an innate incapacity for
penetration — for getting either out of themselves or into any-
thing or anybody else. They were enclosed in glass. How
4 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
intolerable! Have you noticed, too, that they were nearly all
physically impotent? — Sidgwick himself, Matthew Arnold,
Jowett, Leighton, Ruskin, Watts. It’s damned difficult to
copulate through a glass case.”
Copulation as an expression of liberation from Victorian hypocrisy
took predominantly homosexual forms, from Lytton Strachey’s or
Vita Sackville-West’s outspoken pursuits of their ideal passions, to
Forster’s or Virginia Woolf’s more tentative and reticent emotional
preferences. At the same time, Bloomsbury developed strongly
matriarchal characteristics. The masculine ambience of Cambridge
in which it had its origins was much changed by the London
influence of the Stephen sisters. Vanessa Bell at Charleston, Car-
rington at the Mill House and at Ham Spray, and Ottoline Morrell
‘murmuring on buggery’? at Bedford Square or at Garsington,
created an atmosphere in which their friends and lovers (who
included many of the most important intellectual figures of the
time) could thrive. Bloomsbury has not for this reason been hailed
as a precursor of the woman’s movement, but there is nevertheless
a link between the interest in its sexual and social organization, and
the recent enshrinement of Virginia Woolf, not only as a leading
member of the Bloomsbury Group, but also as a dedicated feminist.
This byway in the criticism of her works has been pursued,
following Herbert Marder’s lively book Feminism and Art(1968), in
three recent critical studies. James Naremore, Nancy Topping Bazin
and Alice van Buren Kelley concentrate on the dichotomy expressed
in Virginia Woolf’s work between two kinds of life. Naremore (much
the best of the three critics) defines these as the masculine, ego-
ridden, assertive, factual world of the self and the amorphous,
creative, feminine, intuitive world without a self. Bazin, in a book
called Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision, distinguishes more
crudely between the masculine and feminine type of experience and
relates them to the two stages of Virginia Woolf’s mental illnesses,
mania (feminine) and depression (masculine). She suggests that the
experiences Virginia Woolf underwent in her ‘manic’ phases were
* Lytton Strachey to Maynard Keynes, 1906, quoted Michael Holroyd, Lytton
Strachey: A Biography (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1971), p. 312.
2 Ibid. p. 627.
 Introduction 5

creatively productive. Kelley describes the conflict in the novels

between ‘fact and vision’ — between, again, the masculine and the
feminine point of view.
Following this type of criticism, a table might be drawn up to
categorize the dualities in Virginia Woolf’s novels, thus:
Masculine Feminine
Intellect Intuition
Fact Vision
Day Night
Waking Dreaming
Words Silence
Society Solitude
Clock time Consciousness time
Realism Impressionism
Opaqueness ‘Transparency
Land Water
and so on — the elements in the two columns being fused in the
androgynous mind. This does to some extent describe the business
of the novels. But to centre a criticism of Virginia Woolf entirely
on these dualities provides a rather narrow perspective. Taken to
extremes, criticism of Virginia Woolf which is emphatically feminist
cannot get very far with any of the fiction, except perhaps Orlando.
Kate Millett’s attempt at criticism, for example, gives up uneasily,
betraying a lack of sympathy for the tone and content of the novels:
Virginia Woolf glorified two housewives, Mrs Dalloway and
Mrs Ramsay, recorded the suicidal misery of Rhoda in The
Waves without ever explaining its causes, and was argumenta-
tive yet somehow unsuccessful, perhaps because unconvinced,
in conveying the frustrations of the woman artist in Lily
Briscoe. Only in 4 Room of One’s Own, essay rather than
fiction, could she describe what she knew.!
The reasons for reading Virginia Woolf do not make themselves
felt in that critique. As fuel for the women’s movement, or as

1 Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London, Hart-Davis, 1971; Abacus, 1972),

Pp» 139—40-
6 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
fictionalized versions of the ethics of Bloomsbury, her novels are
of very limited significance, though, paradoxically, their recent
popularity arises largely from those two centres of interest.
It is not enough to judge Virginia Woolf’s work in terms of its
affinity with Bloomsbury’s atmosphere and attitudes, if only for the
reason that such an emphasis leaves out of count the important
positive influence of Leslie Stephen. The sense of moral responsi-
bility which characterizes her achievement owes as much to her
father as it does to Bloomsbury. In fact, as Noel Annan points out
in his fine book on Stephen, there is some similarity between
Bloomsbury’s aesthetic revolution against Victorianism and
Stephen’s rationalist departure from Evangelicism. Both set them-
selves courageously and honestly against the traditions in which
they had been brought up; but both were influenced by the idea of
Election, though grace, in their eyes, came through reason rather
than faith. Both used the eighteenth century as a model; and both
were engaged in the pursuit of the true. In Leslie Stephen’s philo-
sophical, biographical and critical work there is a sense of duty
which forges a link between the beliefs of the Clapham Sect and
the ideals of Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf:
Unable to remould the scheme of things nearer to his heart’s
desire, the rationalist labours on, now in this vineyard and in
that, striving to bring order into one small corner of the chaos
which surrounds him and to which he inescapably belongs.
The belief that order can be created, and the realisation that
his own efforts will change little in the world, are the two
central facts in his experience that dignify and ennoble him.+
‘The mixture of desolation and effort which Annan characterizes
here, though it reminds us of the absurd side of Mr Ramsay, also
has relevance for Virginia Woolf’s own achievements. She was, it
is true, in revolt against her father’s personal characteristics — his
male aggression and tyranny, his violent opposition to the morbid
and the effeminate, and his idealization of the domesticated woman.
Her discomfort under those pressures and assumptions went on
being expressed in her fictional and non-fictional works long after
+ Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to his Time
(London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1951), p. 284.
 Introduction G,
Leslie Stephen’s death. The stifling oppressiveness of the patriarchal
Victorian family life (which she so often summed up by the image
of a certain sort of room) had to be escaped from over and over
again. In that reiterated rejection itself there is evidence of Leslie
Stephen’s influence on the material of her novels. Though Lytton
Strachey’s portrait is drawn several times, most obviously in her
first novel, and Night and Day is said by Bell to be inspired by
Vanessa Bell’s life at Wissett with Duncan Grant,! the later novels
found far more potent sources in her memories of her family, child-
hood and adolescence. And, though there can be no doubt that Mr
Ramsay is in many ways a hostile portrait, it also expresses admira-
tion and respect. Virginia Woolf was intellectually in debt to her
father as much as she was emotionally oppressed by him. Not only
were his friends - Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, Henry
James — some of the most important of the nineteenth-century
English writers; not only had he married into Thackeray’s family;
he also provided a generous literary education, which consisted of
‘allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unex-
purgated library’.?
And more than this, his interest in the character of an age as an
essential part of the biography of individuals, the humour and ele-
gance of much of his literary criticism, and the scrupulousness of his
literary judgements, have a great deal in common, both in attitudes
and methods, with Virginia Woolf’s critical and theoretical work.
Literature represents all the reasonings and feelings and pas-
sions of civilized men in all ages. .. . To select any particular
variety as best for all is as absurd to say that every man ought
to be a priest or that every man ought to be a soldier. But this
I may say, Take hold anywhere, read what you really like and
not what someone tells you that you ought to like; let your
reading be part of your lives.?
After all, what laws can be laid down about books? [. . .] To
admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into
See p. 62 below, note r. 2 ‘Leslie Stephen’ (1932), CE IV, p. 79.
o Leslie Stephen, “Ihe Study of English Literature’ (1887), Men, Books and
Mountains: Essays by Leslie Stephen, collected S. O. Ullmann (London,
Hogarth Press, 1956), p. 43.
8 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read,
what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit
of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries.
Her faith in enlightened independent judgement is evidently an
inherited one. Similarly, Virginia Woolf’s attempts to empathize
with the characteristics of a historical period or a literary personality
in order to understand them owe a good deal to Leslie Stephen’s
biographical and critical methods:
No human being was ever more acutely sensitive to the
opinions of the day than Pope... The Rape of the Lock, the
Dunctad ... first take their true colouring when you know
the people for whom they were written; when you have a
clear vision of Queen Anne ‘taking sometimes counsel and
sometimes tea’ at Hampton Court, quarrelling with the
Duchess of Marlborough, and going to meet Harley at Mrs
Masham’s; when you can elect yourself a member of Addi-
son’s ‘little senate’, where Steele, listening reverentially over
his cups, and Budgell and Tickell and namby-pamby Philips
are sitting around in rapt admiration, or follow the great man
to Holland House and watch him writing a Spectator and
revolving round two foci, each marked by a bottle of port...
or drive over with Pope himself in a chariot to sit with Boling-
broke under a haystack and talk bad metaphysics in a pasture
painted with spades and rakes; or let his waterman row you up
from Westminster stairs to see his garden and present a crystal
for his grotto, and talk to Gay and Swift till your host says,
‘Gentlemen, | leave you to your wine,’ and leaves three of you
to finish the pint from which he has deducted two glasses.”
That lively, undemanding, impressionistic piece is quite close in
character to Virginia Woolf’s whimsical and fantastic review (in
the form of a conversation) of the Recollections of Lady Georgiana
Peel:
Lord and Lady John were resting under an oak tree in
Richmond Park when Lord John remarked how pleasant it
1 “How Should One Read a Book?’ (1926), CE II, p. t.
? Leslie Stephen, op. cit., p. 30.
 Introduction 9
would be to live in that white house behind the palings for the
rest of their lives. No sooner said than the owner falls ill and
dies. The Queen, with that unfailing insight, etc., sends for
Lord John, etc., and offers him the lodge for life, etc., etc.,
etc. I mean they lived happily ever after, though as time went
by, a factory chimney somewhat spoilt the view. Fudith: And
Lady Georgiana? 4un: Well, there’s not much about Lady
Georgiana. She saw the Queen having her hair brushed,
and she went to stay at Woburn. And what d’you think they
did there? They threw mutton chops out of the window
‘for whoever cared to pick them up.’ And each guest had
a piece of paper by his plate ‘in which to wrap up an eat-
able for the people waiting outside.’ Fudith: Mutton chops!
People waiting outside! nn: Ah, now the charm begins to
work.
The point of departure, as well as the points of comparison, make
themselves felt. Virginia Woolf’s passage is also trying to get ‘under
the skin’ of the period, but it picks out for emphasis the odd, the
unexpected and the grotesque, instead of the central and the decora-
tive, in pursuance of her belief that we should not assume ‘that life
exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than what is
commonly thought small’.2 The sense of fun and the spirited, easy
tone which are on display in ‘A Talk about Memoirs’ distinguish
her critical work from her father’s, which has a more authoritative
and conventional tone. Here the influence of Bloomsbury does
make itself felt, however peripheral it may be in her novels. In her
journalism and her essays it is important. She shares a tone of voice,
part conversational, part erudite, but never quite without the saving
grace (or, in some cases, the fatal irresoluteness) of irony, which
can be found in works as various as Strachey’s Eminent Victorians
(1918), Roger Fry’s Vision and Design (1920) and Forster’s essay
‘What I Believe’ (1939). The tone is used to set, without aggres-
sion, a civilized, liberated personal judgement against prevailing con-
ventions which seem to the writers outmoded, hypocritical or
repressive. It is informed, but not laborious; humorous, but not
1 ‘A Talk about Memoirs’ (1920), CE IV, p. 217.
2 “Modern Fiction’ (1919), CE II, p. 107.
IO The Novels of Virginia Woolf
trivial. Practised at an inferior level, as in Clive Bell’s Civilization,
it is extremely smug and offensive:
To point the road is the task of the few. Neither guides nor
lecturers these, the highly civilized, will merely live their
lives; and living will be seen to have pleasures and desires . . .
different from those of the busy multitude. By living passively
they become the active promoters of good. For when it begins
to appear that the few have discovered intense and satisfying
delights which have escaped the notice of the less inquisitive
and less gifted pleasure-seekers, the many will begin to wonder.
They will wonder whether there may not be pleasures better
than their own. Can art and thought, the play of wit and
fancy, and the subtler personal relations really mean more to
these odd people than racing, yachting, hunting, football,
cinemas and whisky?
That is Bloomsbury at its very worst. But those easy manners,
used for more interesting ends, were nevertheless a perfect tool for
Virginia Woolf’s essays, particularly when she is being humorous.
You who come of a younger and happier generation may not
have heard of her — you may not know what I mean by The
Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She
was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She
was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family
life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took
the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it — in short she was
so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own,
but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes
of others. Above all — I need not say it — she was pure. Her
purity was supposed to be her chief virtue — her blushes, her
great grace. In those days — the last of Queen Victoria — every
house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered
her with the very first words.?
Still, the memory of talking about Marivaux to George Eliot
on a Sunday afternoon was not a romantic memory. It
1 Clive Bell, Civilization (London, Chatto and Windus, 1928), pp. 209-10.
2 ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), CE II, p. 285.
 Introduction II
had faded with the passage of years. It had not become
picturesque.*
In short, the only place in the mansion of literature that is
assigned her [Mrs Browning] is downstairs in the servants’
quarters, where, in company with Mrs Hemans, Eliza Cook,
Jean Ingelow, Alexander Smith, Edwin Arnold, and Robert
Montgomery, she bangs the crockery about and eats vast
handfuls of peas on the point of her knife.?
That witty and irreverent tone is characteristic of Bloomsbury,
and in Virginia Woolf’s case, as in Forster’s and Strachey’s, it is
misleading. The fun is for a purpose. Strachey’s refashioning of
historical biography and Forster’s morality of personal relationships
are serious matters, made acceptable to their audience by a decep-
tively agreeable, light presentation. Virginia Woolf is a very good
literary critic, erudite, perceptive and thoughtful, particularly in her
criticism of English, French and Russian novelists. If she had
written no novels, she would have a place in twentieth-century
letters as a considerable essayist. The fun at the expense of those
who talk solemnly about George Eliot or Mrs Browning is the
froth on the surface of a sound and wide-ranging literary judgement.
And, though her non-fictional work amalgamates the high standards
of Leslie Stephen with the ease and wit of Bloomsbury, it is at the
same time idiosyncratic and distinctive. Her most valuable literary
judgements work through images, which link the technique of the
essays to those of the novels, as in this commentary on Mansfield
Park:
Here is nothing out of the way; it is midday in Northampton-
shire; a dull young man is talking to rather a weakly young
woman on the stairs as they go up to dress for dinner, with
housemaids passing. But, from triviality, from commonplace,
their words become suddenly full of meaning, and the moment
for both one of the most memorable in their lives. It fills itself;
it shines; it glows; it hangs before us, deep, trembling, serene
for a second; next, the housemaid passes, and this drop, in
1 “George Eliot’ (1919), CE I, p. 196.
2 ‘Aurora Leigh (1931), CE I, pp. 209-10.
 12 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
which all the happiness of life has collected, gently subsides
again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary
existence.
The passage reveals the difference between Leslie Stephen’s
nineteenth-century rational discursiveness and Virginia Woolf’s
modernist effort to encapsulate truth in figures of speech.

Virginia Woolf’s contribution to modernism is an important one.

The term is most easily defined through examples, as by Frank
Kermode in “The Modern’ when he says that ‘on the whole,
everybody knows what is meant by modern literature, modern art,
modern music. The words suggest Joyce, Picasso, Schoenberg, or
Stravinsky — the experiments of two or more generations back.’ ?
Elsewhere in the same essay Kermode fixes the ‘peak period’ of the
modernist ‘movement’ as ‘somewhere around 1910-1925’.3 A
similar kind of definition through example occurs in an article by
Richard Wasson, who describes ‘the literature we call modern’ as
‘the literature represented in English by Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce,
in French by Proust, in German by Hesse’. Other names —
Lawrence, Kafka, Gide, Musil, Pound, Stein — might be invoked.
But such descriptions of modernism, though suggestive rather than
definitive, do imply that the ‘movement’ has some recognizable
common denominators. It is associated with the first third of this
century. It applies to different art forms. It is experimental. And
it is international — one of the marked characteristics of modernism
being its crossing of cultural boundaries, for instance in the exodus
of writers from America to France and England.
-
‘Jane Austen’ (1923), CE I, pp. 150-1.
wv
Frank Kermode, “The Modern’ (1956), reprinted in Modern Essays (London,
Collins, 1971), pp. 65-6. For further definition, discussion and examples of
modernism, see Richard Ellmann and Charles Fiedelson (eds), Te Modern
Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1965), and Cyril Connolly (ed.), One
Hundred Key Books from England, France and America 1880-1950 (London,
André Deutsch and Hamish Hamilton, 1965).
Kermode, op. cit. p. 42.
hoRichard Wasson, “Notes on a New Sensibility’, Partisan Review, Vol. XXXVI
(1969), pp. 460-77. Quoted by William A. Johnsen in “Towards a Re-
definition of Modernism’, Boundary 2, Vol. II, No. 3 (Spring 1974), p. 542.
 Introduction 13
Definitions of literary modernism (particularly when the modern
is being contrasted with the avant-garde or the contemporary) very
often emphasize the two aspects with which Virginia Woolf herself
was most concerned in her comments on modern fiction. First,
modernism is usually described as a response to an era whose political
and social developments invited nihilism, scepticism and despair;
an era thus described in 1929:
The structures which are variously known as mythology,
religion, and philosophy, and which are alike in that each has
as its function the interpretation of experience in terms which
have human values, have collapsed under the force of successive
attacks and shown themselves utterly incapable of assimilating
the new stores of experience which have been dumped upon
the world. With increasing completeness science maps out the
pattern of nature, but the latter has no relation to the pattern
of human needs and feelings.1
If modernism has ‘a persistent world-view’, Kermode writes, ‘it is
one we should have to call apocalyptic’.2, Modern literature is, then,
an attempt to create in an environment hostile to order and faith —
and, it seemed after 1914, to life itself. Second, it is often pointed
out that there is an intimate relationship between the ‘apocalyptic’
world view of modernism and the form of its repeated efforts to
‘make it new’. The experiments of the modernists were very largely
(and very minutely) concerned with form, as though, by an inten-
sive ordering process of a kind not before attempted, the chaotic
universe might be mastered. Thus Kermode finds ‘a kind of formal
desperation’ in the ‘great experimental novels of early modernism’.?
Through elaborate structuring, through allusion and literary
references — the fusion of ‘tradition and the individual talent’ —
through images and through myths, the modern writer expressed
‘a yearning to pierce through the messy phenomenal world to some
perfect and necessary form and order’.*
1 Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper (New York, Harcourt Brace and
World, 1929; Harvest Books, 1956), p. 9.
2 Kermode, op. cit. p. 40. 3 Ibid. p. 48.
4 William A. Johnsen, op. cit. pp. 541-2. Johnsen is here paraphrasing Iris
Murdoch’s criticism of modern literature, in ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful
Revisited’, Yale Review, Vol. XLIX (1959), pp. 247-71-
14 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf is a remarkable, though not a major figure in
this ‘movement’. None of her novels has the stature or scope of
Proust or of Conrad, of Joyce’s Ulysses or of Lawrence’s The
Rainbow. She is, with Forster, in the second rank of twentieth-
century novelists. Her imaginative territory is strictly demarcated
by her social environment, her intellectual inheritance, her mental
instability! and her sexual reserve. Yet no other English novelist of
the period combined the theoretical analysis of the requirements for
the modern novel with a continuing attempt, in every new work,
to match her vision of reality with its appropriate form.
That she is aware of herself as being part of a movement is
clear from her brilliant statements on the future of the modern
novel. (found essentially in ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925), ‘Mr Bennett
and Mrs Brown’ (1924) and “The Narrow Bridge of Art’ (1927))
which dominate her reputation as an essayist. The most frequently
quoted paragraph of her writing is reinvoked not only as an illustra-
tion of her own methods but as a central comment on modernism:
Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day.
The mind receives a myriad impressions — trivial, fantastic,
evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all
sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms;
and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Mon-
day or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the
moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a
writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what
he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his
own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot,
no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the
Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig-
lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-
transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of
consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to
convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed
Spirits .7
1 See p. 95-6 below.
2 “Modern Fiction’ CE II, p. 106.
 Introduction 15
The passage has suffered from being too much quoted. Out of its
historical context it does not seem a very convincing definition of
what the novel should do; nor is it an entirely accurate summing
up of her own achievements and intentions. In spite of the fluid
structure of the novels, which creates the movement of intangible
consciousnesses rather than of visible appearances or large-scale
destinies, there is nevertheless a foundation of ‘plot’, ‘comedy’ and
‘tragedy’ which unites, in her best work, solidity with the ‘lumin-
us’. But for all this the message of ‘Modern Fiction’ was apt and
useful in 1919, expressing exactly the Bergsonian! feeling of the
time, in arts and in letters, that to think in terms of a fixed identity
and of a common reality was no longer possible. The images with
which she expresses this idea do double duty. They establish her
idea of true reality; but in doing so they also reject, by implication,
a whole tradition of literature. The lamps of a horse-drawn car-
riage and the buttons sewn by the Bond Street tailor suggest the
material as well as the methods of the Victorian and Edwardian
novel. The images that replace those figures of realism are cun-
ningly chosen so as to have an air of scientific modernity, and, also,
so as to seem intangible: the atoms, the luminous halo and the semi-
transparent envelope are visual references which have, however, a
vague and shapeless quality.
The antithesis in ‘Modern Fiction’ between representational
scenes and amorphous shapes bears a marked resemblance to Roger
Fry’s theories of art. His preference for post-impressionist painters
over a realist such as Sargent is analogous to Virginia Woolf’s
rejection of Bennett, Galsworthy and Wells in favour of the
‘Georgians’ — Forster, Lawrence, Joyce, Strachey, Eliot, Dorothy
Richardson, In her biography of Roger Fry (1940) she quotes his
description of Sargent’s portrait of the Duke of Portland, which
anticipates the distinction she makes in Between the Acts between
portraits and pictures:
‘First the collie dog which the Duke caresses has one lock of
very white hair; secondly the Duke’s boots are so polished that
they glitter; thirdly the Duke’s collar is very large and very
stiffly starched; fourthly the Duke was when he stood for his
1 See further, p. 111, n. 3, below.
16 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
portrait sunburnt. After that we might come to the Duke
himself,’ But by the time he came to the Duke himself [he]
is so ‘deadened by the fizz and crackle of Mr Sargent’s brush
work that (he) can see nothing’.?
The grounds for dislike are exactly the same as in Virginia Woolf’s
criticism of how Mr Bennett would treat Mrs Brown:
Mr Bennett, alone of the Edwardians, would keep his eyes in
the carriage. He, indeed, would observe every detail with
immense care. He would notice the advertisements; the pic-
tures of Swanage and Portsmouth; the way in which the
cushion bulged between the buttons; how Mrs Brown wore a
brooch which had cost three-and-ten-three at Whitworth’s
bazaar; and had mended both gloves — indeed the thumb of
the left-hand glove had been replaced.?
What is to be set against this engrossment in ‘childish problems of
photographic representation? (The phrase is Fry’s.)? Fry and
Virginia Woolf have the same answer: not illusion, but another
reality; not imitation, but equivalence. The work of art must
create, through form, its own terms for truth. Roger Fry tries to
explain this in his Introduction to the catalogue of the second Post-
Impressionist exhibition of 1912 (which contained works by
Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Lhéte, Braque, and the English
artists Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, Spencer Gore, Eric Gill and
Wyndham Lewis):
These artists [. . .] do not seek to give what can, after all, be
but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the con-
viction of a new and definite reality. They do not seek to
imitate form, but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find
an equivalent for life. By that I mean that they wish to make
images which by the clearness of their logical structure, and by
their closely-knit unity of texture, shall appeal to our disin-
terested and contemplative imagination with something of the
same vividness as the things of actual life appeal to our
1 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (1940), pp. 110-11.
2 “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), CE I, p. 328.
3 Roger Fry, p. 164.
 Introduction iy
practical activities. In fact they aim not at illusion but at
reality. +
He expands the argument in a letter written in 1913 to P. J.
Atkins, a Leicester water-colourist:
The reality of a picture is immensely greater if the spectator
is not referred back by illusion to a possible exterior reality
(which is stronger and more real) but is held within the reality
of the artistic creation by its sheer necessity and intensity of
unity.?
It is no accident, then, that Virginia Woolf dated the change in
‘human character’ which called for a new kind of literature as
taking place in December 1910 — the date of Roger Fry’s first
Post-Impressionist exhibition — nor that in her thoughts on litera-
ture she frequently employs analogies with painting.? But Virginia
Woolf goes further than Roger Fry when she relates modernism
in the arts to the emotional, social and intellectual climate of the
1gtos. The need for the creation of a new reality, not through
‘photographic representation’ but through ‘necessitated form’,* is a
need created by the conditions of existence. When she talks of a
change taking place in December 1910 she is talking about a
change in life rather than in art, as she makes humorously clear:
In life one can see the change, if I may use a homely illustra-
tion, in the character of one’s cook. The Victorian cook lived
like a leviathan in the lower depths, formidable, silent, obscure,
inscrutable; the Georgian cook is a creature of sunshine and
fresh air; in and out of the drawing-room, now to borrow the
Daily Herald, now to ask advice about a hat.>
This may seem too bland and cosy to be taken seriously. But it
presents the lighthearted side of the difficult and unsettling nature
1 Tbid. pp. 177-8.
2 Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton (London, Chatto and Windus, 1972),
Vol. I, p. 364.
3 See Chapter 4, pp. 92-3 below, for her correspondence with the painter Jacques
Raverat; see “Walter Sickert’ (1933), CE II, pp. 233-44; and see Lily Briscoe
in To the Lighthouse.
4 Letters of Roger Fry, p. 364.
5 “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, CE I, p. 320.
18 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
of twentieth-century life, which must be taken seriously, and for
which the artist has a public duty to find some fitting expres-
sion:
The mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emo-
tions. That the age of the earth is 3,000,000,000 years; that
human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human
mind is nevertheless boundless; that life is infinitely beautiful
yet repulsive; that one’s fellow creatures are adorable but dis-
gusting; that science and religion have between them destroyed
belief; that all bonds of union seem broken, yet somehow
control must exist — it is in this atmosphere of doubt and
conflict that writers have now to create [.. .]}
The old confidence in a general, recognizable perspective on life
and character has vanished. There is indeed some envy and wist-
fulness in the tone in which Virginia Woolf looks back on the
literature of an empiricist universe:
In both [Scott and Jane Austen] there is the same natural
conviction that life is of a certain quality. They have their
judgment of conduct. They know the relations of human
beings towards each other and towards the universe [.. .]
Certainty of that kind is the condition which makes it
possible to write. To believe that your impressions hold good
for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement
of personality.”
But there should be no pretending that that comfortable perspec-
tive remains. The idea of life and character presented in the
Edwardian novel is, according to Virginia Woolf, a fraudulent
attempt to sustain a fixed idea of reality under inappropriate con-
ditions. Paradoxical though it may seem to call her a more realistic
novelist than H. G. Wells, that is the response she demands. Her
idea of modernism was that it must pursue the expression of a
reality more true to post-war sensibilities. A settled point of view,
chronological continuity, and the idea that one can say of anyone
1 “The Narrow Bridge of Art’ (1927), CE II, p. 219.
2 ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923), CE II, p. 159.
 Introduction 19
‘that they were this or were that’! will no longer do. ‘Georgian’
writers have already learned — from Sterne, from Meredith, from
the Russian novelists and above all from Proust — that the soul is
‘streaked, variegated, all of a mixture’,? and that if it is to be
accurately ‘translated’ into literature, we must learn to ‘tolerate the
spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure’.
I use the word ‘translated’ because it is the word which Proust
uses in the antithesis drawn in Time Regained between photo-
graphic realism and true reality.
If reality were indeed a sort of waste product of experience,
more or less identical for each one of us, since when we speak
of bad weather, a war, a taxi rank, a brightly lit restaurant, a
garden full of flowers, everybody knows what we mean, if
reality were no more than this, no doubt a sort of cinemato-
graph film of these things would be sufficient and the ‘style’,
the ‘literature’ that departed from the simple data that they
provide would be superfluous and artificial. But was it true
that reality was no more than this? If I tried to understand
what actually happens at the moment when a thing makes
some particular impression upon me — on the day, for instance,
when as I crossed the bridge over the Vivonne the shadow of
a cloud upon the water had made me cry: ‘Damn!’ and jump
for joy; or the occasion when, hearing a phrase of Bergotte’s,
all that I had disengaged from my impression was the not
specially relevant remark: ‘How splendid!’; or the words I
had once heard Bloch use in exasperation at some piece of bad
behaviour, words quite inappropriate to a very commonplace
incident, ‘I must say that that sort of conduct seems to me
absolutely fffantastic!’; or that evening when, flattered at the
politeness which the Guermantes had shown to me as their
guest and also a little intoxicated by the wines which I had
drunk in their house, I could not help saying to myself half
aloud as I came away alone: “They really are delightful people

1 Mrs Dalloway, p. 10.

2 ‘Street Haunting’ (1927), CE IV, p. 161. (Dated in CE 1930, but first printed
Yale Review, October 1927.)
3 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, CE I, p. 337.
20 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
and I should be happy to see them every day of my life’ — I
realised that the words in each case were a long way removed
from the impressions that I or Bloch had in fact received. So
that the essential, the only true book, though in the ordinary
sense of the word it does not have to be ‘invented’ by a great
writer — for it exists already in each one of us — has to be
translated by him. The function and the task of a writer are
those of a translator.?
Though it is complex, humorous and analytical of social experience
in a manner foreign to Virginia Woolf, the passage can nevertheless
be compared to the flimsier, more abstract statement of a similar
idea in ‘Street Haunting”:
But what could be more absurd? It is, in fact, on the stroke of
six; It is a winter’s evening; we are walking to the Strand to
buy a pencil. How, then, are we also on a balcony, wearing
pearls in Junet What could be more absurd? Yet it is nature’s
folly, not ours. When she set about her chief masterpiece, the
making of man, she should have thought of one thing only.
Instead, turning her head, looking over her shoulder, into
each one of us she let creep instincts and desires which are
utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked,
variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run. Is the true
self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that
which bends over the balcony in June??
Virginia Woolf is describing the coexistence of different states of
mind inhabiting an apparently fixed personality; Proust is describing
the imbalance between response and actuality. But both imply that
reality is not fixed; it is not the same to each person, nor does each
person partake of that sameness and fixedness. Though Virginia
Woolf (however much in debt to Proust) may not have been
directly influenced by that passage from Time Regained, it does,
however, become clear from the comparison that she was, and felt
herself to be, part of a movement. Two excellent critics, one
1 Marcel Proust (translated Andreas Mayor), Time Regained, Vol. 12 of
Remembrance of Things Past (London, Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 255
(first published as Le Temps retrouvé in 1927).
2 ‘Street Haunting’, CE-IV, p. 161.
 Introduction 21
writing on Virginia Woolf and one on Proust, have useful com-
ments here:
A shift in emphasis followed; and now many writers present
minor happenings, which are insignificant as exterior factors
in a person’s destiny, for their own sake or rather as points of
departure for the development of motifs... This shift in
emphasis expresses something that we might call a transfer of
confidence: the great exterior turning points and blows of fate
are granted less importance; they are credited with less power
of yielding decisive information concerning the subject; on the
other hand there is confidence that in any random fragment
plucked from the course of a life at any time the totality of its
fate is contained and can be portrayed.
As the novel form has developed beyond the description of a
deterministic environment towards the inner reality of the
self, it has necessarily shifted its techniques of presentation.
The fetish of point of view in fiction corresponds to an aware-
ness of the self as the source of meaning, of significance in
experience. The style of writing known as stream of conscious-
ness consists in pure point of view, no other order than that of
the self struggling to reach the core of feeling (or to escape
from it) in each successive moment.”
The comparison with Proust, and these two general statements
about the modern novel, show that Virginia Woolf was not work-
ing alone. Even Tarrrence. who was not at all in sympathy with
anything that came out of Bloomsbury, shared some of Virginia
Woolf’s ideas about life and the novel:
The universe is like Father Ocean; a stream of all things
slowly moving. We move, and the rock of ages moves. And
since we move and move for ever, in no discernible direction,
there is no centre to the movement, to us. To us, the centre
shifts at every moment . . . 4/lons! there is no road before us!
1 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (1946), translated Willard Trask (Princeton, NJ,
Princeton University Press, 1953; New York, Anchor Books, 1957), pp. 483-4.
2 Roger Shattuck, Proust's Binoculars (London, Chatto and Windus, 1964),
p- 68,
 22 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
There is nothing to do but to maintain a true relationship
to the things we move with and amongst and against.!
The novel, he feels, must change to accommodate this Bergsonian
sense of flux.
“You can put anything you like in a novel. So why do people
always go on putting the same thing? Why is the vol au vent
always chicken!’ So wrote Lawrence in 1925... “Tell
Arnold Bennett,’ he once wrote to his literary agent, ‘that all
rules of construction hold good only for novels that are copies
of other novels.’ 2
These statements illuminate Virginia Woolf’s otherwise rather
surprising feeling about Lawrence, that ‘he and I have too much
in common’.? Nevertheless she found his novels hard to read. In
fact she was not entirely in sympathy with the ‘crashing and
destruction’* being carried out by any of the other ‘Georgian’
modernists. 4 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1917) and the
early chapters of Ulysses had a very powerful influence on Virginia
Woolf, and their appearance coincided with the major change in
her style between 1919 and 1922. She felt that Joyce’s concern ‘at
all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which
flashes its messages through the brain’ * marked an extremely
important development in fiction. But, in spite of her belief that
‘any method is right, every method is right, that expresses what we
wish to express, if we are writers’,° Joyce made her uneasy. She
found him distasteful — she was ‘irritated and disillusioned by a
queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’ 7 — and she felt that
his narrative method was too self-regarding. It ‘never embraces or
creates what is outside itself and beyond’,® leaving one inside the

1 D. H. Lawrence, ‘Art and Morality’, Phoenix, ed. E.D. MacDonald (London,

Heinemann, 1936; reprinted 1961), p. 525.
2 David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World (University of Chicago
Press, 1960), p. 140.
AWD, 2 October 1932, pp. 187-8.
‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, CE I, p. 334.
‘Modern Fiction’, CZ II, p. 107. 6 Ibid. p. 108.
wu
&w
a
AWD, 16 August 1922, p. 47. 8 “Modern Fiction’, p. 108.
 Introduction 23

‘damned egotistical self’! Again, in considering Dorothy Richard-

son’s gargantuan stream of consciousness novel, Pilgrimage, she is
disappointed, because, when we are given up to the consciousness
of Miriam Henderson, ‘we should perceive in the helter-skelter of
flying fragments some unity, significance, or design’ but instead
“Things look much the same as ever.’?
By the 1930s she was faced with a different sort of difficulty.
Her experimentation seemed to have outlasted the period with
which it had most in common, The ‘Georgian’ movement had
petered out, and, as Bell remarks, the adversaries and the collabora-
tors she had cited in 1924 had (with the exception of H. G. Wells)
either stopped living or stopped writing:
The English novelists of roughly her own generation were
Compton Mackenzie, Aldous Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Hugh
Walpole, David Garnett and Rose Macaulay; they none of
them seemed to be carrying forward the revolution which, in
1924, she had believed to be imminent. Having lost both her
adversaries and her collaborators she stood very much alone.
But her sense of isolation did not prevent her from continuing to
carry out what she felt to be the task of the modern novelist.
Though her novels move from the treatment of youth to middle
age, and then from individuals to society, and though they experi-
ment with a wide variety of techniques — The Waves being as
different from To the Lighthouse as Between the Acts is from Night
and Day — they perpetually make an attempt to formulate and
express a true reality. In every novel we find a consistent and
energetic presentation of perception and experience, which invites
analogies between the conditions under which her characters feel
and live, and their creator’s idea of the nature of fiction. But the
mirror which allows manner to reflect matter, form to reflect
content, does not frame an aesthetic paradise. Her continual, self-
conscious struggle for an accurate rendering of life as she perceived
it is a struggle for mastery over the intractable and the chaotic,
both inside and outside the mind. These forces are never excluded:
1 AWD, 26 January 1920, p. 23.
2 Review of “The Tunnel’ (1919), Contemporary Writers (London, Hogarth
Press, 1965), pp. 140-1. 3 Bell II, p. 185.
24 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the characters, like the narrator, are always dealing with them.
Both are engaged in ‘an exacting form of intercourse’. Virginia
Woolf is often praised for sensitivity and lyricism and criticized for
ineffectuality and preciousness. There is truth on both sides, but
such praise and blame sidestep equally the determined pursuit of
control and authenticity which invigorates even the slightest of her
work, and makes her major achievements solid with integrity and
rich with inventiveness.

The nature of the achievement can be usefully defined by a minor

piece of work, a passage from a wartime short story called “The
Searchlight’, published for the first time in 4 Haunted House and
Other Stories in 1944.
In the half light, they could see that Mrs Ivimey was leaning
over the balcony, with her chin propped on her hands, as if she
were looking out over the moors from the top of a tower.
‘Nothing but moor and sky, moor and sky, for ever and
ever,’ she murmured.
Then she made a movement, as if she swung something
into position.
‘But what did the earth look like through the telescope?’
she asked.
She made another quick little movement with her fingers
as if she were twirling something.
‘He focussed it,’ she said. ‘He focussed it upon the earth.
He focussed it upon a dark mass of wood upon the horizon.
He focussed it so that he could see... each tree... each
tree separate .. . and the birds . . . rising and falling .. . and
a stem of smoke... there... in the midst of the trees...
And then ... lower... lower . . . (she lowered her eyes) .. .
there was a house... a house among the trees... a farm-
house . . . every brick showed . . . and the tubs on either side
of the door . . . with flowers in them blue, pink, hydrangeas,
perhaps . . .” She paused . . . “And then a girl came out of the
house... wearing something blue upon her head... and
stood there . . . feeding birds... . pigeons . . . they came flut-
1 To the Lighthouse, p. 180.
 Introduction 25
tering round her... And then... look... A man...A
man! He came round the corner. He seized her in his arms!
They kissed .. . they kissed.’
Mrs Ivimey opened her arms and closed them as if she were
kissing someone.
‘It was the first time he had seen a man kiss a woman — in
his telescope — miles and miles away across the moors!’
She thrust something from her — the telescope presumably.
She sat upright.
‘So he ran down the stairs. He ran through the fields. He
ran down lanes, out upon the high road, through woods. He
ran for miles and miles, and just when the stars were showing
above the trees he reached the house. . . covered with dust,
streaming with sweat...’
She stopped, as if she saw him.
‘And then, and then . . . what did he do then? What did he
say? And the girl . . .” they pressed her.
A shaft of light fell upon Mrs Ivimey as if someone had
focussed the lens of a telescope upon her. (It was the air force,
looking for enemy aircraft.) She had risen. She had something
blue on her head. She had raised her hand, as if she stood in a
doorway, amazed.
‘Oh, the girl . . . She was my —’ she hesitated, as if she were
about to say ‘myself.’ But she remembered; and corrected
herself. ‘She was my great-grandmother,’ she said.
She turned to look for her cloak. It was on a chair behind
her.
‘But tell us — what about the other man, the man who came
round the corner?’ they asked.
“That man? Oh, that man,’ Mrs Ivimey murmured, stoop-
ing to fumble with her cloak (the searchlight had left the
balcony), ‘he, I suppose, vanished.’
“The light,’ she added, gathering her things about her,
‘only falls here and there.’

Though not an outstanding achievement, the passage is char-

acteristic, in that it deals, by means of concentrating on two ‘spots
of time’, with the interplay between past and present in the human
26 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
consciousness. On a grander scale, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
and The Waves concern themselves with that interplay, providing
various but consistent answers to the question
What composed the present moment? If you are young, the
future lies upon the present like a piece of glass, making it
tremble and quiver. If you are old, the past lies upon the
present, like a thick glass, making it waver, distorting it. All
the same, everybody believes that the present is something,
seeks out the different elements in this situation in order to
compose the truth of it, the whole of it.*
‘In order to compose the truth of it.” The narrator of “The Search-
light’ orders and selects, shaping her sentences to resemble the action
of looking through a telescope, contrasting Mrs Ivimey’s hesitating,
fragmented recollections with the curt details of her present actions,
and creating a relationship betwen the past and the present by slight
emphases on, for instance, the colour blue. Within the story there
are three activities analogous to the narrator’s. There is the ray of
the searchlight, which, though impersonal and haphazard, and
associated with the harsh reality of the present, is still ironically
comparable to the other ‘rays’ in the story: Mrs Ivimey’s thoughts,
which concentrate on and select from her great-grandfather’s
experience in order to understand his life and his love; and his view
through the telescope, which shapes the blank, undifferentiated
waste of ‘moors and sky’ into a rich selection of ‘real’ detail, making
every brick show.
Mrs Ivimey’s narrative method is like the author’s, in that it
refuses to accommodate the ‘low atavistic’ response ‘And then?’,
which Forster, unlike Virginia Woolf, believes resignedly to be at
the back of all fiction.” Virginia Woolf—and Mrs Ivimey — attempt
1“The Moment: Summer’s Night’ (CE II, p. 293), published in The Moment
and Other Essays (London, Hogarth Press, 194.7). The date is unknown, but
Guiguet finds affinities between this sketch and The Waves, and suggests
that they date from the same period (Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her
Works, translated Jean Stewart (London, Hogarth Press, 1965), p. 289, note
415).
2 a — oh dear yes — the novel tells a story .. . The primitive audience was
an audience of shock-heads, gaping round the camp-fire, fatigued with
contending against the mammoth or the woolly rhinoceros, and only
 Introduction 27
to channel that primitive response into an aesthetic interest. The
story tells of the way Mrs Ivimey is telling the story — not of what
will happen to her great-grandfather. But human action makes
itself felt through the aesthetic experience. The man in the story
sees life through the telescope and then rushes out to possess it, so
becoming merged with it. Mrs Ivimey’s train of thought is also an
action. She goes out of herself in order to empathize with the man’s
experience (re-enacting, incidentally, Virginia Woolf’s procedures
as a literary critic as well as a novelist). The giving up of the
personality, which enables her by the end of the story to be at one
with the figures in her imagination, is seen as a positive action, and
again suggests an analogy between content and narrative form.
Perception and empathy come through the intuition, not the
intellect — though the intellect must play its part. Clarissa Dallo-
way’s relation to Septimus Smith and Lily Briscoe’s to Mrs Ramsay
(which particularly investigates the interplay between aesthetic
selection and human action) provide the most important treatments
of this idea. But it is not only found within the fictions. ‘How
should one read a book?’ Virginia Woolf asks.
Wait for the dust of reading to settle; for the conflict and the
questioning to die down; walk, talk, pull the dead petals from
a rose, or fall asleep. Then suddenly without your willing it,
for it is thus that Nature undertakes these transitions, the book
will return, but differently. It will float to the top of the mind
as a whole.
How does the writer ‘compose’?
After a hard day’s work, trudging round, seeing all he can,
feeling all he can, taking in the book of his mind innumerable
notes, the writer becomes — if he can — unconscious. In fact,
his under-mind works at top speed while his upper-mind
kept awake by suspense. What would happen next? The novelist droned
on, and as soon as the audience guessed what happened next, they either
fell asleep or killed him.
(E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (London, Edward Arnold, 1951;
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1965), p. 34).
1 “How Should One Read a Book?’ CE II, p. 8.
28 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
drowses. Then, after a pause the veil lifts; and there is the
thing — the thing he wants to write about — simplified, com-
posed. Do we strain Wordsworth’s famous saying about emo-
tion recollected in tranquillity when we infer that by tran-
quillity he meant that the writer needs to become unconscious
before he can create?
The reference to Wordsworth (Leslie Stephen’s favourite poet) is
illuminating — though it is as much Keats who springs to mind
here:
When Man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect any
one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a starting post
towards all ‘the two-and thirty Pallaces’. How happy is such a
‘voyage of conception,’ what delicious diligent Indolence! A
doze upon a Sofa does not hinder it, and a nap upon Clover
engenders ethereal finger-pointings . . . let us open our leaves
like a flower and be passive and receptive. . .?
Clearly Virginia Woolf inherits something of the Romantic idea
of the potency of the imagination, working at a depth below the
conscious mind. And there is a further echo of Wordsworth in her
idea of a creative relationship between the imagination and the
natural world, though she is not interested in the moral effect of
nature on man, nor does she actually write about nature. But she
can find no other way to express the truth of life and character
than through natural images and physical perceptions. In “The
Searchlight’, as in To the Lighthouse, the dominant figure of a beam
of light draws the story together. But what the light picks out are
also visual images, and emotion is engendered in both the great-
grandfather and Mrs Ivimey, through the physical reaction to those
images. The essay on “The Moment’, quoted above, continues its
definition of ‘the present situation’ thus: “To begin with: it is
largely composed of visual and of sense impressions.’ 3

1 ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), CE II, p. 166.

2 Keats to Reynolds, 19 February 1818, Letters of Fohn Keats, selected Robert
Gittings (Oxford University Paperbacks, 1970), pp. 65-6. Gittings’s note
for the ‘Pallaces’ reads — ‘of Buddhist doctrine’.
3 ‘The Moment: Summer’s Night’, CE II, p. 293.
 Introduction 29

“The Searchlight’ corroborates this statement, and so, on a larger

scale, do all Virginia Woolf’s novels. Objects, colours and physical
sensations express the life of the mind. But were this all, the
accusation levelled against Virginia Woolf by Muriel Bradbrook
(among others) would be a damning one: ‘Emotions are reduced to
a description of their physical accompaniment.... Mrs Woolf
never . . . attempts to reproduce the process of thinking.’ 1 But the
translation of mental states into physical images is not reductive.
The process is the natural expression of her concept of existence,
not a superficial, decorative technique. Virginia Woolf not only
felt that the expression of the life of the mind through physical
images was the most accurate equivalent that art can make for
reality; she also believed in the relationship between people and
non-human objects as being life-enhancing. The Wordsworthian
idea of the consolatory and educative function of nature is too joyful
for her; her novels are melancholy and uncertain. But they do
express a secular faith in the value of the seen and felt — a faith
more usually expressed in the twentieth century in poetry. These
two examples, one from the twenties and one from the sixties,
express in different ways the belief, shared by Virginia Woolf, in
the objects of the mortal world as the most significant metaphors
of, and vehicles for, our spiritual life:
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.?
1 “Notes on the Style of Mrs Woolf’, Scrutiny, Vol. 1, No. 1 (May 1932), pp.
36-7.
2 Wallace Stevens, “Sunday Morning’, Harmonium (1923); collected in The
Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York, Knopf, 1971), p. 8
30 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
The grass is green
The tulip is red
A ginger cat walks over
The pink almond petals on the flower bed.
Enough has been said to show
It is life we are talking about. Oh
Grateful colours, bright looks: Well, to go
On. Fabricated things too — front doors and gates,
Bricks, slates, paving stones — are coloured
And as it has been raining and is sunny now
They shine. Only that puddle
Which, reflecting the height of the sky
Quite gives one a feeling of vertigo, shows
No colour, is a negative. Men!
Seize colours quick, heap them up while you can,
But perhaps it is a false tale that says
‘The landscape of the dead
Is colourless.*
1 Stevie Smith, ‘Oh grateful colours, bright looks!’, Scorpion (London, Long-
man, 1972), p. 35.
 I

The Voyage Out

TQS

YTTON Strachey praised The Voyage Out for being ‘very,

very unvictorian’.! Virginia Woolf’s first novel is not
revolutionary, but it is unsparingly satirical of the restrictions
on freedom and truth that she and Strachey both associated with
Victorianism. And, within its deceptively traditional form, it
undertakes a theme sufficiently abstract and methods sufficiently
impressionistic to make it, as she herself allowed, ‘a gallant and
inspiring spectacle’.?
The ‘unvictorian’ quality is suggested by its first working title,
Melymbrosia, which romantically evokes the ethics of a pastoral
Greek antiquity, as opposed to those of nineteenth-century England.
The flowery, sentimental name points, ironically, to the humorous
triumph of enlightenment over conventionality enacted, for in-
stance, by St John Hirst (who is modelled on Strachey) in his
selfconscious reading of Sappho during the British community’s
Church of England service.

‘Sappho,’ he replied. “Ihe one Swinburne did — the best thing

that’s ever been written.’
Mrs Flushing could not resist such an opportunity.

