I think her life circle is one most intellectual butterflies ultimately undergo. They are so distant from actually Making and producing goods and business they look down on the real world of doings, till finally they realize that all this doing is what made it all possible, all that is great exists because those stuffy old men were shipping things around the world, and selling shipping insurance to the freight steamers, and loaning the money to buy the cargoes, and being the Captain of the Regiment in far away lands, and on and on. And the looking down and arguing against it all, that it is ungrateful and misses the point.
Just have to point out that Virginia and Leonard set up The Hogarth Press in 1917, publishing and hand-printing books. Virginia was fully involved in running the business and literally printing books with her hands using a press for over 20 years from 1917 till 1938.
It was a successful business and went on to become Chatto & Windus.
I’m sorry, but I think you have made some mistaken and untoward assumptions in your comment.
But they produced too much CO2 so now we must eat bugs, Bill Gates’s frankenmeat, Wear our tracking devices everywhere so our betters know how much CO2 we use. Gates has a good thing going. He’ll own massive forests and algae CO2 absorbing ponds so he will have a CO2 negative balance, use as much fossil fuel as he wants, eat grass feed beef raised on his pristine farmland. Poor people living in apartments can grow a few potted plants I suppose but they’ll have to get Bill Gates’s vaccines to slow their metabolism to a crawl. Can’t be a useless breather anymore. The world can’t afford it! Thank God Bill Gates is here to save us.
Yep Bill ”Gates of Hell,” only has Two Private Jets & 24 Sports GT cars mostly porsches, and doesn’t affect climate,ONLY , Ordinary Folk like you &I do that….Gates,Bezos,Soros All Globalist hypocrites…funding non-Scientific data, Zero Carbon (No Life on Earth) Zero SARS2 etc…
Colin Brewer
3 years ago
Virginia Woolf was a classic case of real manic-depressive illness – the most illness-like of the common psychiatric disorders. It also has one of the highest rates of suicide, even now when there are reasonably effective medications. It seems to be more common in creative artists and perhaps the more creative and unconventional, the more common. Poets are especially prone. Mania brings energy and weird ideas (and rhymes). Depression brings tales from the abyss if they survive the journey
As she herself recognised in correspondence with Ethel Smythe, it both helped and hindered her own writing. “And then I married, and then my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does.” She also shared her thoughts on suicide with Smythe. In 1930, she asked: “By the way, what are the arguments against suicide? You know what a flibberti-gibbet I am: well there suddenly comes in a thunderclap a sense of the complete uselessness of my life. It’s like suddenly running one’s head against a wall at the end of a blind alley. Now what are the arguments against that sense – “Oh, it would be better to end it”? I need not say that I have no sort of intention of taking any steps: I simply want to know.” Both the depressive and and manic phases can arrive quite rapidly. Some people even have a regular 48 hour cycle of manic and depressive moods. One day, they sit silent and miserable; the next they are cracking jokes or going on a shopping spree. Try explaining that by reference to Freudian (or R D Laingian) theories. Manic-depressive illness is almost certainly an overwhelmingly biochemical brain disorder, though like most illnesses,it may be triggered or aggravated by stress and distress. It also has a large genetic component. In a piece for The Times decades ago, I described is ‘the achiever’s insanity’ and got a nice letter from a manic-depressive support group for the description.
I would describe it as the under-achiever’s insanity. I agree with most of the rest of your comment.
Claire D
3 years ago
Poor Virginia Woolf, it’s a long time since I read her books. I’m the opposite to Fraser Bailey in that The Waves was the only one I could not cope with at all.
For me, as just another human being, I feel sorry for her; genius combined with intermittantly severe mental illness, and the crude treatments she had to undergo for that at the time, was a heavy cross to bear. No wonder when she felt another psychotic episode was about to begin she could’nt face it again aged 60.
I detest sneering criticism of anyone because they were born into wealth, all that talk of “toffs” etc, as if somehow they are less deserving of sympathy in their suffering, that is just ug ly, resentful Marxism. That just undermines the article’s worth for me.
… indeed … while struggling through this piece with it’s rebarbative, unsavoury tone, [extended click bait presumably] one waited for the concerns of the racial/industrial complex to be deployed – perhaps they were.
