VIRGINIA WOOLF

I82I)4l, English
iL/eltne iYrgima Stephen Wo/fwas born in Lon
don, the chuighter of Sir Leslie Stephen, an infizien
tial critic and editor ofthe voluminous Dictionary
of National Biography. Virginia and her sister
Vinessa (later l4inessa Bell,) were largely self
educated in theirfather extensive library Both
were aware that had they been male, they would
have gone to college like their brothers. Afrer their
fither death, Virginia and Vanessa moved to Bloomsbury a bohemian neighborhood
ofLondon near the British Museum. They soon became the center ofthe Bloomsbury
Group, a collection 01 irogressive British artists and intellectuals. In 1912 Virginia
married Leonard Wiolf a journalist and novelist. Always infrail health, she experi
enced episodes ofmental disturbance, In 1917 as therapy she and Leonard set up a
handpress in their home and started the Hogarth Press, which became one ofthe most
celebrated small presces oft/ic century In addition to Wooif own books, it issued
books andpamphlets by 7. S. Eliot, Kitherine Mansfield, Robinson JefJrs, E. A.
Robinson, and Sigmund Freud Wootfcfirst novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in
1915 and though quite reilisth; it alreadyfireshadowed the psychological depth and
poetic flirce ofher late work. In innovative novels such as Mrs. Dalloway (1925,), To
the Lighthouse (1927,), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931), Woofbecame
one ofthe central Modernist fiction writers in English. Woofc critical essays, collected
in her two volumes, Ihe Common Reader (1925, second series 1932), remain in
fluential, and her long essay, A Room of Ones Own (1929,), is a classic ofthefrmi
nist i-notement. A/icr several nervous breakdowns, olffraringfbr her santl,,
drowned herce//in 1941.
Although Volf literary reputation rests mat nly on her novels and criticism, the
short story served tn important part in her development. Throughout her career; she
urote short stories as breaks f+om the arduous demandc ofnovel writing Folfalso
used her stories to explore the ideas and techniques later developed in her novels. Wooq
yjecred the tiiditional approach of realisticfiction and sought to create a morefluid
npe of narratue. I-Icr work emphasizes the elusive nature olperception. She pioneered
ireamn of consciousness narration, a style which tries to portray the seemingly random
way in which thoughts, freling, andperceptionsflow through a character mind Woof
published only tuo collections (f short stories in her lzf?timeKew Gardens (1919)
and Monday or Tuesday (1921). A Flaunted House and Other Short Stories was
issuedposthumously in 1943. Her Complete Shorter Fiction appeared in 1985.
843
344 Vaciy \XOOLF
A Haunted House 1921
Wmtever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room they
went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making surea ghostly couple.
I lere we left it, she said. And he added, Oh, but here too! Its up
stairs, she murmured. And in the garden, he whispered. Quietly, they said,
or we shall wake them.
But it wasnt that you woke us. Oh, no. Theyre looking for it; theyre
drawing the curtain, one might say, and so read on a page to two. Now
theyve found it, one would he certain, stopping the pencil on the margin.
And then, tired of reading, one might rise and see for oneself, the house all
empty, the doors standing open, only the wood pigeons bubbling with con
tent and the hum of the threshing machine sounding from the firm, What
dd I come in here for? What did I want to find? My hands were empty. Per
[taps its upstairs then? The apples were in the loft. And so down again, the
garden still as ever, only the book had slipped into the grass.
But they had found it in the drawing room. Not that one could ever see
them. The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were
green in the glass. If they moved in the drawing room, the apple only turned
its yellow side. Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about
the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from the ceilingwhat? My hands
were empty. The shadow of a thrush crossed the carpet; from the deepest wells
of silence the wood pigeon drew its bubble of sound. Safe, safe, safe, the
pulse of the house beat softly. ihe treasure buried; the room the pulse
stopped short. Oh, was that the buried treasure?
A moment later the light had faded. Out in the garden then? But the trees
spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun. So tine, so rare, coolly sunk be
neath the surface the beam I sought always burnt behind the glass. I)eath was
the glass: death was between us; coming to the woman first, hundreds of years
ago, leaving the house, sealing all the windows; the rooms were darkened. He
left it, left her, went North, went F.ast, saw the stars turned in the Southern
sky; sought the house, found it dropped beneath the Downs. Safe, safe, safe,
the pulse of the house beat gladly. FheIieasure yours.
The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that.
Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain. But the beam of the lamp falls
straight from the window. ihe candle burns stiff and still. Wandering through
the house, opening the windows, whispering not to wake us, the ghostly cou
ple seek their joy.
Here we slept she says. And he adds, Kisses without number. Wak
ing in the morning Silver between the trees Upstairs In the gar
den When summer came In winter snowtime The doors go shut
ting far in the distance, gently knocking like the pulse of a heart.
Nearer they come; cease at the doorway. The wind falls, the rain slides sil
ver down the glass. Our eyes darken: we hear no steps beside us; we see no
lady spread her ghostly cloak. His hands shield the lantern. Look, he
breathes. Sound asleep. Love upon their lips.