1 Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters, ed. Leonard Woolf and James
Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1956), Lytton Strachey to Virginia
Woolf, 25 February 1916, p. 56.
2 AWD, 4 February 1920, p. 24.
31
22 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
She gulped down the Ode to Aphrodite during the litany [. . .]
(p. 233)
Melymbrosia (which might itself be the title of a translation by
Swinburne) was abandoned, however, during the many revisions
of the novel (seven, according to Leonard Woolf, between 1907
and 1913). But the Greek allusion was retained in the name of
the ship, the Euphrosyne.t The change of title from a name to a
phrase descriptive of time and space (like the later changes from
The Pargiters to The Years and from Pointz Hall to Between the
Acts) was cunning and discreet. Like the title To the Lighthouse,
The Voyage Out can be literally interpreted, but is at the same time
suggestive of further significance. Even at a literal level the title
does double duty, in that it covers both the journey from England
to South America on the Euphrosyne, and the river journey from
Santa Marina into the native wilderness. And it lends itself flexibly
to other possible meanings; Rachel’s journey into maturity, her
discovery of love, her approach to death (and, retrospectively,
Virginia Woolf’s own embarkation as a novelist). We are fre-
quently encouraged to think of the voyage as a metaphor:
She [the ship] was a bride going forth to her husband, a virgin
unknown of men. (p. 28)
She [Helen] was working at a great design of a tropical river
running through a tropical forest. (p. 28)
Visions of a great river [...] beset her. Helen promised a
river. (p. 84)
On the bank grew those trees which Helen had said it was
worth the voyage out merely to see. (p. 172)
In these passages the journey takes on a predestined quality, and the
objects described seem as much symbols of Rachel’s inner develop-
ment as real objects. Helen appears as the designer of Rachel’s fate
1 The name was a private joke. In 1909 she was calling the ship the Mary Fane
and the heroine Cynthia, a name that dissatisfied her. Clive and Vanessa Bell
suggested, among alternatives, Barcelona, Apricot and Euphrosyne (Bell I,
p- 137) — the last being the name of an ephemeral book of poems, much
ridiculed by Virginia, which Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf and others of her
friends published in 1905 (Bell I, pp. 98, 205-6).
 The Voyage Out: 1915 33
(anticipating Mrs Ramsay’s mythic, even sinister, qualities in To
the Lighthouse). But Helen is also a human being. Rachel’s journeys
do take place; there is a real ship and a real river. We are prepared
by the title! for a continuous shifting from the literal to the meta-
phorical, which gives, as Virginia Stephen hoped it would, ‘the
feel of running water’.?
The novel’s hazy, fluid interplay between the material and the
metaphoric is well illustrated by the account of Santa Marina’s
history, information which ‘died within’ poor Mr Pepper but which
the reader, not Rachel, acquires. We learn that, when the country
was still ‘a virgin land behind a veil’ (p. 86), it was colonized by
Elizabethan settlers, but that ‘the English dwindled away’, for
want of leaders like Richard Dalloway, in the face of threats from
land and sea. Not much advanced since those days, it has recently
become a rather popular holiday spot for the English. The descrip-
tion establishes Santa Marina realistically, but it also reminds us of
other things: of the Euphrosyne, travelling like ‘a virgin unknown
of men’ ‘with veils drawn before her and behind’ (p. 28), and of
Rachel, ‘her mind’ ‘in the state of an intelligent man’s in the
beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth’ (p. 30). The analogies
are not firmly drawn. We are not being forced to think of Santa
Marina as symbolic of Rachel’s virginal state of mind, liable to be
impressed by the political and physical onslaught of a man like
Dalloway. Nor do we have to imagine Rachel as a naive, adventur-
ous Elizabethan settler. But some such suggestions are lightly
made by the fluid link between the vestal ship, the doomed Eliza-
bethan colony and the girl’s mind, encouraging us to look for
metaphorical possibilities in other ‘real’ things such as the villa
and the hotel. Such possibilities allow the book to work both as a
literal, satirical account of Rachel’s development and as an abstract
argument about existence, underlying, and related to, the level of
realism.
It seemed dreadful that the town should blaze for ever in the
same spot; dreadful at least to people going away to adventures
1 It was a mistake to render The Voyage Out, as the French translator Savitzky
did, as La Traversée des Apparences, which destroys the title’s flexibility by
reducing it to an abstract concept.
2) Belly pair.
34 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
upon the sea, and beholding it as a circumscribed mound,
eternally burnt, eternally scarred. From the deck of the ship
the great city appeared a crouched and cowardly figure, a
sedentary miser. (p. 13)
From this first Conradian description of the Euphrosyne’s voyage
out of London, it looks as though the journey is to be a liberating
one. We imagine that it will provide opportunities for the twenty-
four-year-old Rachel Vinrace to move away, at last, from the
sheltered background provided by her aunts and her ship-owning
father Willoughby, and to discover, under the protection of her
aunt Helen Ambrose, adventure and self-fulfilment. But the struc-
ture of the book turns out not to be a simple drawing away from
English civilization towards an exotic, enfranchising world. Both
on the ship and in Santa Marina, Rachel’s development takes
place within a microcosm of the upper-middle-class conventional
English way of life which has ensured her ignorance and her
inexperience. In a remote, exotic setting, that civilization can be
sharply ridiculed, and a contrast established between personal
susceptibility to the grandeur and dangers of the landscape, and a
social group ludicrously protecting itself against strangeness.
Mrs Parry’s drawing-room, though thousands of miles away,
behind a vast curve of water ona tiny piece of earth, came be-
fore their eyes. They who had had no solidity or anchorage
before seemed to be attached to it somehow [...] But [...]
there was no time to enjoy the fruits of the discovery. The
donkeys were advancing, and it was advisable to begin the
descent immediately, for the night fell so quickly that it
would be dark before they were home again. (p. 145)
The exotic setting, which might seem rather perversely chosen!
and was certainly not to be characteristic, provides the basis for a
satirical contrast between Rachel’s private needs and the public

1 Virginia Woolf had not been to South America. The setting is drawn from
her experience of Portugal and Greece, and from Leonard Woolf’s accounts
of Ceylon, fictionalized in his novel The Village in the Jungle (London,
Hogarth Press, 1913).
 The Voyage Out: 1915 35
world she must inhabit. In Virginia Woolf’s later works, the
romantic, exotic life of love or solitude is incorporated into the
‘circumscribed mound’, the England which The Voyage Out leaves
behind in order to make its point. In Night and Day the heroine’s
search for self-fulfilment takes place in London and county settings,
her exotic jungles are in her own mind. After Night and Day,
the characters are increasingly enabled to create a balance between
the demands of an ordinary external landscape and the sensations
of their inner lives. It is left for a character such as Rhoda in The
Waves, a refugee from the conditions of real life, to create exotic
mental landscapes reminiscent of Santa Marina.
Far from being left behind, the image of the ‘circumscribed
mound’ is reinvoked in the little hunched figures which suggest
the sexual oppression of women:
Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through
a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed
women sitting in archways playing cards [. . .] (p. 336)
It is an image of nightmare and fever, suggesting a horror of sex.
And although the principal point of the novel is not really that
‘Rachel discovers sex in the jungles of Latin America’,! it is sig-
nificant that when she first tries to define to Hewet the ‘terrors
and agonies’ of being a young woman, she formulates it as ‘Men
kissing one’ (p. 217). Since she has only been once kissed, by the
‘pompous and sentimental’ Richard Dalloway, we are allowed to
laugh at her exaggeration here. But the implication is a serious one:
that girls of Rachel’s (and Virginia Stephen’s) age and class are
both overprotected from, and the victims of, a system which
exploits women intellectually, sexually and socially. Rachel’s
ignorance about sex and her lack of proper education, described
by Helen as her confusion between politics and kissing politicians,
stem from the same social assumption that she is to be subservient
in a masculine world. Her teachers, who ‘would as soon have forced
her to go through one piece of drudgery thoroughly as they would
have told her that her hands were dirty’ (p. 29); her aunts, who
disapprove of Rachel’s spoiling her arms playing the piano as ‘then
1 James Naremore, The World Without a Self (New Haven and London, Yale
University Press, 1973), p. 22.
36 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
one won’t marry’ (p. 16); her father, who assumes that Rachel can
be turned into a “Tory hostess’ (p. 84) —all further the acceptance
of ‘an ideal scale of things where the life of one person was absolutely
more important than the life of another’ (p. 216). The Dalloways,
who, in this book, support the scale by word and deed, impress
Rachel immensely when they irrupt into the life of the Euphrosyne.
Both seem perfectly adapted to their functions in life. Both con-
vince Rachel, temporarily, of the value of being a dominated wife or
an anti-intellectual politician, very much as Helen Schlegel, at the
beginning of Howards End (1910), is temporarily convinced by
‘the energy of the Wilcoxes’ and ‘liked being told that... Art and
Literature, except when conducive to strengthening the character,
[were] nonsense’.t When Richard says that he is prouder of his
factory reforms than of ‘writing Keats and Shelley’, ‘It became
painful to Rachel to be one of those who write Keats and Shelley’
(p. 62). Rachel’s attraction towards philistinism is given a check,
however, when Richard kisses her. The action makes her violently
aware of her ignorance and fear of sex, but it also has an intellectual
effect. Both Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster felt that brutal
sexual hypocrisy was the corollary to the energetic chauvinism of
men like Richard Dalloway or Henry Wilcox. Rachel’s eyes are
opened to this, and in reaction she swings towards Helen, whose
influence is from now on to be of increasing importance.
The narrator satirizes the Dalloways in a tone of voice rather
like Helen’s, whose free and rational mind and _ pessimistic,
passionate nature sets an ethical standard in the book, though
not an absolute one. Helen embodies some aspects of Julia Stephen,
Virginia’s mother. But we may assume that Helen’s morality also
reflects the ambience into which Virginia Stephen moved, in mov-
ing from Hyde Park to Gordon Square, during the gestation of
The Voyage Out. The book is not autobiographical, but it is impor-
tantly personal in ways which one would expect from a first novel.
Rachel’s incoherence and fealty to the masculine world suggest
Virginia Stephen’s youth; Helen’s proffered alternatives are those of
Bloomsbury. She is cynically aware that the conventionally religious
society in which she lives is an enemy to the artist and a trivializer
of relationships. She has brought her children up to ‘think of God
1 E. M. Forster, Howards End, Ch. 4.
 The Voyage Out: 1915 37
as a kind of walrus’ (p. 23); in contrast to the Dalloways, ‘it seemed
to her as wrong to keep sailors as to keep a zoo’ (p. 66), and her
medicine for Rachel is talk— ‘talk about everything, talk that was
free, unguarded, and as candid as a habit of talking with men made
natural in her own case’ (p. 122).
Helen begins her education of Rachel by setting at naught an
object which Virginia Woolf was fond of using as an image of a
male-dominated society: a volume of Who's Who. Rachel, trying
to express her interest in people who inhabit a larger world than her
own, becomes absorbed in its lists of public figures. Helen, who is
encouraging her to be discriminating, enables her to set the volume
aside:
‘I can be m-m-myself,’ she stammered, ‘in spite of you, in spite
of the Dalloways, and Mr Pepper, and Father, and my Aunts,
in spite of these?’ She swept her hand across a whole page of
statesmen and soldiers.
‘In spite of them all,’ said Helen gravely. (p. 81)
Helen makes Rachel more definite, but her influence is only a
groundwork for the diversity of new experience which Rachel
encounters at Santa Marina. And, though Helen’s intellectual
influence is liberating and beneficial, at the book’s underlying,
abstract level she has an almost sinister role to play. In weaving her
design of a tropical river she does lure Rachel to her death. In
encouraging her to think of life cynically, even pessimistically, she
does, as will be seen, make it harder for Rachel to find union with
another person.
At the book’s realistic, satirical level, however, Helen prepares
Rachel for Santa Marina. Already made aware of different ap-
proaches to life by the contrast between the Ambroses and the
Dalloways, Rachel now encounters further varieties of characters
and attitudes. The lives in the ‘little boxlike squares’ (p. 101) of
the hotel rooms enable Rachel to create new categories. Looking
in from the dark garden, Helen and Rachel, trespassers from the
more personal, intimate life of the villa, can see how ‘each window
revealed a different section of the life of the hotel’ (p. 98). Entertain-
ment is provided by these ‘sections’, but of a cold and superficial
variety. Most of them display, for Rachel’s benefit, the different
38 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
kinds of existence available to women who are part of a conventional
and philistine society. But childless, fussy Mrs Elliott, absent-
minded Mrs Thornbury, bovine Susan Warrington and her tyran-
nical old aunt, and the would-be liberated flirt, Evelyn M., are
callous caricatures. There is little warmth even in the treatment of
the kind academic spinster, Miss Allan, or of the jolly, eccentric
Mrs Flushing. The tone for the presentation of the minor charac-
ters is feebly satirical.*
It was close on twenty years now since Mrs Paley had been
able to lace her own shoes or even to see them, the disappear-
ance of her feet having coincided more or less accurately with
the death of her husband [. . .] (p. 178)
The men to whom these women are subservient are, of course,
equally ludicrous, though it seems as if Virginia Stephen did respond
to Clive Bell’s criticism of the novel in 1909:
To draw such sharp and marked contrasts between the subtle,
sensitive, tactful, gracious, delicately perceptive, and per-
spicacious women, and the obtuse, vulgar, blind, florid, rude,
tactless, emphatic, indelicate, vain, tyrannical, stupid men, is
not only rather absurd, but rather bad art, I think.?
Although there is still a marked difference in stature between Helen
Ambrose and her husband (an absentminded Greek professor who
is a first draft for Mr Ramsay), the dichotomy between the sexes
had been largely transferred, by 1915, to a division between
serious ‘major’ characters and ludicrous ‘minor ’ones. These ‘human
beings’ (p. 133) are frequently ridiculed by being compared to ani-
mals. Helen and Rachel look into the hotel:
Through the open window came an uneven humming sound
like that which rises from a flock of sheep pent within hurdles
at dusk. (p. 99)
1 Virginia Woolf looked back with embarrassment on these attempts to amuse:
‘I [...] must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart
satires, that will never cease to rankle in the grave’. (AWD, 4 February 1920,
P- 24).
? Clive Bell to Virginia Stephen, 25 February 1909, Bell I, Appendix D, p. 209.
 The Voyage Out: 1915 39
Susan Warrington’s breathing in sleep is described:

With its profoundly peaceful sighs and hesitations it resembled

that of a cow standing up to its knees all night through in the
long grass. (p. 103)

The hotel guests reading their letters ‘prompted Hirst to make the
caustic remark that the animals had been fed’ (p. 175). During the
church service animal imagery turns to vegetable in Rachel’s
mind: she hears ‘the patter of baaing inexpressive human voices
falling round her like damp leaves’. That the imagery of sheep
should be used in the context of the religious service is obviously
apt. Rachel is in retreat from a society which comforts itself with
hypocritical formulae; she has suddenly found herself able to despise
those “innumerable men and women, not seeing clearly, who finally
gave up the effort to see, and relapsed tamely into praise and
acquiescence’ (p. 231).
Clearly Virginia Woolf shares her ‘major’ characters’ disdain
for commonplace minds. There is a rigid distinction between the
heroine’s love affair and the courtship of Susan Warrington and
Arthur Venning (though in fact the two love scenes have points of
resemblance). There is no analogy drawn between silly Evelyn’s
cravings for feminine equality and Rachel’s vague approach to a
sense of freedom. And it is never in any doubt that the common-
place minds will try to destroy the outstanding, and that therefore
they are not to be tolerated. The hero of the novel, Terence Hewet,
is the spokesman for this belief.

“They are not satisfactory; they are ignoble,’ he thought.

[. -.] Amiable and modest, respectable in many ways, lovable
even [...] how mediocre they all were and capable of what
insipid cruelty to one another! [...] these were the people
with money, and to them rather than to others was given the
management of the world. Put among them some one more
vital, who cared for life or for beauty, and what an agony,
what a waste would they inflict on him if he tried to share with
them and not to scourge!
‘There’s Hirst,’ he concluded [.. .] (pp. 132-3)
40 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
The conclusion to this passage of romantic disdain is appropriate,
since in the mutual hostility which exists between the brilliant
St John Hirst and the inmates of the hotel lies the clearest indication
of the community’s conventionality and philistinism, Their en-
counters are satirically presented — the knife cutting both ways—
with reference to animals again being used for comic effect.
Hirst [...] observed: ‘Oh, but we’re all agreed [...] that
nature’s a mistake [.. .] I once met a cow ina field by night.
The creature looked at me. I assure you it turned my hair
grey. It’s a disgrace that the animals should be allowed to
go at large.’ ‘And what did the cow think of him?’ Venning
mumbled to Susan, who immediately decided in her own mind
that Mr Hirst was a dreadful young man. (p. 119)
If Hirst is meant to be one of the three cleverest men in England
the reader must feel some disappointment with his conversation
(though Virginia* Woolf was always to find a difficulty in telling
us what her clever characters actually say). However, he is evi-
dently portrayed as the interesting and sympathetic character in
this exchange. Hirst is the first of a number of misogynist or
homosexual academics in the novels who come from highly privi-
leged social backgrounds and who suffer from their ugliness or
loneliness: William Rodney, Bonamy, Charles Tansley (whose
relationship with Mrs Ramsay is a development from Hirst’s
with Helen), Neville and William Dodge are alike. It was a type
very well known to Virginia Woolf and in the relationship between
Hirst and Rachel she may well have been drawing on her early
feelings about Lytton Strachey.!
Hirst brings home to Rachel the gap between men and women,
a gap resulting largely from education, which he makes her feel is
impassable: ‘It’s no good; we should live separate; we cannot
understand each other; we only bring out what’s worst’ (p. 154).
Rachel feels outraged by him because he has patronizingly assumed
that she won’t be able to understand Gibbon; Hewet consoles her
by pointing out the ludicrous side of Hirst’s character. Rachel was
as much outraged by Dalloway’s kiss, and Helen had to undercut
1 ‘She found him, I suspect, very frightening ... it was not until later that she
was to discover how kind and sympathetic he could be.’ (Bell I, p. 102.)
 The Voyage Out: 1915 AI
the impression it made. These upsetting encounters with two
absolutely different kinds of superior males are laughed off by a
woman or by a man sympathetic to women. But they remain as
indications to Rachel of the unassailable male fortresses, politics
and scholarship, and of the male assumptions of privilege and
domination in sexuality and in intellect. She can only set against
these assumptions something impersonal, rather than feminine:
her musicianship; satire; or an indefinable quality in her which
Hewet calls ‘the extraordinary freedom with which she [...]
spoke as she felt’ (p. 247).
Both Richard Dalloway and St John Hirst advise Rachel to read
writers whom Virginia Woolf thought of as very much part of the
male tradition. It is highly characteristic of the novel that the
impact of the two men should be summed up by their recommend-
ing Burke and Gibbon, for Rachel’s development is to some extent
marked out in literary stages. The Voyage Out is full of quotations
and references, and is evidently written by a well-read essayist turn-
ing her hand to fiction. The mass of undigested literary allusions in
The Voyage Out compares badly with their more integrated use in
the later novels; the quotation from Cymbeline running through
Mrs Dalloway and from Cowper’s “The Castaway’ in To the
Lighthouse are, by contrast, literary allusions firmly woven into
their context. But there are interesting anticipations of such
devices in the first novel. Sophocles’ Antigone, which was to be of
great importance as a motif for the oppression of women in The
Years and Three Guineas, is used here (in Greek) for its reference
to a sea voyage (p. 41):
Many the wonders but nothing walks stranger than man,
This thing crosses the sea in the winter’s storm,
Making his path through the roaring waves.”
But the allusion also calls to mind the fate of the heroine, the
woman buried alive, as in Rachel’s dream of the hunched figures in
1 ‘That is a man’s sentence; behind it one can see Johnson, Gibbon, and the
rest.” (A Room of One’s Own, p. 77.)
2 Sophocles, Antigone, ll. 322-37, translated Elizabeth Wyckoff in Greek
Tragedies, Vol. 1, ed. David Grene and Richard Lattimore (Chicago, Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1960).
42 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the tunnel. Rachel, who is frequently identified with sea creatures,
is listening to the address to Sabrina from Comus when she falls ill.
The quotation is full of coolness, beauty and shade, in contrast to
Rachel’s feverish state. But it also suggests that Rachel is like
Sabrina—a water nymph, virginal and elusive—and gives poetic
form to the feeling in the whole novel of the strangeness of water,
the element creative of life, death and change.
While all her tormentors thought she was dead, she was not
dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea. There she lay,
sometimes seeing darkness, sometimes light, while every now
and then someone turned her over at the bottom of the sea.
(p. 346)
Sabrina is still at the back of our minds, but fused with other im-
pressions: again, the crouched figures of women from Rachel’s
nightmares; or Lycidas, even, visiting ‘the bottom of the monstrous
world’, .
Literature is used as a conscious, inner part of Rachel’s develop-
ment, as well as providing external images for her fate. She is as
susceptible to people’s literary suggestions as she is to their characters,
and is almost as shocked at being told by Hewet that Thackeray is
a second-rate writer as she was at being kissed by Dalloway. Indeed,
we are meant to think of literary preferences as indications of
personality. Clarissa’s patriotic taste for Henry VY and Jane Austen
is as revealing as Hirst’s admiration for Gibbon and Sappho, Helen’s
reading of G. E. Moore? and recommendation of Defoe and Mau-
passant, and Ridley Ambrose’s dedication to Pindar. Rachel pro-
gresses from Cowper’s letters to Meredith, Ibsen and modern
feminist novels. (Meanwhile, in the hotel, Miss Allan is writing
her History of English Literature, which she finishes just before
Rachel dies.) But when Rachel falls in love with Hewet she finds
that ‘none of the books she read [. . .] suggested from their analysis
of love that what their heroines felt was what she was feeling now’
(pp. 226-7).

1 Richard Dalloway picks up her book and reads ‘Good, then, is indefinable’
(p. 71). The quotation is from Principia Ethica (Cambridge University Press,
1903; reprinted 1960),Ch. 1, Section 14, p. 17.
 The Voyage Out: 1915 43
Before falling in love with Terence, when Rachel is still in the
process of discovering that she can have a separate, unmergeable
existence, she sometimes falls into peculiar states of impersonality.

Inextricably mixed in dreamy confusion, her mind seemed to

enter into communion, to be delightfully expanded and com-
bined with the spirit of [. . .] the sea, with the spirit of Beet-
hoven Op, 112,' even with the spirit of poor William Cowper
[. - -] (p. 33)
Her dissolution became so complete that she could not raise
her finger any more, and sat perfectly still, listening and
looking always at the same spot [.. .] She forgot that she had
any fingers to raise... The things that existed were so im-
mense and so desolate... She continued to be conscious of
these vast masses of substance for a long stretch of time [. . .]
(p. 123)
The style used for these trance-like states begins to predominate
from the time of the journey up the river, when Hewet and Rachel
declare their love, and culminates in the descriptions of Rachel’s
delirium. After her death we are returned to the external world of
personalities and activity. As in Night and Day, the experience of
love removes the characters, and the narrative, further from daylit
realism. There is a hint of a trite romantic dichotomy between the
caricatured tedium of unimpassioned everyday life and the intense
private happiness of love. To some extent The Voyage Out and
Night and Day do fall into this trap, but in both books the effect is
complicated by the fears and difficulties the lovers encounter. Rachel
and Terence’s love scene in the jungle, their most private and
intense moment of communication, is ‘terrible’ and exhausting;
the scene is described in sinister and unreal tones:

1 Though one might suspect Virginia Woolf of making a musical error here,
since Rachel, being a pianist, would be more likely to have the last piano
sonata, Op. 111, in her mind, Op. r12 is in fact an appropriate choice, since
it is the Cantata ‘Meeresstille und gliickliche Fahrt’ (‘Calm Sea and Happy
Voyage’), dedicated to Goethe and published in 1823.
44 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Rachel followed him, stopping where he stopped, turning
where he turned, ignorant of the way, ignorant why he stopped
or why he turned.
‘I don’t want to be late,’ he said, ‘because —’ He put a flower
into her hand and her fingers closed upon it quietly. ‘We’re
so late — so horribly late,’ he repeated as if he were talking in
his sleep. ‘Ah — this is right. We turn here.’ (p. 276)

The sense of helpless dread may be meant to anticipate Rachel’s

death. But this is not really its main function. Our strongest
reaction to it is to be aghast at the terrifying idea of falling in love.
It is a perilous experiment, threatened by the stultifying effect of
intimacy, which Terence has earlier pictured to himself in the image
of ‘married couples [. . .] walled up in a warm firelit room’ (p. 244),
by the public trivialization of the relationship by well-wishers,
‘mouths gaping for blood’ (p. 314), and by the impossibility of
absolute union, so that when they most wish to be indivisible they
are ‘really very small and separate’ (p. 308).
There is dread, too, in the idea of sexual desire, suggesting a
profound inhibition which extends from the author to her heroine.
Though Rachel’s fear and ignorance are not explicitly mentioned
again after the Dalloway episode, the delirious recurrence of her
nightmare vision of hunched figures implies that her sexual fears
have not been quieted; and she wriggles out of her game with
‘Terence — a kind of playing at sex — by pretending to be a mermaid
(p. 302). Their erotic relationship is eerily dominated by Helen.

A hand dropped abrupt as iron on Rachel’s shoulder; it might

have been a bolt from heaven. She fell beneath it, and the grass
whipped across her eyes and filled her mouth and ears.
‘Through the waving stems she saw a figure, large and shape-
less against the sky. Helen was upon her. Rolled this way and
that [...] she was speechless and almost without sense. At
last she lay still, all the grasses shaken round her and before
her by her panting. Over her loomed two great heads, the
heads of a man and woman, of Terence and Helen.
Both were flushed, both laughing, and the lips were moving;
they came together and kissed in the air above her [...]
 The Voyage Out: 1915 45
Raising herself and sitting up, she too realized Helen’s soft
body, the strong and hospitable arms, and happiness swelling
and breaking in one vast wave. (pp. 287-8)
This extraordinary passage is the first of several in the novels which
describe a moment of emotion in terms of a physical orgasm.}
Helen, who setsin motion Rachel’s maturing process, here takes part
in what reads as a sexual initiation. The description is alarming and
dreamlike, mainly because the characters seem to be depersonalized,
It is this, in fact, which gives love its importance. Like music,
it enables the difficult approach to a more impersonal plane of
existence, in which divisions of character cease to oppress:
Although they sat so close together, they had ceased to be
little separate bodies; they had ceased to struggle and desire
one another. There seemed to be peace between them. It might
be love, but it was not the love of man for woman. (p. 320)
There is, inevitably, a conflict between the impersonal achieve-
ments of solitude, music or love, and the personal emphasis of society.
‘To an extent the conflict makes for an artistic failure. There is an
imbalance in the novel between satire and abstraction, and it is
hard for Virginia Woolf to express the difficult and obscure argu-
ment which really interests her before she has evolved a fictional
structure that can deal both with the material of life and with a
vision of life. The Voyage Out does not have an integrated structure;
it moves about in a hazy and ramshackle manner, wishing away Its
own plot in the interests of its central argument, and then, as if
guiltily, returning itself to people and things. For much of the
time it pretends to be a novel about women in society or, even more
convincingly, about Rachel’s development. But it is really a novel
which presents the question of whether existence entails division
or unification, and, as such, cannot be considered as being of a
different species from Virginia Woolf’s later work, in which the
fusion of the abstract and the material is more masterfully achieved.
The abstract question lies behind the different narrative styles of
the book; it dominates most of the descriptions of sea or landscape;

1 See Mrs Dalloway (p. 36) and To the Lighthouse (pp. 75-6).
46 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
it is the basis of people’s literary tastes; and it is the key which
unlocks all the ‘important’ characters.

Rachel learns from Helen on the Euphrosyne the possibility of being

an ‘unmergeable’ personality. Helen is witty, cynical, pessimistic
and divisive; though maternal, she has a masculine attitude (which
enables her to get on well with St John Hirst).1 But we are tempted
to feel that Helen’s separatist view of existence is not conclusive
when we move from the Euphrosyne to the conversation between
Hirst and Hewet in the hotel. Hirst presents a satirical and divisive
view. He draws chalk circles round people, partitions them and
disdains them. Hewet’s opposition to this view suggests that of the
two men it will be he who most affects Rachel; she has already
learnt what Hirst believes. By falling in love with Hewet, she moves
towards his view of life as not divisive, but as always merging and
confused, a matter of overlapping bubbles rather than chalk circles.
Unlike Hirst, who judges entirely by the mind, Hewet resists
characterization in favour of a more intuitive sympathy for human
beings:
‘We don’t care for people because of their qualities,’ [he tells
Evelyn] ‘It’s just them that we care for’ — he struck a match —
‘just that,’ he said, pointing to the flames. (pp. 190-1)
Hewet anticipates the ways in which Virginia Woolf wanted fiction
to reflect the nature of existence. And Hewet is himself a novelist,
planning to write a novel about ‘Silence’, ‘the things people don’t
say’ (p. 218). But, though this is frequently quoted as an indication
of what is to come in Virginia Woolf’s work, neither she nor her
character is able to opt entirely for the merging, unifying, ‘feminine’
approach. Hewet is also writing another novel, not at all about
Silence, but about a would-be gentleman with a worn-out suit who
carries off the Lady Theo Bingham Bingley to a ‘snug little villa
outside Croydon’ (p. 220). His style for describing this social
comedy is quite unlike the style in which he talks of streaked and
1 Sexual characteristics, here and elsewhere in Virginia Woolf (see, particularly,
Orlando), are in the mind rather than in the body. Hirst, who is homo-
sexual, and Helen, who is feminine and maternal have ‘masculine’, analytical,
divisive minds; Hewet, who is virile, has a feminine, unifying world view.
 The Voyage Out: 1915 47
merging bubbles: it is the witty public style familiar to readers of
Virginia Woolf’s essays and reviews. Hewet’s two novels illustrate
the choice of narrative techniques which Virginia Woolf saw before
her, as well as the two world views which The Voyage Out is examin-
ing. Just as Hewet is writing the two novels at once, so Virginia
Woolf, in the style and content of The Voyage Out, is vacillating
between the satirical, divisive view of existence and the merging,
unifying view.
The two approaches to life create a running battle between
Rachel and Terence. Superficially this expresses itself in her
reluctance, and his eagerness, to share their secret lives with other
people. Answering the letters of congratulation, Rachel feels an
absurd dichotomy to exist between the words of communication
and her aloof sense of reality:
She stopped writing and looked up; looked at Terence deep in
the armchair, looked at the different pieces of furniture, at
her bed [. . .] at the window-pane [. . .] heard the clock tick-
ing, and was amazed at the gulf which lay between all that, and
her sheet of paper. Would there ever be a time when the
world was one and indivisible? (p. 301)
Her reluctance to write letters or to visit the hotel indicates her
position in the argument: in her efforts to create a definite personality
for herself, she has become a divisive person. She feels no intuitive
sympathy for human beings; at best she can achieve a sense of
unity only on an impersonal plane, through the trance-like states
in which she goes outside herself, through her music and at times
through love. Terence attempts to change her view; it is the begin-
ning of what would have been a long struggle. (When we meet it
again in To the Lighthouse, the positions have been reversed: the
woman has become the unifier, the man has the divisive view.)
According to him, [...] there was an order, a pattern which
made life reasonable [...] Nor were people so solitary and
uncommunicative as she believed. She should look for vanity
[...] and she would find it in ten people out of every twelve
she met; and once linked together by one such tie she would
find them not separate and formidable, but practically in-
distinguishable, and she would come to love them when she
48 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
found that they were like herself. If she denied this, she must
defend her belief that human beings were as various as the
beasts at the Zoo [. . .] (p. 304)
The reference to the zoo throws more light on the unpleasant tone
of the satire on the minor characters. The animal imagery was not
simply intended to belittle them. It placed them, as Rachel is said
by Hewet to place them, in a universe where satire is applicable
because human beings are ‘separateand small’. The unsatisfactoriness
of The Voyage Out arises from the inconsistent application of its
argument by the narrator, who treats some of the characters as
though Hewet’s unified world were a possibility, and others— the
‘minor’ characters—as though satire and division were the only
possible perspectives.
Rachel would like to be convinced by Terence, but is not; she
continues, though unhappily, to apply the divisive view of life to
the landscape, as well as to the people in it:
‘What’s so detestable in this country,’ she exclaimed, ‘is the
blue — always blue sky and blue sea. It’s like a curtain — all the
things one wants are on the other side of that. I want to know
what’s going on behind it. I hate these divisions, don’t you,
‘Terence? One person all in the dark about another person.’
(pp. 306-7)
Repeated colours in landscape are to be used again, particularly in
Between the Acts, as fearsome indications of a divisive universe.
The Voyage Out frequently uses landscape as part of the book’s
abstract argument. Just as people are different if seen from a satirical
or from a unifying point of view, so natural scenes, and the objects
in them, are subjected to different perspectives. We are continually
made aware of the change in attitude which distance ironically
creates. The image quoted earlier of London seen as a ‘circum-
scribed mound’ from the ship (p. 13) is the first of several shifts
in perspective, which enable the onlooker to take an aloof, de-
personalized view of scenes in which detail is suppressed by dis-
tance. As the ship moves further and further away from England,
land and sea dwellers have less and less sense of each other’s detailed
reality. Those on land are satirically described as thinking them-
selves unique, but as all being part of a unified pattern:
 The Voyage Out: 1915 49
Innumerable parties of picnickers coming home at sunset cried,
“Was there ever such a day as this?’ ‘It’s you,’ the young men
whispered; “Oh, it’s you,’ the young women replied. (p. 27)

Gradually, distance eradicates even this amount of detail. To the

land dwellers, the ship passes out of mind entirely, ‘like snow on
water’; and likewise, ‘when the ship was out of sight of land, it
became plain that the people of England were completely mute’
(p. 28). By contrast with the silenced land dwellers, the ship be-
comes ennobled by her solitary journey and-her union with the
sea.
Again, when other ships sight the Euphrosyne, they regard her as
the Euphrosyne regarded England: at first satirically (Mr Pepper
is ‘mistaken for a cormorant and then, as unjustly, transformed into
a cow’ (p. 85)) and then, at night, when only the lights can be
seen, as ‘mysterious and impressive’, ‘an emblem of the loneliness
of human life’ (p. 85). All point of view is relative: Rachel, later,
can block out the whole town of Santa Marina with her hand from
the distant hill above (p. 128), or can turn her eyes from ‘the great
size of the view’ to an ‘inch of the soil of South America’ made
‘into a world where she was endowed with the supreme power’
(p. 139). All these shifts in perspective contribute to the central
argument. Distance merges and unifies and invests the object
perceived with dignity, while the perceiver acquires an impersonal
aloofness which does not allow for satire. The antithesis between
division and unity is not a comforting one. The ‘distant’, unifying
view is no more warm or humane than the ‘close-up’ satirical,
divisive view. It simply annihilates the familiar distinctions
provided by details in landscape or by characteristics in human
beings.
The book culminates in a final shift of perspective, from health
to sickness and from life to death. Rachel’s divisive view of the
universe has not been corrected by Terence’s intuitive sympathy
for human beings. Now she voyages even further out, creating her
own universe in her fever just as she did when blocking out Santa
Marina with her hand. In the extraordinary and brilliant Chapter
25, which describes the fever, there is a strong ironic emphasis
on the different perspectives of Rachel and of those who surround
Qa
50 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
her. Of course we are not surprised, in the description of a fever,
to come across such phrases as
The world [. . .] appeared distinctly further off (p. 334)
She was completely cut off, and unable to communicate with
the rest of the world (p. 335)
She [. ..] made an effort to remember certain facts from the
world that was so many millions of miles away (p. 337)
She did not wish to remember; it troubled her when people
tried to disturb her loneliness (p. 352)
But these phrases are also reminders of the journey of the Euphro-
syne away from England, and of the trance-like states into which
Rachel has fallen earlier in the novel. The fever and the death are
the furthest points on the voyage through and out of experience,
a voyage which has had three stages. On the Euphrosyne and in the
early stages of her stay at Santa Marina Rachel finds herself in
possession of a discrete identity. On the journey up the river she
attempts to merge and unify herself with another; through fever
and death she withdraws entirely from the claims of personality
into an impersonal mystery.
Presumably Rachel’s death is intended from the start of the novel,
though the reader sometimes feels, with Strachey, as though he has
read ‘only the beginning of an enormous novel, which had been—
almost accidentally —cut short by the death of Rachel.’! If one
shares this feeling, then the death could be seen as the arbitrary
stroke of a force dooming Rachel’s chances of happiness, rather
than as the inevitable climax to the themes of the book. That there
should be a difficulty in deciding whether the death is inevitable
or arbitrary suggests a weakness in the book; Daiches was perhaps
right in wishing that the death had been definitely anticipated
throughout. Of course there are clues, provided not only by
sinister or ominous moments such as Rachel’s dream or the parting
1 Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters, ed. Leonard Woolf and James
Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1956), Lytton Strachey to Virginia Woolf,
25 February 1916, p. 56.
2 David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1942;
London, Nicholson and Watson, Editions Poetry, 1945), p. 20.
 The Voyage Out: 1915 yi
from the Dalloways (‘so, too, would they be forgotten’ (p. 76)) but
also by more particular, even comic, anticipations. Mr Pepper
leaves the villa for the better-cooked vegetables of the hotel, saying
‘If you all die of typhoid I won’t be responsible!’ (p. 91). Hewet,
as a joke against Evelyn, pretends to be dead:
“Now,” he murmured in an even, monotonous voice, ‘I shall
never, never, never move again.’ His body, lying flat among
them, did for a moment suggest death. (p. 144)
But if these moments are meant to be clues, their effect is diminished
by the diffuse structure of the book and by the abruptness with which
Rachel is made to fall ill. It does not seem convincing to treat the
illness as the outcome of Rachel’s emotional experiences — as a flight
from sex or from the unsatisfactoriness of love. It is not the fault
of her attitude to life that she falls ill. At the level of plot and
character development, the death is arbitrary.
At the more abstract level below the plot, the death feels con-
clusive, as being the furthest point of the voyage. Yet it has a
baffling and paradoxical effect. Rachel’s death allows her to achieve
an ultimately remote perspective on the world. But that absolute
impersonality mysteriously, and momentarily, creates a sense of
unification.
They had now what they had always wanted to have, the
union which had been impossible while they lived [...] It
seemed to him that their complete union and happiness filled
the room with rings eddying more and more widely. (p. 358-9)
The conflict between Terence and Rachel as to whether human
beings must be separate from each other is fleetingly solved by her
death. If the personality is relinquished altogether, it can no longer
be a barrier to unification. But, for all that, death is loss. The book’s
ending is problematical, and answers uncertainly the question that
was to be asked again in ‘facob’s Room, in To the Lighthouse and in
The Waves: is there any consolation for the apparently meaningless
death of the loved person?! After Rachel’s death we return to
1 The death of Virginia’s brother Thoby Stephen, of typhoid fever in 1906,
is particularly the subject of this book and of Facob’s Room and The
Waves. See p. 73, 0. I.
52 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the satirized world of the hotel, and the death itself becomes
material for the humour associated with that world:
‘Miss Vinrace is dead,’ he said very distinctly. Mrs Paley
merely bent a little towards him and asked, ‘Eh?’
‘Miss Vinrace is dead,’ he repeated. It was only by stiffening
all the muscles round his mouth that he could prevent himself
from bursting into laughter [. . .] Mrs Paley [. . .] sat vaguely
for at least a minute before she realized what Arthur meant.
‘Dead?’ she said vaguely. ‘Miss Vinrace dead? Dear me...
that’s very sad. But I don’t at the moment remember which
she was. We seem to have made so many new acquaintances
here.’ (pp. 366-7)
Relief is brilliantly provided here from the intensity of the previous
chapter. But the suggestion the comedy appears to make -—that
the importance of Rachel’s existence has been irrecoverably lost
in the trivia of commonplace life—is qualified by the very end of
the book. For Hirst, the most satirical proponent of the divisive
view of the universe, comes back to the hotel and is consoled, not
disheartened, by its continuance:
All these voices sounded gratefully in St John’s ears as he lay
half-asleep, and yet vividly conscious of everything around
him. Across his eyes passed a procession of objects, black and
indistinct, the figures of people picking up their books, their
cards, their balls of wool, their work-baskets, and passing him
one after another on their way to bed. (p. 380)
The erstwhile comic figures achieve impersonality: they are ‘black
and indistinct’, ‘a procession of objects’, moving inevitably on their
nightward voyage. A consolation, though a dark and tentative one,
is offered for Rachel’s death. Though pointless and tragic in itself,
it sheds its impersonal mystery on others, lending them, even in the
eyes of a satirist, an unprecedented dignity.
 2

Night and Day

OED

sits title implies, the novel concerns two kinds of experi-

ence: the private and the social, the silent and the com-
municable. It is a daylit comedy: in spite of obstacles and
misunderstandings, the younger generation achieve integrity and
enlightenment, and some get married. But it is also a ‘melancholy’!
exploration of the mind’s obscure search for an intangible vision
which can only be described tentatively and impressionistically.
There are then similarities between the first two novels, even
though The Voyage Out ends as a tragedy. Both explore the pos-
sibilities for individual happiness within a restrictive society, and
suggest that such happiness can be achieved only by going beyond
relationships to more impersonal areas of existence. But Night and
Day encourages the hope that some link can be forged between its
silent and its communicable worlds. It makes a claim for the uni-
fication of ‘little separate bodies’ within the conditions of everyday
life. Although the increased emphasis towards the end of both
novels on the abstract and the metaphorical is at odds with their
traditional mould, Night and Day, like its heroine, is more en-
cumbered by the exigencies of convention. Plot and characters
are assiduously manipulated, and, with the exception of the last
chapter, the obscure haziness of The Voyage Out is suppressed in the
interests of comedy. After Rachel’s delirium, Virginia Woolf has
come up for air: a process she was frequently to repeat, turning,

1 AWD, 27 March 1914, p. 10.

53
54 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
for instance, from To the Lighthouse to Orlando, and from The
Waves to Flush.
Night and Day takes its tone from established comic models. It
is the only one of Virginia Woolf’s novels to imitate the techniques
of dramatic farce. The book is full of scenes of ridiculous confusion,
abrupt exits and entrances, coincidental meetings, secrets, con-
versations at cross-purposes, and unwelcome interruptions from
absurd figures like Katharine Hilbery’s stage-comedy aunts:
I come from Woking, Mr Popham. You may well ask me,
why Woking? and to that I answer, for perhaps the hundredth
time, because of the sunsets. We went there for the sunsets,
but that was five-and-twenty years ago. (pp. 137-8)
Cassandra Otway is introduced into the novel with extraordinary
abruptness in order to provide a suitable match for William Rodney,
and makes entrances like a dea ex machina:
“You’re right;’ he exclaimed [. . .] ‘I love Cassandra.’
As he said this, the curtains hanging at the door of the little
room parted, and Cassandra herself stepped forth.
‘I have overheard every word!’ she exclaimed. (p. 383)
Such dramatic techniques permeate the whole of Night and Day,
and a debt is explicitly acknowledged to Shakespearian comedy.
The heroine is associated with Rosalind (pp. 162, 285), but it is her
mother, Mrs Hilbery, who, ‘benevolent and sarcastic’ (p. 304),
embodies the spirit of comedy and herself enacts the role of the wise
Shakespearian fool, in her erratic mixture of whimsical optimism
and canny perception. She plays a double part, being also (like
Mr Emerson in Forster’s 4 Room with a View (1910)), a resolver
of muddle. She returns from a visit to Shakespeare’s tomb to stage-
manage a happy ending, as if she were Hymen in 4s You Like It:
Peace, Ho! I bar confusion,
‘Tis I must make conclusion
Of these most strange events.”
1 Mrs Hilbery is based on Lady Ritchie, ‘Aunt Anny’, whose dottiness is
neatly summed up by the anecdote in “Leslie Stephen’ (1932), CE IV, p. 77.
See also Bell I, p. 11.
2 As You Like It, V. iv. 125-7.
 Night and Day: 1919 55
Mrs Hilbery draws attention to the dramatic models for the
novel, but it is as much indebted to Jane Austen, sharing the same
idea of the ethics of comedy. As in Jane Austen’s novels, under-
standing and right action only come through pain. Katharine has
to struggle free of her mistaken idea of marrying William before
she can come to terms with her truer, more important feelings for
Ralph. The pattern of development is reminiscent of Emma’s or
of Elizabeth Bennet’s. Both writers, too, create a link between
emotional development and seasonal growth. Like Emma, Mansfield
Park and Persuasion, Night and Day progresses from a gloomy
autumn to the suggestion of summer. The change from dead to
living season — the basis of comedy — provides both Jane Austen and
Virginia Woolf with a satisfying frame for the transformation of
tangled love affairs into marriages. More particularly, Night and
Day evokes Pride and Prejudice. Katharine’s reaction to Aunt
Celia’s interference in her life suggests Elizabeth Bennet’s reaction
to Lady Catherine, and Katharine’s scene with her father, when
she first tells him she is no longer engaged to William, is markedly
reminiscent of Elizabeth’s two conversations with Mr Bennet
about Darcy, the first arising from Mr Collins’s warning letter, the
second from Darcy’s proposal. Both fathers are slow to understand
their daughters, largely because of their literary and peace-loving
habits which have kept them aloof. Both have been warned about
their daughters’ behaviour by officious spokesmen for conventional
morality, and both expect their daughters to be amused by these
warnings:
Elizabeth tried to join in her father’s pleasantry, but could
only force one most reluctant smile. Never had his wit been
directed in a manner so little agreeable to her.
‘Are you not diverted?’
‘Oh yes. Pray read on.’*
Mr Hilbery was [...] secretly amused at the thought of the
interview [with Aunt Celia], although he could not licence
such irreverence outwardly.
‘Very good. Then you authorize me to tell her that [. . .]
there was nothing but a little fun in it? [. ..]’
1 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 58.
56 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
She did not respond, as he had hoped, with any affectionate
or humorous reply. (p. 432)
There is more to this than a resemblance of situation; the
language of the passages is also comparable. Night and Day sustains
a rather formal, preponderantly Latinate diction which allows for a
satirical tone to colour the presentation of all the characters, not
just the comic turns like Katharine’s aunts, the irascible Sir Francis
Otway, or the enthusiastic Mrs Seal, the White Queen of the suffra-
gette office. Though the complexities of the major characters may
involve a more lyrical and intimate tone, such comic weaknesses
as they display— William Rodney’s fussy, fastidious inhibitions,
Mary Datchet’s self-conscious fluctuations of mood about Ralph
and her work, Katharine’s absentmindedness and Ralph’s pride
and resentments—are rendered in a dry, hard language which
makes no concessions to the obscure, incommunicable areas of the
personality:
He was roused by a creak upon the stair. With a guilty start
he composed himself, frowned, and looked intently at the fifty-
sixth page of his volume. A step paused outside his door, and
he knew that the person, whoever it might be, was consider-
ing the placard, and debating whether to honour its decree or
not. Certainly, policy advised him to sit still in autocratic
silence, for no custom can take root in a family unless every
breach of it is punished severely for the first six months or so.
But Ralph was conscious of a distinct wish to be interrupted,
and his disappointment was perceptible when he heard the
creaking sound rather farther down the stairs, as if his visitor
had decided to withdraw. He rose, opened the door with
unnecessary abruptness, and waited on the landing. (p. 25)
The narrator, formal, omniscient and ironic, sets us down in the
room with Ralph and shows us his endearing mixture of silliness
and self-pity. He takes himself seriously, while we are encouraged
to laugh at him by the mock-heroic pomposity of the Latinisms
which describe his efforts at dignity, combined with the clichés — ‘a
guilty start’, ‘a distinct wish’ — which give away his real feelings.
‘The authorial voice (much given to aphorisms and commentary
 Night and Day: 1919 57
in Night and Day) will never again present itself in such a direct,
traditional manner, though it will never be made to disappear
entirely.
With such uncharacteristically straightforward presentation of
character is found a very large amount of vivid, naturalistic dialogue.
Much use of dialogue will be made in The Years and Between the
Acts, but no other of her novels presents it with the air of direct
representation. There is none of the later uncertainty as to whether
a person is speaking aloud, or to himself, or even speaking at all.
Here the speech of the characters is quite- unambiguous, and,
though this style was to be abandoned, often brilliantly achieved:
‘No one enjoys being made a fool of before other people,’ he
blurted out [...] “hat refers to me, I suppose,’ she said
calmly.
‘Every day since we’ve been here you’ve done something to
make me appear ridiculous,’ he went on. ‘Of course, so long
as it amuses you, you’re welcome; but we have to remember
that we are going to spend our lives together. I asked you,
only this morning, for example, to come out and take a turn
with me in the garden. I was waiting for you ten minutes,
and you never came. Every one saw me waiting. The stable-
boys saw me. I was so ashamed that I went in. Then, on the
drive you hardly spoke to me. Henry noticed it. Every
one notices it... You find no difficulty in talking to Henry,
though.’ [.. .]
‘None of these things seem to me to matter,’ she said.
‘Very well, then. I may as well hold my tongue,’ he replied.
‘In themselves they don’t seem to me to matter; if they hurt
you, of course they matter.’ (p. 221)
In isolation, the interplay in this passage between William’s
nervous, exasperated iteration and Katharine’s unimpassioned
comments is extremely impressive. But the effect of the dialogue
is rather lessened, in context, by there being so much of it. The
reader may well be tired of such conversations by the end of ‘that
interminable Night and Day’.1 Though it is far more elaborately
plotted than The Voyage Out, which, after the arrival at Santa
17 Bell Ly para
58 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Marina, is loosely structured along the path of Rachel’s develop-
ment without leading up to any necessary moment for her death,
Night and Day nevertheless gives the effect of unwieldy shapeless-
ness. ‘It’s so long and so tahsome,’ Katherine Mansfield tartly
remarked;! and Virginia Woolf (who was taking time off from the
novel to write such short sketches as ‘Kew Gardens’ and “The Mark
on the Wall’) expressed her impatience with it in ‘Modern Fiction’
(1919):
We go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our
two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more
ceased to resemble the vision in our minds.”
The organization of the novel reflects the pointless and repetitive
quality of its upper-class heroine’s conventional daily round. Ralph
asks Katharine what she has been doing since they last met.
‘Doing?’ she pondered. ‘Walking in and out of other people’s
houses.’ (p. 341)
Virginia Woolf, similarly, pushes her plot along by having the
characters walk in and out of people’s houses in order to talk and
think. They seem always to be having tea with each other, while
their emotions interact in as elaborate a pattern as that of the
mathematical equations which the heroine constructs in the privacy
of her room. Ralph Denham loves Katharine, but Katharine is
engaged to William Rodney. Mary Datchet loves Ralph, but knows
that he loves Katharine, and so refuses his offer of marriage.
Katharine realizes that her marriage with William is impossible,
and eventually (guided selflessly though reluctantly by Mary)
comes to love Ralph. At the highest point of ‘muddle’ in the story,
Katharine arranges for William to court Cassandra Otway, while,
in the eyes of the world, he is still engaged to Katharine. These
private affairs become public when the interfering Aunt Celia
discovers the relationship between William and Cassandra. Mrs
Hilbery steps in to seal the union of the two couples, in spite of
Mr Hilbery’s half-hearted opposition. Mary has withdrawn into a

1 Bell II, p. 69. 2 CE Il, p. 105.

 Night and Day: 1919 59
self-abnegating, impersonal life of work. The shifts in the pattern
all take place between Chapters 18 and 22, so that there is a longer
first part of muddle and a shorter second part of enlightenment.
Important visits are made to the Otways at Stogdon House and
to Mary’s family at Disham, but in the main the action centres on
five places in London: the Hilbery home in Cheyne Walk, where
Katharine pours tea, helps her mother to write the life of the poet
Richard Alardyce, and works secretly in her room at mathematics;
Ralph’s shabby, middle-class house in Highgate, full of relatives,
where he barricades himself in his room to dream of Katharine;
Mary Datchet’s flat at the top of a block of offices off the Strand,
and the suffragette office in Russell Square, where her increasingly
self-reliant life takes place; and William Rodney’s comfortable
eighteenth-century rooms in King’s Bench Walk, the rooms ‘of a
person who cherishes a great many personal tastes, guarding them
from the rough blasts of the public with scrupulous attention’
(p. 65).
“Tahsome’ though the form of Night and Day may be, it is
appropriate that the story of Katharine’s escape from nineteenth-
century traditions should be described in the kind of novel which
was in its turn to be escaped from. Ten years later, in 4 Room of
One’s Own and in ‘Women and Fiction’,! Virginia Woolf was to
write brilliantly about the enormous and special problems facing the
woman writer who has so many inhibiting traditions to resist in
order to write at all, let alone to write well and with her own voice.
But in Night and Day the discussion is already taking place in dis-
guised form, so that a retrospective analogy may be drawn between
Katharine’s emancipation as a woman and Virginia Woolf’s
development as a writer. In order to be truthful and free and to
work at her ‘art’ in daylight, as ‘mistress in her own kingdom’ (p.
445), Katharine has to reject the phantom voices of traditional
authority which decree that ‘Insanity is not a fit subject for fiction’
(p. 323), that women are only ‘half alive’ without marriage (p. 59),
that a wife must be ‘ambitious for her husband’ (p. 140) and that ‘a
woman who wants to have her own way’ should not get married
(p. 196). Katharine’s tentative resistance to these voices is described
in an extremely important passage.
1 CE Il, pp. 141-8.
60 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Like all people brought up in a tradition, Katharine was able,
within ten minutes or so, to reduce any moral difficulty to
its traditional shape and solve it by the traditional answers.
The book of wisdom lay open, if not upon her mother’s knee,
upon the knees of many uncles and aunts. She had only to
consult them, and they would at once turn to the right page
and read out an answer exactly suited to one in her position
[. ..] But in her case the questions became phantoms directly
she tried seriously to find an answer, which proved that the
traditional answer would be of no use to her individually.
Yet it had served so many people, she thought, glancing at the
rows of houses on either side of her, where families, whose
incomes must be between a thousand and fifteen-hundred a year
lived, and kept, perhaps, three servants, and draped their
windows with curtains which were always thick and generally
dirty, and must, she thought, since you could only see a looking-
glass gleaming above a sideboard on which a dish of apples was
set, keep the room inside very dark. [. . .]
The only truth which she could discover was the truth of
what she herself felt —a frail beam when compared with the
broad illumination shed by the eyes of all the people who are
in agreement to see together; but having rejected the visionary
voices, she had no choice but to make this her guide through
the dark masses which confronted her. (pp. 290-1)
Katharine’s predicament is vividly rendered through images. The
book upon the knees of older relatives suggests security as much as
repression (anticipating the vision in The Waves of ‘the old nurse
who turns the pages of the picture-book’).! Not to read that book
is to go out into the unknown, away from the stability of childhood.
But the alternative to the unknown is those dark, stuffy, nine-
teenth-century rooms, which Virginia Woolf uses again and again
as images for the attitudes they contain.” The symbol for Katharine’s
own search for truth, the ‘frail beam’, grows in strength, like the
search itself, until it dominates the latter part of the novel.
1 The Waves, p. 247.
? See, for example, ‘Lappin and Lappinova’ (written in 1919), A Haunted
House and Other Short Stories, p. 83; Orlando, Ch. 5; The Years, pp. 10-40;
Flush, Ch. 2 and 3.
 Night and Day: 1919 61
It is not easy for Katharine to find her own way, partly because
she is fond of what she must reject. Certainly she resents having to
spend her mornings surrounded by manuscripts and letters and old
photographs, trying to organize her mother’s scatty, eloquent
recollections into a ‘Life’ of Richard Alardyce, and her afternoons
showing visitors the ‘shrine’ of her grandfather, the poet. But,
though she longs to climb out of this ‘deep pool of past time’ (p.
104), it is attractive: living on in her mother, the past seems richer
and more serene than her own time, and Richard Alardyce a more
romantic figure than any she can find in the present:
Sometimes she felt [. . .] that the past had completely displaced
the present, which, when one resumed life after a morning
among the dead, proved to be of an utterly thin and inferior
composition. (p. 39)
The present consists of Aunt Celia fulminating over the immorality
of Cousin Cyril’s living with a woman not his wife, and William
Rodney demanding constant sympathetic subservience. Katharine’s
feelings for William in no way measure up to her secret ideal of
romantic emotion, and she therefore assumes that her ‘imaginary
world’, ‘a place where feelings were liberated from the constraint
which the real world puts upon them’, cannot be linked with the
actual. She turns from her dreams, with ‘resignation and a kind of
stoical acceptance of facts’ (p. 131), to marry William as a means to
independence. At least, as a married woman, she will be able
to work at maths and not at the life of her grandfather. Her marriage
‘seemed no more than an archway through which it was necessary
to pass in order to have her desire’ (pp. 200-1). Since William has
conventional ideas about marriage and women (‘Don’t ask them
for their reasons. Just ask them for their feelings’ (p. 190)), their
conflict is inevitable. Though he is not presented as a sexually
potent character, his desire to put Katharine in a doll’s house
creates a fierce sexual hostility between them, anticipating the
more powerfully imagined relationships between Mr and Mrs
Ramsay and Isa and Giles Oliver:
William’s exacting demands and his jealousy had pulled her
down into some horrible swamp of her nature where the
primeval struggle between man and woman still rages. (p. 344)
62 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
—an observation which is made, appropriately, at the zoo. William
(whose intellectual refinement and egotistical chauvinism are not
quite happily fused, making him an unsatisfactory combination of
St John Hirst and the first Richard Dalloway) has an aesthetic
appreciation of Katharine which is balked by her inability to act
up to his concept of womanly behaviour. He is not likely to realize
that she represents ‘the manly side [...] of the feminine nature’
(p. 317), since the possibility of deviation from standard sexual roles
is foreign to his way of thought, but he can tell that the ‘womanly’
Cassandra, who soothes his pride, makes him feel happier.
Katharine is offered a very different kind of consolation by Ralph
Denham: the possibility of freedom and equality, without pretence.
Katharine’s androgynous qualities will be able to express themselves;
space, privacy and rational understanding will be the enlightened
alternatives to the ‘horrible swamp’ of jealousy and possessiveness.
Though the word ‘androgynous’ is not used, the relationship is
a serious early version of the light-fantastic androgynous marriage
in Orlando and of the sexless relationship between Sara and Nicholas
in The Years.’ Ralph and Katharine’s love, however, is not sexless.
Though Virginia Woolf apologized to Lytton Strachey for the lack
of ‘tupping’ in the novel,? it is clear that the lovers are sexually
attracted: Mr Hilbery, though never jealous of William, feels that
Ralph Denham is a rival:
She might have married Rodney without causing him a twinge.
This man she loved [. . .] Had he loved her to see her swept
away by this torrent, to have her taken from him by this
uncontrollable force? [...] [He] strode out of the room,
leaving in the minds of the women a sense, half of awe, half
1 The type of relationship is based partly on Virginia Woolf’s own marriage
and partly (see p. 7 above) on her sister Vanessa’s life with Duncan Grant at
Wissett Farm in 1916. See Bell II, pp. 31-2, 42.
2 Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters, ed. Leonard Woolf and James
Strachey (London, Hogarth Press, 1956), Virginia Woolf to Lytton Strachey,
28 October 1919, p. 84.
3 The reader is put in mind here of Leslie Stephen, whose character is used as
material both for Mr Hilbery —a jealous father and a reader of Scott — and for
the eccentric Mr Ambrose in The Voyage Out, in anticipation of Mr Ramsay
(see p. 38 above).
 Night and Day: 1919 63
of amusement, at the extravagant, inconsiderate, uncivilized
male, outraged somehow and gone bellowing to his lair [. . .]
(p. 464)
Her father’s outrage suggests too that Ralph is to enfranchise
Katharine from the world of her childhood. He is a spokesman for
modernism, who will enable her to move into the twentieth century,
partly by virtue of his coming from another class and working for his
living. He opens the doors for Katharine to the outside world of
human activity from which she has been sheltered in Cheyne Walk
by privilege and tradition. The challenge he embodies to her family
history is summed up in a companion piece to the passage on tradition
quoted above.
At any moment she might hear another summons of greater
interest to her than the whole of the nineteenth century. [. . .]
The alcove on the stairs, in which the telephone was placed
[...] was a pocket for superfluous possessions, such as exist
in most houses which harbour the wreckage of three genera-
tions. Prints of great-uncles, famed for their prowess in the
East, hung above Chinese teapots [...] [which] stood upon
bookcases containing the complete works of William Cowper
and Sir Walter Scott. [...] Whose voice was now going to
combine with them, or to strike a discord? [. . .]
She dropped the machine, and looked fixedly at the print of
the great-uncle who had not ceased to gaze, with an air of
amiable authority, into a world which, as yet, beheld no
symptoms of the Indian Mutiny. And yet, gently swinging
against the wall, within the black tube, was a voice which
recked nothing of Uncle James, or of China teapots, or of red
velvet curtains. (pp. 287-8)
Katharine’s emancipation from the nineteenth century in all its
forms—her parents, the house, William’s idea of marriage, the
family tea-kettle (p. 460)* — is the result of her emotion for Ralph,
and its reward is their marriage. Though she has to undergo a
private and difficult struggle in order to understand her feelings,
the struggle takes her towards a mutual experience. By contrast,
i The image is used again in The Years, pp. 10-11.
64 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Mary Datchet’s struggle takes her towards isolation. Though
Katharine is the heroine, Mary is the more heroic character, the
first of several single women— Lily Briscoe, Miss La Trobe, the
‘Marys’ of 4 Room of One’s Own — whose life is their work. She
has removed herself from her version of Cheyne Walk—a quiet
country rectory in the medieval village of Disham-— six months
before the start of the novel, and, by means of a private income,
is able to devote herself to the cause of women’s suffrage. When
she has to suppress her love for Ralph, she marshals her generous
affections in the service of the world’s troubles, and determines on
a life which is ‘not happiness’, but which involves her in ‘the vast
desires and sufferings of the mass of mankind’ (p. 243). In practical
terms she may not achieve much. The work of Mary’s suffrage
office is not idealized, and her colleagues, Mrs Seal and Mr Clacton,
are treated satirically. The society which she joins towards the end
of the novel is vaguely described. It seems as though the value of her
work lies more in its ennobling effect on the personality than in
its political effects. Even at the moment of Mary’s apotheosis, when
Ralph and Katharine look up at the light burning in her window
and see it as ‘a sign of triumph shining there for ever’, the figure
whom Ralph associates with Mary’s ‘plans’ is the absurd one of
Sally Seal (p. 469). But Mary’s stature in the novel is not under-
mined by the reservations felt for her work. She is a source of
strength— as is comically indicated by the continuous visits she is
paid by the other characters. Though she is wrenching herself away
from personal involvements she is necessary to less self-reliant people,
particularly to Katharine, whose developing relationship with her
is the most interesting and the most convincing in the novel.