Katharine Eyre
3 years ago
A nice article. I’m not sure Virginia Woolf died many times. Rather, I think the experience of death so early on in her life (when her mother and half-sister Stella died within a fairly short space of time) impressed on her how close to life death was. During her life, it must have felt like a constant presence, closer at some points than others, like a cliff edge she was pulled towards.
Being a writer and a deep thinker living through the times that she did couldn’t really have resulted in any other conclusion than having been mistaken about some things – if not everything. The world order was shattered twice during her lifetime. After WWI, she and the others from the Bloomsbury set were still young and idealistic enough to think that the world could be completely remade into something better and set off to achieve that with tremendous élan and creative energy.
By the time 1939 arrived, everybody was a bit older, a little more jaded. It’s the natural way of life to look back on your youthful ideals and shake your head at how silly some of them were. To Virginia, another war must have seemed like the final proof that the project of building the brave new world had failed and that all that creative endeavour and all that giving of herself had been for nought.
Last edited 3 years ago by Katharine Eyre
J Bryant
3 years ago
A very interesting article on the life and beliefs of Virginia Woolf. It presents her as a more rounded, flawed and relatable human being rather than the sanitized feminist icon she’s become.
The article does, however, seem to end with its most important question unanswered: “… discovering, so late in the day, that all her judgments were wrong.”
What judgments, exactly, were wrong? Her whole world view? And why were they wrong? Were they wrong or did time and events simply pass them by?
Anyone care to enlighten me?
Conservatism, Victorianism, and “Christianity, patriotism, well-plotted novels and realistic landscape painting”, which looked like “bumbling absurdities” to Woolf’s clique.
That aside, I never really enjoyed Woolf’s writing. She always seemed like she was striving to be as good as her superior contemporaries, Proust and Joyce, and came up short.
I sort of agree. Mrs Dalloway really is very good though.
George Bruce
3 years ago
So it is with the ball at Lady Sligo’s mansion which Virginia was spirited to in June 1900. The solid, rumbling reign of Queen Victoria had three years to run;
No it didn`t – she died six or seven months later. Strange mistake to make – I had it quite firmly in my head that this monarch personifying the 19th century only just managed to make it into the 20th century. She died on 22 January 1901.
I had a similar experience with a lot of her work, but rate Mrs Dalloway very hjghly indeed.
Jennifer Britton
3 years ago
Woolf’s essays, especially “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas,” are some of her best writing and thinking about the world she lived in. Her fiction attempts to deal with the issues set out in her essays. Does her fiction succeed as great literature? The verdict is still out: in the academy she is celebrated; outside the academy she is not read. But the same could be said if Joyce, Proust, and others who pushed the literary envelope.
However, the mind that produced the level of analysis evident in her essays is first rate. Her essays, like those of Montaigne, luminate the mind. In light of the restricted education she received, her highly analytical observations and mastery of the essay form make me wonder whether the deficits in Woolf’s fiction that Mr Lloyd attends to are reflections of her mind and its experiences: her essays reveal a great mind; her fiction reveals her milieu as socially stifling, emotionally stunted, egoistic. For all intellectually snobbery, of the upper class, it was utterly materialistic. Her father fretted over money often. Her fiction is all of the above. Hence, it captures the essence of her world. When I read her fiction, I never emotionally affected. But I think that is how her world affected her creation of characters. Her fiction can feel lifeless (dead) but in that lifelessness lies the verisimilitude to the world she inhabited. In that, her work succeeds.
Just using new techniques, such as using multiple perspectives to tell a story or compressing the events of a novel into one day, doesn’t necessarily lead to the production of great literature. New techniques must be in service of the artistic vision. The quality of the vision is a function of the writer’s genius and experience, including education. Woolf herself expressed regret at not having had the classical education her step-brother had. I think her genius was always cramped by the feeling of a haunting inadequacy, not to mention cramped emotions and mental illness.
In short, don’t dismiss Woolf’s fiction. First, read her essays. Then read her fiction. Taken together, they illuminate each other and the reader.
Fraser Bailey
3 years ago
I loved The Waves, which Malcolm Bradbury considers to be the culmination and high point of her oeuvre in his study of 20th century English fiction. I have not enjoyed her other books quite so much. Perhaps I should have read some of the others first, and built up to The Waves.
David James
3 years ago
What a pity Virginia wasn’t fortunate enough to have been born black, poor and disabled; then, writers of such tosh, would be lauding her to the skies.