Xicu nd 1i. ron
mping, holding their silver lamp above us. long they look and deeply.
I ong they pause. Ihe wind drives straightly; i he flame stoops shghtly. Wild
Iscanis ol moonlight cross both floor and wall, and, meeting, stain ihe fices bent;
he laces pondering; the races that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy.
ale, safe, safe, the heart of the house beats proudly. Long years he
tgbs Again you found me Hcr. she murmurs slceping in thc. gardcn
reading; laughing, rolling apples in the loft. I fere we left our treasure Stoop
ng, their light lifts the lids upon my eyes, Safi! safe! safe! the pulse of the
house bears wildly, Wtking, I cry ( )h, is this your buried treasure The light in
the heart.
a Auri-ioRs PERSPECTIVE
Virginia Woof
Women and Fiction 1920?
Fiction was, as fiction still is, the easiest thing for a woman to write. Nor
is it difficult to find the reason, A novel is the least concentrated form of art.
A novel can be taken up or put down more easily than a play or a poem.
(;e<>rge Eliot left her work to nurse her father, (Zharlotte [3ronte put down her
pen to pick the eyes out of the potatoes. And living as she did in the common
sitting-room. surrounded by people, a woman was trained to use her mind in
observation and upon the analysis of character, She was trained to he a novel
ist and not to be a poet.
Even in the nineteenth century, a woman lived almost solely in her home
and her emotions. And those nineteenth-century novels, remarkable as they
were, were profoundly influenced by the fact that the women who wrote them
were excluded by their sex from certain kinds of experience. That experience
has a great influence upon fiction is indisputable. The best part of Conrads
novels, for instance, would be destroyed if it had been impossible for him to
he a sailor. Take away all that Tolstoi knew of war as a soldier, of life and soci
ety as a rich young man whose education admitted him to all sorts of experi
ence, and War and Peace would be incredibly impoverished.
Yet Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, Villette, and Middlemarch were
written by women from whom was forcibly withheld all experience save that
which could be met with in a middle-class drawing-room. No first-hand ex
perience of war or seafaring or politics or business was possible for them. Even
their emotional life was strictly regulated by law and custom. When George
Eliot ventured to live with Mr. Lewes without being his wife, public opinion
was scandalized. Under its pressure she withdrew into a suburban seclusion
which, inevitably, had the worst possible effects upon her work. She wrote
that unless people asked of their own accord to come and see her, she never
invited them. At the same time, on the other side of Europe, Tolstoi was
living a free life as a soldier, with men and women of all classes, for which no
body censured him and from which his novels drew much of their astonish
ing breadth and vigor.
SiR \io,i.i \ IR RE
But the tiovels of women were not affected only by the etessa riB narr iw
rjnre of the writers experience. lltev showed, at least in the nineteenth ecu
ttirv, another L IlaraF kr istiE whit. h may be traced to the writers SeX. In ,Ilf/(//C
nii re/i and in line [vie we are conscious not merely o[ the svn ters character, ,is
we are conscious ol the character ui ( harles [)ickens, hut we are ionsciouis (it
,i WOtflaFIs piesence--of someone resenting the treatment of her sex arid
ph. udint, for us rit,ht s I his hi nts Into women s v ritint, in lenu., nt v, ft ii. h is
entirely absent from a niatis, unless indeed, he happens to be a workinttn.iti.
a Negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious o disability. It intro
duces a distortion md is Irecjuiently the cause of weakness. liw desire to plead
some personal cause or ro make a character the mouthpiece of some persott.il
discontent or grievance always has a distressing effect, as if the spot at wlucli
the readers attention is directed were suddenly two dId instead of single.
Ihe genius of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte is never more convincing
than in their power to ignore such claims and solicitations and to hold on
their way unperturbed by scorn or censure. But it needed a very serene or a
very powerful mind to resist the temptation to anger. [he ridicule, the Fun-
sure, the assurance of inferiority in one form or another which were lavished
upon women who practiced an art, provoked such reactions naturally enough.
One sees the effect in Charlotte Bronts indignation, in (ieorge Eliots resig
nation. Again and again one finds it in the work of the lesser women writers
in their choice of a subject, in their unnatural self-assertiveness, in their tin
natural docility. Moreover, insincerity leaks in almost unconsciously. They
adopt a view in deference to authority lhe vision becomes too masculine or it
becomes too feminine; it loses its perfect integriry and, with that, irs most es
sential r1 ualiry as a work of art.
The great change that has crept into womens writing is, it would seem, a
change of attitude. 11w woman writer is no longer bitter. She is no longer
angry. She is no longer pleading and protesting as she writes. \X/e are ap
proaching, if we have not vet reached, the time when her writing will have lit
tle or no Idretgn nilluence to disturb it. She will he able to concentrate upon
her vision without distraction from outside. The aloofness that was once
within the reach of genius and originality is only 110W coming within teach of
ordinary women. lherefore the average novel by a woman is fir more genuine
and far more interesting today than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago.
- \\io lien an (I i ciii) Il