Mary, Ralph and Katharine find, in different ways, that it is pos-

sible to forge links between ‘the life of solitude and the life of society’
(p. 315), and that the dark, inner states of the personality can have
some active relation to the external, daylit world, and need not
always be suppressed or kept separate. That the characters can
1 Virginia Woolf had experience of such work. In 1g10 she was employed in
addressing envelopes for the suffrage movement (Bell I, p. 161) and from 1916
to 1920 she was an active member of the Richmond Branch of the Woman’s
Co-operative Guild (Bell II, p. 35).
 Night and Day: 1919 65
achieve this assimilation makes Night and Day the most optimistic
of the novels; but at the same time the difficulty of their attempt
gives it a ‘melancholy’ tone:
Yet if one is to deal with people on a large scale, and say what
one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to
being hopeless though: only the spectacle is a profoundly
strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to
grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old,
when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is
a sad one.?
The comment might be a description of narrative innovations as
much as of subject matter: it directs us to the relationship between
Virginia Woolf’s attempt to find the right ‘modern’ way of master-
ing and communicating reality, and Ralph and Katharine’s similar
struggle to translate the truer, secret areas of the mind into com-
municable terms.
At the heart of the comic vacillations between different partner-
ships is the emphasis on the difficulty of knowing others and on the
extreme obscurity and remoteness of the self. Underlying the comic
cross-purposes and misunderstandings is the isolation of social
beings. Katharine, in a conversation with her cousin Henry, sums
up the despondency produced by attempts to communicate.
She knew that any intercourse between people is extremely
partial; from the whole mass of her feelings, only one or two
could be selected for Henry’s inspection, and therefore she
sighed. (p. 184)
Conversations are repeatedly being carried on against the ironically
different activity of the inward mind—a condition of existence to
which Virginia Woolf will give increasing attention in the novels,
There seems no possibility of reconciling the external and the in-
ternal, when a proposal of marriage (for instance) can spring from
such incommunicable depths as these:
He had been building one of those piles of thought, as ram-
shackle and fantastic as a Chinese pagoda, half from words
1 AWD, 27 March 1919, p. 10.
66 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
let fall by gentlemen in gaiters, half from the litter in his own
mind, about duck shooting and legal history, about the Roman
occupation of Lincoln and the relations of country gentlemen
with their wives, when, from all this disconnected rambling,
there suddenly formed itself in his mind the idea that he would
ask Mary to marry him. (p. 211)
‘Oh, dear me! The mystery of life; the inaccuracy of thought!”
Virginia Woolf exclaims in “Che Mark on the Wall’, written in
1917, where she enters into the kind of mental process which is
here being descriptively paraphrased. Since the arbitrary process
of connection in Ralph’s mind cannot be understood by anyone
else, it seems unlikely that the attempt to know others will result
in anything but confusion and dismay, the aimless, hopeful crying
out of names: ‘Jacob! Jacob!’ “Mrs Ramsay! Mrs Ramsay!’ But
for all this we cannot help ‘arrows of sensation striking strangely
through the envelope of personality, which shelters us so conven-
iently from our fellows’ (p. 252). In spite of its impossibility, the
task of communication is attractive, because participation is life;
absolute isolation is death. The antithesis is powerfully expressed
by Mary’s dilemma over whether to tell Katharine that Ralph
loves her. In terms of the plot, it means that Mary will lose Ralph
for ever. But the problem is not explored in those terms:
After all, she considered, why should she speak? Because it is
right, her instinct told her; right to expose oneself without
reservation to other human beings. [...] But if she did keep
something of her own? Immediately she figured an immured
life, continuing for an immense period, the same feelings living
for ever, neither dwindling nor changing within the ring of a
thick stone wall. (p. 255)
It is an image of hell. The barren sterility of isolation which Mary
imagines here is one of several horrific visions which haunt the
three principal characters. All three are aware of an aspect of the
world without joy or hope, a ‘heart of darkness’? which is an appal-
1 Conrad is called to mind, particularly in the words of Marlow in Lord Fim:
‘He appealed . . . to the side turned perpetually to the light of day, and to that
side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon, exists stealthily in
 Night and Day: 1919 67
ling kind of reality. Ralph, hearing of Katharine’s engagement,
gives way to it, to the accompaniment of the appropriate passage
from Measure for Measure:
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world...
All things had turned to ghosts; the whole mass of the world
was insubstantial vapour, surrounding the solitary spark in his
mind [which] burnt no more [...] He sawthe truth. He saw
the dun-coloured race of waters and the blank shore. (pp. 143,
146)
Katharine, isolated by William’s love for Cassandra, before her
union with Ralph, undergoes a similar experience:
The dream nature of our life had never been more apparent
to her, never had life been more certainly an affair of four
walls, whose objects existed only within the range of lights
and fires, beyond which lay nothing, or nothing more than
darkness. She seemed physically to have stepped beyond the
region where the light of illusion still makes it desirable to
possess, to love, to struggle. (p. 327)
It is difficult for Ralph and Katharine to establish a relationship in
the face of this dark, nihilistic vision, since, in Katharine particularly,
there is a part that embraces the vision in preference to the muddle
of personal relationships. The inward effect of her bondage to
social tradition is that she has come to resent the demands made on
her inner life by other people; she dislikes having to be involved in
‘all that part oflife which is conspicuously without order’ (p. 308).
Looking out of her window, she yearns, not for participation, but for
space, darkness, silence, ‘the nothingness of night’ (p. 97). So that
when the hero and heroine approach each other, they are engaged
perpetual darkness, with only a fearful ashy light falling at times on the
edge’ (Ch. 8). ‘For a moment I had a view of the world that seemed to wear a
vast and dismal aspect of disorder’ (Ch. 33). Allen McLaurin compares the
passage about Ralph on p. 146 to the introduction of Heyst in Ch. 1 of
Victory (The Echoes Enslaved (Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 36—7)-
68 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
not only in a mutual defiance of their vision of a world entirely
dark, but also against Katharine’s wariness of daylight communi-
cation. Their desire, and their task, is to fill both ‘night’ and ‘day’
with meaning by linking the two, jumping ‘this astonishing precipice
on the one side of which the soul was active and in broad daylight,
on the other side of which it was contemplative and dark as night’
(p. 315). They attempt to actualize their daydreams. Both have
existed, in the earlier part of the novel, in a dream world which
seems to have no possible meeting place with reality. Ralph ts
obsessed by a mythical ‘Katharine’, but even before her advent he
had been prone to ‘strange voyages’ of the mind, and has had to
divide his life ‘rigidly’ into ‘hours of work and those of dreams’
(p. 117). Katharine, similarly, has been used to wandering in a
dream world with an ideal lover: “They rode through forests
together, they galloped by the rim of the sea’ (p. 98). As we have
seen, in agreeing to marry William, she is resigned to suppressing
the reality of herdreams for the task of living, like the cave dwellers
in Plato’s Republic, in a prison of appearances (p. 131). The only
person she knows who does not have to make any distinction
between dreams and life is her mother, who, when asked about her
past, can reply: ‘It was life, it was death. The great sea was round
us. It was the voyage for ever and ever’ (p. 449). This is the
language of Katharine’s dreams, and she gazes admiringly at her
mother, ‘that ancient voyager’. Even when Ralph and Katharine
begin to link their real lives with their daydreams, they find it hard
to achieve Mrs Hilbery’s serene harmonizing of the two; instead
they are continually in difficulties, because their dreams threaten
to dominate their understanding of each other. These moments
they call their ‘lapses’.
‘Reality— reality’ [...] ‘I cease to be real to you [...] We
come together for a moment and we part.’ (pp. 438-9)
The romantic language used for their dream lives is uninteresting:
the jungles and seashores and mountains (which will recur more
subtly in Rhoda’s and Isa’s monologues) do not have the vigour
and sharpness of their real surroundings. Where the language does
become interesting is in the increasingly impressionistic images
of air, light, fire and gloom, which are used for the vision of truth
 Night and Day: 1919 69
to which the lovers aspire. Towards the end of the book, as the
vision is realized, the dialogue between Ralph and Katharine loses
its previously naturalistic tone, and becomes anticipatory of the
lyrical speech in Between the Acts. The relationship is increasingly
described in terms oflight. Ralph sits on the Embankment thinking
of Katharine and an old tramp approaches him and asks for money.
When the elderly man [. . .] mumbled on, an odd image came
to his mind of a lighthouse besieged by the flying bodies oflost
birds, who were dashed senseless, by the gale, against the glass.
He had a strange sensation that he was both lighthouse and
bird. (p. 365)
Later he thinks of the light from the Hilberys’ house as a lighthouse
beam irradiating the ‘trackless waste’. It is interesting to find that
Virginia Woolf is already using the image — in a book which has
no excuse for a lighthouse — for its flexibility. It suggests ideas of
hope and of desolation, of loneliness and of sanctuary. And it
provides the alternative to the hard, bright electric light of ‘society’,
the light Mrs Hilbery rejects when she says: ‘Shall we give a
little party in complete darkness? ‘There’d have to be bright rooms
for the bores...’ (p. 18). Towards the end of the book Ralph tries
to write Katharine a letter expressing his belief that relationships
are the only means to the kind of impersonal state which she
desires. It is as near as the novel comes to defining its vision of true
reality, which for most of the time remains as unspecific as the
alternatives it rejects are clear-cut.
Human beings [...] make it possible for each to have access
to another world independent of personal affairs, a world of
law, of philosophy, or more strangely a world such as he had
had a glimpse of the other evening when together they seemed
to be sharing something, creating something, an ideal — a vision
flung out in advance of our actual circumstances. (p. 452)
The letter turns itself into a drawing, the only expression he can
find for his idea: a ‘little dot’ with ‘flames round it’ (p. 457).
It represented by its circumference of smudges surrounding a
central blot all that encircling glow which for him surrounded,
70 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
inexplicably, so many of the objects of life, softening their
sharp outline, so that he could see certain streets, books, and
situations wearing a halo almost perceptible to the physical
eye. (p. 458)
Katharine, to whom Ralph appears as ‘fire burning through smoke’
understands the symbol: ‘She said simply [...] “Yes, the world
looks something like that to me too.” ’’ Very soon after, Virginia
Woolf was to write a non-fictional description of true reality in the
same terms, in the passage in ‘Modern Fiction’ which says that life
is not a ‘series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged’ but ‘a luminous
halo’.t Again, the relationship between the discovery of a truer
life in Night and Day and Virginia Woolf’s search for a ‘truer’
form of narrative realism is clear. Because the vision 1s exploratory
and owes nothing to received ideas, it has no ready-made concrete
form, and cannot be firmly expressed — ‘reality, was it, figures,
love, truth?’ (p. 466) — except in such images as a dot with flames
round it or a luminous halo. The obscure and melancholy tone of
the last chapter of Night and Day results from the great difficulty
which the lovers find in expressing their ‘vision of an orderly world’.
She felt him trying to piece together in a laborious and ele-
mentary fashion fragments of belief, unsoldered and separate,
lacking the unity of phrases fashioned by the old believers.
‘Together they groped in this difficult region, where the un-
finished, the unfulfilled, the unwritten, the unreturned, came
together in their ghostly way and wore the semblance of the
complete and the satisfactory. (p. 470)
But the truth is hard to retain. It appears in ‘moments, fragments,
a second of vision, and then the flying waters, the winds dissipating
and dissolving’ (p. 470). The struggle to sustain the moment of
vision against the forces of chaos, to send the lighthouse beam across
the trackless waste, will be found in the later novels. In its pre-
occupation with this struggle, Night and Day, in spite of its tradi-
tional and comic form, is integral to the whole of Virginia Woolf’s
work.

1 CE Il, p. 106.
 3
Jacob’s Room
1922

y IRGINIA Woolf discovered a form for Facob’s Room before

she knew what the subject of the novel would be. The
discovery sprang from the commentaries on modern fiction
and the short experiments in narrative which she had been making
since 1917. Quite suddenly, in 1920, she realized how they would
lead to her next book. The relevant passage in the diary is a major
landmark, prefacing a novel so different in appearance from The
Voyage Out and Night and Day that its similarities of themes and
perspectives, and its considerable debt to traditional ingredients such
as epigrams, mock-heroic diction and comic dialogue, may easily be
overlooked.

. . having this afternoon arrived at some idea of anew form

for a new novel. Suppose one thing should open out of another
—as in An Unwritten Novel— only not for 10 pages but 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? My doubt is how far it will
enclose the human heart — Am I sufficiently mistress of my
dialogue to net it there? For I figure that the approach will
be entirely different this time: no scaffolding; scarcely a brick
to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, humour,
everything as bright as fire in the mist. Then I’ll find room
for so much — a galety — an inconsequence — a light spirited
7i
72 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
stepping at my sweet will. Whether I’m sufficiently mistress
of things — that’s the doubt; but conceive[?] Mark on the
Wall, K.G. and Unwritten Novel taking hands and dancing
in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover; the
theme is a blank to me.. .!
It is the techniques of the short stories that are uppermost in her
mind, but these arise from and express their subject matter. The
‘Unwritten’ search for Minnie Marsh’s hidden character, the
impressionistic perspective of the snail in ‘Kew Gardens’, the mind
that seeks an impersonal peace in lieu of facts and generalizations
in “The Mark on the Wall’ are attempts to fuse the experience
and the presentation of true reality. And, when she envisages that
‘one thing should open out of another’ in ‘facob’s Room and that
all will be ‘crepuscular’, she points to its version of life — intangible
characters and mixed perceptions — as much as to its narrative
‘approach’. The form of Facob’s Room is the subject: an alternative
to the false reality of the biography of fact. The momentary ‘shower
of innumerable atoms’ ? of the short sketches is now sustained to
the extent of a whole life: a biography of fragments.
The ingredients of traditional biography are there. When the
book begins on ‘the third of September’, Jacob is a small boy on
holiday in Cornwall, with his widowed mother, Betty Flanders,
and his two younger brothers Archer and John. Cornwall becomes
Scarborough, their home, where Jacob grows up, learns Latin from
Mr Floyd (who proposes to his mother), and collects butterflies.
When he is nineteen he goes to Cambridge, where he makes friends
with Richard Bonamy and Timothy Durrant. He goes by boat,
one long vacation, to Timothy’s home (again in Cornwall) where
he meets Timothy’s sister Clara. Coming down from Cambridge,
aged twenty-two, he lives in elegant eighteenth-century rooms in
Lamb’s Conduit Street, has affairs, goes to parties, works in an
unspecified office, rides to hounds, pays visits to his mother’s old
friends one day and to prostitutes the next, writes essays, goes to the
opera, and reaches the age of twenty-five. He goes abroad, to
France, Italy and Greece, where he falls in love with an older

1 AWD, 26 January 1920, p. 23.

2 “Modern Fiction’ (1919), CE II, p. 106.
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 73
married woman. When he returns, the war is beginning, in which
he is killed.
There is very little drama in Jacob’s life except his death, and
that is kept as quiet as possible. The biographer is looking for
interest other than action, and the attention is not on facts. Jacob’s
age, place of residence and acquaintances are slid into the texture
of a description or a meditation. The ‘fact’ that his home town is
Scarborough is merged on the first page with Betty Flanders’s letter,
her tears, and her view. Captain Barfoot’s conversation with Mrs
Flanders about the advisability of ‘sending a boy to one of the
universities’ leads brusquely to: ‘Jacob Flanders, therefore, went up
to Cambridge in October, 1906’ (p. 27), while the fact of his going
still seems an idea taking root in his mother’s mind. Though every
chapter shows Jacob’s life, there is no impartial account of it.
Instead he is evoked by numerous points of view which add up to
a portrait strongly anticipating that of Percival in The Waves:' a
fine upstanding English youth, blue-eyed (p. 28), beautiful (p. 71),
distinguished-looking (p. 67), silent and awkward in company
unless fired with enthusiasm, expressing himself in inarticulate
‘public school’ language in which the word ‘rot’ frequently appears,
physically healthy and sensual (p. 87), attractive, to all kinds of
women, liking sincerity (p. 136), slow-thinking (p. 142), and
interested in politics (p. 131) as well as in literature. Florinda and
Fanny Elmer both compare him to Greek statues (as Mary Datchet
does Ralph). Sandra Wentworth-Williams thinks he is like a small
boy. Clara, the most sensitive of the women who love him, calls
him ‘unworldly’ (p. 67). All the onlookers, however, are more or
less baffled. Though evidently a simple type, he is also aloof and
mysterious. Bonamy (anticipating Neville’s love for Percival) is

1 Both Facob’s Room and The Waves are elegies for Virginia’s brother Thoby
Stephen, who died of typhoid fever, after a holiday in Greece, in November
1906. Thoby’s intellectual and personal influence on Virginia was a strong
one (and it was, of course, his Cambridge friends who formed the nucleus of
the Bloomsbury Group). But, though Virginia was very fond of her brother,
she was not very close to him. Both novels reflect not only her sense of loss
(‘after twenty years it still seemed to her that her own continuing life was no
more than an excursion without him’) but also her feeling that Thoby had
been a mystery to her. (Bell I, p. 112.)
74 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
drawn to Jacob and at the same time in awe of him. He finds him
‘barbaric, obscure’ (p. 156) — also romantic, gloomy, enthusiastic,
incoherent, and liable to ‘get into the doldrums’ and look ‘like a
Margate fisherman out of a job, or a British admiral’ (p. 137).
But Bonamy’s view — like Betty Flanders’s, or Mrs Durrant’s, or
Lucinda’s, or Sandra’s — is incomplete. The method of portrayal
bears comparison to the modelling of Greek statues, on which
Jacob himself remarks: “The side of the figure which is turned
away from view is left in the rough’ (p. 141).
This shadowy but consistent vision of life and character requires
its own tone of voice. Facob’s Room uses a fluid, complex sentence
which has been conceived in the short sketches and which, though
much.developed in the later novels, is always to be the hallmark of
Virginia Woolf’s style. Its ‘looseness and lightness’ is well illustrated
by the account of Betty’s letter to Jacob, which is first quoted and
then paraphrased:

‘And Mrs Jarvis tells me —’ Mrs Flanders liked Mrs Jarvis,

always said of her that she was too good for such a quiet place,
and, though she never listened to her discontent and told her
at the end of it (looking up, sucking her thread, or taking off
her spectacles) that a little peat wrapped round the iris roots
keeps them from the frost, and Parrot’s great white sale is
Tuesday next, ‘do remember,’ — Mrs Flanders knew precisely
how Mrs Jarvis felt; and how interesting her letters were,
about Mrs Jarvis, could one read them year in, year out — the
unpublished works of women, written by the fireside in pale
profusion, dried by the flame, for the blotting-paper’s worn to
holes and the nib cleft and clotted. Then Captain Barfoot.
Him she called ‘the Captain’, spoke of frankly, yet never
without reserve. The Captain was inquiring for her about
Garfit’s acre; advised chickens; could promise profit; or had
the sciatica; or Mrs Barfoot had been indoors for weeks; or
the Captain says things look bad, politics that is, for as Jacob
knew, the Captain would sometimes talk, as the evening
waned, about Ireland or India; and then Mrs Flanders would
fall musing about Morty, her brother, lost all these years —
had the natives got him, was his ship sunk — would the
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 75
Admiralty tell her? — the Captain knocking his pipe out, as
Jacob knew, rising to go, stiffly stretching to pick up Mrs
Flanders’s wool which had rolled beneath the chair. Talk of
the chicken farm came back and back, the woman, even at
fifty, sketching on the cloudy future flocks of Leghorns,
Cochin Chinas, Orpingtons; like Jacob in the blur of her
outline; but powerful as he was; fresh and vigorous, running
about the house, scolding Rebecca. (p. 86)

Mrs Flanders’s mind and letters are runny and hazy, as we know
from earlier in the novel; but so is the style of the narrator. What
are the ingredients of this characteristic ‘blur of outline’?
‘Two of the sentences in the passage, the first and the fourth, are
enormous. The first has a simple main clause (Mrs Flanders liked
Mrs Jarvis, and knew how she felt), with two dependent passages,
one describing a typical conversation between Mrs Flanders and
Mrs Jarvis (‘and though she never listened [. . .] told her [. . .]’),
the other making a generalization which hangs from a semicolon
at the end of the main clause. Betty’s letter is turned into ‘the
unpublished works of women’ by the non-fictional tone of comment
in ‘could one read them’ and then, quite simply, by a dash which
jumps us through the connection between the particular and the
general. But the generalization is not allowed quite to hang loose.
The past-participle phrases describing womens’ letters lead, by way
of the loosely linking ‘for’, back into a present tense (‘for the
blotting-paper’s worn’) which could indicate a return to the par-
ticular: it might be Betty’s blotting-paper. The other very long
sentence derives a more firmly structured air from its string of
past-tense, elliptical clauses linked by semicolons. As the account of
Captain Barfoot’s and Mrs Flanders’s evening continues, the tenses
shift us from a particular to a typical evening (‘was saying [. . .]
would talk’) and then, by way of present participles, (‘the Captain
knocking his pipe out’) to a fusion of the two. The point of view
of this sentence, as well as the point in time, fluctuates. At first the
clauses seem to depend on an invisible ‘Mrs Flanders wrote that’.
But, when we reach the first ‘for as Jacob knew’, Mrs Flanders’s
writing voice is replaced by Jacob’s recollections. A new sentence
might have been started, with a new set of dependent clauses
76 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
depending on ‘Jacob knew that’, But this would destroy the
ambiguity essential to the whole passage, which allows us to take
in all at once the sense of several, habitual scenes in Mrs Flanders’s
life; the particular incidents which she has put in her letter; the
tone in which it is written; and the memories it might evoke, if
read. The sad quality of the whole arises from the fact that the
letter is in fact lying unread on the hall table. The ambiguity
allowed by the syntax matches the haziness of some of the images.
‘A little peat wrapped around the iris roots’ is linked incongruously
with ‘Parrot’s great white sale’, mixing ideas of dark earth and
billowing sheets; and the image of the flocks of chickens sketched
on ‘the cloudy future’ almost suggests the beating of wings in the
air. The odd juxtaposition of these images gives the passage a faint
blur of lyricism.
The long, rambling sentences which allow for so many possibili-
ties are characteristic of Facob’s Room; but there is more to tone of
voice than sentence length. Much of the effect of the passage is
made by its interpolation of direct or free indirect speech into the
main narrative structure, creating a flexible interchange of voices
which was to be most brilliantly used in To the Lighthouse and
Between the Acts. Another noticeable feature, strongly anticipating
The Waves, is the rhythm, provided by the semicolon connectives,
by the lists of details such as the chickens’ names, by the alliterative
pairings (‘pale profusion’, ‘cleft and clotted’), the repeated ellipses,
the participles, and the inversions. A larger rhythm, made out of the
constant repetition of these techniques, energizes the whole book.
The most striking syntactical feature of the passage is perhaps its
change of tense, from the past to the present or from the past
imperfect to the past perfect. Such shifts are found throughout the
novel. The historical past in which Jacob spoke or acted is mixed
with the present-tense commentary of the narrator. Often the past
is made, by a startling switch of tense, to loom into the present:

Rose Shaw [. . .] said that life was wicked because a man called
Jimmy refused to marry a woman called (if memory serves)
Helen Aitken.
Both were beautiful. Both were inanimate. [. . .] And now
Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders and Helen visits hospitals. Oh,
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 a,
life is damnable, life is wicked, as Rose Shaw said. (pp. 91-2)
As for Cruttendon and Jinny, he thought them the most
remarkable people he had ever met — being of course unable
to foresee how it fell out in the course of time that Cruttendon
took to painting orchards; had therefore to live in Kent; and
must, one would think, see through apple blossom by this time,
since his wife, for whose sake he did it, eloped with a novelist;
but no; Cruttendon still paints orchards, savagely, in solitude.
(pp. 123-4)
A sense of Jacob’s doom is created by the fairytale formula: we
feel a double sense of sadness at the outcome of early promise and
at the continuation of life without Jacob.
The switching of tenses is frequently preceded by the use of the
pronoun ‘one’, which allows the narrator to hover over the char-
acters without being too assertive. The ladylike tentativeness of this
‘compromise pronoun’? has been criticized,? while, on the other
hand, the narrator of Facob’s Room has been attacked for being
over-intrusive.* But the essential quality of the novel is, surely, the
fluid relationship between biographer and subject: it is a novel about
writing about Jacob. Hence the great importance of ‘one’, which
is often used to distinguish the narrator’s thoughts from those of
her characters:
One must do the best one can with her report. Anyhow, this
was Jacob Flanders, aged nineteen. It is no use trying to sum
me
Compare, for example, the ending of the story which Mrs Ramsay will read
to James: “And there they are still living to this day.’ (“Ihe Fisherman and
his wife’, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, translated Margaret Hunt and James Stern
(London, Routledge, 1938), p. 112.)
nN
David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (London, Nicholson and Watson, Editions
Poetry, 1945), p. 65.
The Language of Fiction (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 86.
wo
b See Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1945; 2nd ed. 1964), p. 77; R. L. Chambers, The Novels of Virginia
Woolf (Edinburgh and London, Oliver and Boyd, 1947), p. 42; and Nancy
Bazin, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (New Brunswick, NJ,
Rutgers University Press, 1973), p. 98.
78 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor
yet entirely what is done. (p. 28)
In short, the observer is choked with observations. [. . .] But
the difficulty remains — one has to choose. For though I have
no wish to be Queen of England — or only for a moment — I
would willingly sit beside her. (p. 65)
In the second excerpt, the change to the first person pronoun lays
the emphasis squarely on the narrator and her problems of selection.
But such comments on life and art are not always so clearly dis-
sociated from the fiction. Often they seem to belong partly to the
characters:
But the thought saddened him. It’s not catastrophes, murders,
deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look
and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses. (p. 78)
The observation hovers between Jacob and the narrator, as on the
frequent occasions when an apparently impersonal generalization
is concluded by ‘thought Jacob’ or ‘such were Bonamy’s views’, or
when, on the other hand, the thoughts of the characters are uncer-
tainly rendered:
But whether this is the right interpretation of Jacob’s gloom
[. . .] it is impossible to say; for he never spoke a word (p. 46)
Jacob, no doubt, thought something in this fashion. (p. 130)
‘These constant fluctuations between the biographer and her
subject make us as interested in her struggle to discover and com-
municate character as we are with character itself. Jacob, like
Minnie Marsh, is the narrator’s field of experiment. Sometimes,
abandoning all reserve, as at the end of ‘An Unwritten Novel’, she
tells us point blank about the difficulties of her task. The reader is
thus as much engaged with her character as with Jacob’s; it is a
similar position to that of the reader of Lord Fim, where the subtle
consciousness of Marlow clouds, while it explores, a personality
which may in itself be quite simple. If the reader is moved by
Jacob or by Jim, it is largely because the narrators of their stories
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 79
are moved, both by their heroes and by the very process of discover-
ing chatactert

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need

that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty
are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the
warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and
absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood
on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched
hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and
elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.}

In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows

why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart
with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this and much
more than this is true, why are we yet surprised fee lepy ta
sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things
in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to
us — why indeed? For ite moment afet we know nothing
about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the condition of our
love. (p. 68)

It is apparent that the technique of “facoh’s Room is necessary to the

expression of Virginia Woolf’s beliefs in the shadowiness of char-
acter and the elusiveness of relationships. “The people are ghosts,’
Leonard Woolf commented acutely,? remarking not only on the
sad air that Jacob and his acquaintances have of being already dead
(‘and now Jimmy feeds crows in Flanders’) but on the ‘crepuscular’
nature of their fictional existence. Virginia Woolf is reapplying the
impersonal vision of the descriptive sketches to the personal.

But after life [. . .] As for saying which are trees, and which
are men and women, or whether there are such things, that
one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There

1 Joseph Conrad, Lord Fim (1900), Ch. 16.

2 AWD, 26 July 1922, p. 47.
80 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by
thick stalks, and rather a a up perhaps, rose shaped blots
of an indistinct colour.
Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these
colours, men, women and children were spotted for a second
upon the horizon, and then [...] they wavered and sought
shade [. . .] dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and
green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.”

In both these examples, the idea of personality is transposed into

impressions of indistinct colours and dissolving shapes. Jacob is
similarly merged, at each stage of his life, with objects and sur-
roundings. His feelings are frequently suggested through colours or
scenes, or environments such as Cambridge and Greece, in passages
of lyrical descriptive prose in which we are apparently, but not
effectually, removed from the contemplation of Jacob. The merging
of personality into impersonality is not confined to the hero. Clara
Durrant, for example, is first seen as a figure from ‘Kew Gardens’:
Opposite him were hazy, semi-transparent shapes of yellow
and blue. [. . .] Nothing settled or stayed unbroken. [. . .]
‘Oh, Clara, Clara!’ exclaimed Mrs Durrant, and Timothy
Durrant adding ‘Clara, Clara,’ Jacob named the shape in
yellow gauze Timothy’s sister, Clara. (p. 54)
The calling of a name evokes nothing more certain than a shape
and a colour. Picking grapes on a ladder, Clara is ‘semi-transparent,
pale [. . .] the lights swimming over her in coloured islands’ (p. 59).
We hear, not her voice, but her diary; when she sleeps we see, not
her, but ‘dishevelled roses and a pair of long white gloves’ (p. 73)5
we associate her with the paper flowers which open in water (p. 80)
and with ‘a white satin shoe’ (p. 114). Thus, though facts about
Clara’s life (which is very like Katharine Hilbery’s) are glimpsed —
her social milieu, her relationship with her mother and her love for

1 ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 4 Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944)
P- 45-
2 “Kew Gardens’, ibid. p: 41.
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 SI
Jacob — the reality lies in images rather than facts. Jacob too is
suggested by the crab struggling to escape from the bucket of water,
by the butterflies he hunts in the woods, by the tree falling with a
sound as of shots,! by the sheep’s jaw he preserves as a child and
the ram’s skull carved over his doorway. These objects spread him
into the world of solid objects. We do not think of Jacob as a crab
or a butterfly. But their struggles and deaths in a hostile universe
suggest him.
‘Though aiming at a shadowy effect, the figures of speech are far
from hazy in themselves, but frequently sharp; tronic and grotesque:
the monster shark[. ..] being only a flabby yellow receptacle,
like an empty Gladstone bag in a trunk. (p. 15)
St Paul’s Cathedral, like the volute on the top of a snail shell
(p. 61)
the noise of the voices served like a clapper in little Mrs
Withers’s mind, scaring into the air flocks of small birds (p. 104)
For however long these gossips sit, and however they stuff
out their victims’ characters till they are swollen and tender
as the livers of geese exposed to a hot fire, they never come
to a decision. (p. 147)
In these dry, vivid decorations, there are noticeable transpositions
between the human and the inhuman. The monster becomes a bag,
the cathedral a snail-shell. Voices are a clapper to scare the birds of
thought; reputations are roasted geese livers.? “These small things
encapsulate the method of the whole whereby Jacob is fused with
shapes, colours, rooms, streets, cities and countries. In miniature it is
possible to see that the effect of haziness (which has already been
seen to arise largely from the syntactical qualities of the writing) is
created from extremely precise elements. And, on a larger scale,
Jacob’s merging with the impersonal world often takes the form of
sharp, acerbic accounts of the environments to which he is currently

1 The same image is used in ‘Reading’ (1921), CE II, p. 25.

2 The anthropomorphism in these images anticipates the interludes in The
Waves.
D
82 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
adapting. Cambridge and its three archetypal professors, the British
Museum Reading Room, Greece and its tourists are pinned down
with a comic dispatch which 1s solid, and not at all hazy or blurred.
The same is true of very many of the characters who surround
Jacob. Overall they are meant to produce an indistinct impression,
and do so, by the sense of breathless confusion which arises from
having so many idiosyncratic characters in the room at once.
Virginia Woolf was aware of the baffling effect this could produce;
she criticized Compton Mackenzie for it:

So, at an evening party, someone might whisper in your ear,

“That lady is Mére Gontran, and she keeps owls ina shed, and
when her collie barks she thinks it is the voice of her dead
husband.’ One looks at Mére Gontran with an access of
interest, and before the interest has died down someone else
is introduced, who has some different peculiarity or even
little trick of the hand such as plaiting four necklaces in a rope
until the string breaks and the green shells fall on the floor
[. ..] Meanwhile, what has become of Mere Gontran??
The ingredients of that blurred experience are extremely definite,
and, similarly, Jacob’s acquaintances, taken separately, are very
precisely satirized, from the Countess of Rocksbier — ‘fed upon
champagne and spices for at least two centuries’ (p. 94) — to
Miss Jinny Carslake — ‘pale, freckled, morbid’ (p. 121). There is
always a conflict in the novel between the wealth of detail, and a
sense that life cannot be pinned down by detail; between precision
and strangeness; between comedy and pathos. The tension is
central to the description of Jacob’s room.
Jacob’s room had a round table and two low chairs. There
were yellow flags in a jar on the mantlepiece; a photograph
of his mother; cards from societies with little raised crescents,
coats of arms, and initials; notes and pipes; on the table lay
paper ruled with a red margin — an essay, no doubt — ‘Does
History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’ There

* Review of ‘Sylvia and Michael’ (20 March 1919), in Contemporary Writers

(London, Hogarth Press, 1965) p. 86.
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 83
were books enough; very few French books; but then anyone
who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood
takes him, with extravagant enthusiasm. Lives of the Duke of
Wellington, for example; Spinoza; the works of Dickens;
the Faery Queen; a Greek dictionary with the petals of poppies
pressed to silk between the pages; all the Elizabethans. His
slippers were incredibly shabby, like boats burned to the water’s
rim. Then there were photographs from the Greeks, and a
mezzotint from Sir Joshua — all very English. The works of
Jane Austen, too, in deference, perhaps,-to someone else’s
standard [...] Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling
the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker
armchair creaks, though no one sits there. (p. 36)

The elements of the passage are mostly matter-of-fact, creating by

implication a satire on the young Cambridge man’s intellectual life,
with its absurd mixture of literary influences, and its obeisance to
Elizabethan and Greek culture. But the details are not entirely
straightforward; a strange air of sadness is conveyed even before the
elegiac lyricism of the last two sentences. Their shift in diction —
summed up in the difference between the colloquial ‘all very English’
and the inverted ‘listless is the air’— 1s augured by the images of the
slippers ‘like boats burned to the water’s rim’ and of the poppies
‘pressed to silk between the pages’. The first is more unexpected
than the second, but both evoke the same idea of death and oblivion,
vaguely associated with classical legend — the Greek fleet and the
god Morpheus. Jacob seems to become part of a mythical world, and
the implication contributes to the sense of bereavement arising from
his absence. At the end of the book, Jacob’s room, again empty, is
described with phrases taken from this passage and from the first
account of his London rooms with the ram’s skull over the door
(p. 67). Such repetition implies that Jacob’s death is foreshadowed,
even predetermined. While he moves towards it, the death is always
there. Archer’s sad call for his brother on the beach anticipates
Bonamy’s last calling of Jacob’s name. Everything that will happen
to Jacob is always a part of him; similarly, the experiences that
have formed him — ‘the moors and Byron; the sea and the light-
house; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it’ (p. 33) — remain
84. The Novels of Virginia Woolf
a part of him. He moves through a life which moves with him. The
rhythmic repetition of phrases and images thus creates a combin-
ation of motion and stillness, reflected in our feeling, through the
novel, that Jacob is always present and yet always disappearing: he
remains elusive.

The emptiness of Jacob’s room has led to the novel’s being criticized.
Jacob ‘is absent’.! He ‘escapes us’. We have the luminous halo, but
nothing inside it. The justice of such views is mitigated by the
positive sense we have of Jacob, if not as an individual, then as a
figure of a recognizable class, at a particular time, doomed to a
particular tragic fate. While Virginia Woolf repudiated the didactic
and ‘materialistic’ approach of, say, H. G. Wells, and while in
her own criticism she might say ‘we do not like war in fiction’,? in
Facob’s Room she is morally committed to a fierce attack on the
barren realities which include war. Like the narrator’s meander-
ings in “The Mark on the Wall’, the stylistic innovations of
Facob’s Room constitute an attack on an abhorrent system of life.
Jacob’s enemy, like Katharine’s, is both the burdensome past and
the harshly lit realities of the present, which rob him of Clara and
send him to war. And, as in Night and Day, Jacob’s struggle
against these forces is analogous to the novelist’s struggle against the
conventions of realism.
“Does History consist of the Biographies of Great Men?’ The
essay question can be applied to the novel: can we understand the
history of the period from the biography of Jacob? And doesn’t the
history of this period most appropriately consist of an entirely new
form of biography? The questions set up the analogy between
Facob’s Room and Jacob. The novel attempts an experiment in
fictional biography, in its pursuit of a true ‘modern’ reality. Jacob,
similarly, is for ever writing, or (like Virginia Woolf) criticizing the
writing of others, in order to establish a true vision of life. His
essays, indeed, are'something of a joke. In adolescence he is found
carefully correcting Morris’s statements about moths. Coming
? Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf (London, Allen and Unwin, 1963), p. 103.
? Ralph Freedman, The Lyrical Novel (Princeton University Press, 1963),
Pp. 125.
® Review of ‘Before Midnight’ (1 March 1917), in Contemporary Writers, p. 54.
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 85
down from Cambridge, he writes an attack on the Leeds Pro-
fessor’s expurgated edition of Wycherley:
Aristophanes and Shakespeare were cited. Modern life was
repudiated [. . .] Leeds as a seat of learning was laughed to
scorn. (p. 66)
Embarking on his affair with Florinda (by giving her the poems of
Shelley), he copies out his essay “upon the Ethics of Indecency’
(p. 74). His stand for youthful independence 1is continued in the
British Museum:
Youth, youth — something savage — something pedantic. For
example, there is Mr Masefield, there is Mr Bennett. Stuff
them into the flame of Marlowe and burn them to cinders.
Let not a shred remain. Don’t palter with the second rate.
Detest your own age. Build a better one. And to set that on
foot read incredibly dull essays upon Marlowe to your friends.
(p. 101)
On his way to Greece, he plans an ‘essay upon civilization’ with
‘some pretty sharp hits at Mr Asquith’ (p. 128). While he is there
his musings take shape in ‘a note upon the importance of history —
upon democracy’ (p. 142). But the note may well lead to nothing;
‘it had better be burnt.’
In all these references to Jacob’s literary efforts the tone is
humorous, emphasizing Jacob’s extreme youth. But the effect is of
gallantry rather than silliness. Jacob’s literary opinions are (like
literary opinions in The Voyage Out) reflective of his spiritual
condition. His missionary zeal on behalf of Shakespeare, the Greeks
and the eighteenth-century robustness of Fielding, his exalting of
Marlowe over Masefield, are indicative of his personal resistance to
the civilization he inhabits. His natural imaginative affiliations are
constantly being threatened by organized conventions of education
and society. Jacob is naturally ‘Greek’: he looks like a Greek
statue, he is quite happy lying alone on the top of Mount Olympus,
and at Cambridge he and Timmy Durrant are convinced that they
‘are the only people in the world who know what the Greeks meant’
(p. 72). But such youthful arrogance is not allowed. The gover-
nesses and professors, Mr Plumer and his like, have taken over the
86 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
‘Greek myth’ (p. 130): they are the ‘sole purveyors of this cake’
(p. 37). Education, tradition and authority attemptto deprive
Jacob of his inner conviction of reality. The opposition is not
just between different writers or different ways of thinking about
Greece. It is, more broadly, between the spontaneous impulses of
childhood and the graceless imposition of authority and convention,
which will always attempt to overshadow natural joy and freedom.
It is clear from the passage that centrally describes this conflict
that the impulses of childhood are at one with nature. The
argument is Romantic: Jacob is like the protagonist of The Prelude:

It must come as a shock about the age of twenty —the world of

the elderly — thrown up in such black outline upon what weare;
upon the reality; the moors and Byron; the sea and the light-
house; the sheep’s jaw with the yellow teeth in it; upon the
obstinate irrepressible conviction which makes youth so intoler-
ably disagreeable — ‘I am what I am, and intend to be it,’ for
which there will be no form in the world unless Jacob makes
one for himself. The Plumers will try to prevent him from
making it. Wells and Shaw and the serious sixpenny weeklies
will sit on its head. Every time he lunches out on Sunday — at
dinner parties and tea parties — there will be this same shock —
horror — discomfort — then pleasure, for he draws into him at
every step as he walks by the river such steady certainty, such
reassurance from all sides, the trees bowing, the grey spires soft
in the blue, voices blowing and seeming suspended in the air,
the springy air of May, the elastic air with its particles — chest-
nut bloom, pollen, whatever it is that gives the May air its
potency, blurring the trees, gumming the buds, daubing the
green. (p. 33)
The child of nature cannot commune for ever with the chestnut
bloom; he must also be a social being. Night and day are again in
contrast. Jacob’s ‘crepuscular’ quality is set against the world of
rapid, bright, sharp character sketches. Though the more complex
and sympathetic figures like Betty and Mrs Durrant and Bonamy
are given a blurred outline which arouses interest in their hidden
selves, most of the figures ‘at dinner parties and tea parties’ are
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 87
merely names. The novel is attempting to pluck out the heart of
only one mystery. Is it then a limitation in Virginia Woolf’s ideas
that Jacob is so infinitely ambiguous, while everyone else is so
dismissively defined? By analogy, all the characters should be as
elusive as Jacob. But the distinction between him and the others,
though disturbing, is necessary if there is to beany treatment at all of
the external, social superficialities which are alien to Jacob’s
secret springs of character. And, although the caricaturing of minor
figures is in direct contrast to the patient pursuit of Jacob, a con-
sistent idea of character results. Jacob’s name is all that we finally
know him by, and this is no knowledge at all. How much less, then,
do we know those that surround him! Over 160 characters are
introduced into this short book, of whom many have names which
are ludicrously similar. It is not possible to distinguish carefully
between Norman (p. 27), Budgeon (p. 61), Sturgeon (p.6 1),
Masham (p. 47), Bonham (p. 79), Stretton (p. 82), Gresham
(p. 84) and Sherborn (p. 136); between Gage (p. 126), Graves (p.
105) and Gravé (p. 143); between a Miss Edwards (p. 82), a Milly
Edwards (p. 113) and a Cissy Edwards (p. 153); between two
gardenerscalled Barnet (p. 21) and Barnes (p. 159); between Mallet
(p. 80), Springett (p. 104), Lidgett (p. 62) and Barrett (p. 163);
between Pearce (pp. 10, 11), Perry (p. 116) and Parry (p. 159); be-
tween Mr Curnow (p. 8) and the boy Curnow (p. 52); and between
Helen Aitken (p. 91) and Helen Askew (p. 105). No wonder that
Jacob, introduced to an American called Pilcher (p. 84), remembers
him as Pilchard (p. 130). Evidently there is more to this than
mere paucity of invention. The motives are partly the same as those
which inspire Dickens in Bleak House to call his politicians Boodle,
Coodle, Doodle, and so on: their names don’t matter, so long as
they sound ridiculously interchangeable. But Virginia Woolf is also
interested in putting an emphasis on the names, so that we end by
feeling a sense of irritation at the pointlessness of their number and
their similarity. They become symptoms of the futility of public life:

‘Are you going away for Christmas?’ said Mr Calthorp.