As a student – of music – a friend of mine mentioned he’d just read The Waves. Over the subsequent 50 years, I’ve felt eternally grateful to him for his glowing introduction. In my [modest] opinion, this work represents the greatest novel ever to be written in the English language. To the Lighthouse runs it a close second.
I must have read both works dozens of times – you should see how tatty both my copies now are.
Right that’s it, I’m going to give The Waves another go.
I agree,To the Lighthouse is wonderful, and I really enjoyed Orlando, which is a romp in comparison.
Good reminder, no, I have’nt, it’s the only one I think (apart from The Waves), something to look forward to. I had a craze for reading her in my early twenties, but I left a few out and have gradually got round to them over the years.
By the way, there’s an interesting essay on The Conversation about Virginia Woolf and how music influenced her writing.
This article is pathetic. Full of innuendo, cliche, lack of precision. I can’t stand this kind of lazy, slipshod spilling out of words in a pretence of having actually something valuable to contribute. Please can I have my money back?
“…like lobsters scuttling about inside a vent” What a great simile. Your very own, Will?
Lee Johnson
3 years ago
Didn’t realise her eyes had strabismus
No wonder she was shy
Mark Hussey
3 years ago
New to UnHerd. There doesn’t seem much of value in people’s pronouncements about fiction here. I hated it/I loved it doesn’t really get us anywhere does it? And what a load of tired canards about Woolf-‘terrified of sex’ is so utterly debunked now. This writer needs to get beyond his A level notes.
A beautifully written article.
I think her life circle is one most intellectual butterflies ultimately undergo. They are so distant from actually Making and producing goods and business they look down on the real world of doings, till finally they realize that all this doing is what made it all possible, all that is great exists because those stuffy old men were shipping things around the world, and selling shipping insurance to the freight steamers, and loaning the money to buy the cargoes, and being the Captain of the Regiment in far away lands, and on and on. And the looking down and arguing against it all, that it is ungrateful and misses the point.
Great comment. So true.
But what else could any of them do? Artists or shopkeepers or insurance men, it is our fate to be wrong or ignorant. We still have to go forward.
I think you put this wonderfully well. Have an upvote with my compliments.
You are too generous, an interesting critique but somewhat flawed, but sadly UnHerd is not the forum for further discussion.
Just have to point out that Virginia and Leonard set up The Hogarth Press in 1917, publishing and hand-printing books. Virginia was fully involved in running the business and literally printing books with her hands using a press for over 20 years from 1917 till 1938.
It was a successful business and went on to become Chatto & Windus.
I’m sorry, but I think you have made some mistaken and untoward assumptions in your comment.
But they produced too much CO2 so now we must eat bugs, Bill Gates’s frankenmeat, Wear our tracking devices everywhere so our betters know how much CO2 we use. Gates has a good thing going. He’ll own massive forests and algae CO2 absorbing ponds so he will have a CO2 negative balance, use as much fossil fuel as he wants, eat grass feed beef raised on his pristine farmland. Poor people living in apartments can grow a few potted plants I suppose but they’ll have to get Bill Gates’s vaccines to slow their metabolism to a crawl. Can’t be a useless breather anymore. The world can’t afford it! Thank God Bill Gates is here to save us.
Yep Bill ”Gates of Hell,” only has Two Private Jets & 24 Sports GT cars mostly porsches, and doesn’t affect climate,ONLY , Ordinary Folk like you &I do that….Gates,Bezos,Soros All Globalist hypocrites…funding non-Scientific data, Zero Carbon (No Life on Earth) Zero SARS2 etc…
Virginia Woolf was a classic case of real manic-depressive illness – the most illness-like of the common psychiatric disorders. It also has one of the highest rates of suicide, even now when there are reasonably effective medications. It seems to be more common in creative artists and perhaps the more creative and unconventional, the more common. Poets are especially prone. Mania brings energy and weird ideas (and rhymes). Depression brings tales from the abyss if they survive the journey
As she herself recognised in correspondence with Ethel Smythe, it both helped and hindered her own writing. “And then I married, and then my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets as sanity does.”
