According to Suzanne Nalbantian, “Woolf was closely exposed to biography writing by two dominant male figures in her life: her father and her husband.”¹ One senses that Woolf reacted by becoming fascinated with recreating aspects of herself, and doing so critically, in many places within her texts. Even if Clarissa Dalloway is not a self-portrait, she represents Woolf's reflections on her own physical embodiment and her mental processes. Woolf could be cruel about her own image and pathology, as in this description of Clarissa: “She had a narrow pea-stick figure; a ridiculous little face, beaked like a bird's. That she held herself well was true; and had nice hands and feet; and dressed well, considering that she spent little. But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible, unseen, unknown. …”² Throughout her life, both in fiction and in other more personal writings, Woolf reflected a great deal on herself, her writing and her life experiences—not, however, because she was overly narcissistic. As Hermione Lee notes, “Egotism is often the subject of the diary. She is much concerned with how she writes it, and what it's for. And its uses vary: it is a ‘barometer’ of her feelings, a storehouse for memories, a record of events and encounters, a practice-ground for writing, a commentary on work in progress, and a sedative for agitation, anger, or apprehension.”³

The impulse in Woolf to write about herself owed something to a specific cluster of personal circumstances and feelings, but it was also influenced by the intensely reflexive and spiritual nature of her modernism. Modernism often incorporated the view that all art must include itself in the act of creation as part of the overall effect. Woolf generally seemed to require constant monitoring and reflection upon her mental state. Such introspection was also at times one of the major Bloomsbury activities, including the Memoir Club, to which she belonged. Her autobiographical piece “A Sketch of the Past,” published posthumously in Moments of Being, is one among many such contributions from a number of active members of the group. The alteration of biographical facts in the novels indicates that they were not intended simply as autobiography. As Nalbantian observes, “Woolf manipulated place for the purpose of art. The substitution of the Hebrides for Cornwall [in To the Lighthouse] was an artistic process which depersonalised what could be regarded as a transparent story, allowing it to acquire an ambiguity which no one could clarify but to which all could relate.”⁴

How Woolf perceived herself and her successes remains a matter of debate. The nuances of identity are intriguing. She contrasted herself with both her family and even Bloomsbury in an attempt to define herself. Lee says, “The model for this dual movement—between a struggle for self-definition and a need to belong—is family life. Bloomsbury was rooted in family, and much of its art (painting, decoration, biography, fiction) was about the family.”⁵ Both were ambivalent sources of inspiration for Woolf, who admitted candidly that “[o]ne has to follow ones bent—mine often to be moody, irritable, longing for solitude.”⁶ Nevertheless, she was never entirely solitary and never indifferent to other opinions and reactions. As Lyndall Gordon comments, “Virginia herself drew a distinction between a solitude that is potentially creative (‘slipping tranquilly off into the deep water of my own thoughts’) and a debilitating state of withdrawal following impulses of aversion.”⁷ In May 1925 Woolf reflected on the mixture of indifferent reviews and personal praise in the press and from her circle: “So from this I prognosticate a good deal of criticism on the ground that I'm obscure & odd; & some enthusiasm; a slow sale, & an increased reputation. Oh yes—my reputation increases.”⁸ She knew well the unusual qualities of both the work and her own personality. She could grasp her literary presence, with all of its potential quality and value. Nevertheless, as with the fiction itself, she was never narcissistic or self-absorbed. As T. E. Apter observes, “Virginia Woolf's emphasis on individual consciousness, and her attention to the world as something whose character is determined by individual perception, do not lead her to the conclusion that only one's consciousness is real.”⁹ Woolf understood that she existed in a community of intellectuals and, as is clear from her final novel, Between the Acts, within a tradition of Englishness that she saw under threat. During World War II she found that “[t]here's no standard to write for: no public to echo back: even the ‘tradition’ has become transparent.”¹⁰

In some ways Woolf's evaluation of these issues of fiction and life charts a psychic journey as much as a critical or aesthetic one. It is important to note that her work itself is not centered entirely on her self-image, for she is not the sole, nor even perhaps the central figure of most of her novels. In fact, when Woolf assessed herself and her work explicitly, it becomes clear that despite her acclaim, she saw her literary self as a source of vulnerability. Literary work engaged her in a peculiar bundle of ideas and fears. At times she was optimistic and committed. Even in 1928, after the publication of many of her major novels, she wrote in her diary that “[a]t 46 I am not callous; suffer considerably; make good resolutions—still as experimental & on the verge of getting at the truth as ever.”¹¹ At other moments she wondered of her books, “How much part does ‘coming out’ play in the pleasure of writing then? Each one accumulates a little of the fictitious V. W. whom I carry like a mask about the world.”¹² Nevertheless, Woolf was often capable of seeing herself and her writing as interrelated. Her diaries, with their intimacy and candor, remain one of the most revealing sources of her opinion concerning her work. In them is expressed a self-regard that typifies Woolf's view of her work. Her account fluctuated at times daily, most often articulating a lack of confidence and yet sometimes conveying a very arrogant opinion. This apparent paradox was partly owing to her mental condition, partly due to the way in which she viewed the world, for she was not convinced that people were solely or completely in control of their destinies. Woolf saw herself not as unique in this quality but representative. She illustrated this feeling from her own emotional experiences. In “A Sketch of the Past” she famously describes the influence of her mother as part of a way all people are made up and changed, often like invisible forces:

Until I was in the forties—I could settle the date by seeing when I wrote To the Lighthouse, but am too casual here to bother to do it—the presence of my mother obsessed me. I could hear her voice, see her, imagine what she would do or say as I went about my day's doings. She was one of those invisible presences who after all play so important a part in every life. This influence, by which I mean the consciousness of other groups impinging upon ourselves; public opinion; what other people say and think; all those magnets which attract us this way to be like that, or repel us the other and make us different from that; has never been analysed in any of those Lives which I so much enjoy reading, or very superficially.¹³

More than being about her mother, this passage offers a self-image. Importantly for Woolf, both personality and action were subject to the “magnetic” effect of others. Neither was ultimately stable or monolithic. In this she did not imagine herself to be unique, suggesting that she believed the individual to be part of broader influences and communities, determined by the past as if it were still there in existence alongside the present. This belief might imply that Woolf's writing was like a response, or even part of a dialogue, with those influences, her family and friends.

All of these factors also affected the view Woolf expressed about herself, a figure at times either almost disassociated from the present or at the opposite extreme, so intensely engaged in its more threatening or worrying aspects that all the details of the present became a burden. Furthermore, Woolf saw her role as a writer as quite different from the public's understanding of what a writer represents, as a public figure and a name upon texts. She knew herself as a private individual and one emotionally involved in her expression of her personality and view of the world, before the public persona had much influence on her work.

In one biographical reflection Woolf sets out in detail a concrete picture of herself in terms of her origins: “Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world.”¹⁴ This conveys little of her individually. Woolf is more forthcoming elsewhere in the same essay. She recalls herself and her sister as tomboys and notes her habit of looking guiltily at herself in a hall mirror in the family home. She suspects a puritanical tinge from her ancestors and her father, a tendency toward self-denial in material things. This may explain the richness of the life of her imagination and creativity, and why the self of the fiction was separate and less constrained, a world where she was taken up by “such a violent impulsion & compulsion.”¹⁵ Of childhood and Talland House in Cornwall, Woolf made an idyll set against which her adult life was a pallid existence. As Lee writes, “Happiness is always measured for her against the memory of being a child in that house. The images she uses to describe that memory are pleasurable and consolatory, images of fullness, rhythm and light.”¹⁶

Any reading of Woolf's diaries or letters indicates clearly that as her mood shifted periodically (and often swiftly), her attitude toward her writing was transformed. In these swings Allie Glenny perceives the reactions of an anorexic female, a sense of disempowerment, a self-effacement.¹⁷ Whatever the source of this ambivalence, Woolf combined two contradictory extremes in her opinion of herself. She was capable of being convinced about the overwhelming possibilities of her talent; yet, in other moments, she was devoured by an undermining doubt about her writing and a fear of criticism. This was so severe that it often threatened both her physical and mental health. In this diary entry from the early 1920s, Woolf was planning a new kind of writing, a further development, but was also tinged with self-doubt:

Talks of arriving at “some idea of a new 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 & lightness I want: doesn't that get closer & yet keep form & speed, & enclose everything, everything? My doubt is how far it will [include] 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, the humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist. Then I'll find room for so much—a gaiety—an inconsequence—a light spirited stepping at my sweet will. Whether I'm sufficiently mistress of things—that's the doubt; but conceive mark on the wall, K. G. [Kew Gardens] & unwritten novel taking hands & dancing in unity. What the unity shall be I have yet to discover: the theme is a blank to me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less by chance 2 weeks ago. I suppose the danger is the damned egotistical self; which ruins Joyce and [Dorothy] Richardson to my mind: is one pliant & rich enough to provide a wall for the book from oneself without its becoming, as in Joyce and Richardson, narrowing and restricting? My hope is that I've learnt my business sufficiently now to provide all sorts of entertainments.¹⁸

These reflections about her plans are both complex and revealing. For Woolf, writing was all about emotion and feeling. One key element is what it can say about inner truths, but as an experiential quality. This explains why the given, narrated detail of the lives of her characters are sketchy and partial, secondary to the narrative's enactment of inner consciousness and environment. Certainly, this new form of the modernist novel expressed the joy Woolf felt was within her when engaging in creative work. It created the possibility of some expression of naturalness, a sense of being, as opposed to something painstakingly constructed in the manner of the traditional novel.