‘If my brother gets his leave,’ said Miss Edwards.
‘What regiment is he in?’ said Mr Calthorp.
“The Twentieth Hussars,’ said Miss Edwards.
88 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
‘Perhaps he knows my brother?’ said Mr Calthorp.
‘I am afraid I did not catch your name,’ said Miss Edwards.
‘Calthorp,’ said Mr Calthorp. (p. 82)
The social comedy is the brightly lit side of the forces which are
increasingly felt to oppress Jacob. Silly names and the sixpenny
weeklies are at the surface of a mechanical system of classification
and rigidity whose rhythm is the tick of the clock and the boom of
the guns, a system which is the enemy to nature, childhood,
integrity and imagination. The threat of the war is only introduced
at the very end, but it is the culmination of what Jacob, and Jacob’s
biographer, have been resisting. At the darkest and most bitterly
ironic point of the novel, warfare, as the extreme form of the
mechanical ‘reality’ of modern life, confronts the imagination.
The battleships ray out over the North Sea, keeping their
stations accurately apart. At a given signal all the guns
are trained on a target which (the master gunner counts the
seconds, watch in hand — at the sixth he looks up) flames into
splinters. With equal nonchalance a dozen young men in the
prime of life descend with composed faces into the depths of
the sea; and there impassively (though with perfect mastery
of machinery) suffocate uncomplainingly together. Like blocks
of tin soldiers the army covers the cornfield [. . .] and falls
flat, save that [...] one or two pieces still agitate up and
down like fragments of broken match-stick.
These actions [. . .] are the strokes which oar the world
forward, they say. And they are dealt by men as smoothly
sculptured as the impassive policeman at Ludgate Circus. [. . .]
When his right arm rises, all the force in his veins flows
straight from shoulder to finger-tips; not an ounce is diverted
into sudden impulses, sentimental regrets, wire-drawn distinc-
tions. The buses punctually stop.
It is thus that we live, they say, driven by an unseizable
force. They say that the novelists never catch it; that it goes
hurtling through their nets and leaves them torn to ribbons.
(pp. 147-8)
‘The ‘unseizable force’ is master of an existence (unfairly but
 Jacob’s Room: 1922 89
effectively summed up by domestic life in Surbiton) which is
graceless, automatic, secularized, and where dreams are regulated by
alarm clocks and work sirens, Its victims wake to ‘all the jolly
trappings of the day’ and go off like insects in ‘the conduct of daily
life’ (p. 155). This ‘reality’ is the enemy of the individual and of
the novelist. But its mechanical bondage is contrasted with another
possibility, a more impersonal and timeless existence, found at
midnight on the moors above Scarborough:

The moonlight destroyed nothing. The moor accepted every-

thing. Tom Gage cries aloud so long as his tombstone
endures. The Roman skeletons are in safe keeping. Betty
Flanders’ darning needles are safe too and her garnet brooch.
And sometimes at midday, in the sunshine, the moor seems to
hoard these little treasures, like a nurse. But at midnight
[. . .] it would be foolish to vex the moor with questions— what?
and why?
The church clock, however, strikes twelve. (p. 127)
The true reality, lying beyond the limits imposed by clocks and
policemen and administrators planning world war, may itself be
alarming, a dark formless world of wind and air. But it is also
comforting, in that it sustains life rather than destroying it, by
merging individuals into the stream of nature —as Seabrook Flanders
is merged with the earth:
At first, part of herself; now one of a company, he had merged
in the grass, the sloping hillside, the thousand whitestones[...]
Seabrook was now all that. (pp. 13-14)
This anticipates the only possible consolation for Jacob’s death. Like
his father, he leaves behind a name, objects, letters, bits and pieces,
a pair of old shoes. These are, as always, useless as identifiers of
personality. What may possibly remain, distilled into various
memories and into the earth itself, is the imaginative life which
Jacob was trying to sustain in the face of ‘the unseizable force’.
There is a very faint suggestion of this consolatory, and again
Wordsworthian, idea, at the moment when ‘all the leaves seemed to
raise themselves’ (p. 167) before Bonamy calls out for Jacob. But it
go The Novels of Virginia Woolf
has been implicit in the tension throughout between spirit and
world, and it is present in the title itself: ‘Jacob’s Room’ suggests the
‘room’ of the universe into which he is merged; and it is also the
book itself.
 4
Mrs Dalloway
1925

A4coBp’s biographer was hampered by an inhibition which

Clarissa Dalloway also feels:
She would not say of anyone in the world now that they
were this or were that. (p. 10)
In Facob’s Room, the first novel to concentrate on the impossibility
of pinning down the identity, there is, to some extent, a failure
where Virginia Woolf expected it: ‘My doubt is how far it will
enclose the human heart.’ ‘facob’s Room cannot begin to be a novel
about the personality in action, engaged in relationships or re-
collection, because the emphasis is all on how it can be known. The
only relationship of any real vitality in the novel is onesided — it is
that between the biographer and her subject. But the struggle for
knowledge, an end in itself in ‘Facob’s Room, provides the ground-
work for the consideration, in Mrs Dalloway, of personalities at
work. While we retain our sense of the inscrutability of the self, we
are now taken from the narrator’s efforts at penetration of those to
the characters. We move inside ‘the human heart’.
The background to this achievement was, as for ‘Facob’s Room, a
series of short stories, the first of which, ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond
Street’,! soon ‘ushers in a host of others’.2 On 14 October 1922
1 ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, an experimental version of the first chapter
of Mrs Dalloway, was published in 1923.
2 AWD, 16 August 1922, p. 48. Stella McNichol has collected the stories
gi
92 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
she recorded that ‘Mrs Dalloway has branched into a book’, but it
was some time before she could find the necessary balance between
‘design and substance’:
Am I writing The Hours [its working title] from deep
emotion? [...] Have I the power of conveying the true reality?
Or do I write essays about myself? [...] This is going to be
the devil of a struggle. The design is so queer and so masterful,
I’m always having to wrench my substance to fit it.
Her ability to master the difficulties seems to have come upon her
quite suddenly, as when she realized how to write Facob’s Room:

My discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my

characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity,
humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and
each comes to daylight at the present moment.”
The discovery of the ‘tunnelling process’? enabled her to forge
ahead, and the book was written in a year, gaining as it developed, a
‘more analytical and human [. . .] less lyrical’* quality. These
phrases suggest how different its concentration on the personality
made it from Facob’s Room; but she wanted it to retain at the
same time the haziness of the earlier novel, so that in spite of its
carefully controlled design she would ‘keep the quality of a sketch in
a finished and composed work.’> The terms, of course, are taken from
painting, an analogy which was more extensively used in a corres-
pondence she had with the painter Jacques Raverat towards the
end of the writing of Mrs Dalloway. They discussed fictional form.
The problem about writing, Raverat said, is that it is ‘essentially

written about Mrs Dalloway’s party before, during and after the writing of the
novel itself. Though the collection (Mrs Dalloway’s Party (London, Hogarth
Press, 1973)) contains stories available elsewhere, it draws attention to the
way in which the idea of a party allowed Virginia Woolf to experiment with a
narrative technique which could encompass changing patterns within a fixed
social situation.
1 AWD, 19 June 1923, pp. 57-8. 2 AWD, 30 August 1923, p. 60.
3 AWD, 15 October 1923, p. 61. * AWD, 26 May 1924, p. 62.
5 AWD, 7 September 1924, p. 66.
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 93
linear’; it is almost impossible, in a sequential narrative, to express
the way one’s mind responds to an idea, a word or an experience,
where, like a pebble being thrown into a pond, ‘splashes in the
outer air’ are accompanied ‘under the surface’ by ‘waves that
follow one another into dark and forgotten corners’. Virginia
Woolf replied that it is ‘precisely the task of the writer to go
beyond the “formal railway line of sentence” and to show how
people “feel or think or dream [. . .] all over the place” ’.1 The
concept of tunnelling into ‘caves’ behind characters enfranchised her
from the unwanted linear structure in which an omniscient narrator
moves from points A to B. She arrived instead at a form which
could ‘use up everything I’ve ever thought’,? giving the impression
of simultaneous connections between the inner and the outer
world, the past and the present, speech and silence: a form patterned
like waves in a pond rather than a railway line. Many of the ingre-
dients of the form had been tried out in “facob’s Room; the pronoun
‘one’ allowing a fluid transference of recurrent images from one
character to another, the connective ‘for’ making a leap in thought
seem like a progression, the use of ‘nothing but present particles’? to
evoke the simultaneity of thought and action, are recognizable
techniques. But they are now more unobtrusively used for a style
which is really very different from that of Facob’s Room in its
fusion of streams of thought into a homogeneous third-person, past-
tense narrative.
The maturing of techniques since Facob’s Room accompanied the
maturing of characters. But, although Mrs Dalloway was the first of
the novels to concentrate on middle age, its social milieu, in part,
returned Virginia Woolf (as the reappearance of characters from
The Voyage Out suggests) to experiences of her adolescence. ‘he
Dalloways in The Voyage Out are considerably different from the
later Dalloways. Richard is a sententious, prosing chauvinist who
considers England to be demeaned by her bohemians and suffra-
gettes. Clarissa, worshipping her husband, and sharing all his
grandiloquent beliefs (“Think of the light burning over the House,
Dick!’)* is presented as a creature of frills, charms and affectations.
The satire in the later book is more complex and less obvious. But
1 Bell II, pp. 106-7. 2 AWD, 15 October 1923, p. 61.
3 AWD, 7 September 1924, p. 66. 4 The Voyage Out, p. 47.
94 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the social arena of the Dalloways, in both novels, reflects Virginia
Woof’s fascinated dislike of the world of society hostesses, eminent
politicians, distinguished doctors and lawyers, and grand old
dowager ladies, in which powerful men talk a great deal of non-
sense and the woman’s place is decorative, entertaining and sub-
servient. As the marriageable Miss Stephen, she had been miserably
dragged round this world by her half-brother George Duckworth! and
later by a family friend, Kitty Maxse, the original of Clarissa.”
Virginia Stephen found Kitty brittle and superficial and felt that
her qualities might have over-influenced the portrayal of Clarissa:
was she not ‘too stiff, too glittering and tinsely [szc]?’?
I remember the night [...] when I decided to give it up,
because I found Clarissa in some way tinselly. Then I invented
her memories. But I think some distaste for her persisted. Yet,
again, that was true to my feeling for Kitty, and one must
dislike people in art without its mattering, unless indeed it is
true that certain characters detract from the importance of
what happens to them.*
Other adolescent feelings were recalled in the book; like Clarissa,
Virginia Woolf was tunnelling back into her past when she des-
cribed Sally Seton, who was based on her cousin, Madge Symonds.
When she was fifteen she was in love with Madge, who was,
Quentin Bell says, ‘very much a girl of the nineties’. He describes
how ‘Virginia ... gripping the handle of the water-jug in the top
room at Hyde Park Gate . . . exclaimed to herself: “‘Madge is here;
at this moment she is actually under this roof.” ’5 But present
acquaintances were also used. Lydia Lopokova, the dancer (and
future wife of Maynard Keynes), was ‘observed’ ‘as a type of
Rezia’,® and Lady Bruton was probably based on Virginia Woolf’s
knowledge of the forthright Lady Colefax.” Her hostility to high
society was not all drawn from memory:
I want to bring in the despicableness of people like Ott
[Ottoline Morrell]. I want to give the slipperiness of the
1 Bell I, pp. 76 ff. 2 Bell I, pp. 80-1.
3 AWD, 15 5 October 1923,
923) P p. 61. 4 AWD, 18 June 1925,
Seb) p. 79.
ok
5 Bell I, pp. 60-1. © Bell I, p. go.
7 Bell Il, p. 95.
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 95
soul. I have been too tolerant often. The truth is people
scarcely care for each other.4
Clarissa’s world is, then, familiar to Virginia Woolf, as Septimus’s
is not. But her personal experience was used in the characterization
of Septimus at a more profound level than that of social identity:
‘I adumbrate here a study of insanity and suicide; the world seen
by the sane and the insane side by side.’? For the first time since the
account of Rachel Vinrace’s fever, she was drawing on her own
intermittent states of madness, which had led, in 1915 and in 1913,
to suicide attempts. In The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway and the
characterization of Rhoda in The Waves, we are given vivid
accounts of these mental states, which were evidently painful
studies for her to make: ‘Of course the mad part tries me so much,
makes my mind squirt so badly that I can hardly face spending the
next weeks at it.’> In September 1923, while writing about
Septimus, she had a ‘mental tremor’* fleetingly reminiscent of her
periods of insanity: she was evoking them too intensely.
That the madness of Septimus was close to her own experience
is clear from the accounts given by Leonard Woolf and Quentin
Bell. Both make only tentative diagnoses. Quentin Bell follows
Woolf in saying that ‘her symptoms were of a manic depressive
character’,> usually contenting himself with formulations such as
‘all that summer she was mad’,° or with a jocular reference to
Virginia Woolf at her worst as a ‘raving lunatic’.? Leonard Woolf
also refers to his wife’s illness as ‘manic depressive insanity’,®
though ‘the doctors called it neurasthenia ... a name which
covered a multitude of sins, symptoms, and miseries’.? His painfully
clinical accounts of these symptoms — the progression from exhaustion
and insomnia to states of excitement, violence and delusions alter-
nating with comatose melancholia, depression, guilt and disgust at
food — have points of resemblance to Septimus’s. Virginia Woolf’s
1 AWD, 4 June 1923, p. 55. 2 AWD, 14 October 1922, p. 52.
3 AWD, tg June 1923, p. 57- 4 Bell II, pp. 100-1.
ee belllip azo: © Bell I, p. go.
Gebel lisp a4:
8 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911-1918
(London, Hogarth Press, 1964), p. 161.
9 Ibid. pp. 76-7.
96 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
hostility to her doctors, particularly to Sir George Savage (the model
for Sir William Bradshaw), whom Leonard himself distrusted, is
one such parallel. Both Leonard Woolf and Quentin Bell remark
on the thin dividing line between her normal psychology and her
insanity.1 Woolf comments on the rational quality of her delusions:
the most fearful aspect of her disease was that, during its course,
she was ‘terribly sane in three-quarters of her mind’.? Though such
information adds nothing to a literary estimation of Mrs Dalloway,
it is inevitably of interest to know how much the ‘mad part’ owes
to her recollections of being mad herself — listening to the birds
singing in Greek and imagining that King Edward VII lurked in
the azaleas using the foulest possible language.?

That Virginia Woolf should be combining, as materials for Ars

Dalloway, her social acquaintances and her madness, suggests how
carefully the different areas of the book have to be welded together.
In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life
and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social
system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.*
This is written while the book is still being called “The Hours’.
The change of title (uncharacteristic in that it rejects the abstract
concept in favour of the individual name) points to the way in which
she was having to manipulate the centres of interest. She decides
that the emphasis is to fall on Clarissa in the title; but in the careful
structure of the novel she tries to prevent any one of the book’s
‘many ideas’ from dominating the others. This is immediately
apparent if one summarizes the ‘story’ of Ars Dalloway.
At 10 a.m. on a warm, breezy Wednesday early in June 1923,
Clarissa Dalloway, aged fifty-two, the wife of a Conservative MP,
goes to Bond Street to buy some flowers for a party she is giving
that evening at her house in Dean’s Yard. She meets an old friend,
Hugh Whitbread, on the way through Green Park. While she is
buying the flowers,a VIP’s car— the Queen’s? the Prime Minister’s?
— goes past; it also passes a young couple, Septimus and Lucrezia
1 Tbid. p. 79 and Bell I, p. 112. 2 Woolf, op. cit. p. 164.
3 Bell I, p. go. 4 AWD, 19 June 1923, p. 57.
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 97
Warren Smith, he an estate agent’s clerk and shell-shocked veteran
of the war, she an Italian girl who used to make hats in Milan.
Septimus’s madness has necessitated the calling in of doctors, first
Dr Holmes, the GP, and now Sir William Bradshaw, the famous
nerve specialist, with whom they have an appointment at 12.00.
The Smiths walk up to Regent’s Park, Clarissa walks home; both
see an aeroplane advertising “Toffo’ in the sky. When Clarissa gets
home she finds a message to say that her husband is going out to
lunch with Lady Bruton. She is disturbed at not having been
invited. She starts to mend her dress for the party and is interrupted
by an unexpected visit from Peter Walsh, the man she used to love
in her youth, at her family house at Bourton, and from whom she
parted, with great pain, after she met Richard Dalloway. They
have seen each other occasionally in the last thirty years. Peter went
to India, married, was widowed, and is now in love with Daisy, a
young married woman with two children. His conversation with
Clarissa, in which he bursts into tears as he tells her this, is inter-
rupted by the entrance of Clarissa’s seventeen-year-old daughter
Elizabeth. Peter leaves Dean’s Yard and walks up to Regent’s
Park, pursuing an attractive girl for part of his way. At a quarter
to twelve he glimpses the Warren Smiths in the Park, who leave
at 12.00 for their appointment with Sir William. The interview
lasts precisely three-quarters of an hour and results in Sir William’s
arranging for Septimus (whom he can see to be a very serious case)
to go into one of his homes.
At half past one Richard Dalloway and Hugh Whitbread meet
for lunch at Lady Bruton’s, where they help her to write a letter
to The Times. Richard, hearing that Peter is in London, thinks of
his own love for Clarissa and decides to go and see her after lunch.
He buys her some flowers and goes home at three, to find her
annoyed, because she has had to invite an unwanted guest to her
party, and because Elizabeth is closeted in her room with her odious
history teacher, Miss Kilman. After Richard has gone Elizabeth
and Miss Kilman — whom Clarissa feels to be her enemy — leave
for tea.
Elizabeth, though full of respect for Miss Kilman, is made un-
easy by her emotional, possessive, greedy manner. She leaves her in
the Army and Navy Stores and catches a bus up the Strand, while
98 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Doris Kilman, in despair, goes to pray in Westminster Abbey. At
about five, when Elizabeth is going home from her bus ride,
Septimus, lying in his room, experiences a momentary freedom from
insanity, much to Rezia’s relief. But this is interrupted by the
intrusion of Dr Holmes, and Septimus, hearing the sounds of
pursuit, jumps out of the window. The clock strikes six.
Peter Walsh, going back to his hotel, is passed by the ambulance
carrying Septimus’s body. He goes in to change, finds a note from
Clarissa, has dinner, and, as evening falls, goes out again to walk to
her party. At the party, Sally Seton, an old friend of Peter and
Clarissa, of whom both have been thinking during the day, arrives
uninvited. The Prime Minister, Lady Bruton, Hugh Whitbread,
Ellie Henderson (Clarissa’s unwanted guest) — all characters who
have in some way been important during the day — are there. The
Bradshaws come and Clarissa learns through them of Septimus’s
death, with which she feels a strong connection. Peter Walsh, who
has spent much Of the day criticizing Clarissa, is forced yet again
into a moment of intense emotion for her — ‘for there she was’.
‘Two things are apparent from this résumé of the plot. The first
is that all the activity is carefully held together by a specific use of
time and place. The second is that the meat of the book does not
lie in the sequence of events: they are its bare bones. It would be
dificult to discover from the summary how the book could be
about the relationship of the past to the present, or how there could
be any possible link between Clarissa and Septimus. This is because
a plot summary, apart from mentioning the time at which things
happen, leaves out the narrative texture, in which images, descrip-
tive passages, leitmotifs and internal thought processes create the
‘substance’ of the book.
For Clarissa does not, of course, simply walk through Green
Park and up Bond Street and back again during the first thirty
pages of the novel. She also perceives, thinks, remembers and
generalizes, and in doing so she suffuses her present experience with
the feelings and experiences of thirty years ago. What she re-
members becomes a part of what she sees now, and these in turn
contribute to what she thinks; her attitude to ‘life: London: this
moment in June’. No sooner have we read the first sentence of the
novel, which looks deceptively like the start of a conventional
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 99
‘story’, than we are plunged (“What a plunge!’ (p. 5)) into Clarissa’s
past. The delight of plunging into the London morning reminds
her of similar feelings experienced as a girl at Bourton, and makes
her think of Peter Walsh, which brings into her mind the fact that
he is soon due to return from India. (Already we are made aware
that the past is not in contrast with the present, but involved with it.
Clarissa feels the same now as she did at Bourton; Peter, we shall
find, is still making remarks about vegetables and playing with his
pocket knife, which, like Hugh Whitbread’s silver fountain pen
and Rezia’s delicate hats, is a symbol of his-personality.) As she
thinks how odd it is that only a few things about Peter stick in her
mind — ‘his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness’ — she
is watched, while she waits to cross the road, by a neighbour,
Scrope Purvis, who thinks how charming she is, and compares her
to a bird, a ‘jay, blue green, light, vivacious’ (p. 6), and notices how
white she has grown since her illness. Already we hold in balance
an external view of her — ageing, pale, elegant, charming — with
the emotional life of which we are learning.
With this exception, we remain inside Clarissa’s mind all the
way to the flower shop. Her love of life, her admiration of fortitude,
her pleasure in what she sees; the mixture of fondness and satire
in her thoughts of Hugh; her memory of how she quarrelled with
Peter about Hugh; their arguments, their parting; her ignorance,
her intuitiveness, her feeling that in spite of death she might survive
in ‘the ebb and flow of things’ (p. 11) ... so It continues, and, by
the time she has reached the flower shop and Miss Pym, the flower
lady, has noticed how much older she looks this year, we can recog-
nize and analyse the method, and already have a sense of Clarissa’s
existence taking place on several levels.
The external level, at which Scrope Purvis and Miss Pym can
approach her, is the social level: Clarissa as the society hostess, the
ageing MP’s wife. We are warned against judging people at such
a level by the nature of the book — Peter Walsh assuming the
Warren Smiths to be an ordinary young couple quarrelling em-
phasizes the danger of saying ‘of anyone in the world [...] that
they were this or were that’. Yet, though the external level may bea
mockery of the inner self, it is, at the same time, a part of the self.
All the judgements made about Clarissa, whether satirical or
100 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
sympathetic, have a certain kind of truth in them. Scrope Purvis and
Miss Pym hardly know her. But both bring to our notice the fact
that she has been ill and looks older, thereby giving her love of
life and vitality an air of pathos. At the same time, Scrope Purvis
and Miss Pym both praise her; the former for her charm and elegant
uprightness, the latter for her kindness.
Lady Bruton cannot see the sense in ‘cutting people up, as
Clarissa Dalloway did’ (p. 115). Richard reflects that ‘she wanted
support’ (p. 129); Elizabeth notices that ‘her mother liked old
women because they were Duchesses’ (p. 145). At the party there
are numerous ‘external’ views of Clarissa. Ellie Henderson
guesses that Clarissa ‘had not meant to ask her this year’ (p. 187),
Sir Harry, the Academician, likes her ‘in spite of her damnable,
difficult, upper-class refinement, which made it impossible to ask
Clarissa Dalloway to sit on his knee’ (p. 194). Jim Hutton, the
young intellectual, thinks her ‘a prig. But how charming to look at!’
(p. 195). ‘
There is, then, a recognizable external self, with characteristics
which are appreciated or criticized in different ways by different
people; up to a point, it is possible to say of someone that ‘they
were this or were that’. By this method of showing us external
views of Clarissa, Virginia Woolf lets us ‘see’ her without making
any impersonal comment. Hence she emphasizes the ‘streaked,
involved, inextricably confused’! nature of existence, since any one
person’s view of anyone else is determined and qualified by their
own limitations.
Clarissa, too, thinks of herself as a ‘character’ and sums herself
up rather as other people do. She looks in the mirror and sees her-
self, ‘pointed; dart-like; definite’ (p. 42). She knows that this face is
the result of drawing the parts together, and that the parts are in fin-
itely different and incompatible. But it is this ‘definite’ self, seen
also by others, which has permanent, distinct characteristics; it is
this self which ‘could not think, write, even play the piano [. . .]
muddled Armenians and Turks’ (p. 135), which admires old
dowagers like Lady Bexborough, and which stiffens with pride
when the Queen may be going past. It is this public, definite self,
* “The Russian Point of View’ (CE I, p. 242), published in The Common
Reader (London, Hogarth Press, 1925); the date is unknown.
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 IOI
this ‘being Mrs Richard Dalloway’, which stands at the top of the
stairs being the perfect hostess, and wanting ‘that people should look
pleased as she came in’ (p. 12).
Below this lies her deeper self, made up partly of her feelings
about experience — her love for Sally Seton and for Peter Walsh —
and partly of her present emotions — for Elizabeth, Richard, Miss
Kilman, her party, life itself. In this self there is a continual
interplay between her sense of reaching out to others and with-
drawing from them; between her sense of failure, loss and coldness,
and her involvement with the vivid, energetic pulse of life. The
party is the central image for the outgoing self:

But to go deeper. [. . .] what did it mean to her, this thing

she called life? Oh, it was very queer. Here was So-and-so
in South Kensington; someone up in Bayswater; and somebody
else, say, in Mayfair. And she felt quite continuously a sense
of their existence; and she felt what a waste; and she felt
whata pity; and she felt if only they could be brought together;
so she did it. And it was an offering; to combine; to create;
but to whom? (p. 135).

In contrast with her desire to bring people together, the image of

the old lady moving from room to room in the house opposite sums
up Clarissa’s fierce resistance to emotional possession, ‘love and
religion’, which attempt to force the soul and own people. Clarissa
respects ‘the privacy of the soul’ (p. 140), which is signified for her
by the idea that ‘here was one room; there another’ (p. 141). On the
one hand, the party — the drawing together and harmonizing of
people — expresses Clarissa’s love of participation, as she felt it in
her emotions for Sally and Peter. She still retains such strong,
passionate feelings in moments of sympathy, sometimes for another
woman, when she may have the ‘illumination; a match burning ina
crocus’ (p. 36), an emotional experience which is described as a
sexual orgasm. She still has a strong passion of hatred for Miss
Kilman, who is trying to steal Elizabeth from her, and in hating
whom there is an energy and a life; ‘It was enemies one wanted,
not friends’ (p, 193). But in contrast with such involvement is her
withdrawal. Clarissa going indoors like ‘a nun who has left the

AMERICAN RIVER COLLEGE LIBRARY

102 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
world’ (p. 33), going upstairs to her narrow bed like ‘a child
exploring a tower’ (p. 35), virginal, failing Richard sexually,
unable to abandon herself, feeling her slice of life dwindling away
because Lady Bruton has not asked her to lunch, is possessed of a
cold, ageing world, in contrast with the warm passionate exper-
iences of her youth, to which Peter’s visit recalls her. The contrast
is expressed in a strange and brilliant image, unexpectedly but
arrestingly appropriate:
It was all over for her. The sheet was stretched and the bed
narrow. She had gone up into the tower alone and left them
blackberrying in the sun. (pp. 52-3)
There is a deeper and more remote level of existence in Clarissa
which has nothing to do with failure or success and is not suscept-
ible of satire. At this level, furthest removed from her ‘external’,
social self, Clarissa feels the possibility (one already found in Facob’s
Room) of going beyond the exigencies of time and place to parti-
cipate in the ebb and flow of existence. This elusive, intangible
self awaits death as a release, a way into communication with the
general life of things:
[. . .Jor did it not become consoling to believe that death ended
absolutely? but that somehow in the streets of London, on the
ebb and flow of things, here, there, she survived, Peter survi-
ved, lived in each other, she being part, she was positive, of the
trees at home [...] part of people she had never met; being
laid out like a mist between the people she knew best [. . .] but
it spread ever so far, her life, herself. (pp. 11-12)
On this plane she experiences a sense of identity with Septimus,
feeling that his death redeems the hollowness, the ‘corruption, lies,
chatter’ (p. 204) of her life. The connection cannot be known at
any more external level, being, in fact, in sharp contrast to the
world of the party in which it takes place.
The method by which layer upon layer of Clarissa’s character is
revealed holds good for all the other figures in the novel. Peter
Walsh, for example, is, on a public level, jobless, in love, aged
fifty-three, and just back from India. Deeper down, he dwells on
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 103
his past and present feeling for Clarissa; and, beyond that, he is
dimly aware of some kind of universal, shared life-force, suggested
by the old woman singing outside Regent’s Park tube. On that
plane, he becomes the ‘solitary traveller’ of his dreams. Rezia is
summed up at an external level by comfortable, endearing images:
she makes a noise like ‘a kettle on a hob’ or ‘a contented tap left
running’ (p. 159); she tries to keep out Holmes ‘like a little hen,
with her wings spread’ (p. 164). But this simple, sympathetic
character is in possession of one of the most fluid and ambiguous
trains of thought in the novel. There is no such thing as simplicity
of character: all minds work, deep down, in the immensely complex
manner used to describe the aftermath of Rezia’s words in Regent’s
Park ‘You should see the Milan gardens.’ The words, spoken to
no one, fade like ‘the sparks of a rocket’ into the darkness. In the
darkness, invisible houses give out ‘trouble and suspense’ until the
relief of daylight. Rezia’s loneliness is like the darkness seen by the
Romans in their first visit to the country. Then, in the middle of
her thoughts, ‘as if a shelf were shot forth and she stood on it’, she
remembers that she is Septimus’s wife; but then, like a shelf
falling, she thinks for a moment that he has gone away to kill
himself (p. 28). This cumbersome, elongated, disconnected image
portrays the leaps and bounds of the mind, as well as incorporating
the plot—the Romans landing in England beinga reminder that Rezia
has come from Italy. In some characters the penetration into
their underworld may be so briefas to have the quality ofa vignette;
in this way, for a page or so, we drift into Lady Bruton’s childhood,
or slipintoan experience of Maisie Johnson’s which will ‘jangle again
among her memories’ fifty years hence (p. 30), or share, briefly, the
daydreams of Clarissa’s maid Lucy as she sets out the silverware, and
anticipates her mistress’s triumph atthe party: ‘Ofall, her mistress was
loveliest — mistress ofsilver, oflinen, of china’ (p. 43). The language
makes Clarissa seem slightly ridiculous, and is characteristic of a
mock-heroic diction used to impress on us the worthlessness of her
social existence. Thus, Lucy, ‘taking Mrs Dalloway’s parasol,
handled it like a sacred weapon which a goddess, having acquitted
herself honourably in the field of battle, sheds, and places it in the
umbrella stand’ (p. 34). Thus, Clarissa’s objects of veneration —
Royalty, the Empire, the Government— are made to look silly, as in
104 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the description of the VIP’s car, for which Clarissa, thinking ‘It is
probably the Queen’, wears ‘a look of extreme dignity’ (p. 20):
[. . .] greatness was passing, hidden, down Bond Street, removed
only by a hand’s-breadth from ordinary people who might now,
for the first time and last, be within speaking distance of the
majesty of England, of the enduring symbol of the state [. . .]
(p- 19)
Similarly satirical tones are used of Hugh Whitbread, whom Clarissa
likes:
He had been afloat on the cream of English society for fifty-
five years. He had known Prime Ministers. His affections
were understood to be deep. (p. 114)
Clarissa’s feeling of rejection at having been excluded from Lady
Bruton’s lunch party is put in proportion when the lunch party
itself is described:
With a wave of the hand, the traffic ceases, and there rises
instead this profound illusion [. . .] about the food — how it is
not paid for; and then that the table spreads itself voluntarily
with glass and silver, little mats, saucers of red fruit; [. . .]
and with the coffee (not paid for) rise jocund visions before
musing eyes [. . .] (pp. 115-16)
Lady Bruton herself, one of several grand old dowagers whom
Clarissa admires and respects, is, like Hugh, an object of explicit
satire:
Debarred by her sex, and some truancy, too, of the logical
faculty (she found it impossible to write a letter to the Times),
she had the thought of Empire always at hand, and had acquired
from her association with that armoured goddess her ramrod
bearing, her robustness of demeanour [.. .] (p. 199)
Clarissa is indicted with her society. Peter Walsh has no patience
with her in her role as a ‘perfect hostess’:
Here she’s been sitting all the time I’ve been in India; mending
her dress; playing about; going to parties [. . .] (p. 46)
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 105
He attacks her assimilation of Richard Dalloway’s standards:
The public-spirited, British Empire, tariff-reform, governing-
class spirit [. . .] With twice his wits, she had to see things
through his eyes [. . .] (p. 86)
He attacks her worldliness, her coldness, her ‘timid; hard; arrogant;
prudish’ manner (p. 66), her conventionality, her party air, ‘effusive,
insincere’ (p. 185). Though our view of the characters is entirely
opposed, Peter Walsh’s attacks on Clarissa’s social self have some-
thing in common with Doris Kilman’s. Miss Kilman attacks
Clarissa from hatred and jealousy, not, like Peter, from love and
admiration; but the grounds of the attack — Clarissa’s useless,
luxurious existence, her ‘delicate body, her air of freshness and
fashion’ (p. 138) —are similar. Their criticisms are borne out by the
trivial elements in Clarissa’s inner thoughts; it is not only from the
outside that she is satirized. When Clarissa considers with admiration
‘Mrs Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out
because that nice boy was killed and now the old Manor House
must go to a cousin’ (p. 7), or when she includes in her vision of
‘life: London: this moment in June’, ‘the mothers of Pimlico’
giving ‘suck to their young’ (p. 9); when she muses over the artistry
of her dressmaker, now retired in Ealing, and says of her dresses
that ‘You could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She
had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace’ (p. 44); when
she considers that by loving her roses she is helping ‘the Albanians,
or was it the Armenians?’ (p. 133) (whose concerns she leaves to
Richard): at these points we are invited to direct against her the
kind of hostility felt by Doris Kilman, or, at least, the kind of
satire expressed by Peter Walsh.
At the party the various methods of satire used throughout the
book cohere; Clarissa’s feeling of identity with Septimus is set as
sharply as possible against the ‘corruption, lies, chatter’ of her life.
The party emphasizes the ironic dichotomy between youthful
aspirations and middle-aged resignation, most startlingly in the
actual appearance of Sally Seton: no wild young thing (as we have
continually imagined her) but a complacent Mancunian housewife.
Sally and Peter compare past hopes with present achievements:
‘“Have you written?” she asked him [. . .] “Not a word!”’
106 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
(p. 207). Lady Bruton observes that Richard has lost his chance of
the Cabinet (p. 198). Those who are failures are thriving on a
system of which Septimus Smith has been the victim. Hugh
Whitbread eating cake with Duchesses, the Prime Minister (“You
might have stood him behind acounter and bought biscuits’ (p. 190)),
Lady Bradshaw ‘a sea lion at the edge of its tank, barking for
invitations’ (p. 201) —all are ridiculous,’ even when, like Sir Harry
or Professor Brierly, they are harmless. They are seen mostly
through the eyes of Peter Walsh who has throughout been the
most ruthless critic of Clarissa’s society. But his criticisms are not
the only means of undercutting Clarissa’s ‘triumph’: the way the
party starts in the servants’ quarters, and moves up the stairs, sets it
in its full triviality against the world of the ‘lower classes’ which
Virginia Woolf (though never very realistically) likes to use as a
contrast to the world of the ‘gentry’. And Ellie Henderson,
neglected and overawed, whom Clarissa despises, is, more endear-
ingly than Doris Kilman, a critic of the society in that she is
excluded by it.
Thus Clarissa’s ‘offering’, her ‘triumph’, her attempt to ‘kindle
and illuminate’ (p. 7), on which the book converges, is seen as
hollow, trivial and corrupt, providing satisfaction for the least
satisfactory part of her character. It is not at this level, but at the
deepest one, that her real triumph takes place, in her response to the
death of Septimus, of which she hears from the Bradshaws.
Sir William Bradshaw is the most repulsive character in the book.
His presentation is even stronger than that which turns Miss
Kilman, through emphasis on her ugliness, her mackintosh, her
greed and her lust for possession, into nothing more than a great
hand opening and closing on the table. For Sir William, the mock-
heroic language is used at full strength.
Proportion, divine proportion, Sir William’s goddess, was
acquired by Sir William walking hospitals, catching salmon,
begetting one son in Harley Street by Lady Bradshaw, who
caught salmon herself and took photographs scarcely to be
1 The ridiculous, as often in Virginia Woolf’s work, is associated with food
(cf. Doris Kilman’s éclairs), of which she had an extreme horror during her
periods of madness (seé Bell II, p. 15).
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 107
distinguished from the work of professionals. Worshipping
proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made
England prosper, secluded her lunatics, forbade childbirth,
penalized despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate
their views until they, too, shared his sense of proportion [. . .]
(p. 110)
Sir William ‘forces the soul’; and he is the representative of a
way of life, supported by Clarissa’s Prime Minister, in which
individuals are made to tow the line, or are put away. Septimus sees
Sir William (and Dr Holmes) as human nature, ‘the repulsive brute,
with the blood-red nostrils’ (p. 102) which wants to attack and
pin him down. Clarissa recognizes that Sir William would ‘force the
soul’, and responds as Septimus does to the goddesses of Proportion
and Conversion. As an alternative to the lust for domination which
Sir William calls Proportion and Miss Kilman calls ‘love and
religion’, Clarissa recognizes an underlying unity of all things
which can coexist with the privacy and integrity of the individual. In
this she is against Sir William, against the social world of which she
is a part, and on the side of Septimus.

Virginia Woolf’s main concern about Mrs Dalloway was that

‘the reviewers will say that it is disjointed because of the mad
scenes not connecting with the Dalloway scenes’.! Certainly the
plot does not connect Clarissa and Septimus, apart from the arbitrary
link provided by Sir William, and the situational resemblance of
their both having witnessed the death of someone close to them. But
the connection between them at an experiential level is intimate and
vital, and in it consists the novel’s most remarkable achievement. The
similarity in the way they respond to life leads the reader to feel that
madness is an intensification or distortion of the method of per-
ception that Virginia Woolf feels to be normal. Their response to
experience is always given in physical terms, often remarkably
similar ones:
It rasped her, though, to have stirring about in her this
brutal monster! to hear twigs cracking and feel hooves planted
down in the depths of that leaf-encumbered forest, the soul;
1 AWD, 13 December 1924, p. 69.
108 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
never to be content quite, or quite secure, for at any moment
the brute would be stirring, this hatred, which, especially
since her illness, had power to make her feel scraped, hurt in
her spine [. . .] (p. 15)
Septimus heard her say ‘Kay Arr’ close to his ear, deeply,
softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice
like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and
sent running up into his brain waves of sound which, concus-
sing, broke. (p. 25)
[. . .] this gradual drawing together of everything to one centre
before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to thesurface
and was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world
wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames.
(p. 18)
Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles
and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow!
Burn her to cinders! Better anything, better brandish one’s
torch and hurl it to earth than taper and dwindle away [. . .]
(p. 185)
In these two pairs of quotations, both Septimus and Clarissa
translate their emotions into physical metaphors, which are
indistinguishable from the emotion itself. The climax to this
method of perception is Clarissa’s response to Septimus’s death:
‘her body went through it’ (p. 203).
The difference between Clarissa and Septimus — between
sanity and madness — is that Clarissa does not lose her awareness of
the outside world as something external to herself even while she
responds to it at a physical level. The physical response does not, in
her case, become so overwhelming that it subsumes the reality
which induced it. She hears Big Ben, and her thoughts about it are
translated into a physical response: she ‘feels’ the sound as leaden
circles dissolving, or as a bar of gold flat on the sea, or as a finger
falling into ‘the midst of ordinary things’ (p. 141). But Clarissa
does not, hearing the sound, appropriate and respond to its
qualities without understanding what the sound means, nor does she
think Big Ben is speaking to her. She retains her awareness of
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 10g
reality while she responds to it. Septimus, by contrast, is not always
able to distinguish between his personal response and the indifferent,
universal nature of external reality. He struggles to do so: in
Regent’s Park he keeps trying to remind himself that the ‘shocks of
sound’ which assault him come from ‘a motor horn down the street’
or ‘an old man playing a penny whistle’ (p. 76), and he is capable of
sane, indeed satirical comments on reality: “Che upkeep of that
motor car alone must cost him quite a lot,’ he says of Sir William
(p. 109). But, in his madness, he feels that if the birds sing they must
be speaking to him; if the aeroplane writes in the sky it must be
signalling to him. The distinction between self and external reality
is as blurred, in his mind, as the distinction between different forms
of physical response: sight, sound, touch. In an attempt to sort this
out as it happens to him, Septimus, the victim of Science and
Proportion, tries to be ‘scientific’; but the universe he inhabits, in
which the usual categories are merged beyond recognition, defies
analysis:
[. . .] leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being
connected by millions of fibres with his own body, there on the
seat, fanned it up and down; when the branch stretched he,
too, made that statement. The sparrows fluttering, rising,
and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern; the
white and blue, barred with black branches. Sounds made
harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were
as significant as the sounds. (p. 26)
This impressionist picture is very like the picture Virginia Woolf
creates in a sketch such as ‘Kew Gardens’. Septimus’s perceptions
are those of a normal sensibility taken to its illogical conclusion.
Clarissa and Septimus are linked by a mutual leitmotif, the quota-
tion from Cymbeline (‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’), which
Clarissa reads in Hatchard’s shop window in the morning, and
which comes into Septimus’s mind as he lies in his room:
[. . .] his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he had
seen his hand lie [. . .] on the top of the waves, while far away
on shore he heard dogs barking and barking far away. Fear no
more, says the heart in the body; fear no more. (p. 154)
110 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
His experience is like a re-enactment of Clarissa’s while she is
sewing her dress. For both it is a moment of tranquillity, an escape
from the body, and possibly an anticipation of death. The quotation
from Cymbeline is appropriate, not only to their mutual sense of
death as a triumphant escape, but also to their situations. The lines
are spoken over one who only appears to be dead, by those who
don’t know themselves to be her brothers. So, Clarissa is unaware
of her kinship with Septimus; so, neither of them can be thoroughly
known and understood by those who look at and speak to them.
The lament is spoken for Imogen, an outcast from her society,
and an innocent victim of cruelty and lies: and isolation from society
is experienced both by Septimus and Clarissa. ‘Fear no more the
heat 0” the sun’ casts an air of serenity over the encounter with
death to which the whole book leads up. For the major connection
between Clarissa and Septimus is, of course, that his death enables
her to encounter hers.
Septimus thinks of himself as a scapegoat for society, as a ‘drowned
sailor, on the shore of the world’ (p. 103), who has died and come
back, a risen God from the dead, in order to communicate the
true meaning of life. When he asks himself ‘to whom’ he should
speak (as Clarissa asks herself ‘to whom’ the offering of a party
should be made), the reply comes (rather as in Clarissa’s case) —
‘the Prime Minister’. This suggests that Septimus’s sense of the
true meaning of life is no more compatible with the superficial social
fabric epitomized by the Prime Minister than is Clarissa’s inner
self. His message is given, indeed, not to the world at large, but to
Clarissa. Like
. . . Lazarus, come back from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all?
he speaks to Clarissa after his death, showing her that ‘Death was
defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate [. ..] There was an
embrace in death’ (p. 204). At this impressive climax, where the
‘too many ideas’ cohere, the book’s strongly moral nature, as well as
its structural unity, can be thoroughly perceived.

1 T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, Prufrock and Other

Observations (1917).
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 Id
Clarissa and Septimus connect at an intense moment of con-
sciousness which is ironically contrasted with the moments measured
out by the striking clock. Their communication defies ‘real’ time,
since it is made after, and in spite of, the hour of Septimus’s death,
and takes place outside the room where the ‘strained time-ridden
faces’! of the partygoers bears evidence to the domination of
‘clock time’. Within the party, the effort to vanquish ‘clock time’
fails: the youthful idyll of life at Bourton, which has been painfully
and pleasurably recollected throughout the novel, is time lost, not
time regained.? Though its protagonists are all reassembled at the
party, they are ageing, unsuccessful, disillusioned; the victims of real
time.
The party is the climax to the tension between the two kinds of
time in the novel. The strictly limited ‘clock time’, covering just
over twelve hours, and impressed on the reader (as we saw in the
plot summary) at regular intervals, is combined with a continuous
flowing of various consciousnesses (reflected by the fluid sentence
structures) in which past, present and future are merged.? ‘Con-
sciousness time’ is frequently associated with the image of a vista.
During her conversation with Peter, Clarissa has an image of
herself as
achild throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at
thesame timea grown woman coming to her parents who stood
1 T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton’, V (1936), Four Quartets.
2 The last scene of Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s most Proustian novel,
invites comparison with Marcel’s last party in Time Regained (1927).
3 It has often been noticed that Virginia Woolf’s concept of inner time set
against clock time is very like Henri Bergson’s theory of Ja durée, which was
in fashion at the time. Bergson’s durée, or durational flux, is the inner reality
of the personality flowing through time. ‘Our moods and sensations are queer
blendings of such elements as memories impinging upon and conditioning
our present sensory impressions of confused sounds, smells and sights, all
forming themselves into highly fluid states of consciousness ever merging into
one another.’ (Shiv Kumar, Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel
(London and Glasgow, Blackie, 1962), p. 22.) Kumar is illuminating on the
parallels between Bergson’s philosophy and Virginia Woolf’s perceptions,
but makes it clear that the resemblances were coincidental: it seems very
unlikely that she had read him. The ‘Bergsonian’ flavour of Mrs Dalloway
was more probably filtered through her reading of Proust.
TZ The Novels of Virginia Woolf
by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared
them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a
whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and
said, “This is what I have made of it! This!’ (p. 48)
Clarissa’s approach to her parents down a vista of time is rather like
the vision of the ‘solitary traveller’, who may or may not be Peter
Walsh. As he falls asleep in the park, the figure of the nurse
knitting at the end of the bench becomes transformed into a giant
female figure seen at the end of a forest ride by the traveller, which
leads him on, ‘taking away from him the sense of the earth, the wish
to return, and giving him for substitute a general peace’ (p. 64).
Our feeling that this is meant as Peter Walsh’s dream comes from
the fact that elsewhere he uses two images related to this passage —
the nurse waving at the window, and Clarissa like a ‘lolloping mer-
maid’ with her Prime Minister. But the image is purposely general-
ized into a universal idea of death as peace. Looking down the
vista of time, the traveller sees his own end in sight. It isanalarming,
but at the same time a consolatory vision.
The figure seen at the end of a vista is used again to show the
characters struggling to approach each other through the barriers of
generation, separation and death. Septimus sees Evans coming
towards him through the trees. Richard watches Elizabeth through
a press of people at the party and, for a moment, does not recognize
her. At the end, Clarissa is framed in the doorway and Peter
apprehends her reality in a moment which transcends time; ‘for
there she was.’
The most complex example of the ‘vista’ used as an image for
“consciousness time’ is the passage in which Peter, taking off his
boots in the hotel, considers whether or not he should marry Daisy.
At one point in present time in his hotel room, he remembers one
point in past time when Daisy ran to meet him, crying that she
would give him everything. At the same moment he imagines a
hypothetical future time when he might ‘go to Oxford and poke
about in the Bodleian’:
Vainly the dark, adorably pretty girl ran to the end of the
terrace; vainly waved her hand; vainly cried she didn’t care
a straw what people said. There he was, the man she thought
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 ci 13
theworldof[. ..] paddingabouta room ina hotel in Bloomsbury,
shaving, washing, continuing, as he took up cans, put down
razors, to poke about in the Bodleian, and get at the truth
about one or two little matters that interested him. (p. 174)
‘The actual past moment, the actual present moment and the
hypothetical future moment are here merged in one.
The clocks in Mrs Dalloway recall people from such inner
fluidity to the burden of real time and place, and in this sense the
leaden circles are the enemy, the spokesmen of Proportion, like
Sir William: .
Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of
Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission,
upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme
advantages of a sense of proportion [. . .] (p. 113)
Against them is set an infinity which goes beyond all limits, even that
of the personal consciousness, as in the song of the old woman
outside Regent’s Park tube:
Through all ages — when the pavement was grass, when it was
swamp, through the age of tusk and mammoth, through the age
of silent sunrise — the battered woman — for she wore a skirt
[. . .] stood singing of love — love which has lasted a million
years [. . .] love which prevails, and millions of years ago her
lover, who had been dead these centuries, had walked, she
crooned, with her in May [. . .] and when at last she laid her
hoary and immensely aged head on the earth, now become a
mere cinder of ice [. . .] then the pageant of the universe would
be over. (pp. go-1)?
This impersonal infinity is felt, too, in the music Elizabeth hears in
Fleet Street:
[. . .] this voice, pouring endlessly, year in, year out, would
take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life;

1 This passage strongly anticipates Between the Acts, in its fusion of prehistory
with the idea of a universal ‘pageant’.
E
114 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
this procession; would wrap them all about and carry them on,
as in the rough stream of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of
bone, a blue petal, some oak trees, and rolls them on. (p. 153)
As in Facob’s Room, that natural infinity is in contrast with the
time by which history is measured and wars are made, leaving a
world (in which manners and customs, as Peter notes, are greatly
changed) where the people who pick up life as it was, who open
bazaars and go shopping and give parties and write letters to The
Times, are ironically contrasted with the victims of the war, the
poor, the shell-shocked, and the dead:
Really it was a miracle thinking of the war, and thousands of
poor chaps, with all their lives before them, shovelled together,
already half forgotten; it was a miracle. Here he was walking
across London to say to Clarissa in so many words that he loved
her. (pp. 127-8)
But it is an over-simplification to say that ‘consciousness time’ is
always in conflict with ‘clock time’. The leaden circles dissolving
in the air may be reminders of death, but they are also, for Clarissa,
the pulse of life itself. Big Ben and St Margaret’s often usher in the
moments of intense feeling, those still points of concentration like a
‘falling drop’, in which all life seems to be contained. The notes
strike like warnings but, as they dissolve, they seem to sum up and
become part of the activity of life. Big Ben’s first stroke in the book
is followed by Clarissa’s response: ‘Heaven only knows why one
loves it so’ (p. 6) — ‘it’, as so often, being life itself. Later, the
different sounds of the clocks suggest the different sides to her life:
[. . .] but here the other clock, the clock which always struck
two minutes after Big Ben, came shuffling in with its lap full
of odds and ends, which it dumped down as if Big Ben were all
very well with his majesty laying down the law [. . .] but she
must remember all sorts of little things besides— Mrs Marsham,
Ellie Henderson, glasses for ices [. . .] (p. 141)
Peter Walsh thinks of the bell of St Margaret’s (‘like a hostess’)
as being Clarissa herself; the sound suggests to him both her life
(‘as if this bell had come into the room years ago’) and her death
(‘Clarissa falling where she stood, in her drawing-room’) (p. 56).
 Mrs Dalloway: 1925 5
The bells, which are fluid symbols of life and death, and which
act at the same time as structural connections, are the precursors of a
similarly used motif, the lighthouse, in Virginia Woolf’s next, and
greatest, novel.
 5
To the Lighthouse
1927

o that is marriage, Lily thought, a man and a woman

looking at a girl throwing a ball [. . .] And suddenly the
meaning which, for no reason at all [...] descends on
people, making them symbolical, making them representative,
came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, look-
ing, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. Then, after
an instant, the symbolical outline which transcended the real
figures sank down again, and they became [.. .] Mr and Mrs
Ramsay watching the children throwing catches. (p. 84)
The passage draws together, as in the curve of the ball, the three
centres of this tripartite novel: the Ramsays’ family life; the ‘sym-
bolical outline’, which transcends the ‘real figures’; and Lily’s
attempt to master both symbol and reality.
Prue and Jasper, throwing catches, are watched by their parents
on a September evening before dinner. It is a family party in a
shabby house on the Isle of Skye; there are eight children and some
guests - Charles Tansley, a young philosopher; Augustus Car-
michael, an old college friend of Mr Ramsay’s; William Bankes,
a widowed botanist; Lily Briscoe, who paints; and Minta Doyle
and Paul Rayley, who are falling in love. One of the younger
children, James, has just gone to bed, disappointed because the
weather (as his father and Charles Tansley have unkindly assured
him) will not be good enough to make the long-promised journey
to the lighthouse the next day. T'wo of the older children are still
116
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 ig
at the beach with Paul and Minta. Mrs Ramsay, upset by the con-
versation about the lighthouse, is worried in case they will be late:
the cook has made a baeuf en daube which cannot be kept waiting.
These are ‘real figures’, and this is the stuff of a more than
usually uneventful family saga. Charles Tansley, ill at ease in the
rather snobbish family who don’t like his ties, might find a place in
Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger. James’s disappointment could forma
part of Hugh Walpole’s eremy. But the scene in which Mr and
Mrs Ramsay watch the children throwing catches suggests that the
novel reaches beyond its realistic materials. The people are also
shapes, and the shapes convey larger meanings than can be con-
tained in the lives of individuals. The point of view from which the
scene is described hovers between the personal and the general.
Nevertheless, To the Lighthouse is at an important level a dramatic,
realistic, ironic story of a family life which was, to a great extent,
Virginia Stephen’s. ‘Writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind’!
she says of her preoccupation with her parents; and Vanessa Bell,
best qualified to judge, comments:
In the first part of the book you have given a portrait of mother
which is more like her than anything I could have conceived
of as possible. You have made me feel the extraordinary beauty
of her character... It was like meeting her again with one-
self grown up and on equal terms... You have given father
too I think as clearly, but perhaps... that isn’t quite so
difficult. There is more to catch hold of.?
Vanessa herself is part of To the Lighthouse, as one of the Stephen
children whose lives with their widowed father inspired James’s
and Cam’s relationship with Mr Ramsay in the last part of the novel,
and as Lily Briscoe, whose struggle with her art is as much Vanessa’s
as Virginia Woolf’s own: ‘God! how you'll laugh at the painting
bits in the Lighthouse!’ Virginia wrote to her.?
The marriage of Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth seemed to
Virginia Woolf to present an archetypal pattern of sexual antitheses.
Her portrayal of the Ramsays makes these contrasts so obvious, and

1 AWD, 28 November 1928, p. 138.

2 Bell II, p. 128. 55 Belistl spe a2.
118 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
is so characteristic of her treatment of the differences between male
and female sensibilities, that the grandeur and subtlety of the
relationship seems all the more extraordinary. Mrs Ramsay is
beautiful, queenly, shortsighted, philanthropic and inventive. Her
intimacy with her children nourishes her natural tendency towards
fantasy and exaggeration. Like Mrs Hilbery she is associated with
poetry, Mr Ramsay (like Mr Hilbery) with prose. Mr Ramsay
does not see what is close to him — the flowers, or his own children’s
beauty. Instead, with ‘an eye like an eagle’s’ (p. 81), he seeks for
truth. He is awkward and ungainly in company. He isa stickler for
facts, and cannot bear exaggeration or imprecision. Their conflict
over the weather is a paradigm of the sexual battle: Mrs Ramsay
becomes a fountain of fecundity and Mr Ramsay a ‘beak of brass’.
The woman’s emotional act of giving sympathy paradoxically
fertilizes the man, but more in the manner of a mother feeding her
child than a lover:
He wanted [. ..] to be taken within the circle of life, warmed
and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barren-
ness made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full
of life—the drawing-room; behind the drawing-room the
kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond them
the nurseries; they must be furnished; they must be filled with
life. (p. 44)
But this is not a simple dialectic. Mrs Ramsay is as dependent on
Mr Ramsay for comfort and protection. She rests on the hard cer-
tainties of the masculine world ‘as a child’ (p. 122). It is she who is
the more pessimistic and who relies on him to turn her thoughts
away from doubt and gloom. And, in spite of their contrasted
characteristics, they are engaged on the same field of battle, in
which they evince similar characteristics of courage and endurance.
Mr Ramsay struggles to overcome his sense of failure and transience,
Mrs Ramsay brandishes her sword (p. 70) — an image shared by them
both — against the ‘little strip of time’ which threatens her. She
attempts to build something that will endure, from social and domes-
tic materials.
Both are trying to come to terms with the fact of death; but there
is a difference in the way their attempts are treated. Mr Ramsay is
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 11g
very largely a comic character. His bawling ‘Best and brightest,
come away!’ at Miss Giddings (p. 82), like a character out of
Lewis Carroll, his fury at Augustus Carmichael’s asking for
another plate of soup, his delight when Lily praises his boots, his
pose of desolation on the boat, all emphasize the ludicrous side of
Leslie Stephen which is summed up by the story
that he was heard one night slowly ascending the stairs,
groaning at each step and loudly exclaiming: ‘Why won’t
my whiskers grow? Why won’t my whiskers grow?”!
The language associated with Mr Ramsay’s thoughts frequently
takes on the extravagant mock-heroic tone which was used in
Mrs Dalloway as an instrument of satire:
his own children [. . .] sprung from his loins, should be aware
from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising;
and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes
are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr
Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue
eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage,
truth, and the power to endure. (p. 6)
The metaphor of a dangerous expedition also colours the passage
in which he is trying to ‘reach R’. Though it is a satirical image
imposed from the outside in order to make Mr Ramsay’s heroic
struggle seem absurd, it is also part of his train of thought; again
the mental image is turned into a physical action:
when the search party comes they will find him dead at his
post, the fine figure of a soldier. Mr Ramsay squared his
shoulders and stood very upright by the urn. (p. 42)
Mr Ramsay thus participates in the imagery which is used to satir-
ize him. The same is true of the description of his mental processes
as the struggle to ‘reach R’, in part an ironical shorthand used by the
narrator, but also Mr Ramsay’s own method of summing up the
extent of his achievement as a philosopher. The subtlety with
which the figures of speech hover between the inside and the out-
side of Mr Ramsay’s mind makes it difficult for us to find him
4 Bell I, p. 74.
120 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
altogether comic. At the same time, it is evident that Virginia
Woolf did mean Mr Ramsay to be ludicrous, from the way in which
she has extrapolated him from Leslie Stephen. Her father was an
excellent mountaineer, identified by Thomas Hardy with the
Shreckhorn which Stephen (as ‘gaunt and difficult’ as the mountain)
was the first to climb.+ He was also a great walker until late on in
life, leading the arduous ‘Sunday tramps’ for fifteen years. But Mr
Ramsay’s idea of himself as the leader of an expedition is an unreal
self-dramatization, and his desire to ‘be off for a day’s walk’ ‘with
nothing but a biscuit in his pocket’ (p. 79) is felt by Mrs Ramsay to
be negligible, mere nostalgia for his youth. The real expedition he
leads to the lighthouse is not a strenuous adventure; his children feel
the falsity of his identifying on the boat with the brave, simple
fishermen. Virginia Woolf has transformed Leslie Stephen’s
genuine attributes of physical daring and stamina into facets of Mr
Ramsay’s emotional self-indulgence.
There is no comparable ridicule of Mrs Ramsay’s courage and
endurance. Nevertheless, an equivalent satirical tone is associated
with her which suggests that, like Clarissa, she is not inviolate
from criticism. The tone is grandiose, affected, and full of second-
rate literary clichés:
There was something in this of the essence of beauty which
called out the manliness in their girlish hearts [. . .] (p. 9)
Had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if
slightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters [...] had
lisped so charmingly, had stormed so wildly, and all her wit
and her bearing and her temper came from them [...]
(pp. 11-12)
Like some queen who, finding her people gathered in the hall,
looks down upon them, and descends among them, and ack-
nowledges their tributes silently, and accepts their devotion and
their prostration before her [. . .] she went down [. . .] (p. 95)
An association is made between Mrs Ramsay and the kind of
sentimental Victorianism which is to be parodied in Orlando.
And Mrs Ramsay is at one point explicitly identified with Queen
1 F, W. Maitland, Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (London, Duckworth,
1906), p. 276.
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 121
Victoria (p. 17). But there is a rather different ironic tinge to her
imaginary words to Lily at the dinner table:

‘I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply

some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice
to that young man there, life will run upon the rocks [...]
My nerves are taut as fiddle strings.’ (p. 106)
Sounding here more like Gwendolen Fairfax than Queen Victoria,
she is now being satirized not for her Victorianism but for the
littleness of her society feelings, as Clarissa is satirized by Peter
Walsh. In both women the compulsion to be loved (whether as
wife, mother, hostess or friend) is presented as a weakness. And Mrs
Ramsay has other limitations. She is afraid, like the speaker in
Hardy’s poem, to
look into my glass
And view my wasted skin

She is uninformed (like Mrs Wilcox in Howards End), leaving

factual knowledge and differences of opinion to the men. She
believes fervently and defensively in the essential value for women of
marriage and child-bearing. She is deeply inhibited in her emotional
life and, at the same time, interfering and even malicious in her
dealings with the lives of others.
The evidence about the Ramsays is constantly reshuffled through
the attitudes of different onlookers. Mr Carmichael shows up Mrs
Ramsay’s desire to be liked by not liking her; Mr Bankes exposes
Mr Ramsay’s egotistical concern with his works and fame by his
own disinterestedness; Lily is amazed at Mrs Ramsay’s misjudge-
ments of people and at her universal recommendation of marriage.
The children resent, as well as admire, both their parents; beneath
the main current of the book there is another story, to be fully
expressed in The Years, of the second generation’s attempt to escape
their nineteenth-century background. And the future that the
Ramsays set in motion is also a means of judging them. In the last
part of the novel Mrs Ramsay is dead, and so are the two children
of brightest promise: Andrew, whom Mr Ramsay had said ‘would
be a better man than he had been’ (p. 80), and Prue, whom Mrs
122 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Ramsay intended to be ‘happier than other people’s daughters’
(p. 126). The Rayleys’ marriage, which she arranged, has not been
a success; and Lily and William Bankes have not married as she
hoped they would. At a realistic level it appears that the Ramsays’
marriage was an incompatible union between unsatisfactory charac-
ters whose plans for others were all unfulfilled.
If one is thus to deny the value of the ‘real life’ of the Ramsays,
the only satisfactory conclusion in the book is an aesthetic one. But
to say that their relationship is only triumphant when resolved by
Lily as part of her picture is to be false to the complex and powerful
balance of the novel, which has two moments of climax, not just
one. There is a resolution of conflict between Mr and Mrs Ramsay
at the end of Part I which is weighed against Mr Ramsay’s arrival
at the lighthouse and Lily’s completion of her picture in Part ITI.