She also shared her thoughts on suicide with Smythe. In 1930, she asked: “By the way, what are the arguments against suicide? You know what a flibberti-gibbet I am: well there suddenly comes in a thunderclap a sense of the complete uselessness of my life. It’s like suddenly running one’s head against a wall at the end of a blind alley. Now what are the arguments against that sense – “Oh, it would be better to end it”? I need not say that I have no sort of intention of taking any steps: I simply want to know.”
Both the depressive and and manic phases can arrive quite rapidly. Some people even have a regular 48 hour cycle of manic and depressive moods. One day, they sit silent and miserable; the next they are cracking jokes or going on a shopping spree. Try explaining that by reference to Freudian (or R D Laingian) theories. Manic-depressive illness is almost certainly an overwhelmingly biochemical brain disorder, though like most illnesses,it may be triggered or aggravated by stress and distress. It also has a large genetic component. In a piece for The Times decades ago, I described is ‘the achiever’s insanity’ and got a nice letter from a manic-depressive support group for the description.
You are wasted on here.
Literally and figuratively
I would describe it as the under-achiever’s insanity. I agree with most of the rest of your comment.
Poor Virginia Woolf, it’s a long time since I read her books. I’m the opposite to Fraser Bailey in that The Waves was the only one I could not cope with at all.
For me, as just another human being, I feel sorry for her; genius combined with intermittantly severe mental illness, and the crude treatments she had to undergo for that at the time, was a heavy cross to bear. No wonder when she felt another psychotic episode was about to begin she could’nt face it again aged 60.
I detest sneering criticism of anyone because they were born into wealth, all that talk of “toffs” etc, as if somehow they are less deserving of sympathy in their suffering, that is just ug ly, resentful Marxism. That just undermines the article’s worth for me.
… indeed … while struggling through this piece with it’s rebarbative, unsavoury tone, [extended click bait presumably] one waited for the concerns of the racial/industrial complex to be deployed – perhaps they were.
A nice article. I’m not sure Virginia Woolf died many times. Rather, I think the experience of death so early on in her life (when her mother and half-sister Stella died within a fairly short space of time) impressed on her how close to life death was. During her life, it must have felt like a constant presence, closer at some points than others, like a cliff edge she was pulled towards.
Being a writer and a deep thinker living through the times that she did couldn’t really have resulted in any other conclusion than having been mistaken about some things – if not everything. The world order was shattered twice during her lifetime. After WWI, she and the others from the Bloomsbury set were still young and idealistic enough to think that the world could be completely remade into something better and set off to achieve that with tremendous élan and creative energy.
By the time 1939 arrived, everybody was a bit older, a little more jaded. It’s the natural way of life to look back on your youthful ideals and shake your head at how silly some of them were. To Virginia, another war must have seemed like the final proof that the project of building the brave new world had failed and that all that creative endeavour and all that giving of herself had been for nought.
A very interesting article on the life and beliefs of Virginia Woolf. It presents her as a more rounded, flawed and relatable human being rather than the sanitized feminist icon she’s become.
The article does, however, seem to end with its most important question unanswered: “… discovering, so late in the day, that all her judgments were wrong.”
What judgments, exactly, were wrong? Her whole world view? And why were they wrong? Were they wrong or did time and events simply pass them by?
Anyone care to enlighten me?
It’s complicated.
Read, man!
Conservatism, Victorianism, and “Christianity, patriotism, well-plotted novels and realistic landscape painting”, which looked like “bumbling absurdities” to Woolf’s clique.
That aside, I never really enjoyed Woolf’s writing. She always seemed like she was striving to be as good as her superior contemporaries, Proust and Joyce, and came up short.
Spot on.
I sort of agree. Mrs Dalloway really is very good though.
No it didn`t – she died six or seven months later. Strange mistake to make – I had it quite firmly in my head that this monarch personifying the 19th century only just managed to make it into the 20th century. She died on 22 January 1901.
Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, maybe he got confused with the other long lasting Queen who only just made it into the next century.
I remember my father’s comment on reading ‘To the Lighthouse’: “I couldn’t help wondering, as I turned each page, ‘are we there yet?'”
Lordy, I studied it for O Level and hated it.
I wasn’t so keen on ‘To The Lighthouse’ myself, and it seems a little unfair to inflict it on 15 year olds. But I do like some of her other work.
I had a similar experience with Mrs Dalloway
I had a similar experience with a lot of her work, but rate Mrs Dalloway very hjghly indeed.