And what then? For she felt that he was still looking at her,
but that his loek had changed. He wanted something — wanted
the thing she always found it so difficult to give him; wanted
her to tell him that she loved him. And that, no, she could
not do [...] A heartless woman he called her; she never told
him that she loved him. But it was not so—it was not so.
It was only that she never could say what she felt [. . .] Getting
up she stood at the window with the reddish-brown stocking
in her hands, partly to turn away from him, partly because she
did not mind looking now, with him watching, at the Light-
house. For she knew that he had turned his head as she turned;
he was watching her. She knew that he was thinking, You are
more beautiful than ever. And she felt herself very beautiful
[...] Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of
saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and looked
at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for
though she had not said a word, he knew, of course he knew,
that she loved him. He could not deny it. And smiling she
looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, Nothing
on earth can equal this happiness) —
“Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow.’ She
had not said it, but he knew it. And she looked at him smiling,
For she had triumphed again. (pp. 141-2)
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 1732
The moment is controlled, and described, by Mrs Ramsay; it is
the victory of her beauty and intuition over his desire for speech
and hard facts. In a sense she is subjugating him to her will; her
smile is one of mastery. But her triumph is also achieved by a re-
linquishing of the will: she admits his monopoly of the truth, and
allows that it will be wet the next day. The scene, by its lyrical
fluidity (an intensification of the manner of the whole novel) gives
the impression that both minds are simultaneously revealed to
each other in silence, even though the narrative is really centred in
Mrs Ramsay’s consciousness. Thus, although she dominates the
moment, it creates a moving sense of unification. A reconcilement
of considerable grandeur has taken place between temperaments of
extreme emotional disparity.

The force of this scene, however, does not arise entirely from our
interest in the realistic personal relationship between Mr and Mrs
Ramsay. We come to it after the long first part of the novel has
established, in a brilliant variety of ways, an elastic interplay between
the real and the metaphysical, so that Mr and Mrs Ramsay’s
marriage by now seems to be a reconcilement between abstract
qualities which gives it a more than merely personal importance.
The most obvious of the techniques used to achieve this effect is
the manipulation of participles, by now a familiar device for expres-
sing the simultaneity of different levels of experience, whose
limitation is that it requires an equally refined sensibility of all its
characters: ‘We do not always think of eternity while serving
potatoes; sometimes we just think of serving potatoes. Virginia
Woolf’s characters never do.’ Furthermore, they are often
ironically aware of the dichotomy between their thoughts and their
actions: ‘Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy— that was what
she was thinking, this what she was doing-—ladling out soup
[...]’ (p. 96). The point of this constant emphasis on the disparity
between thought and action is not that it should be psychologically
convincing. Perhaps not everyone thinks like this; but everyone
in this novel must, because the characters are being used in the
service of an abstract argument about the difficulty of infusing
1 David Lodge, Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of
the English Novel (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), p. 86.
124 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
shapes with sense. The recognizable shapes of daily life are fre-
quently at odds with the sense which underlies them. This is evident
in some of the dialogue, which, like the ladling of soup, is often
irrelevant to the flow of consciousness behind it, as in the climatic
scene between Mr and Mrs Ramsay:
‘They’re engaged [...] Paul and Minta.’
‘So I guessed.’
[Pause]
‘How nice it would be to marry a man with a wash-leather bag
for his watch.’
[pause]
‘You won’t finish that stocking tonight.’
‘No [.. .] I shan’t finish it.’
[PAUSE]
‘Yes, you were right. It’s going to be wet tomorrow.’ (pp.
140-2)
Like James’s memory of his mother saying ‘We shall need a big
dish tonight. Where is it—the blue dish?’, which illustrates his
belief that ‘she alone spoke the truth’ (p. 212), the commonplace
words are ironically remote from their emotional significance. But
the novel does not insist on a simple opposition between the actual
and the intangible. Very often, the spoken words sum up, rather
than deflect the underlying meanings, as when the Swiss girl
says “The mountains are so beautiful’ (p. 33) or Mr Ramsay says
‘Damn you’ to Mrs Ramsay (p. 38) or ‘Well done’ to James (p.
2.34). And colloquial phrases may take on a resonance beyond the
control of the speaker. Mrs Ramsay, giving William Bankes a
second helping of baeuf en daube at the moment of realizing that her
dinner party has become a thing of ‘coherence’ and ‘stability’, says
“Yes, there is plenty for everybody’ (p. 121). The trite remark is
suggestive of her bountifulness and creativity. Lily speaks of Mr
Ramsay’s landing at the lighthouse in an oddly uncolloquial sen-
tence: ‘It is finished,’ she says (p. 236), and then completes her
picture. There is an irresistible suggestion of Christ’s last words on
the cross, not for any precise analogy but for the idea of sacrifice
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 125
which they express. The first section of “Time Passes’ eerily com-
bines the sense of an ordinary conversation with prophetic notes:
‘It’s almost too dark to see,’ says Andrew (p. 143), involuntarily
anticipating his own death.
Andrew’s remark seems to hover between the spoken and the
implied, as though it is hanging in the air. This effect contributes
to the narrative method of the whole book, in which very many
phrases and images seem only partly to be attached to the characters,!
so that their mental processes are fused with an impersonal voice,
which takes over in “Time Passes’. Such ambiguity in the creation
of real characters applies, very often, to their spoken words, in that
we are frequently unsure as to whether they are really spoken.
Mr Bankes, one presumes, does not say ‘Nature has but little clay
like that of which she moulded you’ on the telephone to Mrs
Ramsay. He says he will catch the 10.30 at Euston (pp. 34-5).
Mrs Ramsay is far from saying ‘Nothing on earth can equal this
happiness’ to Mr Ramsay. Mr Ramsay does not actually step from
the boat shouting “There is no God’ (p. 236). Indeed, most of the
characters are extremely inhibited. Mr Ramsay makes everyone
very uncomfortable by saying ‘You find us much changed’ (p.
168) or by bursting out with the lines from Cowper’s “The Castaway’.
Lily’s great cry for Mrs Ramsay, which reaches the level of the
spoken word, is immediately an embarrassment to her: ‘Heaven be
praised, no-one had heard her cry that ignominous cry’ (p. 205).
But the inhibition is not merely one of character; it reveals the
immense difficulty of connecting the life of the mind and the world
of external signs in any way that is at all meaningful: a difficulty
that is central to Lily’s attempt to paint. Because the appropriate
utterances or signs are usually so much simpler than the complex of
meanings they contain— ‘It is finished’, or a line down the middle
of the canvas — it is always necessary to understand that ‘Nothing
was simply one thing’ (p. 211).
The infusion of the commonplace with an enriching significance
extends from words to things. Everyday matters of fact take on,
largely through reiteration, the sort of resonance we have already
seen apportioned to trite phrases. Thus the bill for the greenhouse
1 There is a brilliant analysis of this aspect of the novel by Erich Auerbach in
the last chapter of Mimesis (New York, Anchor Books, 1957).
126 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
roof becomes, in Mrs Ramsay’s mind, a synecdoche for the whole
corpus of material worries which have prevented Mr Ramsay,
husband and father of eight children, from being also a first-class
philosopher. The banging of doors, similarly, echoes throughout
the book. Open doors and broken locks annoy Mrs Ramsay as she
sits contemplating the shabbiness of the house; during the long,
destructive onslaught of nature, the abandonment of the house by
human agencies is accompanied by the ghostly banging of doors,
and its undignified resurrection-at the hands of Mrs McNab and
Mrs Bast is, in part, a mending of doors:

Attended with the creaking of hinges and the screeching of

bolts, the slamming and banging of damp swollen woodwork,
some rusty laborious birth seemed to be taking place [. ..] At
last [. . .] keys were turned all over the house; the front door
was banged; it was finished. (pp. 159, 161)
Though the house may have triumphed over death, its inhabitants,
returning, have yet to work out their salvation. Without Mrs
Ramsay, Lily feels it is ‘a house full of unrelated passions’ (p. 168),
suggested by ‘doors slamming and voices calling’ (p. 166) and
questions which ‘opened doors in one’s mind that went banging
and swinging to and fro’ (p. 166). The image has come to stand
for loss of control, and is used again by Lily in her memories of
Mr and Mrs Ramsay’s quarrels:
He would whizz his plate through the window. Then all
through the house there would be a sense of doors slamming
and blinds fluttering as if a gusty wind were blowing and
people scudded about trying in a hasty way to fasten hatches
and make things shipshape. (p. 226)
‘The major image here is of course that of the sea voyage, and
the overlap between the real and the metaphorical is most obvious
in the multiple significances which are drawn from the novel’s
island setting. In this To the Lighthouse resembles The Voyage Out;
their titles could be run together, and suggest how close in both
novels is the interrelationship between the external environment
and the inner meanings. In drs Dalloway, The Waves and Between
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 127
the Acts, though there is great use of water imagery, the characters’
lives are landlocked. But in To the Lighthouse ‘the sea is all about
us’:1 it dominates the actual and imaginative lives of the characters.
An illustration of this is provided by the story Mrs Ramsay reads
to James. In the fairy tale, the fisherman who has caught and re-
leased a magic flounder is urged by his bullying wife to ask the
flounder for more and more exorbitant requests on her behalf: she
must be king, emperor, pope, and at last God. Each request is
granted to the accompaniment of a stormier sea, and at the final
blasphemy the flounder sends them back to their original pigsty.
The story can be read as a grotesque parody of Mrs Ramsay’s
protective, energizing relationship with her husband, suggesting
that she is responsible for his constant need of reassurance: ‘perhaps
it was her fault that it was necessary’ (p. 124), and even that it is
only her death which enables him to make his voyage: “There was
no helping Mr Ramsay on the journey he was going’ (p. 175).
Or, its increasingly terrifying descriptions of the state of the sea
might be used as analogies to Mrs Ramsay’s periodic dread of the
sound of the waves, which make her think ‘of the destruction of the
island and its engulfment in the sea’ (pp. 19-20). Or the throwing
back of the magic flounder might suggest the fish with a piece cut
out of it, thrown into the sea on the voyage to the lighthouse like
a sacrificial offering. Or the wife’s blasphemy might carry a faint
resemblance to Mr Ramsay’s imagined words of triumph, “There is
no God.’ These are fluid possibilities: the fairy tale is by no means
meant to serve as a definite analogy to the novel. But they become
possibilities by virtue of the consistent association between the sea
and the lives of the characters.

Mrs Ramsay telling a fairy story to James, sitting at the window like
a picture of aMadonna and Child (which Lily ‘without irreverence’
may turn into a purple triangle), presides over a mythical world.
Her powers seem to be those of a pagan goddess or a fairytale witch.
But she has to work magic within the confines of the fierce, scienti-
fic world of real facts ruled by her husband, by Charles Tansley
and by William Bankes: the masculine world of which Andrew
would have been, and James will be, the inheritor. To the Lighthouse
1 T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages’ (1941), Four Quartets.
128 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
continually hovers on the edge of becoming a fairy tale, or, more
ambitiously, a mythical or even Christian allegory, whose subject —
a frequent subject of myth — is the conquest of death.
Mrs Ramsay’s mythical qualities seem to arise partly from her
close involvement with the imaginative life of her children: the
idea of the circus fills her with glee (p. 14); as a child might, she
hears in the waves a drum roll or a lullaby (p. 19); the end of the
fairy story is told as though in her own words (p. 71); she fantasizes
about the rooks, calling them-Joseph and Mary, for her own
pleasure as well as for the children (p. 93); and her lullaby to Cam
is a fairy story (p. 132) transforming reality into a mythical paradise
which lingers in Cam’s mind for life (p. 232).
While her imaginings thus transform the real world into a story
for children, she is seen by others as a superhuman figure with
goddess-like creative powers. Dry, precise Mr Tansley finds himself
singing a lyric paean to her beauty (p. 17); Mr Bankes is moved to
similarly exalted language: “The Graces assembling seemed to have
joined hands in meadows of asphodel to compose that face’ (p. 35).
To Lily she is an ‘august shape’ (p. 60) in whose heart ‘were stood,
like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred in-
scriptions’ (p. 59). In the mythic universe which Mrs Ramsay
inhabits and Lily tries to recreate, all objects and characters may be
transformed, as in a sea-change ‘in that underworld of waters [. . .]
where in the green light a change came over one’s entire mind
[..-]’ (pp. 207-8). Prue, at the point of death, seems to Lily to
become Proserpina, letting ‘her flowers fall from her basket’ (p.
228). Augustus Carmichael, who druidically intones the mysterious
poem at the end of the dinner, ‘holding his table napkin so that it
looked like a long white robe’ (p. 128), turns at the end into ‘an old
pagan God, shaggy, with weeds in his hair and the trident (it was
only a French novel) in his hands’ (p. 236). Drugged and remote,
evidently a man of vision, he becomes an acolyte at the ceremonies
of creation engendered by Mrs Ramsay and Lily.
His trident concludes the association made throughout between
mythic powers of creation and the powers of the sea, whose potential
for enfranchising the solid universe from its apparently fixed bound-
aries is sinister as well as creative. Not surprisingly, the imagination
tends towards monsters when thinking of the marine underworld,
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 129
and its mythical inhabitants, the sirens, are emblems of danger for
hardy seamen such as Mr Ramsay:

Steer, hither steer your winged pines,

All beaten Mariners!
Here lie Love’s undiscovered mines,
A prey to passengers —
Perfumes far sweeter than the best
Which make the Phoenix’ urn and nest.
Fear not your ships
Nor any to oppose you save our lips;
But come on shore,
Where no joy dies till Love hath gotten more.
So reads Mrs Ramsay, from an undistinguished seventeenth-century
poem by William Browne of Tavistock, which identifies her with
the insidious, beguiling elements of femininity. But Mr Ramsay,
who is to be a triumphant, not a beaten mariner (and who is
mainly associated with land imagery), resists the siren:

The whole of life did not consist in going to bed with a woman,
he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English
novel and the French novel. (p. 139)
Few others can resist her power, particularly at the dinner party,
where she appears as a pagan deity presiding over a sacrificial rite
in which Paul and Minta are the victims, ‘led [...] Lily felt, to
the altar’ (p. 117). As Mrs Ramsay put ‘a spell on them all’ (p. 116),
the bow] of fruit becomes for her ‘a trophy fetched from the bottom
of the sea’ (p. 112), and the dish of bauf en daube the celebration of
‘a festival’ (p. 115), creating a sense of eternity. As the meal draws
to a close the voices of people talking at the table ‘came to her very
strangely, as if they were voices at a service in a cathedral [...]
some Roman Catholic cathedral’ (p. 127). Earlier betrayed by her
love of rhythm and need for security into murmuring ‘we are in
the hands of the Lord’ (p. 74) — which she does not really believe —
she now, more actively, creates her own service, her own church
full of worshippers, which she knows will outlast her. Lily, recreat-
ing her in “The Lighthouse’, ‘felt as if a door had opened, and one
130 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
went in and stood gazing silently about in a high cathedral-like
place’ (p. 195). The mythical and religious associations allow a
superhuman aspect to Mrs Ramsay’s power of creating harmony
and radiance, like a stroke of light laid over a chaotic waste of
waters. Her ability to reconcile ‘scraps and fragments’ (p. 104),
culminating in the dinner scene, justifies the association with
mythical deities: Mrs Ramsay is herself a creator.
The spiritualization of character hovers between the real and the
abstract areas of the novel. Mr Carmichael’s trident is also a French
novel; but, at the other extreme, the mythical apparatus provides
for an almost entirely impersonal presentation in “Time Passes’.
Through death and absence, character is merged with nature, and
becomes the stuff of folklore and legend in the myth-creating minds
of Mrs McNab and Mrs Bast. The section shows an advance on
the attempt in AZ/rs Da/loway to turn the characters into super-
human beings. The solitary traveller of Peter Walsh’s dream, who is
and is not Peter, encountering the figure of a woman who is and is
not Clarissa, anticipates the ‘sleeper’ of “Times Passes’, the walker
on the beach who tries to find some meaning in appearances, and
whose search for hope is thwarted by the ‘brute confusion’ of the
universe (p. 154). Peter’s dream stands out oddly in Mrs Dalloway.
In To the Lighthouse the hovering vantage point of the ‘sleeper’ is
more firmly integrated into the impersonal fabric of “Time Passes’.
His quest for truth, set first against the pseudo-biblical rhetoric
which describes the decay of the house (‘Let the wind blow; let
the poppy seed itself and the carnation mate with the cabbage’
(p. 157)) and then against the ‘wantoning memories’ of Mrs
McNab, ensures that though the Ramsays’ house is almost entirely
given over to ‘the fertility, the insensibility of nature’ (p. 157) there
is, nevertheless, a constant reminder of human consciousness. The
walker on the beach is not Lily, but he anticipates and recalls
Lily’s attempt to find some ‘vision’ affirmed in ‘the sea and sky’
(p. 152).

The empty house in “Time Passes’ is full of empty shapes.

What people had shed and left — a pair of shoes, a shooting

cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes— those alone kept
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 191
the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they
were filled and animated [.. . ]
So loveliness reigned and stillness, and together made the
shape of loveliness itself, a form from which life had parted.
(p-147)
Shapes imply space, an emptiness at the centre. The abstract
relationship between shapes and space is vital to the novel. Lily’s
painting (unfinished in ‘The Window’, begun again and finished
in “The Lighthouse’) creates, and then has to solve, this relation-
ship.
And so lightly and swiftly pausing, striking, she scored her
canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner
settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her)
a space. [...] What could be more formidable than that space?
(pp. 179-80)
Filling a space entails a sense of perspective. As the morning wears
on, two parallel perspectives are achieved (the structure of the
narrative making the double achievement seem simultaneous). As
Mr Ramsay’s boat nears the lighthouse and to those on board the
land becomes ‘very small: shaped something like a leaf stood on
end’ (p. 214), Mr Ramsay drops his melodramatic pose of suffering
and James and Cam are momentarily reconciled to him. The ap-
proach to the stark actuality of the lighthouse, like the approach to
death, enables the complex land entanglements to be put in pro-
portion. Meanwhile on shore Lily too discovers that “so much
depends [. . .] upon distance’ (p. 217). As the boat draws away she
is more able to understand Mr Ramsay; as she tunnels through her
picture into the past she finds that the time and space dividing her
from Mrs Ramsay make it possible to find her again.
Lily’s visionary translation of life into shapes is the culmination
of a similar process carried on throughout the book, which con-
stantly reiterates a tension between simple and complex shapes. ‘The
importance of the lighthouse in the first part, “he Window’, lies
1 It extends to her description of the writing of To the Lighthouse: ‘I [...] got
down to my depths and made shapes square up.’ (AWD, 7 November 1928,
Pp: 136.)
 a2 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
not in itself, but in the stroke of light it throws in a circular sweep
across space, seen through the frame of the window. To some extent
this light is identified with Mrs Ramsay’s creation of harmony and
rhythm, and she herself appropriates it, as Clarissa does the bells of
London, finding it expressive of certain qualities in herself and of
certain moments in her experience (comparable to Clarissa’s in their
translation of sexual into emotional exaltation (p. 76)). Only in
the third part is the lighthouse seen in its concrete shape, not as a
beam of light but as a tower:-Mr Ramsay’s lighthouse.! James
makes the comparison:
The Lighthouse was then a silvery, misty-looking tower with
a yellow eye that opened suddenly and softly in the evening.
ow —
James looked at the Lighthouse. He could see the white-
washed rocks; the tower, stark and straight; he could see that
it was barred with black and white [. . .] So that was the Light-
house, was it? ~
No, the other was also the Lighthouse. For nothing was
simply one thing. (p. 211)
Though different, the two personae of the lighthouse, tower and
beam, are simple. All the simple shapes of the book — the dome
shape which Lily associates with Mrs Ramsay and Nancy with
Minta, the triangular shadow cast by Mrs Ramsay, the wedge
shape of her dark and secret self, the line drawn down the middle
of Lily’s picture — give a sense of fulfilment and evoke the obscure,
unapparent levels on which the personality works. In contrast
with such simple shapes are found repeated references to twists,
knots, nets, meshes and weaves: the shape of the active life of re-
lationships in which people speak, judge, worry, laugh at each other,
1 An important letter to Roger Fry warns us against forcing the lighthouse to
‘mean’ any one thing:
I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the
middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of
feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted
that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions [...] I
can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way. (Bell
II, p. 129.)
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 133
give parties and arrange things. Mrs Ramsay at the window is
continually stretched between her deep-sunk contemplative life and
the external demands made on her in the scene. The indivisibility
of these two areas of experience is suggested by her knitting, which,
like her life of personal entanglements, she resents (‘making some
little twist of the reddish-brown stocking she was knitting, impa-
tiently’ (p. 7)) but can continue unconsciously while she sinks down
into herself. Her inner simplicity is contrasted with the life of
‘strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the
very fibre of being’ (p. 1), which she deplores. But she herself ‘in
active life’ ‘would be netting and separating one thing from another’
(p. 123). It is the active side of her which leads Lily to ask what it
was ‘by which, had you found a glove in the corner of the sofa, you
would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?”
(p. 57). Like a ‘phantom net’ (Mrs Ramsay’s image for the lights of
the town (p. 79)) she ‘tangled’ one’s perceptions ‘in a golden mesh’
(p. 59) and rejoices to think that ‘wound about in their hearts,
however long they lived she would be woven’ (p. 130).
The web of active relationships spun by Mrs Ramsay, and living
on through “Time Passes’ in the ‘ball of memories’ unwound by
Mrs McNab (p. 160), is set against the less delicate knots in “The
Lighthouse’ that bind the family together under Mr Ramsay, like
the knots tied and untied by Macalister’s boy: “A rope seemed to
bind him there, and his father had knotted it and he could only
escape by taking a knife and plunging it. . .” (p. 213). While James
struggles in his bondage, Lily is trying to untie ‘a knot in her mind’
(p. 178): to complete the picture and to understand the Ramsays.
The knotty problem of balancing ‘this mass on the right hand with
that on the left’ (p. 62) is also the problem of balancing the evidence
about the Ramsays’ marriage in order to arrive at a completed
picture and a moment of vision. Essentially this can only be a
moment — “The vision must be perpetually remade’ (p. 206) — and
at the moment of completion it is already past. ‘I have had my
vision,’ Lily concludes, not ‘I have it.’
What Lily arrives at is the proper balance of shapes; this is not an
easy achievementand it is undertaken several times in the book. Mrs
Ramsay’s dinner party is shaped out of disparate entities — hostilities,
reservations, her own reluctance to participate — into a coherent
134 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
whole, whose ingredients are of the most trivial (talk about vege-
table skins and coffee) but whose effect is nevertheless grand and
transcendental, because it has come about by a creative effort. Like
Lily looking at her picture when it is done, Mrs Ramsay looks back
on her dinner party as something that takes on a new perspective as
soon as it is completed:
With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in
a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then,
as she movedand took Minta’sarmand left the room, it changed,
it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one
last look at it over her shoulder, already the past. (p. 128)
The search for ‘significant form’ must continue. A few moments
later she is reading the Shakespeare sonnet in which the lover
invests the beauties of April with the idea of his beloved:
They were but sweet, but figures of delight
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
The poem gives her a sense of completed form:
There it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful
and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of
life and held rounded here — the sonnet. (p. 139)
There are three analogous activities. In the poem, the lover gives
added meaning to shapes by the force of his emotion, just as the poet
has ‘shaped’ the sonnet to be ‘beautiful and reasonable’ through a
creative effort. Mrs Ramsay, reading, makes sense of the shapes on
the page. In miniature, the passage shows the sense of the whole
novel. Acts which give form to life — even the cutting out of illus-
trations from the Army and Navy Stores catalogue — are creative
and humanizing. Without creative actions there is only space, like
the space caused by death.
For Lily to say that ‘Love had a thousand shapes’ (p. 218) seems
vague and sentimental until it is put in the context of the idea that
Lily and Mrs Ramsay are both ‘lovers’ trying to create shapes of
wholeness:
There might be lovers whose gift it was to choose out the
elements of things and place them together and so, giving them
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 255
a wholeness not theirs in life, make of some scene, or meeting
of people (all now gone and separate) one of those globed com-
pacted things over which thought lingers, and love plays.
(pp. 218-19)
The greatest achievements are proportionate to the greatest in-
tensity of emotion. This is felt particularly of Lily’s concentration,
which is analogous to Mrs Ramsay’s and is used in order to re-
create Mrs Ramsay:
Mrs Ramsay saying “Lifestand still here’; Mrs Ramsay making
of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere
Lily herself tried to make of the moment something perm-
anent) — this was of the nature of a revelation. (p.183)
Lily brings the mythical Mrs Ramsay back to life by her creative
effort to fill space with meaning. Before she does it, all that she sees
is ‘like curves and arabesques flourishing round a centre of complete
emptiness’ (p. 203). She feels that if the meaning of life can be
asked for with sufficient intensity
the space would fill; those empty flourishes would form into
shape; if they shouted loud enough Mrs Ramsay would return.
‘Mrs Ramsay!’ she said aloud. ‘Mrs Ramsay!’ The tears ran
down her face. (p. 205)
The passage derives its energy from the language of painting.
Without that we might look askance at its emotional intensity.
The last part of the novel is a delicate matter, which is made to
work only by the very careful sustaining of an intimate relation-
ship between Lily’s yearning for Mrs Ramsay and her desire to get
the painting right. The ‘return’ of Mrs Ramsay — though well
prepared for by the legendary, mythical qualities with which she
has always been invested — is only acceptable if we can barely
distinguish Lily’s two impulses. To this end, when Mrs Ramsay
does appear, she is there very much as a model for the picture. The
moment of climax is moving because it is very quiet, and even
ironic: Mrs Ramsay’s ‘perfect goodness’ to Lily included her com-
plete disdain of the picture which now immortalizes her; this is
Lily’s triumph over Mrs Ramsay as well as her tribute to her.
136 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Mrs Ramsay — it was part of her perfect goodness to Lily— sat
there quite simply, in the chair, flicked her needles to and fro,
knitted her reddish-brown stockings, cast her shadow on the
step, There she sat. (p. 230)
But the moment has three sides, not two. It also marks the arrival
of Mr Ramsay at the lighthouse, where — as though encountering
death — he momentarily assumes the herioc standards of behaviour
which have previously been used to satirize him, and at last in-
spires nothing but admiration:
He rose and stood in the bow of the boat, very straight and
tall, for all the world, James thought, as if he were saying,
‘There is no God,’ and Cam thought, as if he were leaping
into space, and they both rose to follow him ashesprang, lightly
like a young man, holding his parcel, on to the rock. (p. 236)
Mrs Ramsay appearing, Lily completing her picture and Mr
Ramsay arriving*at the lighthouse are all victorious over the im-
personal powers of chaos and death through their concentration on
the task in hand and through the intensity of emotion which they
possess or inspire.
The book’s conclusion, then, is a moral one. Like Facob’s Room,
Mrs Dalloway and The Waves, To the Lighthouse deals with the
possibility of coming to terms with death. Lily’s painting does not
set up a romantic dichotomy between aesthetic consolation and
mortal suffering. The artistic act involves suffering; itsums up
the extreme difficulty of giving some moral coherence to the chaotic
forms of reality;

It was an exacting form of intercourse anyhow. Other wor-

shipful objects were content with worship; men, women, God,
all let one kneel prostrate; but this form, were it only the
shape of a white lamp-shade looming on a wicker table, roused
one to perpetual combat, challenged one toa fight in which one
was bound to be worsted. (p. 180)
The artist here rejects the passive forms of worship (such as
Christianity) for what she considers a more arduous responsibility.
So Leslie Stephen, saying, like Mr Ramsay, ‘There is no God’,
 To the Lighthouse: 1927 Tay,
turned from the ‘muscular Christianity’ of his early years to a
rationalist philosophy of responsibility and endurance, but retained
the Evangelical belief in ‘the supreme importance of the indivi-
dual’s relation to the good’.t In a novel which criticizes and
mocks but finally finds admirable Mr Ramsay’s bleak drama of
endurance, the consolations offered for death are based on the real
Mr Ramsay’s principles. Completed forms, whether made from a
social and family group, an abstract painting, or the journey to the
lighthouse, create the only lasting victory over death and chaos.
Such forms can only be brought into being by means of the arduous
search for truth which is a necessary personal responsibility.
1 Noel Annan, Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to his Time
(London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1951), p. 123. Annan points out that this
belief is retained in Bloomsbury’s ‘unalterable emphasis on personal salvation’
(ibid. p. 126).
 6
Orlando
1928

RLANDO has a different quality from all Virginia Woolf’s

other novels, though it is interestingly comparable to many
of them, particularly to Facob’s Room and Between the
Acts. The difference in quality is suggested by its subtitle, ‘A
Biography’: it is an attempt to represent the character of a real
person. Though To the Lighthouse was also, in a sense, biographical,
it was not written for the characters who are evoked in the novel.
Orlando, by contrast, is a personal offering, dedicated to Vita
Sackville-West in a spirit of love and fascination and also of
irony.
In writing the book, Nigel Nicolson suggests, ‘Virginia had
provided Vita with a unique consolation for having been born a
girl.” Orlando is meant to console Vita not only for her sex, but
also for her loss of Knole, the ancestral home of the Sackvilles,
which came about because she was a woman and could not inherit.”
Vita had passionate and bitter feelings of possession and loss for
Knole, which one can see expressed in her novels The Heir (1922)
and The Edwardians (1930) and in her letters to Harold: ‘Oh
God, I do wish that Knole hadn’t got such a hold on my heart! If
only I had been Dada’s son, instead of his daughter!’ In The Heir
1 Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
1973; Futura, 1974), p. 214.
2 See Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1945-62 (London, Collins, 1968;
Fontana, 1971), p. 102, note 46.
8 Ibid. p. 182.
138
 Orlando: 1928 1B0
(subtitled “A Love Story’) a quiet little man from Wolverhampton
suddenly finds himself in possession of a Kentish Elizabethan
manor house. The story describes his increasingly possessive love
for the place, which is heavily mortgaged and has to be auctioned.
The hero, Chase, finds the thought of losing the house more and
more unbearable, for “The house was the soul; did contain and
guard the soul as in a casket .. . the soul of England.’! At the sale
he finds himself ‘fighting to shield from rape the thing he loved’?
and buys it back in a defiant gesture ‘to cast off the slavery of the
Wolverhamptons of this world’. The language of the story is equally
emotional throughout, and accurately reflects Vita’s passion for
family property, and her idea of herself as part of the tradition she
inherits:
If I could take my England, and could wring
One living moment from her simple year,
One moment only, whether of place or time,
... Then should my voice find echo in English ear;
Then might I say, “That which I love, I am.’?
‘I loved it’, she says of Knole in Knole and the Sackvilles, ‘and took
it for granted that Knole loved me.’* The phrase is suggestive of
the aristocratic pride which united a distaste for the Wolverhamp-
tons of this world with a strong local feeling for family, house and
land. In The Edwardians, published two years after Orlando, Vita
recreates her childhood at Knole (‘Chevron’). Chevron’s beauty
dominates the book, and the thought of its becoming national
property (as Knole did in 1941) is anathema to the hero. But in
The Edwardians the way of life made necessary by the place is
treated with some reservations. The hero’s sister is a socialist and
‘regards our love for Chevron as a weakness’.* Chevron’s way of
life is threatened, and the book is tinged with Vita’s wistful ac-
ceptance of that fact — a quality similar to the tender nostalgia at
1 Vita Sackville-West, The Heir (London, Heinemann, 1922), p. 59.
2 Ibid. p. 116.
3 Vita Sackville-West, Te Land (London, Heinemann, 1926), p. 62.
4 Vita Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (London, Heinemann, 1922;
Ernest Benn, 1958), p. 29-
5 Vita Sackville-West, The Edwardians (London, Hogarth Press, 1930), p. 246.
140 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the end of Orlando. As in Orlando, too, genders overlap. The
brother and sister of The Edwardians are called Sebastian and Viola,
and both are in love with the same character. It is interesting that
Vita, by this reference to Shakespeare’s sexually ambiguous twins,
should have followed the consolation for the loss of Knole provided
by Orlando. There, Knole is Orlando’s because she has been a
man; in The Edwardians, Chevron is Vita’s because she is a man
as well as a woman. Vita’s masculine sexuality, which she herself
fictionalized in the melodramatic and romantic Challenge (written
in 1919 but at the time unpublished), is closely related to her feel-
ings about her family home, and this is made apparent both in her
own novel about Knole and in Orlando.
Virginia Woolf understood and admired Vita’s feelings for her
house and her land, and was interested in the link between those
feelings and Vita’s sexuality, a link which she recognized as being
central to Vita’s character. By making Orlando’s life span over
300 years and include a change of sex she suggests that Vita’s
personality was formed equally by its androgyny and by its in-
heritance from the past. The novel’s general themes of history and
sexual identity are thus at every point directed towards a description
of personality. The historical periods that have created the house
have also created Orlando. The book necessitates a double reading;
its fantasy and pageantry are being used as the material of a love
letter which tells the loved one the writer’s opinion of her. As the
book goes on, it becomes increasingly concerned with what Vita
is like. Virginia Woolf feared that the book, which she had ‘begun
as a joke’, lacked ‘unity’.1 There is some truth in this; the serious
concentration on Orlando’s personality is at odds with the very
materials and techniques used to create it. The idealization of the
character (which Quentin Bell remarks on, criticizing it for its
nearness to ‘the glamorous creations of the novelette’*) gives an
oddly romantic air to a book which partly sets out to be an instru-
ment of ridicule and satire.
For the subtitle is also a joke. The personal emphasis of Orlando
is couched in parodic terms; the study of Vita’s character is pre-
sented through the medium of a literary jeu d’esprit. The game

1 AWD, 31 May 1928, p. 128. 2 Bell II, p. 118.

 Orlando: 1928 141
takes various forms. Overall, the techniques of the historical bio-
grapher are being ridiculed, very much as in Facob’s Room. What
is life? the narrator asks, giving throughout the implied answer that
life is not what the biographers make of it, ‘since a biography is
considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves,
whereas a person may well have as many thousand’ (p. 218). The
serious experiment in Facob’s Room of ‘following hints’ in order to
get at the truth of life and character is refashioned here into a less
arduous and more entertaining shape. Many of the techniques are
the same. The biographer is as much in evidence, hanging ‘like the
hawk moth’ ‘at the mouth of the cavern of mystery’,’ periodically
standing back to generalize or comment about life and art, speaking
to the reader more often and more directly than Orlando does. In
Facob’s Room, however, the difficulty of discovering Jacob pro-
duced a sense of sadness, anticipating his death. Orlando provides
a comic version of the same difficulty. The ironic disparity between
the jaunty, factual attempt at biography and the shifting, ambiguous
quality of life is parodic rather than elegiac.
The elusiveness of the principal character is not the central
theme. Orlando is far closer to us than Jacob; her thoughts fre-
quently overlap with the biographer’s. They voice, indistinguish-
ably, questions asked by women and by writers: ‘Which is the
greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s?’ (p. 109); ‘What then,
was Life?’ (p. 199); ‘What has praise and fame to do with poetry?’
(p. 229). Unlike Jacob, Orlando is a self-conscious participant in
the biographer’s quest for personality, and at times speaks for her:
“Hair, pastry, tobacco — of what odds and ends are we com-
pounded,’ she said (thinking of Queen Mary’s prayer book).
‘What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting-place of
dissemblables!’ (p. 124)
The biographer is wily. The quaintness of Orlando’s vocabulary
and the humorous conclusion to her meditation (‘she threw her
cheroot out of the window and went to bed’) prevent us from taking
too seriously a platitude with which the biographer is very much
in agreement. The light tone avoids solemnity and at the same time

1 Facob’s Room, p. 69.

142 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
allows for flexibility; at any moment we may find that it is the
biographer rather than Orlando who is speculating:
Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died
for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what
nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well
over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none
coming, let us get on with the story. (p. 48)
Here the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed in
order for it to be mocked. This satire on traditional biography
(which owes a debt to Lytton Strachey’s work in the same field)
is carried out in various ways, all aimed at showing up the dicho-
tomy between factual biography and true life. The predicament
of the biographer whose subject does nothing but write (and
whose reader may consequently ask for his money back) is wittily
described; the absurdities of ‘Acknowledgements’ and ‘Indexes’
are mocked; and the solemn use of historical records is made
fun of: “We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary
from the charred fragments that remain; but often it has been
necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to use the imagination’
(p. 84). Orlando’s career at this point is given to us through the
diary of ‘John Fenner Brigge, an English naval officer’ and
‘Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughter of the General of that name’
(p. 90). Though the pastiche on ‘source material’ is meant to
amuse, it also arises naturally from Virginia Woolf’s tendency to
create scenes and characters through different observers; Penelope
Hartopp’s account of events is reminiscent of Ellie Henderson’s
view of Clarissa’s party. In all the literary jokes made in Orlando
there is a similar sense of Virginia Woolf’s pleasure and natural
inclination. Brief satires on legal parlance, ridiculous accounts and
examples of Victorian literature, pastiches of Sir Thomas Browne
or Jane Austen, sidelong digs at D. H. Lawrence and his game-
keeper (p. 190) or at Hemingway and his monosyllables (p. 182),1
burst out energetically from within the general parodic vein.
Virginia Woolf does not pursue the parodic line which Joyce takes
1 Cf. ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1927), CE II, p. 256. “We find attached to this
admirable frankness an equal bareness of style. Nobody speaks for more than
a line or two ... But there is something faked...”
 Orlando: 1928 143
in “The Oxen of the Sun’ section of U/ysses, where the develop-
ment of the foetus is imaged in a gargantuan parody of the major
styles of English literature from Anglo Saxon to the future time.
But there is in Or/ando a more moderate form of the same idea.
Each historical period, which in itself illustrates or sets off a part of
Orlando’s character, is invoked by literary or artistic allusions
which may (as in the references to Sir Thomas Browne) move
towards actual stylistic parody. Usually, however, the allusions
suggest rather than imitate the tone of the period.
A major element in the book’s humour is the satire directed
against Vita herself, and Vita’s work. Clearly, we are allowed to
view with irony the inconsistency in Orlando which allows him to
be ‘unaccountably ashamed of the number of his servants and of the
splendour of his table’ (p. 60) when he is with Nick Greene, and to
describe ‘with some pride’ when she is with Rustum the gipsy ‘the
house where she was born, how it had 365 bedrooms and had been
in the possession of her family for four or five hundred years’
(p. 103). This fond satire on Vita’s personal characteristics in-
corporates a literary debunking of Knole and the Sackvilles, which
Vita published in 1922. ‘I am reading Knole,’ Virginia Woolf
writes to Vita ‘... you have a rich dusty attic of a mind.’? The
use she makes of Vita’s book on Knole is well suggested by the
illustrations which she chose, in consultation with Vita,” for the
first edition of Orlando. Three of these are photographs of Vita,
posed and dressed to suggest Orlando in the eighteenth, nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. One is a photograph of Angelica Bell in
outlandish costume, representing Sasha; and three are historical
portraits of ‘the Archduchess Harriet’, of ‘Marmaduke Bonthrop
Shelmerdine’ and of ‘Orlando as a boy’, which is the portrait of the
young Edward Sackville, son of the fourth Earl of Dorset, one of
the illustrations to Knole and the Sackvilles. The combination
of photographs of Vita and historical portraits reflects Virginia
Woolf’s treatment of her subject. In part Orlando really is the
history of the Sackvilles at Knole. Many of the details that Vita
1 Vita Sackville-West, ‘Virginia Woolf and Orlando’, The Listener, Vol. 53
(27 January 1955), pp. 157-8.
2 Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1930-39, ed. Nigel Nicolson (London,
Collins, 1966; Fontana, 1969), pp. 29-30.
144 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
records are used in Orlando. These may be small matters like the
names of the servants, the descriptions of the bowls of potpourri, the
mention of King James’s silver brushes or of the gallery ‘whose
floor was laid with whole oak trees sawn across’ (p. 224).1 But
more important themes are also incorporated. Orlando’s early
tragedies call to mind not only Vita’s juvenile historical novels and
plays but also Charles Sackville’s Gorboduc; Orlando’s relationship
with Nick Greene refers to the Sackvilles’ patronage of the arts;
the allusions to Shakespeare echo Vita’s attempts to forge some
connection between Shakespeare and Knole; Vita herself speaks in
Knole of ‘the disadvantage of fine birth to a poet’.? Vita’s desire to
‘resurrect the Sackvilles’ in her guidebook, to destroy the concept of
the house as a historic monument to the dead, is close in spirit to
Orlando’s wistful sympathy for the house at the end of the book:
The house, with its exits and entrances, its properties of
furniture and necessities . . . the house demands its population.
Whose were the hands that have, by the constant light
running of their fingers, polished the paint from the banisters?
... Who were the men and women that, after a day’s riding or
stitching, lay awake in the deep beds, idly watching between
the curtains the play of the firelight, and the little round
yellow discs cast upon walls and ceiling through the perfora-
tions of the tin canisters standing on the floor, containing the
rush lights?
Thus the house wakes into a whispering life, and we
resurrect the Sackvilles.3
Rows of chairs with all their velvets faded stood ranged against
the wall holding their arms out for Elizabeth, for James, for
Shakespeare it might be, for Cecil, who never came. The
sight made her gloomy. [. . .] Chairs and beds were empty;
tankards of silver and gold were locked in glass cases. The
great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house. [. . .]
The gallery stretched far away to a point where the light
almost failed. It was as a tunnel bored deep into the past. As her

1 Cf. Knole and the Sackvilles, p. 25. 2 Ibid. p. 45.

3 Knole and the Sackvilles, p. 40.
 Orlando: 1928 145
eyes peered down it, she could see people laughing and talking
[. - .] (pp. 224-5)
Orlando is an attempt to resurrect the Sackvilles. But it does not
treat Vita’s literary monument to them as sacrosanct. The game
Virginia Woolf plays with Knole is that of exaggerating all its
details, taking her cue from Vita’s descriptions of the house as
having the look of ‘a medieval village’, of containing within its
‘four acres of building’ seven courts, corresponding ‘to the days of
the week; and in pursuance of this conceit . . . fifty-two staircases,
corresponding to the weeks in the year, and three hundred and
sixty-five rooms, corresponding to the days.’! Vita admits that she
has not verified this count, but the elaborate grandeur of the claim
(particularly because of the sense it gives of Knole as a House of
Time) attracts Virginia Woolf’s attention, and sets the tone for
the passage in which she describes Orlando’s refurnishing of Knole.
Every item in the list of Orlando’s expenses is taken from the
inventories and lists of ‘household stuff’ given in the chapter
‘Knole in the reign of Charles I’; but the numbers of Spanish
blankets, walnut-tree tables, cushions of crimson damask, are
wildy exaggerated. Vita’s apology for her lists (‘I fear lest the
detailing of these old papers should grow wearisome’’) is taken up:
‘Already — it is an effect lists have upon us — we are beginning to
yawn’ (p. 77).
But though the effect is satirical, it is also creative of atmosphere.
Knole is vividly, marvellously realized, partly through the parodic
treatment of Vita’s book, partly through more lyrical descriptive
passages. Such changes of approach are characteristic of Orlando; its
interest, and also its weaknesses, arise from the attempt to use
several styles and several approaches interchangeably. Her diary
notes on the writing of Orlando lay stress on this attempt. It is to be
written, she says, in ‘a mock style very clear and plain’;* but then
again ‘it has to be half laughing, half serious; with great splashes of
exaggeration’.* In the end she decides that Or/ando is not a complete
success: it is ‘too freakish and unequal, very brilliant now and

1 Ibid. p. 19. ? Ibid. p. 1o2.

3 AWD, 22 October 1927, p. 117.
* AWD, 20 December 1927, p. 120.
146 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
then’.! Presumably she would, in Orlando, feel open to the charge
she herself levels against the purple patch — ‘not that it is purple but
that it is a patch’.?
The diary entries point to two of the stylistic variations in
Orlando, that between satire and lyricism, and that between the
early fantasy and later seriousness of the book. But there are
further refinements. Each historical period is evoked in a fluent
essayist’s style, distinct from the satiric tone used for the pedantic
biographer, or from the impressionistic, lyrical style which attempts
to reach the heart of Orlando’s personality and the nature of life.
Even within the ‘clear and plain’ historical style there are variations.
The spirit of each age requires a different literary treatment.
Rich, clear, sharp, energetic details evoke the Elizabethan period
like a Breughel painting; the vitality, passion and pageantry of the
age are encapsulated in the personality of Queen Elizabeth, and in
Orlando’s affair with Sasha. The literary climate is suggested by a
generalized paraphrase of all Elizabethan poetry: “Che moment is
brief they sang; the moment is over; one long night is then to be
slept by all’ (p. 19). If one turns from this first chapter to the descrip-
tion of the eighteenth century in Chapter Four, one finds different
techniques at work. The spirit of the age is preserved in the minds of
its major literary figures; as a result the chapter consists largely of
anecdotes and quotations, and is summed up by a silhouette portrait
of Johnson, Boswell and Mrs Thrale. The nineteenth century, by
contrast, is expansively caricatured; the emphasis is on grotesque
parody, whether in the generalized account of the country’s
rising damp or its three-volume novels, or in the exchange about
wedding rings between Orlando and Mrs Bartholemew (“The
muffins is keepin’ ’ot,’ said Mrs Bartholemew mopping up her
tears, ‘in the liberry’ (p. 165)). The pictorial images for the age
are a Turner cloudscape and an object which suggests a mixture of
the Albert Memorial and Crystal Palace:
Draped about a vast cross of fretted and floriated gold were
widow’s weeds and bridal veils; hooked on to other excrescences

1 AWD, 31 May 1928, p. 128.

2 ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ (1927), CE II, p. 226.
3 The method anticipates the pageant in Between the Acts.
 Orlando: 1928 147
were crystal palaces, bassinettes, military helmets, memorial
wreaths, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees,
telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and
mathematical instruments — the whole supported like a gigantic
coat of arms on the right side by a female figure clothed in
flowing white; on the left, by a portly gentleman wearing a
frock-coat and sponge-bag trousers.! (p. 163)
The list is impressionistic and elephantine, and far removed in tone
from the bizarre precision and archaic tone of the list that describes,
as the climax to a series of brilliant descriptive passages, the breaking
of the Great Frost:
Many perished clasping some silver pot or other treasure to
their breast; and at least a score of poor wretches were
drowned by their own cupidity [. . .] furniture, valuables,
possessions of all sorts were carried away on the icebergs.
Among other strange sights was to be seen a cat suckling its
young; a table laid sumptuously for a supper of twenty; a
couple in bed; together with an extraordinary number of
cooking utensils. (p. 44)
Cutting transversely across these linear, historical changes in style is
the fluctuation between wit and lyricism in the treatment of
Orlando. Where Virginia Woolf is concentrating on the absurdities
of the biographer who attempts to create Orlando, or on the relation
between Orlando and the spirit of the age, or on Orlando’s moments
of action, the style is witty, ‘clear and plain’. Where she is con-
centrating, as she does increasingly, on the true, inward nature of
personality, the style is lyrical and impressionistic. But a serious
tone is never allowed to dominate; the light-fantastic is com-
pulsively reintroduced. This is necessary if Virginia Woolf is to
sustain all the levels of the book at once, but it is often rather
irritating. It seems at times as though, in making Orlando at once a
creature of fantasy who lives for centuries and changes her sex, and

1 This is reminiscent of Strachey’s description of Victoria’s possessions in

Queen Victoria (London, Chatto and Windus, 1921; Harmondsworth,
Penguin, 1971), pp. 232-3.
148 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
at the same time a complex person to be used as the spokesman (like
Mary Seton in 4 Room of One’s Own) for women and for women
writers, Virginia Woolf has set herself an almost impossible task.
When the sailors began chanting, ‘So good-bye and adieu to
you, Ladies of Spain,’ the words echoed in Orlando’s sad heart,
and she felt that however much landing there meant comfort,
meant opulence, meant consequence and state (for she would
doubtless pick up some noble Prince and reign, his consort,
over half Yorkshire), still, if it meant conventionality, meant
slavery, meant deceit, meant denying her love, fettering her
limbs, pursing her lips, and restraining her tongue, then she
would turn about with the ship and set sail once more for the
gipsies.
Among the hurry of these thoughts, however, there now
rose, like a dome of smooth, white marble, something which,
whether fact or fancy, wasso impressive to her fevered imagina-
tion that she settled upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant
dragon-flies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon the glass
bell which shelters some tender vegetable. (p. 115)
The dome shape is a recurring image of comfort and fulfilment in
Virginia Woolf, used here to express the contrast between Orlando’s
new feelings of restriction at being a woman and the consolation of
writing. he process of thought is an extremely serious one— indeed
it contains the argument of 4 Room of One’s Own. But seriousness is
kept within the realm of fantasy by the artificial rhythms and rep-
etitions of the first paragraph and the elaborate image of the
second part. The writer chooses to be winsome and entertaining
rather than solemn or didactic; and thereby succeeds only in
sounding whimsical and affected.