Woolf’s essays, especially “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas,” are some of her best writing and thinking about the world she lived in. Her fiction attempts to deal with the issues set out in her essays. Does her fiction succeed as great literature? The verdict is still out: in the academy she is celebrated; outside the academy she is not read. But the same could be said if Joyce, Proust, and others who pushed the literary envelope.
However, the mind that produced the level of analysis evident in her essays is first rate. Her essays, like those of Montaigne, luminate the mind. In light of the restricted education she received, her highly analytical observations and mastery of the essay form make me wonder whether the deficits in Woolf’s fiction that Mr Lloyd attends to are reflections of her mind and its experiences: her essays reveal a great mind; her fiction reveals her milieu as socially stifling, emotionally stunted, egoistic. For all intellectually snobbery, of the upper class, it was utterly materialistic. Her father fretted over money often. Her fiction is all of the above. Hence, it captures the essence of her world. When I read her fiction, I never emotionally affected. But I think that is how her world affected her creation of characters. Her fiction can feel lifeless (dead) but in that lifelessness lies the verisimilitude to the world she inhabited. In that, her work succeeds.
Just using new techniques, such as using multiple perspectives to tell a story or compressing the events of a novel into one day, doesn’t necessarily lead to the production of great literature. New techniques must be in service of the artistic vision. The quality of the vision is a function of the writer’s genius and experience, including education. Woolf herself expressed regret at not having had the classical education her step-brother had. I think her genius was always cramped by the feeling of a haunting inadequacy, not to mention cramped emotions and mental illness.
In short, don’t dismiss Woolf’s fiction. First, read her essays. Then read her fiction. Taken together, they illuminate each other and the reader.
I loved The Waves, which Malcolm Bradbury considers to be the culmination and high point of her oeuvre in his study of 20th century English fiction. I have not enjoyed her other books quite so much. Perhaps I should have read some of the others first, and built up to The Waves.
What a pity Virginia wasn’t fortunate enough to have been born black, poor and disabled; then, writers of such tosh, would be lauding her to the skies.
As a student – of music – a friend of mine mentioned he’d just read The Waves. Over the subsequent 50 years, I’ve felt eternally grateful to him for his glowing introduction. In my [modest] opinion, this work represents the greatest novel ever to be written in the English language. To the Lighthouse runs it a close second.
I must have read both works dozens of times – you should see how tatty both my copies now are.
Right that’s it, I’m going to give The Waves another go.
I agree,To the Lighthouse is wonderful, and I really enjoyed Orlando, which is a romp in comparison.
Have you read Jacob’s Room? It’s her first mature novel yet, for some strange reasons, is hardly ever mentioned.
Good reminder, no, I have’nt, it’s the only one I think (apart from The Waves), something to look forward to. I had a craze for reading her in my early twenties, but I left a few out and have gradually got round to them over the years.
By the way, there’s an interesting essay on The Conversation about Virginia Woolf and how music influenced her writing.
Like all great literature, hers needs constantly revisiting. Imagine, for instance, only hearing the ‘Eroica’ once!
Thanks for the lead on ‘The Conversation’.
[[email protected]]
Upon comparing Woolf’s death to that of Sylvia Plath, a friend and I decided that Woolf’s was more ‘sustainable’.
Because it didn’t cause a sub-nuclear gas explosion perhaps?
Or rather Mr Pike and friends had 21 days to feast on her putrefying corpse, as it languished in the Ouse?
Woolf was an incredible writer. That doesn’t need revision.
Incredible. I don’t believe it.
This article is pathetic. Full of innuendo, cliche, lack of precision. I can’t stand this kind of lazy, slipshod spilling out of words in a pretence of having actually something valuable to contribute. Please can I have my money back?
Apposite, but still a little cruel.
A question. ‘Too cracked up to enter’ society. Cracked in what sense?
Interesting article.
Severe mental illness.
Thankyou
“…like lobsters scuttling about inside a vent”
What a great simile. Your very own, Will?
Didn’t realise her eyes had strabismus
No wonder she was shy
New to UnHerd. There doesn’t seem much of value in people’s pronouncements about fiction here. I hated it/I loved it doesn’t really get us anywhere does it? And what a load of tired canards about Woolf-‘terrified of sex’ is so utterly debunked now. This writer needs to get beyond his A level notes.
She was just a terrible writer.