Though the book’s carefully preserved lightness of tone may not

always be interesting or persuasive, its serious, innermost intention —
the analysis of Orlando’s character — is convincingly achieved.
Orlando, who is both man and woman, also stands in a dual relation
to time. We partly feel that, although Orlando takes over 300 years to
reach the age of thirty-six, she does not change. Her essential
qualities are already formed when she is an Elizabethan boy of six-
 Orlando: 1928 149
teen and continue, over the centuries, to express themselves in her
poem, “Ihe Oak Tree’:

How very little she had changed all these years. She had been
a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she
had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly
and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes
she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she had
remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the
same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and
nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.
(p. 167)
It is important that there should be a ‘sameness’ about Orlando.
Although the character becomes more self-possessed and aware as
a mature woman than as a young man, he/she is always sulky,
beautiful, clumsy, impetuous, devoted to nature and solitude and
‘afflicted with a love of literature’ (p. 52). It is by this means that
Virginia Woolf emphasizes Orlando’s natural androgyny: she is the
same character whether she is a man or a woman, and It is evident
from the first line of the book that Orlando’s man/womanly
characteristics overlap. Orlando’s ‘sameness’ enables Virginia Woolf
eventually to attack the nineteenth century, the only age to which
Orlando cannot adapt her bisexual personality, since it forces men
and women into unnaturally rigid marital roles. Ironically, then,
the major change in Orlando’s life comes not when she turns from
man into woman, but when she has to adapt herself to the Victorian
age:
Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the Elizabethan
spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the eighteenth
century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the
change from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nine-
teenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and
thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat
at its hands as she had never been before. For it is probable
that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it;
some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando
was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines
150 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way
was intolerable. (p. 172)
That Orlando should have permanent qualities, ‘fixed lines’,
rather than a changing, developing character, is necessary too if we
are to bear in mind that the fantasy of Orlando’s moving through
time is a lighthearted metaphor for her historical consciousness.
By the end of the book we think of Orlando as an achieved and real
personality, dominated by her powerful feelings of the past history
of her house and family. We concentrate, finally, on her con-
sistency, not on the changes she has ‘lived’ through. This is empha-
sized in the remarkable passage about the true self and the Captain
self which draws to a conclusion our consideration of Orlando/Vita.
She was [.. .] changing her selves as quickly as she drove [. . .]
as happens when [. . .]the conscious self, which is the uppermost
and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self.
This is what some people call the true self, and it is, they
say, compact ofall the selves we have it in us to be; commanded
and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amal-
gamates and controls them all. (p. 219)
At a cursory reading the passage suggests that the conscious or true
self is the same as the Captain self. But the Captain self is rather the
guardian of the true self, standing in the same relationship to it as
does the biographer to his subject. Virginia Woolf is the Captain
self of the novel who ‘amalgamates and controls’ all the selves of
Orlando. But Orlando too has a Captain self which searches for her
true self, the combination of all her identities, with such questions
as these:
‘What, then? Who, then?’ she said. Thirty-six; in a motor-
car; a woman. Yes, but a million other things as well. A
snob, am I? The garter in the hall? The leopards? My
ancestors? Proud of them? Yes! Greedy, luxurious, vicious?
Am I? (here a new self came in). Don’t care a damn if I am.
Truthful? I think so. Generous? Oh, but that don’t count
(here a new self came in). (p. 219)
The passage continues to delineate all her qualities, though the
Captain self does not succeed in finding the true Orlando until she
 Orlando: 1928 151
passes through the lodge gates to her house. The questionings
suggest Orlando’s infinite variety, but they also confirm the reader’s
sense that Orlando has a recognizable, consistent personality.
Because Virginia Woolf wanted to write a lighthearted, not a
serious biography, she chose to build Orlando’s ‘true self’ out of a
fantastic time sequence rather than out of a day-in-the-life, as with
Mrs Dalloway, or out of a sequence from childhood to old age, as
with Bernard, who, at the end of The Waves, is a Captain self
calling for his true self in manner very similar to Orlando’s.
The historical organization of Orlando is, then, a means of show-
ing how Orlando stays the same, not how she changes. Similarly,
the sex change does not alter Orlando’s character, but her per-
ceptions and her social behaviour. Her perceptions are enriched by it
— ‘She was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the
weaknesses of each’ (p. 112) — but her social behaviour is restricted.
Because she understands both sides, but has to behave as a woman,
she is both enlightened and frustrated. She thus becomes the ideal
spokesman for the androgynous argument also being evolved at this
time in 4 Room of One’s Own, which, though a more public and
straightforward statement than Orlando, uses some of the same
techniques, such as the mingling of a chronological account of
women through the centuries with the fantasy of Shakespeare’s
sister. In 4 Room of One’s Own, as in Orlando (and as in the later
and less engaging Three Guineas) women are encouraged to cherish
and make use of their special qualities, which arise from centuries of
oppression:
‘Better it is’, she thought, ‘to be clothed with poverty and
ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex;
better to leave the rule and discipline of the world to others;
better be quit of martial ambition, the love of power, and all the
other manly desires if so one can more fully enjoy the most
exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are,’ she
said aloud, as her habit was when deeply moved, ‘contempla-
tion, solitude, love.’ (p. 113)
Virginia Woolf says that this train of thought leads Orlando into
‘the extreme folly [. . .] of being proud ofher sex’, but the comment
is perhaps not quite true to the tone of the passage from which it
152 The Novels of Virginia Woolf

arises. A comparison with 4 Room of One’s Own is invited. Here

she states that ‘it is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their
sex. It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple; one must be
woman-manly or man-womanly."* Though the need for such
impartiality is applied equally to both sexes, there is in her account
of the two imaginary writers, Mary Carmichael and Mr A, a
definite preference for the woman, insufficiently androgynous though
she may be. Orlando is supposed to balance equally the qualities
of both sexes, as is shown in this charming analysis of Vita which
expresses very clearly Virginia Woolf’s feelings about her:
For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being
uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an
unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for
example, if Orlando was a woman, how didshe never take more
than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen
at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they
would say, sti, she has none of the formality of a man, or
a man’s love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted.
She could not endure to seea donkey beaten ora kitten drowned.
Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up
at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had
risen. (p. 133)
But Orlando is more a critic of men than of women, and she
does in fact become more womanly — ‘a certain change was visible
in Orlando’ (p. 132) deeper than the change of clothes. Though she
is described as an androgynous personality, her female character-
istics seem to dominate. It would be hard to imagine an Orlando in
which the sex change was the other way round. Only if Orlando
had ended up as a man would the enthusiasm for the hermaphrodite
mind be absolutely unbiased. Not until The Waves does the andro-
gynous spokesman become a man. In Orlando the emphasis is
feminist; Orlando really does fall into the folly of ‘being proud of
her sex’.
She is hauled back from such folly, however, by a consideration of
the word ‘love’. The satisfaction Orlando finds in her relationship
with Shelmerdine (far greater than any she enjoyed in her ego-
1 A Room of One’s Own (1929), Pp. 102.
 Orlando: 1928 Wes
tistical masculine affairs) is reminiscent of Katharine and Ralph’s
achievement in Night and Day (and suggestive of Vita’s adaptable
modus vivendi with Harold Nicolson). Orlando’s sense of freedom
and excitement in the relationship provides her with those moments
of ecstasy which result, here and elsewhere in Virginia Woolf’s
work, from the personality’s being transcended:
It is not articles by Nick Greene or John Donne nor eight-
hour bills nor covenant nor factory acts that matter; it’s
something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life;
red, purple, blue; a spurt; a splash; like those hyacinths (she
was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence,
soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash,
ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop;
that’s what it is — a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy — it’s
ecstasy that matters. (p. 203)
Colours, movements and natural objects are preferred to the mascu-
line world of administration, articulacy and philanthropy. Orlando
thrives on an incoherent plane (described in the terms of an
abstract painting) where her love for one person is a mixed part of
her intense susceptibility to immediate experience. Such ecstasy
can only result from an emancipating relationship in which sexual
characteristics are blended. The tone and structure of Orlando do
not, however, lend themselves to a study of relationships. Shelmer-
dine is a flimsy and fantastic creature, only serviceable as an agent
for the moments of ecstasy, or as an instrument of satire on the
nineteenth-century matrimonial instinct, to which Orlando falls
an unwilling victim. His return in an aeroplane at the end indis-
creetly forces a renewal of the book’s fantasy level, which, since the
striking of the present time, has been abandoned in favour of a con-
clusive search for Orlando’s ‘true self’.
This self lies not in her relationships with other people, but in her
relationship with her house and with her writing. The closest
analogy between Orlando and her biographer is that both are
struggling to find a way of expressing life (or truth, or reality: the
terms are frequently interchangeable) in art. Orlando’s attempts to
write are, like her character, partly evolved from and partly at odds
with the historical periods through which she lives. When an
154 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Elizabethan, she writes tragedies like Gorboduc; whenaseventeenth-
century armbassador she reads Sir Thomas Browne and meditates
upon tombstones (shrinking from ‘the cardinal labour of composition
which is excision’ (p. 50)); in the eighteenth century she becomes a
lover of the picturesque; and in the nineteenth century has to
wrestle with the spirit of the age which would have her write ‘in the
neatest sloping Italian hand [. . .] the most insipid verse she had ever
read in her life’ (pp. 167-8). In the end Orlando writes Vita’s
poem “The Land’ — not perhaps a very startling departure from
Victorianism, but the result of ‘the transaction between a writer and
the spirit of the age’ which ‘is one of infinite delicacy’ (p. 188).
The difficulty of making the transaction when the writer is
unsympathetic to his age is only one of the several difficulties which
obstruct Orlando in her natural desire to write. Orlando is an
aristocrat, by tradition a patron rather than a writer; to become the
latter she must ‘substitute a phantom’ (literature) ‘for a reality’
(her house and lands) (p. 52). In substituting phantom for reality
she is faced with the essential task of every writer (not least of
Orlando’s biographer, who is much preoccupied with it), that of
translating reality into words. ‘Life? Literature? One to be made
into the other? But how monstrously difficult!’ (p. 201).
Like all books about writers, Orlando reflects itself: the book,
and the biographer’s explanations of her difficulty in writing it, is a
mirror, as well as a framework, for Orlando’s poem, and her
difficulty in writing it. Throughout, the biographer and Orlando
both have to tackle again and yet again what it means to have to
write; to have, for instance, to try to turn ‘green’ from a thing into
an idea:
He was describing, as all young poets are forever describing,
nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he
looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the
thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing
beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no
more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.
Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them
together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green
Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. (pp. 11—
12)
 Orlando: 1928 155
At this early stage in Orlando’s literary career he abandons the
problem precipitately, and the biographer has done no more than
crudely to impress on us the untransferability of greenness into
poetry. In the second assault on the same problem, both Orlando
and the biographer are more sophisticated. Orlando is at the stage of
rejecting all elaboration, all rhetoric, all figures of speech. Let
words be things themselves, not other things. But nature itself, he
finds, does not invite such treatment, for all its things can be seen as
other things. Looking at nature — even before one has written about
it — must mean using metaphor. Again he abandons the problem:

So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue
[. ..] Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like
the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from
their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of
girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.
‘Upon my word,’ he said [. . .] ‘I don’t see that one’s more
true than another. Both are utterly false.’ And he despaired
of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what
truth is, and fell into a deep dejection. (pp. 71-2)

Always, when Orlando returns to the attempt at representation,

she works through images, as does her biographer. As the period
changes, so too do the figures of speech. In the eighteenth century,
‘green’ is more formally decorated: ‘She compared the flowers to
enamel and the turf to Turkey rugs worn thin. Trees were withered
hags, and sheep were grey boulders. Everything, in fact, was
something else’ (p. 101). But the problems of mimesis remain
unsolved, and cannot be solved, since new ways of making ‘green’
be literature have endlessly to be struggled for. Lightheartedly, and
in miniature, Orlando thus suggests the necessity for Virginia
Woolf’s own unceasing literary experimentation.
In the struggle, the writer has to establish and sustain integrity.
Orlando must learn to ignore the flattery or abuse of such as Nick
Greene, and come to the point of saying: ‘Bad, good, or indifferent,
I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself’ (p. 73). All
writers, of course, not only those who are also aristocrats or women,
have to struggle for that defiant statement, which arises, or should
156 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
arise, from the continuous tension between exposure and privacy in
the writer’s life.

While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a

man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity
lets the mind take its way unimpeded. (p. 73)

It is an obvious enough conflict — 4 Writer’s Diary bears evidence

to it on almost every page — but not a simple one. Though the
writer’s initial, and essential, integrity, can be established by slough-
ing off external influences, there follows the pull towards the
outside world, the desire for fame. Orlando has to reject Nick
Greene after their first encounter in order to become her own
literary master and judge. But she needs him again in his later
incarnation (as a man of letters modelled on Sir Edmund Gosse)
so that he can give her manuscript what it needs: ‘It wanted to be
read. It must be read. It would die in her bosom if it were not read’
(p. 192). Only then, after the intercourse with public life, can the
writer, justified, withdraw again into obscurity into the centre of
her ‘true self’, which, for Orlando, is found in her relationship with
her house and land:

What has praise and fame to do with poetry? [. . .] Was not

writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?
So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting
people who admired one and meeting people who did notadmire
one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself—a voice ans-
weringa voice. What could have been more secret, she thought,
more slow, and like the intercourse of lovers, than the stam-
mering answer she had made all these years to the old crooning
song of the woods, and the farms and the brown horsesstanding
at the gate, neck to neck, and the smithy and the kitchen and
the fields, so laboriously bearing wheat, turnips, grass, and
the garden blowing irises and fritillaries?
So she let her book lie unburied and dishevelled on the
ground, and watched the vast view, varied like an ocean
floor this evening with the sun lightening it and the shadows
darkening it [. . .] ( pp. 229-30)
 Orlando: 1928 157
The passage gently humanizes the ‘crooning’ landscape, and treats
Orlando’s meditation romantically — with a tender allusion to
Vita’s poem (*... the springing grass/Was dulled by the hanging
cups of fritillaries’ (p. 187)). It is a serious and restrained conclusion
to a book which has been witty, extravagant, even flashy, in tone
and manner. The biographer, at this point in full possession of
Orlando’s true self, creates a mood of sober sympathy for her heroine,
and, giving up tricks and jests, herself discreetly disappears.
 7
‘The Waves
1931

RLANDO’S ‘ease and dash’! only partially expressed

Virginia Woolf’s state of mind after To the Lighthouse.
Behind the ‘externality’ of Orlando and 4 Room of One’s
Own another kind of novel was being evolved from a ‘play-poem
idea’? of ‘some semi-mystic very profound life of a woman’ in
which ‘time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow
blossom out of the past.’ The difficult development from that
first mysterious hint of “The Moths’ in 1926 to the triumphant
completion of The Waves in 1931 is thoroughly charted in the
Diary,* enabling us to see that, although the form and the subject of
the novel were very much changed, the original conception
remained. The life of a woman against the background of flying
moths became ‘a series of dramatic soliloquies’,> but there was a
consistent abstract idea behind these changing forms:
Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the
two contradictions. This has gone on for ever; will last for
ever; goes down to the bottom of the world — this moment I
1 AWD, 28 November, 1928, p. 139.
2 AWD, 18 June 1927, p. 108.
3 AWD, 23 November 1926, p. 102.
4 There is a full and interesting account of the relationship between The Waves
and A Writer's Diary in Joan Bennett’s book, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a
Novelist (Cambridge University Press, 1945; 2nd ed. 1964), Ch. VII.
5 AWD, 20 August 1930, p. 159.
158
 The Waves: 1931 159
stand on. Also it is transitory, flying, diaphanous. I shall
pass like a cloud on the waves. Perhaps it may be that though
we change, one flying after another, so quick, so quick, yet we
are somehow successive and continuous we human beings, and
show the light through.t
The diary entry combines allusions to moths and waves in a passage
which recalls the language of ‘Modern Fiction’, but with a slightly
different emphasis. The concepts of the ‘semi-transparent envelope’
and the ‘shower of innumerable atoms’ shaping themselves ‘into the
life of Monday or Tuesday’ are now applied to ‘human beings’
rather than to ‘life’. The Waves, more devoted to abstraction than
any of the other novels, uses human beings as case histories to
illustrate the nature of life. The concentration on abstract ends
requires a further eradication of materialism from the novel; and the
terms in which this is envisaged remind us, again, of the transition
period between Night and Day and Facob’s Room:
What I want now to do is to saturate every atom. I mean to
eliminate all waste, deadness, superfluity: to give the moment
whole: whatever it includes. Say that the moment is a com-
bination of thought; sensation; the voice of the sea. Waste,
deadness, come from the inclusion of things that don’t belong
to the moment; this appalling narrative business of the realist:
getting on from lunch to dinner. It is false, unreal, merely
conventional. Why admit anything to literature that is not
poetry — by which I mean saturated?
Again, as in the passage describing her discovery of a ‘new form’ for
Facob’s Room in 1920, she expresses a desire to ‘enclose everything,
everything’.* But the desire to exclude and eliminate is as powerful,
and the emphasis is now on concentration and intensity rather than
on ‘looseness and lightness’. The tone of the 1928 diary entry is
sterner and more definite, and suggests some disaffection with the
methods tried out in ‘facob’s Room and perfected in To the Light-
house. It augurs a radical departure from her previous achievements
1 AWD, 4 January 1929, p. 141.
2 AWD, 28 November 1928, p. 139.
3 AWD, 26 January 1920, p. 23.
160 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
which seemed to her inevitable: ‘no other form of fiction suggests
itself except as a repetition’.?
The third-person narrative which characterized the earlier
novels is still found in the italicized passages in The Waves, the
‘interludes’,? but no longer in a fluid, malleable, chameleon style.
Instead it is elaborately literary and impersonal, and carefully set
apart from the bulk of the novel, a first-person narrative in which
the six characters ‘speak’ of themselves. This would suggest that
Virginia Woolf is now, for the first and last time, writing what
could be called a ‘stream of consciousness’ novel,? in which the
minds of the characters flow on, as from the inside, with no
authorial interpolations. And The Waves does seem to fulfil our
criteria for such a novel. Apart from the interludes, the action, dia-
logue, description, factual information, do not exist autonomously,
but only (if at all) within the characters’ minds. The need for more
than one point of view is satisfied, not as in the earlier novels by the
chameleon activity of the third-person narrator, but simply by
presenting six streams of consciousness rather than one.
The definition, however, is inadequate. If we set a passage
from The Waves against some excerpts from twentieth-century
novels which might be, and have been, described by the term
“stream of consciousness’, the effect is one of dissimilarity.
In this way, for two consecutive summers I used to sit in the
heat of our Combray garden, sick with a longing inspired by the
book I was then reading for a land of mountains and rivers,
where I could see an endless vista of sawmills, where beneath
the limpid currents fragments of wood lay mouldering in beds
of watercress; and near by, rambling and clustering along low
walls, purple flowers and red. And since there was always
lurking in my mind the dream of a woman who would enrich
me with her love, that dream in those two summers used to be
1 AWD, 26 January 1930, p. 153.
2 This is Virginia Woolf’s term for them: ‘The interludes are very difficult, but
I think essential’ (ibid.).
3 Melvin Friedman, for instance, calls The Waves ‘the most firmly rooted in
stream of consciousness of all her books’ (Stream of Consciousness: A Study in
Literary Method (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1955),
pe
 The Waves: 1931 161
quickened with the freshness and coolness of running water;
and whoever she might be, the woman whose image I called to
mind, purple flowers and red would at once spring up on either
side of her like complementary colours.1
The far east. Lovely spot it must be: the garden of the world,
big lazy leaves to float about on, cactuses, flowery meads,
snaky lianas they call them. Wonder is it like that. Those
Cinghalese lobbing around in the sun, in dolce far niente.
Not doing a hand’s turn all day. Sleep six months out of
twelve. Too hot to quarrel. Influence of theclimate. Lethargy.
Flowers of idleness. The air feeds most. Azotes. Hothouse
in Botanic gardens. Sensitive plants. Waterlilies. Petals too
tired to. Sleeping sickness in the air. Walk on roseleaves.?
First of all shall I have a haystack? Well idealized that might
be quite good. First of all then we will consider the haystack.
It stands up in a sunny field by the side of but out from a
chestnut tree. So. The hay has been cut. Of course. It isnt
imported hay in that stack. Well all the rest of the field, it is a
very big field, it stretches away far and wide, and there on it
are the swathes of white hay that have been left over. There it
lies. So. There is a blue sky overhead and some white puff
clouds bowling along in front of a summery wind. Not the
sort you say as you crouch under the breakwater: ‘I will say
this about Shrimpton-on-Strand you can always get out of the
wind one side of the breakwater or the other, or under the
bathing machine.’
Well now into this picture empty of all human interest
comes Pompey Casmilus. Here at last, she says, is the right
haystack . . . So I lie back on my ivory haystack and there is
nobody else in the whole wide world and so I fall asleep. No
dreams. No dreams.?
1 Marcel Proust, (translated Scott Moncrieff) Swann’s Way, Vol. 1 of Remem-
brance of Things Past (London, Chatto and Windus, 1966), p. 114 (first
published in 1913 as Du cété de chez Swann).
2 James Joyce, Ulysses (Paris, Shakespeare and Co., and London, Egoist Press,
1922; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1969), p. 73.
3 Stevie Smith, Novel on Yellow Paper (London, Cape, 1936; Penguin, 1951;
reissued 1972), p. 27.
162 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
‘I shall edge behind them,” said Rhoda, ‘as if I saw someone I
know. But I know no one. I shall twitch the curtain and look
at the moon. Draughts of oblivion shall quench my agitation.
The door opens; the tiger leaps. The door opens; terror
rushes in; terror upon terror, pursuing me. Let me visit
furtively the treasures I have laid apart. Pools lie on the
other side of the world reflecting marble columns. Theswallow
dips her wings in dark pools. But here the door opens and
people come; they come towards me. Throwing faint smiles to
mask their cruelty, their indifference, they seize me. The
swallow dips her wings; the moon rides through blue seas alone.
I must take his hand; I must answer. But what answer shall I
give? I am thrust back into this clumsy, this ill-fitting body,
to receive the shafts of his indifference and his scorn, I who
long for marble columns and pools on the other side of the
world where the swallow dips her wings.’ (p. 90)

Evidently the stream of consciousness novel in the first third of the

century is a hybrid genre. The methods used by these four narrators
for examining an exotic alternative to reality are very different.
Marcel orders his childhood sensations, with retrospective irony,
into a completed picture designed like the illustration to a book.
Bloom’s fantasy, nourished by his accumulated perceptions and
information, is immediate: the sentence structure, by avoiding the
imposition of a verb tense, gives us the impression that we are
hearing his mind as it works. Pompey Casmilus’s present-tense
narrative, which shows that her daydream is recurrent, creates the
sound of a voice recounting a humorous anecdote. Rhoda’s soliloquy
resembles none of these. Like Marcel, she presents an elaborate,
literary version of her thought process, but unlike him she is
supposed to be thinking about a scene which is actually taking
place. In spite of this, there is no attempt, as in Joyce, to evoke
natural immediacy, no realistic representation of the jerks and
twists of the mind as it is idly running along. Indeed, there is no
sense of idleness or relaxation: the daydream and the public
experience are pitched at the same level of intensity. There is no
room for the humour available to the other three writers. The
sound of the spoken voice is not simulated in order to create an
 The Waves: 1931 163
ironic distance between the narrator and her own experience.
Instead, a formal, rhythmic monologue subjugates the representa-
tion of personality or action to a series of physical images which are
made to stand for a state of mind. The effect is that of a translation
of life and consciousness into a rigid set of analogies, as though a
character on stage were being represented by two actors, one
carrying out a mime in slow motion while the other comments on the
meaning of the actions. Coldness and intensity are strangely mixed;
agony and fear are formalized, while they are being communicated,
into rhythms and images. The rhythmic prose which is substituted
for a naturalistic representation of speech or thoughts does not
distinguish between descriptions, action, conversation, reflections
or recollection. Whether Rhoda is young or old, happy or sad,
excited or despondent, it does not vary.
The style is the same for all the characters. It is characteristic
of Susan to express herself in simple statements (“The meat is stood
in the oven; the bread rises in a soft dome’ (p. 85)), but the others
may do this too. And Susan is not confined to words of one syllable—
‘I love, I hate’ (p. 12). Describing how Bernard makes phrases, she
makes one herself: ‘Now you mount like an air-ball’s string,
higher and higher through the layers of the leaves’ (p. 14). She is as
liable as the others to employ the Latinisms which are supposed to be
Neville’s idiosyncrasy: going to school, she says: ‘All here is false;
all is meretricious’ (p. 27). The tautology is there for the sake of the
rhythm and is not in character. Parallelism is introduced throughout
irrespective of who is speaking, patterned out of the repetition of
certain parts of speech:

[Bernard:] They too bubbled up, they also escaped. (p. 186)
[Jinny:] The torments, the divisions of your lives. (p. 189)
[Rhoda:] After all these callings [. . .] these pluckings and
searchings (p. 192)
[Neville:] I choose at random; I choose the obvious. (p. 182)
[Louis:] People go on passing; they go on passing. (p. 79)
[Susan:] Everything is now set; everything is fixed. (p. 122)

This rhythm creates a long prose-poem. Though recurrent rhythm

has been an important ingredient of the earlier novels, nowhere else
164 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
has it been consistent and insistent enough to suggest that the book
should be read as lines of poetry rather than as lines of prose.
How strange that people should sleep
that people should put out the lights
and go upstairs.
They have taken off their dresses,
they have put on white night-gowns.
There are no lights in any of these houses.
There is a line of chimneypots against the sky;
and a street lamp or two burning,
as lamps burn when nobody needs them.
The only people in the streets
are poor people hurrying.
There is no one coming or going in this street;
the day is over.
A few policemen stand at the corners.
Yet.night is beginning. (p. 86)
The effect is sustained with extraordinary ease throughout. The
Waves is not difficult to read as poetry; its rhythm is agreeable and
insidious. But it is difficult to read as a novel, in that its emphasis on
rhythm overwhelms distinctions of character. Only the content
enables us to distinguish between the voices. An idiosyncrasy of
speech — Louis’s Australian accent — can be described but not
rendered, since, obviously, the formal framework of ‘said Louis’,
‘said Bernard’, is a sustained irony: real speech is not being rep-
resented.
Given a formal, undifferentiated style, distinctions can only be
made on the basis of the images. This brings the novel dangerously
close to a play of humours in which bits of the human personality are
1 The passage oddly echoes Wallace Stevens’s ‘Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock’,
Harmonium (1923); collected in The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly
Stevens (New York, Knopf, 1971), p. 11.
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings ..
 The Waves: 1931 165
parcelled out among the different characters. Bernard’s twisting of
little toys, Neville’s call to ‘one person’, Rhoda’s dreamland of
swallows and pillars, Louis’s vision of the Nile, Susan’s screwed-up
pocket-handkerchief and Jinny’s yellow scarf seem at times like
routine reminders of which ‘humour’ is speaking. But there is a
counterweight to this limiting technique of identification in the
fact that many images are shared between the characters. The
first utterances of the six as children immediately suggest how fluid
is the relationship between individual and common experience. To
some extent distinctions are made. Louis voices an image which will
be a constant symbol of his insecurity, the great chained beast
stamping on the shore. The metaphor suggests a vivid imagination
and is in contrast to Susan’s direct physical impressions — ‘I see a
slab of pale yellow’ — and her apprehension of concrete, ordinary
objects — ‘Biddy has smacked down the bucket on the kitchen flags’
(p. 8). Rhoda’s images evoke the pressure of hostile or indifferent
elements on unprotected things — the snail flattening the grass
blades, the cold water running on the mackerel, the bird left
singing alone. But the ‘first impressions’ suggest the common
experience of the six children as much as their differences. The
mackerel in the bowl, the bucket on the kitchen flags and the scrap-
ing of fish scales might be noticed by the same voice. As they grow
older, the voices become more distinct. But the narrative sustains
their common consciousness through the general use of images like
circles or waves, and through their participation in each other’s
private figures of speech, Neville and Susan, for instance, both
thinking of Bernard as a loose, dangling thread (as he does himself),
Jinny and Louis both associating Rhoda with the petals with which
she herself identifies, and Bernard, finally, incorporating all their
lives in himself:
Here on my brow is the blow I got when Percival fell. Here on
the nape of my neck is the kiss Jinny gave Louis. My eyes
fill with Susan’s tears. I see far away, quivering like a gold
thread, the pillar Rhoda saw, and feel the rush of the wind of
her flight where she leapt. (p. 249)
Percival, whose death Bernard here assimilates into his own
experience, is the central, dominant example of an image shared by
166 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
all the speakers. Images may become words, but they do not use
words, Percival is silent, then absent, and then dead, so that he can
be used as a catalyst for the feelings of thesixnarrators. Noneof them
wants to think about Percival himself, only about Percival as a
gauge by which to measure their own lives. This is so even when
Percival is present:
We are drawn into this communion by some deep, some
common emotion. Shall we call it, conveniently, ‘love’? Shall
we say ‘love of Percival’ because Percival is going to India?
No, that is too small, too particular a name. We cannot
attach the width and spread of our feelings to so small a mark.
(p. 108)
After his death it is hard for them to concentrate on him. Once
Percival’s obsequies are done, Bernard and Jinny have to go back
into the ‘machine’ of ordinary life (p. 135); it is an artificial effort
to think of the dead, and after a time it becomes a false gesture, like
covering him with lilies (p. 228). His death is generalized by Louis
(‘all deaths are one death’ (p. 145)), forgotten by Rhoda (‘I seldom
think of Percival now’ (p. 176)), and merged with other experi-
ences even by Neville: “You are you. That is what consoles me
for the lack of many things [. . .] andthe flightof youthand Percival’s
death [. . .]’ (p. 155). Instead, the image of Percival’s death gives
birth, as it were, to an idea of youth and life: it is that which
becomes memorable about Percival, as though he is resurrected in
the continuing lives of his friends. This paradox is not only found in
Bernard’s last phrases, but, earlier, in the way that Susan and Jinny
both turn the idea of going to India into an image of life and re-
newal:
‘His eyes will see when mine are shut,’ I think. ‘I shall go
mixed with them beyond my body and shall see India.’ (p. 147)
The activity is endless. And to-morrow it begins again;
to-morrow we make Saturday. Some take train for France;
others ship for India. [. . .] Life comes; Life goes; we make
life. (p. 150)
Images are not only shared among the voices, but also overlap
between the voices and the interludes. Interspersed with the
 The Waves: 1931 167
expressions of personal consciousness from birth to death are the
descriptions of an impersonal scene—a beach, a garden, a house—
from dawn to dusk (which broadens out occasionally into more
remote, exotic settings). Since the style of the two are different, the
interludes being far more effusive, lyrical and alliterative, it is
something of a shock to find the speakers appropriating details from
a universe which is indifferent to them (Louis, for instance,
comparing himself to ‘a warden’ carrying ‘a lamp from cell to cell’
(p. 173), an image which has been used for light on the hills
(p. 127) in the fifth interlude). At such moments the world becomes
their world, particularly at the end, when Bernard turns the scene
of the interludes into his vision of truth, and confirms our sup-
position that the house of the interludes is the house where the
children’s lives began.
‘The overlap is made more plausible by the sustained anthro-
pomorphism of the interludes. In the first one, every figure of
speech is used to relate the processes of nature to those of human
beings. Sea, air, waves and light, become a cloth, a veil, the sediment
in an old wine bottle, the arm of a woman, a lamp, the blades of a
fan and a bonfire. It is the same in the third, where we find a
characteristically elaborate image for the rim of flotsam on the
shore ‘as if some light shallop had foundered and burst its sides and
the sailor had swum to land and bounded up the cliff and left his
frail cargo to be washed ashore’ (p. 62). The birds are characterized
as companionable, fearful, apprehensive, emulous, aware, quizzical
and savage. The waves are turbaned warriors with assegais (an
image also used by Rhoda and Louis in the fourth section (p. 120)
to describe those involved in the dance of life). The cruelty of
maturing life is imaged by the vicious warfare in the undergrowth
between birds and sluggy matter; and in the third section all the
voices use birds as images. Obviously a consistent analogy is being
made between non-human growth and decay and the human
lifespan. But the effect of the anthropomorphism is peculiar; the
inhuman scenes seem, because of it, to be bursting with active
life, and to provide (like the activity of nature in the “Time Passes’
section of To the Lighthouse) a threat to the individual human
consciousness.
The mixture of analogy and opposition between nature and man
168 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
is found particularly in the treatment of the waves themselves,
where there is an unresolved ambiguity. Are the waves meant to
suggest the human lives, or are they the detached, impersonal forces
of fatality? The last sentence of the book, ‘The waves broke on the
shore’, may suggest that Bernard’s encounter with death is itself a
wave, another inevitable part of existence; but it also implies that
his individual effort is set against an arbitrary, uncaring universe.
But the irony of the last line has to do with language as well as life.
Bernard, in his last soliloquy, has used the images of the interludes
as his own phrases, almost as though he were the author of The
Waves. The world described in the interludes is that of ‘the house,
the garden, and the waves breaking’ which make up Bernard’s
vision of ‘the world seen without aself’. Atthe moment of seeing the
world as it really is, he realizes that his phrases are useless to him;
only words of one syllable will serve. The criticism is not only of
Bernard’s phrase-making self, but also of the elaborately written
interludes. And when Bernard stops speaking, only words of one
syllable are left:*‘The waves broke on the shore.’ Both narrators
have had finally to resort to the simplest of terms.
The interweaving of images suggests that the book is about the
relationships between the six characters, who all, not only Bernard,
measure their own lives against the other five, bringing up in their
‘spoons’ ‘another of those minute objects which we call optimistically
“characters of our friends”’ (p. 209). These lines of thought,
netting the voices together like ‘a string of six little fish that let
themselves be caught while a million others leap and sizzle’ (p. 220),
create the narrative links in a book without much plot. Twice
Susan thinks of Jinny in London and the next voice to speak is
Jinny’s, in London (pp. 86, 148). But, apart from two meetings in
Percival’s honour, the extent of their involvement in adult life is
uncertain. Bernard pays visits te Jinny after Percival’s death,
to Susan in the country and to Neville in his room. Rhoda and
Louis are lovers for a time; Jinny prepares her room ‘in case
Bernard comes, or Neville or Louis’ (p. 167). Their relationships,
however, do not seem vital or impassioned. The information that
Susan has always loved Bernard, or that Rhoda and Louis are
lovers, seems to have little relevance to the voices. The quality of
the book is abstract, not personal.
 The Waves: 1931 169
In thus disallowing the emphasis on relationships which was an
important part of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, in favour of
an emphasis on the essences of personality, Virginia Woolf deprives
herself of some of her most powerful qualities. She loses the fine
tension between outer and inner levels of experience which makes
the party scenes of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse more
interesting than the dinner scenes in The Waves. Denying her
characters idiosyncrasies and social mannerisms, she denies herself
the kind of humour which energized her treatment of Mr Ramsay.
There are limited comic possibilities when the characters exist at a
level where they must take themselves seriously, though Jinny
provides comedy by virtue of being the most superficial ‘humour’
— ‘Hereis Percival [. . .] he hasnotdressed’ (p. 105) —and Bernard by
being the wittiest, asin his description of Percival’s Indian triumphs:
By applying the standards of the west, by using the violent
language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in
less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. (p. 116)
Though the resistance of her chosen form to comedy may not
seem very important, it is part of the lack of distinction between
different levels of intensity which makes The Waves the most
arduous of her novels. The important points of climax — the vision
of unity at the dinner for Percival, the momentary fusion of
separate selves at Hampton Court, Bernard’s final vision of truth
and his ensuing encounter with death — are movingly and strenu-
ously lyrical, but they do not stand out vividly from the rest of
the writing.
Yet, in spite of the levelling effect of the style, her natural bent
for characterization will not be suppressed. The outer life presses in
through vivid anecdotes. Neville watches distastefully as Bernard
mops up with his handkerchief the pool of tea running over Don
Fuan. Louis leaves his table in the steamy eating house, slipping a
too large tip under the plate. Jinny writes a note and powders her
nose giving ‘her body a flick with the whip’ (p. 228). Though
Bernard’s wife, Susan’s husband, and Jinny’s and Neville’s lovers
hardly exist, the moments of active emotion they induce are as
strongly and crudely presented as the ordinary material of con-
ventional novels:
170 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
You left me. The descent into the Tube was like death. We
were cut up, we were dissevered by all those faces and the
hollow wind that seemed to roar down there over desert boulders.
I sat staring in my own room. By five I knew that you were
faithless. I snatched the telephone and the buzz, buzz, buzz,
of its stupid voice in your empty room battered my heart down,
when the door opened and there you stood. That was the most
perfect of our meetings. But these meetings, these partings,
finally destroy us. (p. 153; Neville)
And then that rasping, dog-fish-skin-like roughness — those
black arrows of shivering sensation, when she misses the post,
when she does not come. Out rush a bristle of horned suspi-
cions, horror, horror, horror — but what is the use of painfully
elaborating these consecutive sentences when what one
needs is nothing consecutive but a bark, a groan? And years
later to see a middle-aged woman in a restaurant taking off her
cloak. (p. 2153 Bernard)
But such activities, like the places described in the novel, are
subsumed in the lyric rhythm of consciousness, and become
images. Action and environment inevitably take on a universal
quality when treated in this way, and this creates a difficulty about
the novel’s social assumptions.
Obviously all Virginia Woolf’s novels deal — though not
flatteringly or complacently — with a limited social milieu, and
betray a lack of imaginative reach over the classes outside her own
experience. Septimus Smith is convincingly portrayed (at least as
well as Leonard Bast, Forster’s comparable character in Howards
End), but he is, after all, mad, which gives him a classless air. The
charladies and women singing outside tube stations may act as
potent symbols, but they are not characterized at any more
convincing level than is found in “The mothers of Pimlico gave
suck to their young”! or ‘A woman of the lower classes was wheel-
Ing a perambulator.’? Such awkward excursions into foreign
territory do not greatly matter if the central social group of the
novel is vividly presented. The close-knit upper-middle-class

1 Mrs Dalloway, p. 9. aha Years, pat 7s

 The Waves: 1931 171
society that dominates Night and Day, Mrs Dalloway, To the
Lighthouse and Between the Acts is firmly in the tradition of the
novel of social realism dealing with a particular class, from Emma to
The Egoist. There can be no valid criticism of Virginia Woolf for
staying within her own world, nor for turning working-class
women like the singer in A4rs Dalloway and Mrs McNab in To the
Lighthouse into mythical, subhuman figures. In The Waves,
however, because of the determined rejection of realism, the class
distinctions are, paradoxically, disturbing. The six characters are
constantly talking about the proletariat. Rhoda fears and hates it:
Oh, human beings, how I have hated you! [. . .] how hideous
you have looked in Oxford Street, how squalid sitting opposite
each other staring in the Tube! (p. 174)
Louis wishes he could ‘look like the rest’ (p. 79) but, if he cannot be
assimilated, he is determined to impose his will on the flux and
disorder of the ‘average man’s’ life. Jinny is oblivious of any class
but her own; Susan identifies the lives of country working people
with the lives of animals:
I [. . .] sit by the beds of dying women [. . .] frequenting rooms
intolerable except to one born as I was and early acquainted
with the farmyard and the dung-heap and the hens straying in
and out, and the mother with two rooms and growing children,
I have seen the windows run with heat, I have smelt the sink.
(p. 163)
Neville uncompromisingly despises the world of ‘horsedealers and
plumbers’ (p. 66), saying in Cambridge: ‘Where there are buildings
like these [. . .] I cannot endure that there should be shop girls’
(p. 73). Bernard, supposedly in warm contrast to Neville as one who
wants to absorb all the different lives he encounters, is in no doubt,
however, of the cosmic difference between his perceptions and those
of the ‘small shopkeepers’:
What a sense of the tolerableness of life the lights in the
bedrooms of small shopkeepers give us! Saturday comes, and
there is just enough to pay perhaps for seats at the Pictures.
Perhaps before they put out the light they go into the little
V2 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
garden and look at the giant rabbit crouched in its wooden hut.
That is the rabbit they will have for Sunday dinner. Then they
put out the light. Then they sleep. And for thousands of
people sleep is nothing but warmth andsilenceandonemoment’s
sport with some fantastic dream. ‘I have posted my letter,’
the greengrocer thinks, ‘to the Sunday newspaper. Suppose I
win five hundred pounds in the football competition? And we
shall kill the rabbit. Life is pleasant. Life is good. I have
posted the letter. We shall killthe rabbit.’ And hesleeps. (p. 201)

Bernard and his five friends thus, in their different ways, write off
the possibility that another class of people could share their per-
ceptions. The very lack of realism makes this assumption unpalat-
able in The Waves where it would not have mattered in To the
Lighthouse. Because the six characters are abstracted to their
essences from those material envelopes (which in their case may be
semi-transparent but in the case of the small shopkeepers are cer-
tainly opaque), they seem to be giving a definitive account of the
quality of all experience. But the underlying details of their real
lives, protected and privileged, suggest how relative their experience
must in fact be. Though their individual weaknesses are described,
the one, overall weakness — that not one of them ever considers
whether sensibilities as interesting might not be found among the
masses they fear and despise — is not perceived by their creator.

The six voices are not equally important and complex. The images
that identify Jinny and Susan are less suggestive than those for
Rhoda or Bernard, since characters whose lives are dominated by
their bodies require physical images which can be literally applied.
When Louis speaks of his body going down to the depths of the
world, the image stands for his sense of history. But when Jinny
describes herself as dancing like a fire, unfurling like a fern, rippling
like a plant in a river, the image does not reach beyond itself: it
only describes the bodily actions of one who lives in the ‘society of
bodies’ (p. 53). Her leitmotif— “The door opens. O come, I say’
(p. 89) — is a literal description of the pattern of her life. Very
occasionally Jinny makes a statement about herself which reaches
towards a complex idea of personality: ‘I cannot follow any
 The Waves :1931 172
thought from present to past [. . .] I do not dream’ (p. 35). The
sentence deals, unusually for Jinny, with a state of mind rather than
a physical sensation, though it is about her lack of mental subtlety.
There is little room for complexity in the portrayal of an alluring
society lady bravely facing up to the oncoming of old age, though
some attempt is made to transform her interest in clothes, lipstick
and facepowder into a moral stand against chaos:
This is the triumphant procession; this is the army of victory

Look how they show off clothes here even under ground in
perpetual radiance. They will not let the earth even lie wormy
and sodden. There are gauzes and silks illumined in glass cases
and underclothes trimmed with a million close stitches of fine
embroidery. Crimson, green, violet, they are dyed all colours.
Think how they organize, roll out, smooth, dip in dyes and
drive tunnels blasting the rock. [...] I am a native of this
world, I follow its banners. (pp. 166-7)
In the opposition Jinny makes between civilization and pre-
historic savagery there is an interesting antithesis to Louis’s
sense of the links between all ages of the world. But her praise of
artifice goes only as far as the formula of life lived for the body can
take one. And there are limits too within that formula. Jinny is a
sensual creature, living from one orgasm to the next. But the
physical images which describe her — the thin rippling body, the
narrow throat — suggest a barren nerve-racked sexuality, rather like
Lucy Tantamount’s in Point Counterpoint (1928), not a rich,
warm bodily life. There is no such thing in The Waves. Susan,
whose bodily life is slow, maternal and earthbound, is in direct
contrast to Jinny, but hers is a sinister and gloomy sensuality. Her
empathy with things of the earth, leading (predictably) from wild
rural adolescence to silent motherhood, is obscure and alarming:
What I give is fell. I cannot float gently, mixing with other
people. I like best the stare of shepherds met in the road;
the stare of gipsy women beside a cart in a ditch suckling their
children as I shall suckle my children. For soon in the hot
midday when the bees hum round the hollyhocks my lover will
174 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
come. He will stand under the cedar tree. To his one word I
shall answer my one word. What has formed in me I shall
give him. I shall have children; I shall have maids in aprons;
men with pitchforks[. . .] I shall be like my mother, silent in a
blue apron locking up the cupboards. (p. 84)
Susan, locking cupboard doors and netting fruit, ‘glutted with
natural happiness’ in a landscape heavy and rich with the perpetual
breeding and ripening of “Those dying generations at their song’,*
seems a bringer of death as much as of life. Her refusal of Percival
suggests this: ‘She who had refused Percival lent herself to this,
to this covering over’ (p. 230).
By contrast with Jinny and Susan, every physical image associ-
ated with Rhoda points away from the body, towards a description
of mental anguish:
I must push my foot stealthily lest I should fall off the edge
of the world into nothingness. (pp. 36-7)
I came to the puddle, I could not cross it. Identity failed me.?
(p. 54)
Like a ribbon of weed I am flung far every time the door
opens. (p. 92)
The walls of the mind become transparent. (p. 196)
Rhoda’s fearful instability, like Septimus’s, is defined throughout
by physical sensations. And, like Septimus, she combines a sense of
the reality of the life of ‘Monday or Tuesday’ with a desire to
escape it. She knows that she is ‘a girl, here in this room’ as well as
being a ribbon of weed. Rhoda’s is an irreconcilable position: she is
stretched between an ideal vision of impersonality and serenity,
evoked by her imaginary journeys and the satisfaction she finds in
abstract shapes, and the torture of ‘here and now’. Though she
makes journeys away from the real world, she cannot separate
herself entirely, nor does she really want to. Her real desire is to be
1 W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, The Tower, 1928.
2 ‘Life is [...] the oddest affair; has in it the essence of reality. I used to feel
this as a child — couldn’t step across a puddle once, I remember, for thinking
how strange — what am I? etc.’ (AWD, 30 September 1926, p. 101).
 The Waves: 1931 5
included and to give herself— but ‘Oh, to whom?’ — and her escapism
is tempered by her reluctant allegiance to reality:
But these pilgrimages, these moments of departure, start always
in your presence, from this table, these lights, from Percival
and Susan, here and now. (p. 119)
Rhoda expresses an extreme version of the tension between isolation
and participation which dominates all Virginia Woolf’s novels, and
she is defeated by it. Her suicide is her judgement on the real world,
with which she can never be reconciled. Should we be tempted,
however, to draw a simplistic analogy between Rhoda’s experience
and that of her creator, Bernard’s voice provides an important
qualification of Rhoda’s judgement: ‘Cruel and vindictive as we
are, we are not bad to that extent’ (p. 216).
Louis is a more interesting and complex voice than Rhoda in
that, though he too fears the world, he wishes to impose order on
it rather than to flee it; he is more frightening than frightened. His
sense of insecurity and isolation in childhood results in an authori-
tarian and highly ordered public life which is always to be at odds
with his secret loneliness. Thus, more emphatically than with the
other characters, the images that define his personality are drawn
from his childhood. His feelings of inadequacy are for ever evoked
by the fat woman at the children’s party who gave him, in pity, the
Union Jack from the Christmas tree. His fear of untidy passionate
relationships will always be imaged by Jinny’s kiss on the back of the
neck, His desire to impose order and make his way in a hostile world
are already present in the blow he lands on the oak door at school
and in his respect for Crane the headmaster. From the first, he feels
himself to be part of an endless process of historical growth, his
veins going down into the past, and this leads him to work at putting
a ring of commerce round the world in his public life and, in his
solitary attic room, to write poetry which will ‘forge [.. .] a ring
of beaten steel’ (p. 144). Like the flamboyant historical figures
with whom he identifies, he wants to provide an element of the
continuity of which he is so vividly aware:
to mark this inch in the long, long history that began in Egypt,
in the time of the Pharaohs, when women carried red pitchers
to the Nile. (p. 56)
176 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
This recurrent image is a clear indication of the difference between
Louis and Rhoda. Louis’s imaginary pilgrimage to the Nile is not
a terrified flight from the real world, but an implacable source of
strength. In spite of his constant dread of death, of the great beast
stamping, Louis is in the ranks: he is part of ‘the eternal procession’
of working life and, as such, is rather the odd one out of the six.
Neville, like St John Hirst and William Dodge, a clever,
passionate, unattractive homosexual, is a character who cannot
well be summed up by such recurrent physical images as are used
for Louis. Though his life is organized around physical comforts
and intimacies, the ‘ordinary things’ in which he finds his peace —
‘a table, a chair, a book with a paper-knife stuck between the
pages’ (pp. 124-5) — are not symbols but descriptions of his life.
His éngrossment in personal relationships, which gives existence,
for him, the flavour of a Shakespearian play, can only be com-
municated anecdotally and analytically. To some extent his life is
summed up by the images of the headmaster’s crucifix, the gardener
raising his mallet, and the boys on deck squirting each other with
hosepipes. From these figures we gather Neville’s distaste for virile
pomp and circumstance, and his yearning for a momentous, con-
suming personal intimacy. But the image of the naked boys is a
pathetic one. Neville’s refined scenes of intimacy are verbal rather
than physical. Though he longs for a life of the body, like Jinny’s,
his is in fact a life of the mind.
In this passage, Neville’s type, one well known to Virginia
Woolf, is brilliantly portrayed. The physical images are introduced
not as symbols of his personality, but as the material for his
thoughts and relationships:

Now this room seems to me central, something scooped out

of the eternal night. Outside lines twist and intersect, but
round us, wrapping us about. Here we are centred. Here we
can be silent, or speak without raising our voices. Did you
notice that and then that? we say. He said that, meaning... °
She hesitated, and I believe suspected. Anyhow, I heard
voices, a sob on the stair late at night. It is the end of their
relationship. Thus we spin round us infinitely fine filaments
and construct a system. Plato and Shakespeare are included,
 The Waves: 1931 U77
also quite obscure people, people of no importance whatsoever.
I hate men who wear crucifixes on the left side of their waist-
coats. I hate ceremonies and lamentations and the sad figure
of Christ [...] Some spray in a hedge, though, or a sunset
over a flat winter field, or again the way some old woman sits,
arms akimbo, in an omnibus with a basket — those we point at
for the other to look at. [. . .] And then not to talk. To follow
the dark paths of the mind and enter the past, to visit books, to
brush aside their branches and break off some fruit. And you
take it and marvel, as I take the careless movements of your
body and marvel at its ease, its power — how you fling open
windows and are dexterous with your hands. For alas! my
mind is a little impeded, it soon tires; I fall damp, perhaps
disgusting, at the goal. (pp. 153-4)

If one lives by the body, as Susan and Jinny do, and as Neville
attempts to, the body will fail one. Two alternatives are provided
in The Waves. One can be a visionary and look for ‘a reason’, ‘a
plot’ behind ‘this ordinary scene’ (p. 169), like Rhoda and Louis.
To go in this direction is to go towards alienation, solitude and
even suicide. Or one can commit oneself to an interest in ‘this
ordinary scene’, but treating it not as the arena of immediate
gratification but as the material for art. This is no safer direction,
in that words, like the body, may fail one. Bernard’s stories and
phrases, his ‘sense of what other people are like’ (p. 200), frequently
desert him. As a storyteller he is at the mercy of all his assumed
identities, of his need for an audience, and of his chronic sense of
imperfection. Growing old, he begins to wonder whether there
are ‘stories’ at all (p. 160), and whether there is any point in his
life’s activity:

Why impose my arbitrary design? Why stress this and shape

that and twist up little figures like the toys men sell in trays in
the street? Why select this, out of all that — one detail? (p. 161)

He is assailed by the sense of making so many transitions and acting

out so many different tales that ‘there is nothing to lay hold of. I
am made and remade continually. Different people draw different
G
178 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
worlds from me’ (p. 114). He relies on being able to call upon the
real Bernard, ‘you the usual partner in my enterprises’ (p. 162),
whom he thinks of as a ‘faithful, sardonic man’ (p. 68). But he
goes in fear of the moment when he will call upon his real self,
like Orlando in her motor car, and no one will reply.
When this happens — when the fist does not form, the fin does
not rise above the waste of waters! — the story-making identity
finds itself merged with an undifferentiated, ‘omnipresent, general
life’ (p. 96). Passive, undesiring, inarticulate, it becomes part of
‘the world seen without a self’ (p. 247). It is paradoxical that
Bernard, who is the most worldly, domestic and articulate of the
voices, is the character who experiences this mystical abnegation
of the self, ‘at the still point of the turning world’.?
At the end of The Waves, after summing up his life and the
lives of his friends, he admits the limitations of being always an
observer, a raconteur, a separate identity. He recognizes that his
moments of merging, of becoming one with the others, were ‘a
sort of death’ (p. 240), and that to merge and become depersonalized
is as necessary and inevitable as death. Through Bernard the six
lives become one, and this suggests, as in Ars Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse, that the personality is not a discrete entity but can be
subsumed into the general life flow of the universe. For all this,
Bernard’s mystical experience of a loss of personality is not the moral
conclusion of the book. For Bernard (unlike the narrator of Four
Quartets) the timeless moment without a self is not infinitely
desirable. Though it gives one a vision of the truth, ‘to let oneself
be carried on passively is unthinkable’ (p. 206). Loath though
Bernard is to suffer from the compulsions of daily life, of having to

1 The ‘fin in a waste of waters’ (pp. 162, 210, 234) is used by Bernard several
times as an image for something — such as a word, a thought, a sense of one’s
own personality - which may disrupt the monotony of life. The disruption
is welcome, though the image is a sinister one. Virginia Woolf uses it in the
diary to describe both the increased intensity of vision which accompanies
her ‘mental tremors’ (Bell II, p. 100) and her apprehension of the ‘essence of
reality’ (AWD, 30 September 1926, p. 101) which she attempts to pin down
in The Waves. ‘I have netted that fin in the waste of waters’ she writes on
finishing the novel (AWD, 7 February 1931, p. 169).
2 T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton (1935), Four Quartets.
 The Waves: 1931 179
do one thing and then another because “Tuesday follows Monday:
Wednesday, Tuesday’ (p. 243), he nevertheless accepts that action
must take place within that ordinary, sequential life:
What are days for?
Days are where we live.
‘They come, they wake us
‘Time and time over.
‘They are to be happy in.
Where can we live but days?
Bernard remembers the shape of his nose, he bangs his spoon on
the table. He asserts the individual personality and the value of its
struggle against the impersonal forces of flux and death. His
childhood resilience to life’s hostility, expressing itself intuitively
in his explorings and his stories, becomes in later life a more
conscious resistance:
I jumped up. I said, ‘Fight! Fight!’ I repeated. It is the effort
and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering
and piecing together— this is the daily battle, defeat or victory,
the absorbing pursuit. The trees, scattered, put on order; the
thick green of the leaves thinned itself to a dancing light. I
netted them under with a sudden phrase. I retrieved them from
formlessness with words. (p. 232)
In old age, Bernard faces death, like Mr Ramsay, with an individual
effort which is translated into the physical image of Percival on
horseback — Percival being the epitome of the life of action and
effort. Ironic though this image is, Percival having been conquered
by death, it ends the book firmly in a word with a self:
the theme effort, effort, dominates; not the waves: and
personality: and defiance.”

1 Philip Larkin, ‘Days’, The Whitsun Weddings (London, Faber, 1964).

2 AWD, 22 December 1930, p. 162.
 §
The Years
1937

HE years 1930 to 1939 were horrible both publicly and

privately,’ wrote Leonard Woolf.
If one was middle aged or old and so had known at least a ‘sort
of a kind’ of civilization, it was appalling impotently to watch
the destruction of civilization by a powerful nation com-
pletely subservient to a gang of squalid, murderous hooli-
ans...
i The twilight was in one’s private as well as in public life...
This erosion of life by death began for Virginia and me in the
early 1930s and gathered momentum as we went downhill to
war and her own death. It began on 21 January 1932 when
Lytton Strachey died of cancer ... After Lytton’s death Car-
rington .. . shot herself.
‘Two years later Roger Fry died...
Virginia Woolf spent a large part of the thirties writing The Years,
interspersed with her work on Flush and Three Guineas. Though
Three Guineas was a social and political statement, the other works
seem remote from the period in which they were produced. “The
novels of Virginia Woolf ... are irrelevant for the historian,’?

* Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of The Years

1919-1939 (London, Hogarth Press, 1967), pp. 248-50.
2 A.J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 19653
Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1970), p. 389.
180
 Thesy carsis: 19397 181
A. J. P. Taylor writes of the thirties; and Quentin Bell in his
biography points out that
in 1933 — the year of the publication of F/ush — Hitler came to
power and the Japanese were overrunning Manchuria; in the
following year there was what looked like the first stage of a
Fascist revolution in France; in 1935 the Italians invaded
Abyssinia, in 1936 the Spanish Civil War began, in 1937 the
Japanese took Shanghai and Pekin and in 1938 the Nazis
annexed first Austria and then the Sudetenland.!
As in her life she was reluctant — though considerably urged — to
identify with any political movement or ideology, so in her
fiction she was anxious to avoid propaganda or didacticism. In the
prevailing mood of the thirties such attitudes made her seem old-
fashioned and ineffectual: ‘Her gift was for the pursuit of shadows,
. . when what was needed was the swift and lucid phrase that could
reach the ears of unemployed working men or Trades Union
officials.’ It took some time for the dangerous condition of
Europe to affect her imagination — in 1934, as Bell says, she was
‘more worried about her novel than about politics’. And though
her reactions were strong when they were aroused, they were
politically naive:
To her . . . it appeared that the horrible side of the universe,
the forces of madness, which were never far from her conscious-
ness, had got the upper hand again. This to her was something
largely independent of the political mechanics of the world.
The true answer to all this horror and violence lay in an
improvement of one’s own mental state; somehow one had to
banish anger and the unreason that is bred of anger.*
The Years closely reflects this state of mind. It is a novel that
examines the possibility of living a life of integrity and contentment
under adverse conditions, drawing an analogy (as Three Guineas
more explicitly does) between Victorian paternalism and the
masculine militarism and egotism of twentieth-century public life.
Once liberated from the long shadow of the first, the women and the
1 Bell II, p. 186. 2 Ibid.
3 Bell II, p. 179. £ Bell Isp, 287.
182 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
men of the Pargiter family struggle to adapt to the second. Naturally
this involves Virginia Woolf in a satire both on Victorian family
life and on the social and political conditions of the years leading up
to the First World War. These factors determine the relationship
between individuals and society in the ‘present day’ of the mid-
1930s. But though the novel is much occupied with the external
conditions of upper-class English life between 1880 and the
thirties, to say that it is ‘irrelevant for the historian’ is not entirely
absurd. The emphasis falls not on the facts of political or social
change and their implications for the individual, but on a more
abstract and less tangible investigation of various attemps to re-
concile the obscurity of the soul with the moral need for social
participation. The story of the Pargiters traces a tension between
the world and the spirit which requires analogies to be drawn,
rather than developments perceived, between different historical
periods.
The frustration for the historian also stems from the novel’s
characteristic liaison between method and intent. A rejection of
the ‘masculine’ world of fact, aggression, propaganda and con-
vention as being contributory to ‘the horrible side of the universe’,
in favour of a peace-engendering, unegotistical, impersonal freedom,
requires a framework which will not be factual or conventional.
There are frequent references in the diary to her fear of being
crudely didactic in The Years, like other ‘social’ novelists such as
‘Hugh Walpole and Priestley’:*
And conversation: argument. How to do that will be one of
the problems. I mean intellectual argument in the form of art:
I mean how to give ordinary waking Arnold Bennett life the
form of art??
She tells herself to ‘lyricize the argument’S and is troubled by ‘the
burden of something that I won’t call propaganda. I have a horror
of the Aldous novel.’* ‘One can’t propagate at the same time as
write fiction.’> The Years continually replaces the definite and the

1 AWD, tg December 1932, p. 190. 2 AWD, 31 May 1933, p. 208.

3 AWD, 23 January 1935, p. 238. * AWD, 20 February 1935, p. 239.
5 AWD, 13 April 1935, p. 245. °
 Thesyedrss 1537 183
factual with more hazy and haphazard alternatives: this is both its
narrative technique and its message. We are returned to the anti-
thesis which was found twenty years before in “The Mark on the
Wall’:
— but these generalizations are very worthless. The military
sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles,
cabinet ministers — a whole class of things indeed which, as a
child, one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the
real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of
nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow
Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons,
and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits — like
the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain
hour, although nobody liked it. There wasarule for everything.
The rule for tablecloths at that particular period was that they
should be made of tapestry with little yellow compartments
marked uponthem.[...] Howshocking,and yethow wonderful
it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, [. . .]
and table-cloths were notentirely real [. . .] What now takes the
place of those things I wonder [. . .]? Men perhaps, should you
be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our
lives [. ..] which establishes Whitaker’s T'ableof Precedency,
which has become, I suppose, since the war, half a phantom
to many men and women, which soon, one may hope, will be
laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the
mahogany sideboardsand the Landseer prints, Godsand Devils,
Hell and so forth, leaving us all with an intoxicating sense of
illegitimate freedom — if freedom exists ...1
Asin The Years, an analogy is made here, through images, between
Victorian family life, with its protocol and solid objects, and the
post-war public world of masculine authority; and, as in The
Years, resistance to such authority is founded on laughter. Freedom
comes through burlesquing the traditional objects of veneration;
but the possibility of freedom is only tentatively hazarded. In both

1 ‘The Mark on the Wall’, 4 Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944),
Pp: 47-8.
184 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the early short story and the late novel, the ‘quiet, spacious world’
which is suggested as an alternative to the domain of ‘hard, separate
facts’! is difficult to reach. The difficulty applies to art as much as to
life. ‘The Mark on the Wall’ characteristically links the desire for a
more free and impersonal existence with the expectation of new
developments in fiction. The narrator’s reaction against tradition
and ‘generalizations’ is involved with her hope that ‘the novelists of
the future’ will leave ‘the descriptions of reality more and more out
of their stories.’ When she wrote this in 1917 Virginia Woolf
was toiling through the traditional thirty-four chapter form of
Night and Day, and at first sight it might seem as though The Years,
far from being a further experiment in fiction, returns, in reaction
to The Waves, to the traditional structure and naturalistic dialogue
of her second novel. This view gains some support from the apparent
similarity in the subject matter of the two books. But these resem-
blances, though interesting, are superficial. The concentration on
personality, central to the earlier novels, has given way to a pre-
occupation with’ wider areas of experience. Night and Day deals
with individuals, The Years with society: Virginia Woolf was
anxious that no one character should ‘become too dominant’.*
Though much less obviously experimental than The Waves,
The Years is not a retrogressive work. It is an attempt (one made
with extreme difficulty) to transform the realistic saga of family
life, as practised by Walpole in the Herries novels (published
between 1930 and 1933) and by Galsworthy in the Forsyte Saga
of the twenties, into an ‘essay-novel’* dealing with the abstract
themes of time, memory and society.
The differences in structure and approach between The Years and
a conventional family saga (or between The Years and Night and
Day) make themselves felt in a summary of the book’s eleven
sections. The first secton, 1880, takes Colonel Pargiter from his
club and his mistress to his family home, Abercorn Terrace, on the
day of his wife’s death. Though the scene then moves to Ox-
ford, where Edward Pargiter and his cousin Kitty are re-
enacting the youthful experiences of Jacob Flanders and Clara
Durrant, Mrs Pargiter’s death dominates the whole section, which
1 Ibid. pp. 45, 49. Zul bid apa 7.
3 AWD, 25 April 1933, p. 197. * AWD, 2 November 1932, p. 189.
 “FlresYearss; 1937 185
ends with her funeral. Throughout the section, rain falls inter-
mittently, creating a mild dreariness which oppresses the Pargiter
children in London and adds to Kitty’s restlessness in Oxford. We
recall the beginning of the ‘Victorian’ character in Orlando: ‘Rain
fell frequently, but only in fitful gusts, which were no sooner over
than they began again.”!
The second section, 1891, isdominated by the death of Parnell and
the burning of autumn leaves. A ‘specimen day’? of Eleanor’s life
with her father at Abercorn Terrace is described. Through her we
find out where the other children have gone: Martin to India,
Morris to the lawcourts, Delia to the slums. The Colonel visits his
sister-in-law Eugenie and his brother Digby for the birthday of his
little niece Maggie. The juxtaposition of Eleanor’s tiresome
bondage to her father with the wild gaiety of Maggie and Sara’s
bonfire suggests a symbolic value for the burning of leaves: ‘For it
was October, the birth of the year’ (p. 74).
The third section, 1907, takes place on a hot midsummer night in
London. Digby, Eugenie and Maggie have gone to a ball. Sara, who
must rest because she is crippled, lies at home reading. Dance music
and the moon outside disturb her. When the others return,
Maggie talks of her evening out and their mother, romanticand hist-
rionic, dances a waltz for them in the bedroom until called away
by the querulous voice of her husband. The glamorous, music-filled
night sums up the pre-war social world. In the next section, 1908,
it has vanished. Digby and Eugenie are dead, a cruel March wind is
blowing. Martin and Rose visit Eleanor, more than ever a prisoner
to the ageing Colonel and Abercorn Terrace,
The fifth section, 1910, concludes with the death of Edward
VII, but all the imagery is of flowers and spring. The section deals
with older and younger women in their relationships to a male-
dominated society. Rose, Maggie and Sara have lunch together;
Rose and Sara go to a political meeting where they find Eleanor and
Kitty; Kitty leaves for a performance of Siegfried. A Foreign Office
1 Orlando, p. 160.
2 See AWD, 27 November 1935, p. 260, and Bell II, p. rgo: ‘Virginia again
recorded what she called “a specimen day.” By this she meant not a normal
day but rather, I think, a specimen of the distractions, worries, absurdities,
that make up one’s life.’
186 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
employee talks importantly of the King’s illness. At dinner, Sara
tells Maggie about the meeting, but they are interrupted by the
drunken noise of the man next door.
1911, the sixth section, portrays Eleanor’s feelings after the
death of Colonel Pargiter. She goes on holiday with Morris’s
family, whose country life on a hot August day, with the bazaar in
the garden for the church fund, and after-dinner coffee on the
terrace, strongly anticipates Between the Acts. Morris’s children,
North and Peggy, are in their turn secretly conspiring against the
restrictions of family life. The next section, 1913, set in January
snow, describes the pensioning-out of the family retainer, Crosby.
Like Elizabeth Barrett returning to Wimpole Street in Flush,
Eleanor notices for the first time how ‘dark’ and ‘low’ Crosby’s
basement is (p. 175). Crosby’s grief at leaving Abercorn Terrace
is ironically contrasted with Eleanor’s relief.
The long and important section 1914 is given partly from
Martin’s point of view and partly from Kitty’s. During the
‘radiant’ spring day Martin encounters Sara and takes her to
lunch, then to the park to find Maggie and her baby. They pass by
Speaker’s Corner, and Martin considers its alternative: a world
without ‘I’. In the evening he goes to Kitty Lasswade’s party and
feels at once too old and too young for it, like Peter Walsh at
Clarissa’s. As the party ends he sees the very old Lady Warburton
leaving, hung about ‘with chains, furs and lace’: “he nineteenth
century going to bed, Martin said to himself’ (p. 215). Kitty,
impatient throughout her party to get away, now hurries to catch
the night sleeper to the North. Fleeing the London world, she
reaches the timeless country moors. Clocks dominate the section,
as in Mrs Dalloway. People have to meet at certain times; there is a
sense of rush and, at the party, of futility. The moments of still-
ness by the Round Pond and in the country provide a strong
contrast to the pressure of clock time in a world at war. Facob’s
Room is also called to mind.
The ninth section, 1917, shows Eleanor in the dark of a frosty
winter discovering, during an air raid, the life of the next generation:
Maggie, her husband René, Sara and her homosexual friend
Nicholas. Sara speaks of North, Morris’s son, going off to war in
‘the Regiment of Ratcatchers’. René speaks of his own country.
 The Years: 1937 187
Trapped underground, all are struggling to find some vantage
point against a brute externality. But when the war ends, in the
next section, there is no sense of hope: in a November mist, the
disgruntled Crosby, last relic of Abercorn Terrace and the nine-
teenth century, hears the guns booming.
The long final section, ‘Present Day’, is set against a background
of light and summer and sky. Though it largely consists of Delia’s
party, at which all the generations are gathered together, it is
prefaced by several encounters: Eleanor with North, North with
Sara, Eleanor with Peggy. The party is dominated by the view-
points of North, Peggy and Eleanor. Though Eleanor, up to a
point the heroine of the book, has discovered new possibilities and a
more hopeful shape to life, the younger adults, North and Peggy, are
confused and bitter about the legacy of the past and the suffering of
the present.
The summary suggests the book’s hazy and disjointed quality,
deliberately effected by means of a fragmentary time structure,
which replaces the secure sense of regular chronology with the
sense of a weight at each end of the book. The first sections,
1880 and 1891, and the last, ‘Present Day’, are set apart from the
central sections, which only cover a period of twelve years, up
to and during the war. As a result the long family scenes of 1880
seem to be weighted against the long family party of the last
section, and the description of Eleanor’s life in the second section
is set in balance with the references she makes to that life in
‘Present Day’.1 There is a further avoidance of rigid chronology in
the introductory descriptive passages for each ‘year’. These were
originally intended as ‘interchapters’, like the interludes in The
Waves, but she kept to her later idea of ‘compacting them in the
text’.2? Though they provide information about the lives of the
characters, their historical content is minimal. In the spring of
1910, omnibuses have replaced the hansom cabs and landaus of
1880, and ‘Queen Alexandra’ is referred to instead of ‘the Princess’.
But there is no great difference in tone; both seasons have the same
1 “This last chapter must equal in length and importance and volume the first
book: and must in fact give the other side, the submerged side of all that’
(AWD, 22 May 1934, p. 219).
2 AWD, 2 February 1933, p- 195.
 188 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
festive and restless air. There is a far greater difference between the
spring of 1910 and the March of 1908. The introductory descrip-
tion of 1908 is grim and cruel. A different mood, rather than a
different historical setting, is emphasized in each section by means of
the season, the weather, and sometimes a recurrent leitmotif like
burning leaves or flowers. It is evident that the sections were
thought of in terms of their dominant images by the reference in the
diary to the ‘wind chapter’. *
The use of such images for each section points to the novel’s
whole method. Like the chronology, the characterization and hist-
ory of the family are carried on in unexpected ways. We do not
have the satisfaction of knowing any person’s life completely, nor
the excitement produced by love or ambition. The mother’s death in
the first section is the most dramatic and important event in the
novel, which consists mainly of tangential or unfinished conver-
sations, events of little apparent importance, obscure passages of
thought and snatches of description. Instead of the domination of
action or character, we find the domination of images. The Years is
thus a development from, rather than a reaction against, The Waves.
But the images that fill The Years aim at diffuseness rather than
concentration, and create a random pattern, rather than a dense
rhythm. Their function, however, is in part to provide continuity.
The caravan procession of shoppers and businessmen in 1880
becomes the caravan procession of market carts in 1907 (pp. 5,
105).? The London season is summed up by the sight of flags
flying both in 1910 (p. 130) and in 1914 (p. 181). The statues in
Parliament Square are for ever carrying ‘rods or rolls of paper
(pp. 73, 106). Other recurrences are found not in the impersonal
narrative voice but within the minds of the characters, linking the
passage of time with the processes of memory. But, unlike the
earlier novels in which images recur for similar reasons, here the
minds of the characters seem impoverished. The images that
haunt them, whether an inkstained, walrus-shaped penwiper or ‘the
song Pippy used to sing as she wiped your ears with a piece of slimy
flannel’ (pp. 75, 182), are trivial or unpleasant.
1 AWD, 3 November 1936, p. 270.
2 At one point she thought of calling the novel The Caravan (AWD, 11
January 1935, p- 237)-
 Mibe dy eats:219 37 189
The grim beginning — a masterly piece of naturalistic writing —
employs a collection of images which encapsulate the oppressiveness
of Victorian family life. The most striking of these are the ugliest:
the man exposing himself to Rose on the street corner, his face
returning in her dream, ‘bubbling in and out, grey, white, purplish
and pock-marked’ (p. 34), Colonel Pargiter’s deformed hand
fumbling at his mistress’s neck or fumbling for coins in his pocket,
and Mrs Pargiter on her deathbed, ‘the skin [...] stained with brown
patches [. . .] soft, decayed but everlasting’ (pp. 19, 20). This
emphasis on the physically repulsive, which is unprecedented in the
novels, continues throughout; at the final party Milly is described in
the same terms as the dying Mrs Pargiter (p. 302). But quieter
images in the first section have as strong and lasting an effect. In
Abercorn Terrace we are inside one of the houses into which
Katharine Hilbery glanced
with curtains on the inside which must, she thought, since you
could only see a looking glass gleaming above a sideboard on
which a dish of apples was set, keep the room inside very dark.
Abercorn Terrace, heavy with furniture, seems as though it will
last for ever, like the dying mother. For Crosby there is a grandeur
in its air of permanence:
Knives and forks rayed out round the table. The whole room,
with its carved chairs, oil paintings, the two daggers on the
mantlepiece, and the handsome sideboard — all the solid objects
that Crosby dusted and polished every day— looked at its best in
the evening. Meat-smelling and serge-curtained by day, it
looked lit up, semi-transparent in the evening. And they were
a handsome family, she thought [. . .] (p. 30)
The house has the same suffocating solidity as Wimpole Street in
Flush:
The Barretts never left London. Mr Barrett, the seven
brothers, the two sisters, the butler, Wilson and the maids,
Catiline, Folly, Miss Barrett and Flush all went on living at
50 Wimpole Street, eating in the dining-room, sleeping in the
1 Night and Day, p. 291.
190 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
bedrooms, smoking in the study, cooking in the kitchen, carry-
ing hot-water cans and emptying the slops from January to
December. The chair-covers became slightly soiled; the carpets
slightly worn; coal dust, mud, soot, fog, vapours of cigar smoke
and wine and meat accumulated in crevices, in cracks, in
fabrics, on the tops of picture-frames, in the scrolls of carvings.*
The Pargiter children are similarly imprisoned by ‘solid objects’,
‘the jugs, the tumblers, the covered bowls’ of the sick room (p. 16),
the ‘heavy frame’ of the picture and the rim of the dog’s bowl
(p. 36) which Eleanor sees on her way down from the nursery, the
kettle which always takes so long to boil, the ‘ink-corroded walrus’
at which Eleanor stares while she is doing the house-keeping
accounts:
That solid object might survive them all [... ] It was part of
other things — her mother for example ... She drew on her
blotting-paper; a dot with strokes raying out round it. (pp. 74—
75)
The image from Night and Day suggests Eleanor’s intuition of a
possible alternative to the Victorian world of ‘solid objects’ — the
housekeeping accounts and the family furniture. But although at
the end of her life she feels that she has grown up into a more
“quiet, spacious world’, it is clear that nosimple escape from material-
ism can be made. The Pargiter children who do leave Abercorn
Terrace do not, like Elizabeth Barrett, vanish into romantic,
colourful Italy. Flush presents a simplified alternative, a little like
Forster’s opposition of Sawston and Monterianoin Where Angels
Fear to Tread (1905). But in The Years escape from the Victorian
home does not mean escape from solid objects. They are found again
in the satirical descriptions of twentieth-century public life, as
seen through unsympathetic eyes. The men in the Law Courts ‘all
looked like pictures [...] like eighteenth-century portraits hung
upon a wall’ (p. 89). Trafalgar Square consists of ‘A man [...]
joined to a pillar; a lion[...] joined to a man; they seemed
stilled, connected, as though they would never move again (p. 92).

1 Flush (1933) p. 58.

 The Years: 1937 IgI
The statues at Temple Bar are ‘as ridiculous as usual — something
between a serpent and a fowl’ (p. 189). The boss of the newspaper
office is ‘the mahogany man, the clean-shaven, rosy-gilled, mutton-
fed man’ (p. 275), and the ‘fat man brandishing his arm at Speaker’s
Corner’ (p. 195) is for ever saying ‘I, I, I’, ‘like a vulture’s beak
pecking, or a vacuum-cleaner sucking, or a telephone bell ringing’
(p. 290). The aggression, humbug, self-aggrandizement and self-
deception which the Pargiter children suffered from in their
father’s home are more widely and more dangerously practised in
the public, male-dominated, warmongering world of the twentieth
century. But this argument is not stated, only contained within
impressionistic, fictional terms. The analogy between paternalism
and fascism is drawn undisguisedly in Three Guineas (1938), which
is valuable if only as a non-fictional appendix to The Years. Virginia
Woolf herself thought of them as ‘one book’.!
The relationship between the two works is exemplified by their
use of Sophocles’ Antigone. In Three Guineas the Antigone is
described as the best literary analysis of the corrupting ‘effect of
power and wealth upon the soul’.? Creon is compared to Hitler or
Mussolini. Antigone’s line (quoted by Edward Pargiter in The
Years) —”Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving’ — is
said in Three Guineas to be ‘worth all the sermons of all the arch-
bishops’,? and her elevation of personal judgement over the laws
of the city is used as an illustration of the moral obligation on
women to retain, on entering the predominantly masculine pro-
fessional world, the peace-loving rational attitudes they have
acquired from ‘poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal
loyalties’. In The Years, Sara, as a young girl, recounts to herself
the story of the Antigone, and identifies with the heroine:
The man in the loincloth gave three sharp taps with his mallet
on the brick. She was buried alive. (p. 111)
The ‘three sharp taps’ echo through the novel; they have already
been heard at Mrs Pargiter’s funeral:
Earth dropped on the coffin; three pebbles fell on the hard
shiny surface; and as they dropped she [Delia] was possessed
1 AWD, 3 June 1938, p- 295. 2 Three Guineas (1938), p. 148.
3 Ibid.
192 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
by the sense of something everlasting; of life mixing with
death; of death becoming life. (p. 72)
Mrs Pargiter has, like Antigone, been the victim of a masculine
world; endlessly bearing children, she has been exploited and
deceived by the Colonel. Her children, too, feel as though they
have been buried alive; their mother’s death is the first possibility
of escape for them. But ‘the three sharp taps’ recur in the outside
world. Kitty Lasswade (who has been identified with Antigone
by Edward Pargiter) goes from a feminist meeting to a performance
of Siegfried:
The dwarf was hammering at the sword. Hammer, hammer,
hammer, he went with little short, sharp strokes. (p. 148)
The moment is echoed in the scene which follows between Sara
and Maggie. They talk of the afternoon’s meeting; outside a
drunken man is being thrown out of a pub. Sara is filled with
disgust:
‘In time to come,’ she said, [...] ‘people, looking into this
room — this cave, this little antre, scooped out of mud and dung,
will [. . .] say “Pah! They stink!””’ (p. 153)
Then they hear Upcher, the drunkard, knocking to be let in:
The hammering stopped. Then it began again — hammer,
hammer, hammer. (p. 154)
Siegfried, the drunken man and the hammer strokes on Antigone’s
coffin contribute to the same idea. Sara’s image of cave-dwellers
(influenced by Plato’s Republic as well as by Sophocles) also recurs,
in Eleanor’s question during the air raid: ‘When shall we live
adventurously, wholly, not like cripples in a cave?’ (p. 239).
That these images should never harden into an explicit dis-
cussion of the links between paternalism, professionalism and
patriotism is a lesson learned from the Antigone itself. Though we
may try (Virginia Woolf says in Three Guineas) to identify the
nae with Mrs Pankhurst, the play will not let itself be thus
reduced:
 TihhegYicarss 1937 193
When the curtain falls we sympathize, it may be noted, even
with Creon himself. This result, to the propagandist un-
desirable, would seem to be due to the fact that Sophocles
(even in a translation) uses freely all the faculties that can be
possessed by a writer; and suggests, therefore, that if we use
art to propagate political opinions, we must force the artist
to clip and cabin his gift to do us a cheap and passing service.}
Virginia Woolf here propagates her opinion that fiction should
have no truck with opinions or propaganda. The form and content
of The Years celebrate this conviction; but the celebration is not
an altogether triumphant one. Her reliance upon images to do
the work of argument has led to the criticism that ‘a deeply felt...
indictment of an historical social order’ is ‘based, quite incon-
gruously, upon fragmentary and trivial details’. Though this
complaint does not allow for Virginia Woolf’s belief that the tech-
nique of the book had to Ze its argument, the ‘fragmentary and
trivial details’ being a necessary form for her indictment of society,
it does nevertheless point to the unease we feel at reading a political
and historical novel which continually shies away from the fac-
tual.
‘A meeting?’ Maggie murmured. ‘Where?’
‘Ina room,’ Sara answered. ‘A pale greenish light. A woman
hanging clothes on a line in the back garden; and someone
went by rattling a stick on the railings.’
‘I see,’ said Maggie. She stitched on quietly.
‘I said to myself,’ Sara resumed, ‘whose heads are those. . .’
she paused.
‘A meeting,’ Maggie interrupted her. ‘What for? What
about?”
“There were pigeons cooing,’ Sara went on. “Take two cvos,
Taffy. Take two coos... Tak... And then a wing darkened
the air, and in came Kitty clothed in starlight; and sat on a
chair.’ (pp. 151-2)
It is in accordance with the novel’s aesthetic and ethical principles,
1 Three Guineas, p. 302, note 39.
2 A. D. Moody, Virginia Woolf (Edinburgh and London, Oliver and Boyd,
1963), P- 73.
194 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
as well as with Sara’s character, that she should reply thus; but the
reader may well want to reiterate Maggie’s questions. The char-
acters’ reluctance to state anything other than impressions becomes,
at length, frustrating. All are tongue-tied.
‘I know,’ she said guiltily. “I haven’t been to Papa lately.
But then there’s always something — ’ She hesitated.
‘Naturally,’ said Mrs Malone, ‘with a man in your father’s
position ...’ Kitty sat silent. They both sat silent. (p. 67)
‘And now,’ she said, leaning back comfortably, ‘tell me all
your news.’
The Colonel, too, lay back in his chair. He pondered for a
moment. What was his news? Nothing occurred to him on the
spur of the moment. [...] While he hesitated, she began.
(p. 99)
Eleanor turned. The others were still arguing.
“You’ll agree with me one of these days,’ Martin was
saying.
“Never! Never!’ said Kitty, slapping her gloves on the table.
She looked very handsome [.. .]
‘Why didn’t you speak, Nell?’ she said, turning on her.
‘Because —’ Eleanor began, ‘I don’t know, she added, rather
feebly. (pp. 144-5)
‘My life ...’ she said aloud, but half to herself.
“Yes?” said Sara, looking up.
Eleanor stopped. She had forgotten her. But there was
somebody listening. Then she must put her thoughts into
order; then she must find words. But no, she thought, I can’t
find words; I can’t tell anybody. (p. 295)
Their difficulty (culminating in Nicholas’s repeatedly incom-
pleted speech at the final party) in answering questions, finishing
sentences, stating beliefs or opinions or giving information, manifests
the unsatisfactory conditions of social intercourse. This realistic
insistence on the characters’ ineffectuality gives the novel a negative,
uncertain quality, arising in part from there not being very much to
set against the tentative, unsatisfactory social relationships. There
 The Years: 1937 195
are a few powerful moments of stillness or solitude, such as Kitty’s
Orlando-like communion with the country, and there is an idea
of harmony and enfranchisement in the ‘Present Day’ party scene,
particularly in Eleanor’s consciousness. But the main emphasis is
on difficulty rather than on achievement, on unease rather than on
contentment. The lack of balance is made more noticeable by the
very length of the book. Accumulated inconclusiveness has a
wearisome effect. Individually, however, there are moving moments
of pathos and uncertainty, as here in the air-raid scene, where the
wistful, romantic, tentative idealism has a markedly Chekhovian
tone:
“About the new world . . .’ she said aloud. ‘D’you think we’re
going to improve?” she asked.
“Yes, yes,’ he said, nodding his head.
He spoke quietly as if he did not wish to rouse Renny who was
reading, or Maggie who was darning, or Sara who was lying
back in her chair half asleep. They seemed to be talking,
privately, together.
‘But how ...’ she began, ‘... how can we improve our-
selves... live more. . .’—she dropped her voice as if she were
afraid of waking sleepers —‘. . . live more naturally .. . better
... How can we?’
‘It is only a question,’ he said — he stopped. He drew himself
closer to her — ‘of learning. The soul .. .” Again he stopped.
“Yes — the soul?’ she prompted him.
“The soul — the whole being,’ he explained. He hollowed
his hand as if to enclose a circle. ‘It wishes to expand; to
adventure; to form — new combinations?’ (p. 238)
MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?
TOOZENBACH: Meaning? ... Look out there, it’s snowing.
What’s the meaning of that?’ (4 pause.)
1 Virginia Woolf expresses repeated concern in the diary about the novel’s
‘immense length’ (AWD, 2 August 1934, p. 221); her revisions are an agonizing
process of ‘perpetual compressing’ (AWD, 4 March 1936, p. 266), and when
the proofs are at last corrected, after great suffering and uncertainty, her
dominant feeling is that she will ‘never write a long book’ again (AWD, to
November 1936, p. 273).
196 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
MASHA: I think a human being has got to have some
faith, or at least he’s got to seek faith. Other-
wise his life will be empty, empty ... How
can you live and not know why the cranes
fly, why the stars shine in the sky! You must
either know why you live, or else. . . nothing
matters ... everything’s just wild grass ...
(A pause.)}
TROFIMOV: I can see happiness, Ania, I can see it
coming...
ANIA: (pensively): The moon’s coming up.
(YEPIHODOV can be heard playing his guitar,
the same melancholy tune as before. The moon
rises. Somewhere in the vicinity of the poplars
VARIA ts looking for ANIA and calling:
‘Ania! Where are you?’)
TROFIMOV: » Yes, the moon is rising. (4 pause.) There it
is—happiness— it’s coming nearer and nearer,
I seem to hear its footsteps. And if we don’t
see it, if we don’t know when it comes, what
does it matter? Other people will see it!’?
The resemblance to Chekhov is more than merely atmospheric.
The characters in The Years are struggling towards some concept
of general happiness, however remote. Their language is uncertain
because they have no secure basis of faith. It is the common pre-
dicament of an unsettled generation. Elizaveta Fen, in her intro-
duction to her translation of Chekhov’s plays, points out
the affinity between the disenchanted Russian of 1880-1900
and the frustrated Englishman of 1919-1939. The two
periods — unhappy interludes between wars and revolutions —
are stamped with spiritual discouragement: the men and
women who lived through them are haunted by the same emo-
tions and thoughts.3
1 Three Sisters (1901), Plays of Anton Chekhov, translated Elizaveta Fen (Har-
mondsworth, Penguin, 1959), p. 282.
2 The Cherry Orchard (1904), ibid. p. 369. 3 Ibid. p. 9g.
 Mheyvears: 4937 197
And Virginia Woolf in her essay ‘The Russian Point of View’
quotes Chekhov in explanation of the peculiar and unexpected
emphases she finds in his stories:
*,.. such a conversation as this between us,’ he says, ‘would
have been unthinkable for our parents. At night they did not
talk, but slept sound; we, our generation, sleep badly, are
restless, but talk a great deal, and are always trying to settle
whether we are right or not.”4
Chekhov’s stories and plays sprang from ‘that restless sleep, that
incessant talking’; but his main interest is not, she says, really in
society nor in psychology:
Is it that he is primarily interested not in the’soul’s relation
with other souls, but with the soul’s relation to health — with
the soul’s relation to goodness? [.. .] The soul is ill; the soul
is cured; the soul is not cured. These are the emphatic points
in his stories.?
Chekhov, she suggests, expresses the spiritual predicament of his
generation in terms verging on the abstract. There is a close analogy
with The Years, where the younger generations struggle to heal
or liberate their souls in a social environment conducive neither to
faith nor to happiness. Though there are considerable numbers of
what she refers to as ‘upper-air scenes’,? in which the social en-
vironment of the characters is portrayed, the true emphasis of the
novel is, as in Chekhoy, more abstract; it is on ‘the soul’s relation
to goodness’,
But the soul and society cannot be simply divided. The search
for goodness necessitates the search for a modus vivendi with other
people, not in solitude. The enemy to goodness, both in the
Victorian home and in the public world, is the voice of egotism
that says ‘I, I, I’. Eleanor, Sara and Nicholas, Martin, Maggie
and Renny, Martin, Norris and Peggy, all want to combat that

1 “The Russian Point of View’ (CE I, p. 241), published in The Common

Reader (London, Hogarth Press, 1925).
2 Ibid.
3 AWD, 16 October 1935, p. 258; 21 November 1935, p. 259.
198 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
enemy, but have no ready-made defences. Possibly the only alter-
native to the domineering ‘I’ is ‘the world without a self’, con-
templated by many of Virginia Woolf’s narrators from the speaker
in ‘The Mark on the Wall’ to Bernard in The Waves. The
characters in The Years wistfully ask themselves: ‘What would the
world be [...] — he was still thinking of the fat man brandishing
his arm — without ‘I’ in it?’ (p. 195). But, as in The Waves, an
entire loss of identity — the ultimate simplification — is rejected
because it is feeble. It is not enough for the soul to merge with
the impersonal world, be lost, and be at peace. The fact that
tyranny and injustice exist implies a need for the personality to
express itself as a positive part of society. But such exercise need
not be the aggressive ‘quack, quack!’! of opinion or tyranny. The
soul need not deceive itself or impose its will, but should mix with
others without losing its own identity, giving and receiving freely
as part of society. Thus Eleanor’s chance reading of Dante’s lines
For by so many the more there are who say ‘ours’
So much the more of good doth each possess. (p. 171)
is at the philosophical centre of the book. ‘Ours’ is the alternative
to ‘I’: egotism is combated, not with the loss of self, but with the
interdependence of souls. The quotation from Dante embodies the
political belief in The Years that the activity of sharing increases
the worth — and indeed the amount — of what is shared. The novel’s
main drawback is that this, its central idea, is not enacted; what is
enacted is the difficulty of saying ‘ours’ instead of ‘I’. But the idea
does grow in strength and urgency towards the end of the book, and
dominates the last section.
‘Present Day’ is not in the least idyllic. The sense of fragmenta-
tion and inadequacy in social relationships persists. The encounters
before the party are unsatisfactory; North eats a squalid meal with
Sara and is puzzled by her emotions and her way of life; Peggy is
irritated by Eleanor and cannot understand her past. Running
through the scenes like an erratic tune are the rival claims of society
and solitude. North, that afternoon, has heard Eleanor’s friends
having ‘Serious talk on abstract subjects’. ‘Was solitude good; was
1 Quack, Quack! is the title of Leonard Woolf’s attack on the political and
intellectual barbarisms of the 1930s (London, Hogarth Press, 1935).
 pioheny ats: 11997 199
society bad?’ (p. 249). At Sara’s, he picks up a book, but it is too
dark to read; instead he quotes Marvell by heart:

Society is all but rude—

To this delicious solitude. (p. 272)
The party indeed seems to show that solitude is the only good. The
generations do not understand each other, and no one can describe
or sum up their own lives and memories to anyone else. Nicholas
will not finish his speech of thanks: ‘This is not a time for making
speeches’ (p. 337). When the caretaker’s children come in to eat
cake, they will say nothing — “The younger generation [. . .] don’t
mean to speak’ (p. 344) — but instead burst into a discordant,
unintelligible song:
Etho passo tanno hai,
Fai donk to tu do,
Mai to, kai to, lai to see
‘Toh doin to tuh do —
That was what it sounded like. Not a word was recognizable.
The distorted sounds rose and sank as if they followed a tune.
They stopped. (p. 345)
The moment is at once grotesque and sinister, emphasizing to the
point of parody the lack of kinship between the isolated members
of the family. The assumption made by Molly and Hugh Gibbs of
a family bond is ridiculous and oppressive. Familial emotions seem
only to be conducive to saying ‘I’ rather than ‘ours’, as North feels
with Maggie:
He looked down at her hands. They were strong hands; fine
hands; but if it were a question, he thought, of watching the
fingers curl slightly, of ‘my’ children, of ‘my’ possessions, it
would be one rip down the belly; or teeth in the soft fur of the
throat. We cannot help each other, he thought, we are all de-
formed. (p. 305)
The family intercourse of the last section seems to reiterate the
novel’s earlier despondency about social relationships. And the
frail alternative to despondency that was found in the lines from
200 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Dante is now reconsidered in ironic terms by North’s sister Peggy,
a doctor, whose bitterness at the suffering that surrounds her leads
her to think of ‘sharing’ in terms of pain, not of good:
Pleasure is increased by sharing it. Does the same hold good of
pain? she mused. Is that the reason why we all talk so much
of ill-health — because sharing things lessens things? Give
pain, give pleasure an outer body, and by increasing the surface
diminish them ... But the thought slipped. He was off telling
his old stories [. . .]
How many people, she wondered, listen? This ‘sharing’,
then, is a bit of a farce. (p. 283)
Peggy, deciding that the sharing of suffering in ‘a world bursting
with misery’ is the only possible kind of sharing, longs for the peace
that comes from not thinking: ‘she would force her mind to become
a blank’ (p. 312). But a moment later she is drawn back from ‘the
world without a self’ through laughter. The others have made a car-
toon of society from a game of pictorial consequences:
On top there was a woman’s head like Queen Alexandra,
with a fuzz of little curls; then a bird’s neck; the body
of a tiger;
and stout elephant’s legs dressed in child’s drawers completed
the picture. (p. 313)
The absurdity of this is different in kind to the absurdity of the
children’s song. The latter is a mystery, something unmanageable;
it suggests that the youngest generation at the party (of a different
class from the Pargiters) are ‘moving about in words not realized’;
they hold some secret and untranslatable clue to the future. The
cartoon is, by contrast, reassuring. It takes the recognizable
emblems of ‘pride, pomp, and circumstance’ and renders them
powerless through a liberating ridicule, which is activated and
enjoyed by a group. This sharing process is one of the important
antidotes to the continuing sense of suffering and frustration found
in the last section. The others are provided by Eleanor and by
North.
Eleanor is at times portrayed from the outside, as an endearingly
optimistic old lady like Mrs Swithin, and at times internally, as she
 The Years: 1937 201
tries to order her memories into a coherent life. From both vantage
pointsshe expressesa tentative idea of happiness drawn from suffering
and confusion themselves. If the solid objects to which she was in
bondage for most of her life have vanished, then there has been some
progress and there will be more, however much the present gen-
eration feels at a loss. That very sense of baflement implies hope.
She shut her hands on the coins she was holding, and again
she was suffused with a feeling of happiness. Was it because
this had survived — this keen sensation (she was waking up).
and the other thing, the solid object — she saw an ink-corroded
walrus —had vanished? She opened her eyes wide. Hereshe was;
alive; in this room, with living people. She saw all the heads in
acircle [.. .]
There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into
her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in
this room, with living people [. . .] This is too short, too
broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves. We’re only
just beginning, she thought, to understand, here and there [...]
She held her hands hollowed; she felt that she wanted to enclose
the present moment; to make it stay; to fill it fuller and fuller,
with the past, the present and the future, until it shone, whole,
bright, deep with understanding. (pp. 342-4)
Eleanor’s meliorism is of the haziest, but it is emphatically con-
cerned with an improvement in mutual, not merely individual,
experience, and is thus aptly summed up by the image of the two
people getting out of a taxi.
These figures are young, and it is a younger member of the
Pargiter family who formulates more coherently Eleanor’s hopes
for ‘another life’. True to the shape of the novel, North is a minor
character, but his thoughts at the party provide us with the con-
clusive summing up of the morality of The Years:
For them it’s all right, he thought; they’ve had their day: but
not for him, not for his generation. For him alife modelledon the
jet (he was watching the bubbles rise), on the spring, ofthe hard
leaping fountain; another life; a different life. Not halls and re-
verberating megaphones; not marching in step after leaders, in
202 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
herds, groups, societies, caparisoned. No; to begin inwardly,
and let the devil take the outer form. [. . .] Not black shirts,
green shirts, red shirts — always posing in the public eye; that’s
all poppycock. Why not down barriers and simplify? But
a world, he thought, that was all one jelly, one mass, would
be a rice pudding world, a white counterpane world. To keep
the emblems and tokens of North Pargiter [. . .] butatthesame
time spread out, make a new ripple in human consciousness, be
the bubble and the stream, the stream and the bubble~ myself
and the world together— he raised his glass. [.. .] But how can
I, he thought[. . .]unless Iknow what’ssolid, what’s true; inmy
life, in other people’s lives? (pp. 329-30)
The uncertain, inconclusive peroration is characteristic, but
deceptive. Ineffectuality is in fact rejected in the passage, and in the
novel. Being passive, giving in, are as much indicted as the
megaphones and black shirts of the aggressors. Another life must
be forged from the moral sense that social interdependence, based
on understanding, is the only means to right action. The con-
clusion that is here implied is more explicitly set out in the con-
clusion of Three Guineas, where the voice of the narrator is
supported by a diversity of corroborating voices, Coleridge,
Rousseau, Whitman and George Sand, all speaking on behalf
of ‘sharing’:
All existences are interdependent, and any human being who
wasto present his own in isolation, without linking it with that
of his fellow creatures, would only be presenting a riddle in
need of solving. His individual existence, by itself, has no
significance or importance whatsoever. It only takes on some
kind of meaning by becoming a fragment of life in general, by
merging with the individuality of all of us, and it is only by
this means that it becomes a part of history.
1 George Sand, Histoire de ma vie (my translation), quoted Three Guineas,
PP- 328-9, note 49.
 9
Between the Acts
1941

leBetween the Acts Virginia Woolf returns to the methods which

suit her. By contrast with The Years, her last novel is lyrical,
carefully patterned and highly controlled. But its range, para-
doxically, is broader. This time the family in its relation to society
is made part of the history of all England: a history which, ‘on a
June day in 1939’, may be without a future. Although Between
the Acts is in the tradition of the kind of English novel, from
Mansfield Park to Howards End, which has a firm sense of English
locality, the members of a family as its main protagonists, and a
humorous tone used for a serious moral purpose, it is an extremely
experimental work. Although it has the air of a delicate social
comedy, it is more disturbing and more inclusive than that de-
scription implies.
The novel opens out in a series of concentric rings, englobing
Pointz Hall at its centre. The house, lying in its hollow, contains
the lives of three generations: Old Bartholemew Oliver and his
widowed sister Lucy Swithin; Bart’s son Giles and Giles’s wife,
Isa; and their two children. On the day of the novel there are two
self-invited visitors to the house, Mrs Manresa, the brash, sed-
uctive ‘child of nature’, who has in tow an ‘unknown young man’,
William Dodge, nervous, civilized and repressed. They act as
catalysts to the emotions of the family. Just outside, on the terrace,
is Miss La Trobe’s world of the pageant, which involves as actors
and audience the ‘gentles and simples’ of the village and of surroun-
ding villages. Pointz Hall is only thirty-five miles from the sea;
203
204 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
beyond that lies a continent on the brink of war. Below all social
and national boundaries lies the earth, frequently imagined by
Mrs Swithin as it was in its inchoate state, before the coming of
language or divisions, before, even, the channelling off of England
from the continent. The sense of a broadening radius is intensified
by contrasts. Giles is tortured by the thought of Europe, ‘bristling
with guns, poised with planes’ (p. 42), while his son George can
dwindle the radius of his own world toa flower blazing in the roots
of a tree. Local gossip about Miss La Trobe’s Russian blood and
Mrs Manresa’s Tasmanian birth stretch the radius to ‘foreign
parts’; at the same time Mrs Sands the cook, who ‘had never in all
her fifty years been over the hill, nor wanted to’ (p. 26), contracts
it.
The setting of Between the Acts reflects the radius of Virginia
Woolf’s life in the years in which she wrote the novel and com-
pleted her biography of Roger Fry. From late 1938 to 1941,
because of the war, Leonard and Virginia spent more and more
time at Monk’s House, living there permanently from October
1939. The last sixty pages of 4 Writer’s Diary (and the last chapter
of Quentin Bell’s biography) show how closely Between the Acts
(meant to reflect ‘the present state of my mind’!) was evolved from
the two major elements of Virginia Woolf’s last years: country life
and the war. Though the first was agreeable, at times even ‘a long
trance of pleasure’,? the threat and then the actuality of the second
dominated it. The stability and pleasant pettiness of the one, the
monstrous ruination of the other, provided an ironic, even nonsen-
sical, contrast, brought out both in the diary and the novel:
Ding dong bell . . . ding dong—why did we settle in a village?
And how deliberately we are digging ourselves in! And at any
moment the guns may go off and explode us.?
At any moment guns could rake that land into furrows. (p. 42)
The feeling of ‘pressure, danger, horror’* grows in her towards the
middle of 1940. She cannot conceive of a future:

1 AWD, 26 April 1938, p. 290. 2 AWD, 29 March 19409, p. 330.

3 AWD, 28 August 1938, p. 301. * AWD, 31 August 1940, p. 345.
 Between the Acts: 1941 205
We pour to the edge of a precipice .. . and then? I can’t con-
ceive that there will be a 27th June 1941.!
“The doom of sudden death hanging over us,’ he said. (p.82)
The idea of personal and national destruction is linked to her sense
as a writer that her audience is being destroyed. The civilization she
writes for is ceasing to exist: ‘No audience. No echo. That’s part
of one’s death.’ The feeling lies behind Miss La Trobe’s struggle
to master her audience.
But, in the second half of 1940, while Between the Acts was
being completed, and before the last recurrence of her mental
illness in March 1941, Virginia Woolf had what Bell calls ‘an
euphoric interval’.* ‘This sense of pleasure also finds its way into
the novel.
A daylike this is almost too — I won’t say happy: but amenable.
The tune varies, from one nice melody to another. All is
played (today) in such a theatre. Hills and fields; I can’t stop
looking; October blooms; brown plough; and the fading and
freshening of the marsh [. . .] And one thing’s ‘pleasant’ after
another: breakfast, writing, walking, tea, bowls, reading,
sweets, bed [. . .] Queer the contraction of life to the village
radius.*
The view repeated in its own way what the tune was saying.
The sun was sinking; the colours were merging; and the view
was saying how after toil men rest from their labours; how
coolness comes; reason prevails; and having unharnessed the
team from the plough, neighbours dig in cottage gardens and
lean over cottage gates. (pp. 95-6)
Though 4 Writer’s Diary always provides an extremely in-
teresting selfconscious analysis of the writing of each novel, never
before has the material and style of the diary been so markedly
analogous to the ‘work in progress’. Though plurality rather than
1 AWD, 27 June (misdated 22 June) 1940, p. 337-
2 AWD, g June 1940, p. 336.
S Bell i pr22 te
4 AWD, 12 October 1940, pp. 354-5.
206 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
individuality (‘ “I” rejected: ““We” substituted’) is the keynote
of Between the Acts, the book is nevertheless very close to Virginia
Woolf’s own life in her last years.
The new relationship between the diary and Between the Acts
suggests that the novel is of a different sort from its predecessors.
And, though obvious comparisons can be made with the episodic
structure of ‘Facob’s Room, the use of a single day in Ars Dalloway,
the pageant of English history in Orlando, and the relationship
between a family group and an.artist in To the Lighthouse, Between
the Acts is a new departure, in being more concerned with language,
history and place than with individuals. It is unprecedented,
particularly, in its use of speech.

The characters in Virginia Woolf’s novels, with the -exception

of The Waves, speak a language which hovers between the natur-
alistic and the symbolic. Terence in the jungle with Rachel
repeating ‘We’re so late — so late — so horribly late’, or Andrew
Ramsay, ‘coming up from the beach’ saying ‘It’s almost too dark to
see’, use phrases which are colloquial and at the same time resonant
with suggested, half-felt meanings. It is usually unclear whether
the characters are aware of the significance that irradiates their
words, or whether they are even speaking out loud. Such ambiguity
allows for the fluid interplay between internal and external states
which is relinquished in The Waves in favour of a formaliza-
tion of selfconsciousness. The characters in The Waves, how-
ever colloquial their ‘speech’ may be at times, are in full possession
of the symbolic value of their statements. One is not tempted to
read their speeches naturalistically; it is clear that the verb ‘said’
is a formula which does not indicate actual speech.
In reaction against that linguistic restriction to significant, inner
experience, The Years provides colloquial speech in a realistic
context. As in the novels preceding The Waves, the speech fre-
quently suggests a meaning beyond the words, But the methods
whereby this is achieved are now more diffuse, as befits a novel
which deals with fragmentation and frustration. There is not the
economy of dialogue that there was in To the Lighthouse. People
talk a great deal, but their conversations are tangential and random,
1 AWD, 26 April 1938, p. 289.
 Between the Acts: 1941 207
they speak at cross-purposes or in unfinished sentences. Their
language is thin and conventional, except for Sara, who speaks in a
rambling, poetic style as an indication of how different she is from
the others and how much at odds with the real world.
Like The Years, Between the Acts incorporates a longing for a
more lyrical and impersonal existence than that provided by the
chaotic and destructive reality of the thirties. But the scrappiness of
modern life is now embodied in a condensed, unnaturalistic nar-
rative which largely consists of speech. All the characters, but parti-
cularly Isa, speak a language which in The Years was restricted to
Sara, the misfit. Their speech fuses the lyrical and the colloquial;
every word and phrase seems to ring with significance. Because the
burden of meaning is almost entirely carried by speech — either
that of individuals, or of the characters in the play, or of the
‘voices’ of the audience — Between the Acts comes to be a book
about speech, considering the history of a people as created and
sustained by the spoken word, and adducingits present decay through
the state of language. But, side by side with the emphasis on speech,
words and names, a suggestion is found which is summed up by
Bartholemew’s question: “Thoughts without words, [...] Can
that be?’ (p. 43). As alternatives to the domination of speech, the
book enters into domains of speechlessness — fishponds and faith —
which undermine the emphasis of the novel’s last words, “They
spoke.’
The language of English speech has evolved, through history,
from primeval incoherence, like the fishpond in the grounds of
Pointz Hall, created where ‘water, for hundreds of years, had
silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep
over a black cushion of mud’ (p. 35). People are like the fish,
silent and uncaught below the surface, in the speechless areas of the
personality, but occasionally rising to the surface for bait. At the
surface they must communicate; so relationships are summed up by
images of fishing (pp. 19, 38), and Isa’s bondage to the routine of
domesticity, by her ringing up to order the fish.
In the whole structure of the book, language and speech seem to
be patterned in ever-widening circles over the surface of silence.
The most private, inner speech, nearest to the heart of silence, is
Isa’s poetry, which, as Daiches points out, provides ‘in part, the
208 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
probability for the lyrical mood of the book’.* Isa’s poems are esca-
pist in the same vein as Katharine Hilbery’s fantasy lifeand Rhoda’s
imaginary journeys. They yearn towards another world, of moors
and moonlight, where there will be freedom and truth: “To fly
away, from night and day, and issue where — no partings are — but
eye meets eye’ (p. 62). As the book progresses, Isa’s longing for
escape becomes increasingly desperate. Her earlier need for water
becomes a desire for drowning (pp. 75-6); she imagines herself as a
donkey burdened by the past,.ordered to go on ‘till your heels
blister and your hoofs crack’ (p. 109). But her world of escape from
this bondage itself becomes a place of terror:
To issue where? In some harvestless dim field where no even-
ing lets fall her mantle; norsun rises. All’s equal there. Unblow-
ing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the
mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings. (p. 109)
Heaven is changeless, we are told elsewhere in the novel (p. 121).
But for the modern consciousness there is nothing to choose
between heaven and hell. Isa’s longing for a world without change,
society or the complications of language seems a dreary, passive
form of retreat from the harsh world. Her lyricism is joyless as well
as incommunicable. It is symptomatic of the inhibitions and frus-
trations of the characters that Isa ‘writes her poetry in a book
bound like an account book lest Giles might suspect’ (p. 39), and
that she is embarrassed at being overheard by William Dodge. But
her sense of isolation is ironic; she is not as alone as she thinks. Her
speech is linked with that of the other characters, as well as with
the language of the play. Giles, William, Bartholemew, even
Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, also voice their inward thoughts in scraps
of rhyme. And their conversations, though on such apparently
trivial subjects as the weather, the distance of Pointz Hall from the
sea, or the two pictures on the dining-room walls, are lyrical and
resonant, partly because of a stong sense of rhythm which turns
conversations into recurring tunes, partly because of the emphasis
given to simple phrases:
* David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (London, Nicholson and Watson, Editions
Poetry, 1945), p. 116.
 Between the Acts: 1941 209
“Are we really,’ she said, turning round, ‘a hundred miles
from the sea?’
“Thirty-five only,’ her father-in-law said, as if he had
whipped a tape measure from his pocketand measuredit exactly.
“It seems more,’ said Isa. ‘It seems from the terrace as if the
land went on for ever and ever.’
‘Once there was no sea,’ said Mrs Swithin. ‘No sea at all
between us and the continent.’ (p. 25)

At times this lyrical, significant tone is remarked on as though it is

consciously created by the speakers.

“The nursery,’ said Mrs Swithin.

Words raised themselves and became symbolical. “The cradle
of our race,’ she seemed to say. (p. 54)

As Mrs Swithin is aware, everyday speech is significant, even if

it dwells on insignificant topics, because it is silted up with the
detritus of the past. English people have in common an inherited
language of literature and folklore which is, consciously or uncon-
sciously, always on their lips. Old Bart remarks that ‘as a race’ we do
not have the same intimate, unconscious familiarity with our
painters as with our poets. His point is ironically illustrated by a
series of incompetent misquotations from Shakespeare and Keats by
Mrs Manresa, Isa and William. Scraps and fragments are all that
come to mind. But there is still truth in Mrs Swithin’s reference to
the books: ‘Here are the poets from whom we descend by way of
the mind’ (p. 52). Scrappily though the modern English mind
may remember, it nevertheless contains something of a literary
heritage. Bart, remembering his mother’s gift of a Byron, actualizes
his inheritance with two quotations. Even Giles, the most un-
literary of men, has bits of Lear and Cowper in his mind and every-
one in the village audience has a rough idea of Miss La Trobe’s
literary models. English people have a common consciousness
which is partly made up of their literary history and partly of the
folk traditions which imbue English speech with proverbs, catch-
phrases, nursery jingles, old tales and legends. The mother of
Bart and Lucy (almost the personification of Old England) gave
210 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Byron to her son; to her daughter, old sayings and a consciousness
of English words, expressed in her two injunctions: ‘Don’t stand
gaping, Lucy, or the wind’ll change’ (p. 11) and ‘Never play on
people’s names’ (p. 28). Son and daughter argue for facts against
faith. Mrs Swithin asks for the origin of “Touch wood’; Bart
replies ‘Superstition’ (p. 22). He will not hear her when she asks
the name of the man who, ‘hearing the waves in the middle of the
night’, ‘saddled a horse and rode to the sea’ (p. 24), though he nods
in approval when she comes up with a ‘fact’ about lobsters. But
though they are irreconcilable on the question of faith, they share a
verbal heritage. Though Bart is scathing about the servants’ need
for a ghost story, and teases Mrs Manresa for rhyming over her
cherry stones, it is he who repeats the old stories about the ‘great
eighteenth-century winter’ (p. 10) at Pointz Hall, and who alludes
to the fable of ‘the donkey who couldn’t choose between hay and
turnips and so starved’ (p. 46). The folk language is general; it may
not necessarily be Mrs Swithin who is heard wondering in the audi-
ence ‘What’s the origin [. . .] of the expression “‘with a flea in his
ear”’?’ (p. 88). Isa incorporates folk legends and nursery rhymes into
her stories, Giles and Mrs Manresa find a point of verbal contact in
“Pop goes the Weasel’ (p. 100). Folk traditions characterize the
smallest details of rural life: “There was another name in the
village for nettle-rash’ (p. 49).
But this folk language is in decay. No one can remember whole
quotations, theorigins of phrases or the characters in the old stories.
‘Through repetition, the old rhymes have become senseless or irri-
tating. It is only Mrs Swithin who tries to sanctify them with
understanding, chanting ‘an old child’s nursery rhyme to help a
child’ (p. 54). Asin The Waste Land, the fragmentation of modern
consciousness is very largely conveyed by the use of these residual
scraps (like the scraps of tunes in The Years) from a more dignified
and literary past. The play itself incorporates this decay into its
subject matter. It is a medley of literary and folk allusions, pro-
viding the audience with a parody of English literary history. In-
corporated in its crude pastiche are scraps of folk tunes and nursery
rhymes (‘I’m off with the raggle-taggle gipsies, O!’) and fragments
of genuine literary material (‘Call for the robin redbreast and the
wren’), culminating in the final ‘uproar’, where Stevenson, Tenny-
 Between the Acts: 1941 211
son, Dante, Shakespeare and ‘Anon’ are jangled together with Miss
La Trobe’s own inventions.
Like the successive historical scenes in Orlando, the play shows
the development of the language from highly coloured dramatic
Elizabethan verse, to the elegance of eighteenth-century lyrics and
prose, to the sentimental or bombastic clichés of Victorianism, to the
cacophany and incoherence of the present. As each of its styles
throws off the last, so each of its scenes shows the younger generation
throwing off the older. Within the pastiche there are some striking
moments of lyricism:
What pleasure lies in dreaming
When blue and green’s the day?
Now cast your cares behind you.
Night passes: here is Day. (p. 89)
of vitality:
Yet to think on’t — how we hid in the dairy the day the cat
jumped. And read romances under the holly tree. La! how I
cried when the Duke left poor Polly... And my Aunt found
me with eyes like red jellies. ‘What stung, niece?’ says she.
And cried ‘Quick Deb, the blue bag.’ (p. 97)
and of humour:
My mother with her last breath charged me to give this ring
only to one to whom a lifetime in the African desert among
the heathens would be — ELEANOR (taking the ring) Perfect
happiness! (p. 116)
But as a whole the play seems to be exaggeratedly literary, and too
long. These failings in the play are necessary, though they weaken
the novel. If Miss La Trobe is to communicate the literary history
of England to an English audience, she has to exaggerate or they
won’t understand her. Representation involves distortion, as her
last scene with the mirrors makes clear. And, if the play is to com-
municate a sense of history, it must also communicate a sense of
duration. It fills the main part of this short novel, and like the his-
tory of England, it seems, until its abrupt closure, to be going on for
ever. Any impatience the reader may be tempted to feel is controlled
212 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
by Mrs Manresa’s comically philistine reaction, which the reader
will not be willing to share:
Mrs Manresa looked at her programme. It would take till
midnight unless they skipped. Early Briton; Plantagenets;
Tudors; Stuarts — she ticked them off, but probably she had
forgotten a reign or two. (p. 61)
The long process of history is imaged in the play by the dis-
integration of historic forms of language into the ‘jangle and the
din’ of the modern age, followed by the ‘megaphonticanonymous
loudspeaking’ voice (p. 130) which tells the audience that it con-
sists of ‘scraps, orts and fragments’. A loss of dignity, culminating
in the Rey. Streatfield’s peroration, has been traced. It is a quality
which is carefully made away with in the novel. The heroine makes
her first appearence looking like a bolster; romantic emotions —
unrequited love, the hatred of war — are rendered absurd; and one
has only to compare Mrs Swithin to Mrs Ramsay or Miss La
Trobe to Lily Briscoe to see that the characters who embody
sympathetic or admirable states of mind have become ridiculous or
grotesque.
The breakdown of dignity is neatly summed up by the use of
nicknames. Mrs Swithin, Cindy to her brother, is known variously
to the servants as ‘Batty’ (p. 11), ‘Old Flimsy’ (pp. 23, 107), ‘Old
Swithin’ (p. 23) and ‘old Mother Swithin’ (p. 28). She knows and
accepts this — ‘Old Flimsy — that’s me’ (p. 46) — just as Miss La
‘Trobe knows that the villagers call her ‘Bossy’ (p. 147). Barthole-
mew Oliver, Bart to his sister, had his drawing-room name, “The
Master’, changed to ‘Bartie’ downstairs; likewise the cat, Sung- Yen,
undergoes ‘a kitchen change into Sunny’ (p. 27).
The recurrent nicknames partly serve as brilliant illustrations of
the novel’s social climate. The villagers have a subtle and long-
standing attitude to the gentry, which accepts class divisions (‘It’s
all my eye about democracy’ (p. 75) Mrs Manresa concludes),
resents outsiders (Miss La Trobe is ‘an outcast’ (p. 147)), and does
not spare eccentricities. The attitude, as Virginia Woolf explains,
is a kind of snobbery, part of the chauvinism which prevents Mrs
Sands from ever going ‘over the hill’ and makes the servants want
to ‘have their ghost’.
 Between the Acts: 1941 28
Snobs they were; long enough stationed that is in that one
corner of the world to have taken indelibly the print of some
three hundred years of customary behaviour. So they laughed;
but respected. (pp. 23-4)
As this passage shows, the servants’ use of nicknames makes a
historical point as well as a social one. The downgrading of names
reflects not only the relationship between gentry and villagers, but
also the erosion of the grandeur of the past. This is emphasized in
the constant iteration all through the play of the villagers’ real
names side by side with the characters they represent: ‘England am I,
Phyllis Jones continued’ (p. 58); ‘From behind the bushes issued
Queen Elizabeth — Eliza Clark, licenced to sell tobacco’ (p. 62).
As the play’s time span comes within living memory, the absurd
dichotomy between the villagers and the characters they represent
lessens: Budge (the publican) is the right name for a Victorian
policeman. Two points are being made at once. The continuity of
English history is established: the figures of the past live again in
the local village people. But the village names also seem ridiculous
by contrast with the historic figures, suggesting the inferiority of
modern times.
A close analogy is drawn between the downgrading of names and
the decline in dignity of the house:
The house before the Reformation, like so many houses in that
neighbourhood, had a chapel; and the chapel had become a
larder, changing, like the cat’s name, as religion changed.
(p. 27)
Pointz Hall, like all of England, takes its character from the distant
past. The roots of the pear tree go under the flags (p. 109), the
garden is said to be 500 years old (p. 106), the view from the garden
(as described in ‘Figgis’s Guide Book, 1833”) has not changed.
As Mrs Swithin remarks, ‘That’s what makes a view so sad [...]
and so beautiful. It’ll be there [. ..] when we’re not’ (p. 41). The
house has its accumulated legends and trophies: the concealed
passage, the doomed lady’s ghost, the watch ‘that had stopped a
bullet on the field of Waterloo’ (p. 10). But Pointz Hall is not what
it was. It has been sold to a family which does not reach very far
214 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
back into the country’s history (unlike the Swithin family, Lucy’s
by marriage, who ‘were there before the Conquest’ (p. 26)):
The Olivers, who had bought the place something over a
century ago, had no connexion with the Warings, the Elveys,
the Mannerings, or the Burnets; the old families who had all
intermarried, and lay in their deaths intertwisted, like the
ivy roots, beneath the churchyard wall. (p. 9)
‘The unfinished wing has never been completed; the chapel is now
the larder; the bedroom furnishings are ugly mid-Victorian things
from Maples, and the library is full of ‘shilling shockers that week-
enders had dropped’ (p. 16).
The change for the meaner is general. The cesspool is to overlay
the original Roman road; the festal pageant is for the installation of
electric lighting in the church. The communal voice of the villagers
harks not only on the war, poised to destroy these fragments of
civilization, but also on the new bungalows and the impact of ‘the
motor bike, the motor bus, and the movies’ (p. 57). Family names
sum up the decline. Some of the local names are in ‘the Doomsday
Book’ (p. 26):
Had Figgis been there in person and called a roll call, half the
ladies and gentlemen present would have said: ‘4dsum; I’m
here, in place of my grandfather or great-grandfather,’ as the
case might be. (p. 56)
but others had been wiped out, as in the case of
the great lady in the bath chair, the lady whose marriage with
the local peer had obliterated in his trashy title a name that
had been a name when there were brambles and briars where
the Church now stood. (p. 69)
Names and speech thus reveal the tension of modern life between
enduring tradition and impoverishing encroachments. And the
encroachments themselves take the form of language. Against the
fragmented ‘historical’ language that remains in old family names,
old sayings, old plays and poems, is thrust the language of the mod-
ern age, apt for a ‘book-shy’ (and ‘gun-shy’) generation. Isa and her
 Between the Acts: 1941 215
contemporaries can, she feels, no longer use their own literary and
linguistic heritage:
For her generation the newspaper was a book; and, as her
father-in-law dropped The Times, she took itand read: ‘A horse
with a green tail...’ which was fantastic. Next, “The guard
at Whitehall . . .. which was romantic and then, building word
upon word she read: “The troopers told her the horse had a
green tail; but she found it was just an ordinary horse. And
they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown
upon a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her
clothing and she screamed and hit him about the face...’
That was real. (pp. 18-19)
It is not a fairy story after all, but the horrific reality with which
each day the newspaper ‘obliterates the day before’ (p. 150).
Between the Acts deals with the appallingly destructive impact of war
on civilization in a characteristically inhibited and tangential way.
Violence is explicitly contained in the few references to the war, in
this account of the rape, and in Giles’s trampling on the snake and
the toad, a gesture all the more brutal for its isolation and its point-
lessness. But more usually the idea of destruction is channelled into
an emphasis on the destruction of language. It is appropriate,
though, that when Isa picks up the newspaper she reads of some-
thing horrific: it is all that the modern media has to speak of: When
it speaks of hope, it speaks of it in the sterile language of the age.
Machines are its Messianic promise:
Homes will be built. Each flat with its refrigerator, in the
crannied wall. Each of us a free man; plates washed by mach-
inery; not an aeroplane to vex us; all liberated; made whole...
(p. 127)
The communal voice of the audience, which periodically takes
over from individuals or from the narrator, is filled with the arid
trivia of modern language, culled from newspapers and radio.
Temporarily, the play lures them towards a historic language,
particularly during the Victorian scenes, which are close enough
for them to remember. Here the communal voice changes: street-
cries and old stories seep in. But after the play is over, the language
216 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
of the time recurs, and any glimpses of the past are immediately
overborne:
Then those voices from the bushes... Oracles? You’re
referring to the Greeks? Were the Oracles, if I’m not being
irreverent, a foretaste of our own religion? Which is what?
. . Crepe soles? That’s so sensible . . . They last much longer
and protect the feet .. . (p. 138)
But the scraps and fragments of modern speech are not the
outermost ring in the linguistic structure of the novel. Encircling
all is the language of the narrator, whose speech is by turns decora-
tive, witty and lyrical. It abounds in crisp, formal figures of speech
— the birds singing ‘like so many choir boys attacking an iced cake’
(p. 10), the nurses rolling words ‘like sweets on their tongues’
(p. 11), the pigeons “as ornate as ladies in ball dresses’ (p. 53) —
which (rather like the language of the interludes in The Waves)
humanize the natural world and impose a sense of order and dec-
orum on experience. These decorations are part of the humour of
the narrative frame, which constantly deflects the book’s intense
sadness into an ironic tone, very largely created by the narrator’s
fluid participation in her characters’ trains of thought and turns of
phrase. It is the technique of To the Lighthouse, abandoned in The
Waves and now masterfully reinstating the humour which that
novel lacked.
Mrs Manresa was nettled. What for had she squatted on the
floor then? Were her charms fading? Both were gone. But,
woman of action as she was, deserted by the male sex, she was
not going to suffer tortures of boredom from the refeened old
lady. Upshescrambled, putting her handsto hairasif it were high
time that she went too, though it was perfectly tidy. Cobbet in
his corner saw through her little game. He had known
human nature in the East. It was the same in the West.
(pp. 79-80)
The man was an ancestor. He had a name. He held the rein
in his hand. He had said to the painter:
‘If you want my likeness, dang it sir, take it when the leaves
are on the trees.’ There were leaves on the trees. He had said:
 Between the Acts: 1941 217
‘Ain’t there room for Colin as well as Buster?’ Colin was his
famous hound. But there was only room for Buster. It was, he
seemed to say, addressing the company not the painter, a
damned shame to leave out Colin whom he wished buried at
his feet, in the same grave, about 17503 but that skunk the
Reverend Whatshisname wouldn’t allow it. (pp. 29-30)
The passage leads on to a change in the narrator’s diction for the
lyrical evocation of the empty room where the pictures hang.
The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a
vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold,
holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. (p. 30)
Every so often the squalor, indignity or frustration of the pro-
tagonists is encircled by such passages of narrative, which are point-
edly evocative and romantic, as though standing in defiance of the
fragmentation of language which the rest of the novel describes.
By contrast with Miss La Trobe’s cumbersome pastiche and Isa’s
affected, inhibited rhymings, the narrator’s lyricism is fluent and
masterful. It operates in direct contrast to the language of the media,
of, for example, the weather forecast:

‘The forecast,’ said Mr Oliver [...] ‘says: Variable winds;

fair average temperature; rain at times.’ [...] Certainly the
weather was variable. It was green in the garden; grey the
next. Here came the sun — an illimitable rapture of joy, em-
bracing every flower, every leaf. Then in compassion it with-
drew, covering its face, as if it forebore to look on human
suffering. (p. 20)
And then a breeze blew and all the muslin blinds fluttered out,
as if some majestic goddess, rising from her throne among her
peers, had tossed her amber-coloured raiment, and the other
gods, seeing her rise and go, laughed, and their laughter floated
her on. (p. 55)
No one had seen the cloud coming. There it was, black,
swollen, on top of them. Down it poured like all the people in
the world weeping. Tears. Tears. ‘Tears. (p. 125)
218 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
Such passages are characterized by their sanctification of the
universe with mystical presences. The lyrical language of the
narrator, which comes so hard to the characters within the novel,
is used to evoke a sense of faith. Thus the outer ring of language
acts as an implied antidote to the sense of dereliction which is
central to the book, and which is found most intensely in Isa’s
poems.

The word that characterizes Isa to herself is ‘abortive’, and it is

a word which echoes through the book, imaged by the ‘mon-
strous inversion’ of birth (p. 72), the snake with the toad in its
mouth. Relationships, social intercourse, art, all are abortive. Miss
La Trobe’s sense of failure, which almost always stays with her, is
analogous to the failure that accompanies all attempts to communi-
cate or harmonize. The action of the book is itself abortive. There
are no developments in relationships; any perceptions aroused by
the play are lost and dispersed by the day’s end; Giles and Isa go on
re-enacting their conflict of love and hate. Such pointless repetition
is the condition of modern man; individual unhappiness is de-
scriptive of a general experience. (Hence the peculiar fact that,
though the relationships are powerfully presented, the character-
ization of individuals is rather sketchy.) The social and familial
organization of the novel suggests a destructive tension between
over-closeness and lack of communication. The unhappy married
pair are ‘pegged down’ and ‘pressed flat’ by their situation, Giles
tied to work for which he has no love or aptitude, Isa to a domes-
ticity which she resents. They are only alone at nightfall, spending
their days exposed to the family group, which in its turn has
continually to accommodate to social intrusions. Individuals are
given up to the group, and have to struggle for some sort of private
integrity and sense of meaning within a press of people, which
seems to increase in oppressiveness as the family group is merged
with the larger, more formalized group of the village audience.!
} Virginia Woolf had been reading ‘Freud on Groups’ (AWD, 18 December
1939, P. 322), where it is pointed out that the origins of the group personality
are to be found in the more circumscribed family circle (Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego, translated James Strachey (London and Vienna,
International Psycho-Analytical Library, 1922), p. 3).
 Between the Acts: 1941 219
The characters struggle constantly but ineffectually to find free
and private ways to communicate. William Dodge is taken by Mrs
Swithin to look at the house and by Isa to look at the greenhouse,
but they do not find words for what they want to say to each other.
Giles unsuccessfully tries to vindicate his manhood to himself by
disappearing with Mrs Manresa. But for most of the time they are
imprisoned in the social sphere which prevents their passions from
finding release through expression:
He said (without words) ‘I’m damnably unhappy.’
‘So am I,’ Dodge echoed.
‘And I too,’ Isa thought.
They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a
spectacle. Nothing happened. (p. 123)
Their situation is none the less desperate because it exists within a
pleasantly rural, genteel, traditional social occasion. As in Jane
Austen’s novels, personal submission to the small social round can
be horrific. And, in Jane Austen’s words, it is the ‘little zigzags of
embarrassment”! which characterize the horror of social bondage.
The hostility of the social world to its misfits colours the
existence of the novel’s two homosexuals, Miss La Trobe and
William Dodge, who deal with their pariahdom in opposite ways,
the first by aggression and activity, the second by retreat into a
nervous reserve. But all the characters, not only the obvious cases
of unadaptability, are struggling with the necessities of social
behaviour. This is why Mrs Manresa, though predatory and not
quite honest, still shows up well for her calculated defiance of con-
ventions. However much of an affectation, it is still a virtue in her
because of its liberating effect:
for everybody felt, directly she spoke, ‘She’s said it, she’s done
it, not I,’ and could take advantage of the breach of decorum,
of the fresh air that blew in, to follow like leaping dolphins in
the wake of an ice-breaking vessel. (p. 33)
Mrs Manresa ‘feels free’ because she is in fact the most well-
adjusted character in the novel. She can afford to flout conventions,

1 Jane Austen, Emma (1816), Ch. 15.

220 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
not being threatened by them. Her counterpart in this respect is
Mrs Swithin, whose mind is not tied down by social forms. But the
other characters are painfully imprisoned. As a result, there are
frequent moments in which some form of social embarrassment
acts as an indication of inner suffering or unwillingness to adapt.
The first scene, in which all the themes of the novel are densely
woven, contains one such uncomfortable moment. Mrs Haines,
aware of the emotion ‘circling’ her husband and Isa, rises to leave,
extending her hand.
But Isa, though she should have risen at the same moment that
Mrs Haines rose, sat on. Mrs Haines glared at her out of
goose-like eyes, gobbling, ‘Please, Mrs Giles Oliver, do me
the kindness to recognize my existence ...’ which she was
forced to do, rising at last from her chair [. . .] (p. 9)
Isa refuses here to embark on the kind of social rescue operation
with which, the next day after lunch, she covers up for her husband,
whose horror at his situation is beginning to show itself. To distract
attention, Isa ‘half purposely’ knocks over a coffee cup (p. 46), an
acceptable, manageable social blunder. (William Dodge, delicately
‘managing’, catches the cup.) But social embarrassment can take
less obvious forms. A case in point is Bartholemew’s game with
George. The old man means to amuse, not to frighten; the boy,
startled, his private world destroyed by the intrusion, refuses to
‘play along’. It is analogous to Isa’s refusal to ‘play along’ with
Mrs Haines. Mother and child both cause dismay by their refusal
to share the other person’s terms of reference. Such inopportune
misunderstandings are frequent. Isa asks William to look at the
greenhouse, but not when he wants her to; Mrs Swithin’s failure
to communicate with Miss La Trobe is embarrassing until Mrs
Swithin breaks through the impasse; Miss La Trobe is not there
when she should be being thanked by the vicar. Only Mrs Manresa
is oblivious and unembarrassed when her attempts to communicate
misfire:
‘Scenes from English history,’ Mrs Manresa explained to Mrs
Swithin. She spoke in a loud cheerful voice, as if the old lady
were deaf. ‘Merry England.’ (p. 61)
 Between the Acts: 1941 221
The discomfort of social bondage is at its height in the extra-
ordinarily horrifying scene in the garden after lunch, which includes
Isa’s knocking over of the cup. The conversation touches lightly
on the pageant; but the real, inexpressible conversation concerns
Giles’s racked preoccupation with the war, his resentment of
William Dodge, and Isa’s awareness of all his feelings. The view
is the same as it has always been, the weather is hot, and there is
nothing for them to do but to look at the view and wait for the
pageant:
They stared at the view, as if something might happen in one
of those fields to relieve them of the intolerable burden of
sitting silent, doing nothing, in company. Their minds and
bodies were too close, yet not close enough. We aren’t free,
each one of them felt separately to feel or think separately, nor
yet to fall asleep. We’re too close; but not close enough. So
they fidgeted.
.-] The flat fields glared green yellow, blue yellow, red
yellow, then blue again. The repetition was senseless, hideous,
stupefying. (pp. 50-1)
It is hell on earth: no escape, no end, no privacy and no communica-
tion. Mrs Swithin can escape, taking William with her; Barthole-
mew, his intoxication with Mrs Manresa wearing off, retreats into
sleep. The scene does end, but it is stupefying while it lasts, a
powerful example of the way in which this novel builds a complex
pattern of relationships, and the sense of duration and intensity,
out of short, fragmented scenes.
The imprisoned group watching the view and drinking coffee
anticipates the predicament of Miss La Trobe’s audience. A
theatrical experience is the perfect means of exhibiting extreme
forms of social embarrassment. The discomfort which is limited to
individuals when one person refuses to shake hands with another is
kin to that felt by a large group when something goes wrong on
stage, or when nothing happens at all and ‘Illusion fails’. It is a
grotesque version of the many delicate shades of misunderstanding
and embarrassment in social life: grotesque, because the spectators,
instead of acting naturally and unconsciously as social beings, are
artificially made to participate as a group. As long as the illusion
222 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
works, they lose their selfconsciousness and are passive and willingly
convinced: “The audience sat gazing; and beheld gently and
approvingly, [. . .] for it seemed inevitable, a box tree in a green tub
[...]’ (p. 96). But as soon as things don’t ‘seem inevitable’ they are
made aware of themselves, and embarrassed. ‘All their nerves were
on edge. They sat exposed [. . .] They were suspended, without be-
ing, in limbo’ (p. 124). Miss La Trobe is herself embarrassed — it is
like death for her — by her failure to convince, which is an extreme
form of a social failure to communicate. She wants to discomfort
her audience, not through the inadequacy of her art, but through
the triumph of illusion. This she finally succeeds in doing by
‘holding the mirror up to nature’ and forcing the audience to
recognize its own hapless participation in what it has been watching
—a play about the history and character of England. The spectators
(apart from Mrs Manresa) are embarrassed at having to stare at
themselves in public. The experience is horrible; reality seems gro-
tesque. But their embarrassment at this point is useful, unlike that
which resulted from the failure of illusion. Miss La Trobe’s efforts
to make them see the truth have succeeded — though only by the
crudest and most haphazard of means.
All Miss La Trobe’s moments of theatrical success are fortuitous,
and due to nature and music rather than to speech. It is the bellow-
ing of cows and the downpour of rain which ‘take her part’ in
moving the audience and concentrating its wandering attention,
and the tunes of the gramophone which determine the spectators’
moods, lamenting for their dispersal, but also lulling them, keeping
them together, unifying them to be ‘all comprehending; all en-
listed’ (p. 131).
The comparative ineffectuality of language is of central im-
portance, not only in the context of the play. So far two areas of
the novel’s concern with language have appeared: the dereliction
of the modern age, where language is in decay, and the bondage of
social intercourse, where language is necessary but inadequate. But
there are areas of human experience in which language is redundant.
In the novel’s subtly organized short sections, an alternation is
noticeable between scenes of communication and scenes of silence.
Midway through the lunch party, for example, the scullery maid
communes in silence with the ghost of the lady in the lilypond.
 Between the Acts: 1941 223
Once the play takes over the main part of the book, the alternation
is between the acts and the intervals. After the play, the pattern is
to some extent continued (Miss La Trobe’s solitary musings con-
trasting with the leavetakings of the audience) until the final
scene, which impressively welds silence and communication
together.
Some of the silent scenes show places without people, lovely but
sad (like the deserted house in To the Lighthouse) because unseen.
‘They suggest a world lying just behind the populated world we
know, like the ‘other play which always lay behind the play she
had just written’ (p. 48). The empty dining-room with its two
pictures, ‘a shell, singing of what was before time was’ (p. 30); the
nursery, ‘a ship deserted by its crew’ (p. 54); the barn, ‘empty’, but
pullulating with animal life (p. 73): all conserve a secret tranquillity
which the entrance of people destroys. The dining-room’s two
pictures sum up the two worlds of speech and silence: the ‘talk
producing’ ancestor is contrasted with the ‘picture’, the lady who
‘led them down green glades into the heart of silence’ (p. 39).
But people are necessary, however attractive the heart of silence
is made to seem.
The fire greyed, then glowed, and the tortoiseshell butterfly
beat on the lower pane of the window; beat, beat, beat;
repeating that if no human being ever came, never, never,
never, the books would be mouldy, the fire out and the
tortoiseshell butterfly dead on the pane. (p. 16)
The uninhabited world behind the world of speech and personality
is fearsome. Its presence presses in on the characters so that they are
felt to be threatened with the potential return of a prehistoric con-
dition in which the earth would be given back to swamp and jungle
and the animals. The effect is partly produced by the prehistoric
images which fill Mrs Swithin’s mind from her reading, and partly
by the constant use of animal metaphors for the characters, par-
ticularly noticeable in the sinister identification of Bartholemew
with his dog Sohrab. In no case are these comfortable images: on
Mrs Swithin’s forehead is ‘a blue vein wriggling like a blue worm’
(p. 55); the lady married to a local peer ‘resembled an uncouth,
nocturnal animal, now nearly extinct’ (p. 69). By the end, when
224 The Novels of Virginia Woolf
the family is seen as a circle of insects, and Giles and Isa’s relation-
ship is compared to the dog-fox fighting with the vixen in the fields
of night — ‘the night before roads were made, or houses’ (p. 152) —
the effect has become terrifying. The destruction of England is
imminent; perhaps this is the only future imaginable, a return to
prehistory with all civilization wiped out. But, though civilization
as it stands is oppressive, trivial and decaying, the alternative of a
speechless animal life is not altogether enticing. Some creative and
harmonizing personality is still required; as ever, human attempts
to find momentary order over chaos must still continue
and now,
Under conditions that seem unpropitious.*
They are made by the narrator in her establishing of a lyric
frame around a story of dereliction; they are made by Miss La
Trobe in her painful and ungainly struggle to be true to the frag-
mentary nature of life, while giving it coherence; and they are
made, ridiculously, but with tenderness and grace, by Mrs Swithin.
Mrs Swithin’s unifying vision of life is not at the centre of the
novel; it is one of many fragments. Nor is it presented with any
grandeur or dignity. She is laughed at because she is a ridiculously
eccentric figure, she has her weaknesses (her insensitivity to Miss
La Trobe after the play, for example), and she has weighed herself
down with an allegiance to crucifixes and clergymen which the
other characters find difficult to understand. Her vision is at every
point undermined by her brother’s elevation of reason and fact:
their conflict is irreconcilable, yet it is the conflict of lovers, follow-
ing the mould of the Ramsays’ relationship (even to their conversa-
tion about the weather). Rather like Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Swithin is
at times a sinister character. Her appetite for the prehistoric world
is alarming; she enters ‘carrying a hammer’ (p. 19) while Isa is
reading about the rape; she lures William Dodge into the bedrooms
of the house almost like a siren; at the end, after staring eerily into
the picture of Venice in search of ‘a little figure — woman, veiled;
or a man?’ ‘in the hood of the gondola’ she returns into the room
‘like a tragic figure from another play’ (p. 149). She is partly a
figure of doom, the prophetess of the destruction of civilization and
1 T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, V (1940), Four Quartets.
 Between the Acts: 1941 225
its return to ‘a swamp’. For all this, she is heroic, particularly in
i
her resistance to Bart, and her vision of unity is presented in a
sympathetic tone, all the more convincing because it stems from
characters within the novel.
She was off, they guessed, on a circular tour of the imagination
— one-making. Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves — all are one.
If discordant, producing harmony — if not to us, to a gigantic
ear attached to a gigantic head. And thus — she was smiling
benignly — the agony of the particular sheep, cow, or human
being is necessary} and so —she was beaming seraphically at the
gilt vane in the distance — we reach the conclusion that a// is
harmony, could we hear it. And we shall. Her eyes rested on
the white summit of a cloud. Well, if the thought gave her
comfort, William and Isa smiled across her, let her think it.
(p. 122)
The tone does not lend much credence to this Emersonian vision,
but makes its enthusiasm attractive. Its good effect, too, is empha-
sized: Mrs Swithin zs creating harmony at this moment between
Isa and William. Faith in organized religion has not been given
charitable treatment in the novels, but here it coexists with kindness
and integrity. And Mrs Swithin’s faith, though official, and in
some ways risible, is familiar to us in its ingredients. In an exag-
gerated and simplistic version it restates the tentative consolations
for suffering and death found in Facob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway and
To the Lighthouse. The self may free itself from the bondage of
personality, and be merged in an impersonal world. Mrs Swithin,
like Clarissa, hopes that this is the meaning of death: an immortality
of speechlessness. But, appropriately in a novel which describes the
conflicting claims of language and silence, her hope also suggests
the impersonal achievement of the writer, whose immortality is
words.
‘But we have other lives, I think, I hope,’ she murmured.
‘We live in others, Mr... We live in things.’ (p. 53)
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ANNAN, NOEL. Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in

Relation to his Time. London, MacGibbon and Kee, 1951.
AUERBACH, ERICH. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in
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Willard Trask. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press,
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BASHAM, C. ‘Between the Acts’. Durham University Fournal, Vol.
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BAYLEY, JOHN. The Romantic Survival: A Study in Poetic Evolu-
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BAZIN, NANCY TOPPING. Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous
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BEACH, J. w. ‘Virginia Woolf’. The English ournal, Vol. 26
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BELL, QUENTIN. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. Vol. 1: Virginia
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BENNETT, JOAN. Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist. Cam-
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BREWSTER, DOROTHY. Virginia Woolf. London, Allen and
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FREEDMAN, RALPH. The Lyrical Novel: Studies in Hermann
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GREENE, GRAHAM. ‘Francois Mauriac’. Collected’ Essays, pp.
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GUIGUET, JEAN. Virginia Woolf and Her Works, Translated
Jean Stewart. London, Hogarth Press, 1965.
HAFLEY, JAMES. The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist.
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HOLMs, J. F. ‘Mrs Dalloway’. Review in Calendar of Modern
Letters (July 1925), pp. 404-5.
HOLROYD, MICHAEL. Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography. 2
vols. London, Heinemann, 1967-8. Reissued as Lytton Strachey
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HOLTBY, WINIFRED. Virginia Woolf. London, Wishart, 1932.
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MARDER, HERBERT. Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia
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MCLAURIN, ALLEN. Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved.
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WOOLF, LEONARD Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880-
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VIRGINIA WOOLF: TEXTS

The Voyage Out. London, Duckworth, 1915; Harmondsworth,

Penguin, 1970.
Night and Day. Duckworth, 1919; Penguin, 1969.
Facob’s Room. London, Hogarth Press, 1922; Penguin, 1965.
Mrs Dalloway. Hogarth Press, 1925; Penguin, 1964.
To the Lighthouse. Hogarth Press, 1927; Penguin, 1964.
Orlando. Hogarth Press, 1928; Penguin, 1942.
A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929; Penguin, 1945, 1963.
The Waves. Hogarth Press, 1931; Penguin, 1951.
Flush: A Biography. Hogarth Press, 1933.
The Years. Hogarth Press, 1937; Penguin, 1968.
Three Guineas. Hogarth Press, 1938.
Roger Fry: A Biography. Hogarth Press, 1940.
Between the Acts. Hogarth Press, 1941; Penguin, 1953.
A Haunted House and Other Short Stories. Hogarth Press, 19443
Penguin, 1973.
A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf.
Ed. Leonard Woolf. Hogarth Press, 1953.
Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters. Ed. Leonard Woolf
and James Strachey. Hogarth Press, 1956.
Contemporary Writers. Hogarth Press, 1965.
Collected Essays. Ed. Leonard Woolf. 4 vols. London, Chatto and
Windus, 1966, 1967.
Mrs Dalloway’s Party. A short story sequence. Ed. Stella Mc-
Nichol. Hogarth Press, 1973.
ur i

4
~
te

an
INDEX
 Index

Alexandra, Queen, 187, 200 Bergson, Henri, 15, 22, r11n

Annan, Noel, 6, 137 Boswell, James, 146
Aristophanes, 85 Bloomsbury, 1, 2-4, 6, 9-11, 21, 36, 73n,
Arnold, Matthew, 4 1370
Atkins, P. J., 17 Bradbrook, Muriel, 1, 29
Auerbach, Erich, 2, 21, 125n Braque, Georges, 16
Austen, Jane (see also VW, ‘Jane Austen’), Breughel, Pieter, 146
18, 42, 55, 83, 142, 219; Emma, 55, Brewster, Dorothy, 84
171, 219; Mansfield Park, 11-12, 55, Browne, Sir Thomas, 142-3, 154
203; Persuasion, 55; Pride and Pre- Browne, William of Tavistock, 129
judice, 55 Burke, Edmund, 41
Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 83, 86, 169,
Balzac, Honoré de, 129 209, 210
Barrett, Elizabeth (Mrs Browning), 11,
186, 189-90 Cambridge, 4, 72, 73, 73n, 80, 82, 83, 85,
Bazin, Nancy Topping, 4-5, 770 171
Beach, J. W., 1 Carrington, Dora, 4, 180
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 43 Carroll, Lewis, 119
Bell, Angelica, 143 Cézanne, Paul, 16
Bell, Clive, 32n, 38; Civilization, 10 Chambers, R. L., 77n
Bell, Quentin, Virginia Woolf: A Bio- Chekhov, Anton, 195-7
graphy, 1, 2,7, 23, 320, 330, 38n, 40n, Christianity, allusions to, 6, 31-2, 36-7.
54n, 57n, 58n, 62n, 64n, 73n, 93n, 94, 39, 107, 124, 127-8, 129-30, 136-7,
g5-6, 106n, 1170, I19, 132n, 140, 177, 183, 212, 215, 224-5
178n, 181, 185n, 204-5 Clapham Sect, 3, 6
Bell, Vanessa, 4, 7, 16, 32n, 62n, 117 Colefax, Lady, 94
Bennett, Arnold (see also VW, ‘Mr Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 202
Bennett and Mrs Brown’), 15, 16, 22, Connolly, Cyril, r2n
85, 182; Clayhanger, 117 Conrad, Joseph, 14, 34, 66n; Lord Fim,
Bennett, Joan, 2, 77n, 158n 66n, 78-9; Victory, 670
234 Index
“The
Cowper, William, 42, 43, 63, 2093 Gosse, Sir Edmund, 156
Castaway’, 41, 125 Grant, Duncan, 7, 16, 62n
Greece and Greek culture, 31-2, 34n, 38,
Daiches, David, 2, 22n, 50, 77n, 207-8 41, 72, 73-4; 80, 82, 83, 85-6, 191-2,
Dante, 198, 211 216
Defoe, Daniel, 42 Greene, Graham, 2
Dickens, Charles, 83; Bleak House, 87 Grimm, Brothers, 77n, 135
Donne, John, 153 Guiguet, Jean, 26n
Duckworth, George, 94
Hardy, Barbara, 2
Edward VII, 96, 185
Hardy, Thomas, 7, 120, 121
Edwardian writers, 15, 16, 18
Hemingway, Ernest, 142
Eliot, George (see also VW, ‘George Hesse, Hermann, 12
Eliot’), 10-11 Hitler, Adolf, 181, 191
Eliot, T. S., 12, 15; Four Quartets, 111,
Hogarth Press, 1
127, 178, 224; ‘The Love Song of J. Holms, J. F., 1
Alfred Prufrock’, 110; The Waste Land,
Holroyd, Michael, 2, 3
210
Huxley, Aldous, 23, 182; Point Counter-
Elizabethans (see also ‘Marlowe’, ‘Shake-
point, 173
speare’), 33, 83, 139, 144, 146, 149,
DEL 23 ‘
Ibsen, Henrik, 42
Ellmann, Richard, 12n
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 225
James, Henry, 7
Fen, Elizaveta, 196 Johnsen, William, 12n, 13
Fiedelson, Charles, 12n Johnson, Samuel, 41n, 146
Fielding, Henry, 85 Johnstone, J. K., 2
Horstery Eis M2504 tls) 14500550205 Jowett, Benjamin, 4
Aspects of the Novel, 26—7n; Howards Joyce, James, 12, 15, 22-3; 4 Portrait of
End, 36, 121, 170, 203; Maurice, 2; the Artist As a Young Man, 22;
A Room with a View, 54; Where Angels Ulysses, 2, 14, 22, 142-3, 161-2
Fear to Tread, 190; ‘What I Believe’, 9
Freedman, Ralph, 84 Kafka, Franz, 12
Freud, Sigmund, Group Psychology and the Keats, John, 28, 36, 209
Analysis of the Ego, 2180 Kelley, Alice Van Buren, 4-5
Friedman, Melvin, 160n Kermode, Frank, 12-13
Fry, Roger (see also VW, Roger Fry), Keynes, Maynard, 4n, 94
15-17, 132n, 180, 204; Vision and Krutch, Joseph Wood, 13
Design, 9 Kumar, Shiv, r11n

Galsworthy, John, 15; Forsyte Saga, 184. Lake Poets, 3

Garnett, David, 23 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 183
Georgian writers, 15-17, 19, 22, 23 Lawrence, D. H., 12, 15, 21-2, 1423 ‘Art
Gibbon, Edward, 40, 41, 42 and Morality’, 22; The Rainbow, 14
Gide, André, 12 Larkin, Philip, ‘Days’, 179
Gill, Eric, 16 Leavis, F, R., 2
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 43n Leavis, Q. D., 1
Gore, Spencer, 16 Leighton, Sir Frederick, 4
 Index #33
Lewis, Wyndham, 1-2, 16; Men without Post-Impressionists, 16-17
Art, 1 Pound, Ezra, 12
Lhéte, André, 16 Pre-Raphaelites, 3
Lodge, David, 77n, 123 Priestley, J. B., 23, 182
Lopekova, Lydia, 94 Proust, Marcel, 12, 14, 19-213 Swanns
Way, 160-2; Time Regained, 19-20,
Macaulay, Rose, 23 Trin
Mackenzie, Compton, 23; Sylvia and
Michael, 82 Raverat, Jacques, 17n, 92-3
McLaurin, Allen, 67n Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 83
McNichol, Stella, g1-2n Richardson, Dorothy, 15; Pilgrimage, 23
Maitland, F. W., 120n Ritchie, Lady (‘Aunt Anny’), 54n
Mansfield, Katherine, 58 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 202
Marder, Herbert, 4 Ruskin, John, 4
Marlowe, Christopher, 85 Russian writers (see also Chekhov and VW,
Marvell, Andrew, 199 ‘The Russian Point of View’), 11, 19
Masefield, John, 85
Matisse, Henri, 16 Sackville, Charles, Gorboduc, 144. 154
Maupassant, Guy de, 42 Sackville-West, Vita, 3, 4, 138-40, 143,
Maxse, Kitty, 94 150, 152, 153, 1575 Challenge, 1403
Mellers, W. H., 1 The Edwardians, 138-40; The Heir,
Meredith, George, 7, 19, 42; The Egoist, 138-9; Knole and the Sackvilles, 139,
171 143-5; The Land, 139, 154. 157
Millett, Kate, 5 Sand, George, 202
Milton, John, Comus, 42; Lycidas, 42 Sappho, 31, 42
Modernism, 12-15 Sargent, J. S., 15-16
Moody, A. D., 2, 193 Savage, D. S., 2
Moore, G. E., 2, 42; Principia Ethica, 42n Savage, Sir George, 96
Morrell, Ottoline, 3, 4, 94 Schoenberg, Arnold, 12
Murdoch, Iris, 13n Scott, Walter, 18, 62n, 63, 129
Musil, Robert, 12 Scrutiny, 1, 2, 290
Mussolini, Benito, 191 Shakespeare, William, 85, 144, 151, 176,
209, 211; As You Like It, 545 Cymbeline,
Naremore, James, 4, 35n 41, 109-10; Henry V, 42; King Lear,
Nicolson, Harold, Diaries and Letters, 138, 209; Measure
for Measure, 67; Sonnet
143, 153 No. 98 (‘From you have I been absent
Nicolson, Nigel, 2, 3, 138 in the spring’), 1345 Twelfth Night, 140
Shattuck, Roger, 21
Oxford Movement, 3 Shaw, George Bernard, 86
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 36, 85
Pankhurst, Emmeline, 192 Sidgwick, Henry, 3-4.
Parnell, Charles Stewart, 185 Smith, Stevie, Novel on Yellow Paper,
Pater, Walter, 1 161-2; ‘Oh grateful colours, bright
Picasso, Pablo, 12, 16 looks!’, 30
Pindar, 42 Sophocles, Antigone, 41, IgI-2, 193
Plato, 176; Republic, 68, 192 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queene, 83
Pope, Alexander, 8 Spinoza, Baruch, 83
236 Index
Stein, Gertrude, 12 to its methods, 77-9, 84, 91, 1389
Stephen, Mrs Leslie (Julia Duckworth), 140-2, 150, 153-4; her brother, feel-
(see also VW, mother’s influence) 36, ings for, 51, 73n; criticism of her works,
117-18, 120-1 1-2, 29, 350, 45, 50, 67n, 77, 84, III,
Stephen, Leslie (see also VW, father’s 123, 125n, 158n, r60n, 180, 193, 208;
influence, and ‘Leslie Stephen’), 6-9, death, her treatment of, 50-2, 73n, 79,
II, 12, 28, 62n, 117-20, 136-7; ‘The 83, 89-90, 110, 136-7, 166, 179, 2253
Study of English Literature’, 7-8 developments in her methods, 23, 53-4,
Stephen, Thoby (see a/so VW, brother, 59, 69, 71-2, 91-3, 158-60, 184, 216;
feelings for), 51n, 730 her father’s influence, 6-7, 11, 62n,
Sterne, Lawrence, 19 117-20, 136-7; feminism and andro-
Stevens, Wallace, ‘Disillusionment of Ten gyny, her interest in and treatment of,
O’Clock’, 164n; ‘Sunday Morning’, 29 4-5, 35-6, 40-1, 46n, 59, 61-2, 64,
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 210 64n, 117-18, 140, 148-9, 151-2,
Strachey, Lytton, 2, 3, 4, 7, 11, 15, 31, 191-2; her insanity, and her treatment
40, 50, 62, 142, 180; Eminent Victor- of, 4-5, 49-50, 95-6, 106n, 107-9,
ians, 93 Queen Victoria, 1470 174-5, 205; her literary criticism, 7-15,
Stravinsky, Igor, 12 22-3, 27, 82, 84; her marriage, 62n; as
Swiaburne, Algernon, 31-2 amodernist, 12-24, 65, 70; her mother’s
Symonds, Madge, 94 influence, 36, 117-18, 120-1; painting,
her interest in and treatment of, 15-17,
Taylor, A. J. P., English History 191 4- 92-3, I17, 131, 135-75 as Virginia
1945, 180 Stephen, 4, 33, 35, 36, 38, 94, 1175
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 210 reading, her views on, 7-8, 27-8; her
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 7, 42 style and techniques, 9-11, 46-7, 56-7,
Thrale, Hester Lynch, 146 74-8, 81, 124-5, 146-7, 160, 162-4,
Troy, William, 1 206-7
Turner, John, 146 ‘Aurora Leigh’, 11
Between the Acts, 203-2253 15, 23,
Victorianism, 3, 6, 7, 10, 31, 59-60, 63, 32, 40, 48, 57, 61, 64, 68, 69,
120-1, 146-7, 149, 154, 181-3, 185, 76, 113n, 126-7, 138, 146n, 171,
189-90, 197, 211, 213, 214 176, 186, 200
Contemporary Writers, 23, 82, 84
Wagner, Richard, Siegfried, 185, 192 ‘Essay on Criticism, An’, 142n
Walpole, Hugh, 23, 182, 1845 Feremy, Flush, 54, 60n, 180, 181, 186, 189—
117 190
Wasson, Richard, 12 ‘George Eliot’, ro—11
Watts, G. F., 4 “How it Strikes a Contemporary’, 18
Wells, H. G., 15, 18, 23, 84, 86 “How Should One Read a Book?’, 8,
Whitaker, Joseph, 183 27
Whitman, Walt, 202 Facob’s Room, 71-90; 40, 51, 66, 91,
Wilde, Oscar, 121 92, 93, 102, 114, 136, 138, 141,
Woolf, Leonard, 32, 32n, 79; Autobio- 159, 184, 186, 206, 225
graphy, 2, 95-6, 180; Quack, Quackl ‘Jane Austen’, r1—12
198n; The Village in the Fungle, 34n ‘Kew Gardens’, 58, 72, 80, 109
Woolf, Virginia, her achievement an- ‘Lappin and Lappinova’, 60on
alysed, 23-30; biography, her allusions ‘Leaning Tower, The’, 27-8
 Index 237
‘Leslie Stephen’, 7, 54 Three Guineas, 41, 151, 180, 181,
‘Mark on the Wall, The’, 58, 66, 72, IQI, 192, 193, 202
79-80, 84, 183-4, 198 To the Lighthouse, II6-137; 2, 5,
“Modern Fiction’, 9, 14-15, 22, 58, 6-7, 17N, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 32,
79> 725 159 33> 38, 40, 41, 45m, 47, ST, 54.
“Moment: Summer’s Night, The’, 61, 62n, 64, 66, 69, 76, 77n, 115,
26, 28 138, 158,159,167, 169,171,172,
‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 14, 178, 179, 206,212,
216, 223, 224,
TO, P75 LOy 22 225.
Mrs Dalloway, 91-1153 2, 5, 19, 26, ‘Unwritten Novel, An’, 71-2, 78
27, 41, 45N, 119, 120, 121, 126, Voyage Out, The, 31-523 53, 57, 62,
T2030 32501 30,0 1d2 O19 00, 62n, 71, 85,93, 95, 126, 176, 206
170, 171, 178, 186, 206, 225 “Walter Sickert’, 17n
“Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’, 91 Waves, The, 158-1793 5, 23, 26,
‘Narrow Bridge of Art, The’, 14, 18, 35» 40, 51, 54, 60, 68, 73, 76,
146 SiHy1Q)5 aks Onnhs Ong aleaT OAS
Night and Day, 53-703 7; 235 35140 187, 188, 198, 206, 208, 216
43, 71, 80, 84, 118, 153, 1595 ‘Women and Fiction’, 59
171, 184, 190, 208 UA Aite SsIDGIA, ly Dn 33, OES aie
Orlando, 138-157; 5, 46n, 54, 60n, 38n, 53, 65, 71-2, 79, 91-6, 107,
62, 120, 158, 185, 206, 211 Di, PRWy T4O,01 415014:Osmn SO,
‘Professions for Women’, 10 158-60, 174n, 178n, 179, 182,
‘Reading’, 81n 184, 185, 187, 188, 191, 195n,
Roger Fry, 15-17 197, 204-5, 218n
Room of One’s Own, A, 5, 41n, 59, Years, The, 180-2023 32, 41, 57,
64, 148, 151-2, 158 Oony 62,63, 0121.) 170,) 2025
‘Russian Point of View, The’, 100, 206-7, 210
197 Wordsworth, William, 28-9, 89; The
‘Searchlight, The’, 24-29 Prelude, 86
‘Street Haunting’, 19-20 Wycherley, William, 85
‘Talk about Memoirs, A’ (Review of
Recollections of Lady Georgiana Yeats, William Butler, 12; ‘Sailing to
Peel), 8-9 Byzantium’, 174
 Errata to original text

p.14 “Modern Fiction” should be dated 1925.

p.22, Quote cstarting, You, can put a. eiastalinescut.. the”
before “novels that are copies”.
p-39 Full stop after “apt” and before “Rachel is in retreat”.
p.72 Footnote 1 should be 26 Jan 1920.
p.-77 Footnote 3 cut “The” before “Language”.
p.94 Change “cousin” George Duckworth” to “half-brother”.
p-95 Change 1915 to 1913 before “suicide attempts”.
p.106 Line 5, “might”.
p.169 “Separate” selves at Hampton Court.
p.189 Footnote, change p.ref to p.291.
p.190 Change Poggibonzi to Monteriano.
p.201 Close bracket in quote after “she was waking up”.
p.211 Close quote mark in inset quote after “the blue bag.”
p.212 “Megaphontic” not “megaphonic’”.
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PR 6045 .072 2774 2010
Lee, Hermione.
The novels of Virginia Woolf
American River College Library
4700 College Oak Drive
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 The NovelsofVirginia Woolf
This is Pyreissue of a critical introduction to the novels of Virginia
Woolf, first published in 1977. It makes close, illuminating
~~i teadings of her nine novels, placing Woolf in her literary context
Hi

and providing an accessible, clear and valuable guide for students

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reading Woolf. Twenty years later, Hermione Lee wrote a prize-
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study represented an early stagein this biographer-critic’s life-
_ Jong interest and involvement with Woolf's life and work.

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