Writing in this fashion and being recognized for doing so literally constituted part of Woolf's notion of her identity and adult personality. Compared to the Victorian fictional model of building up scenes and characterization, Woolf's writing offers evidence of a reinvigorated process and a kind of lightening of her own mood and spirits. There was a sense of expiation and therapeutic engagement that she sought and understood. By shaking off the past in this way Woolf made the transformation of the culture a personal challenge. Her words in the quoted passage describe a critical moment in her literary life when she was about to develop her writing more fully, become more experimental and much bolder with her narrative structures. Woolf questioned herself intensely, as she did over nearly all issues. Here, at a point before she had completed Jacob's Room, is a picture of a woman approaching forty without any real major success but reaching toward inner talents and ambitions. The image of the scaffolding that is to be removed offers a mental image not only of Woolf's realization that she did not need the traditional structures of the novel—the currency of realism and plot development—but also of the risk involved. Without the past tradition, she feared, the whole edifice might collapse, but she had to risk this possibility. Significantly, she reminded herself of the success of three of her modernist short stories—“The Mark on the Wall” (1917), “Kew Gardens” (1919), and “An Unwritten Novel” (1921)—rather than her first two novels. In order to see what was different about her own kind of writing, Woolf distinguished herself not from modernism generally but from two other specific writers, James Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, its major proponents at that point. Woolf wanted a unity that was less about the author and more balanced than previous modernist writing. This signifies the greatness of her ambitions, despite her many self-doubts.

Woolf's literary doubts were recurrent, and the record of them provides many insights into how she regarded her abilities as her writing career progressed. In June 1923, while working on a novel with the working title “The Hours” (later to become Mrs. Dalloway), her commitment to making language less artificial and more appropriate was at the forefront of her thoughts. She was concerned about whether she might be rather too fond of words for their own sake, drawn to their effects as formal and poetic things. Her love of wordplay, rhetoric, and argument, noted by various contemporaries, confirmed certain aspects of this self-image: “One must write from deep feeling, said Dostoevsky. And do I? Or do I fabricate words, loving them, as I do? No I think not. In this book I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life & death, sanity & insanity; I want to criticise the social system, & to show it at work, at its most intense—But here I may be posing.”¹⁹

Intense feeling was central to Woolf's creativity, but she saw a further purpose to her fiction, an aspect of social commentary, an underlying desire for change. Ideas and a sense of life were essential to her. She wondered about the accusation of Arnold Bennett and others that she could not deal with characterization and was unable to sustain a sense of a person as memorable. For Woolf, her search for a fuller reality and the reaching of a more powerful writing than the traditional was a thing with its own merits. It offered her personal benefits: “This is justification; for free use of the faculties means happiness. I'm better company, more of a human being.”²⁰ The implication is that outside of her writing life she felt less involved and often very isolated. Beyond the issue of characterization, Woolf questioned even her ability with plotting. She worried that she was limited to thinking only at the level of a scene, rather than a protracted series of events. In October 1927 she expressed doubt about her talents: “I can make up situations, but I cannot make up plots. That is: if I pass the lame girl, I can without knowing I do it, instantly make up a scene: (Now I cant think of one). This is the germ of such fictitious gift as I have.”²¹

Woolf's overwhelming doubts about her writing tended to suppress the moments of harmony. Her creative anxieties were akin to the isolation to which she was prone, torturing herself with thoughts of her own childlessness. Woolf felt her mental state as a literal thing. She saw her own lack of discipline as a matter of regret. Typically, she reflected in her diary, “a little more self control on my part, & we might have had a boy of 12, a girl of 10: This always makes me wretched in the early hours.”²² Although aware of the practical difficulties of motherhood, Woolf saw something lacking in herself because of her childlessness. At times she felt an intense jealousy of her sister, Vanessa, with her three children.

Consciously, Woolf channeled these rivalries and regrets into her writing. It offered her a consolation. Her propensity for jealousy, as she knew, went beyond the personal and affected her relationships in the literary world. In a 1920 diary entry she recorded one of her early meetings with T. S. Eliot. The entry highlights Woolf's tendency toward both positive and negative comparisons regarding herself and her contemporaries. It demonstrates that her critical doubts toward her own work varied as her optimism ebbed and flowed. Her writing was affected by mood swings and by her fluctuating levels of energy:

I think I minded more than I let on; for somehow Jacob [Jacob's Room] has come to a stop, in the middle of that party too, which I enjoyed so much. Eliot coming on the heel of a long stretch of writing fiction (2 months without a break) made me listless; cast shade upon me; & the mind when engaged upon fiction wants all its boldness & self-confidence. He said nothing—but I reflected how what I'm doing is probably being better done by Mr Joyce. Then I began to wonder what it is that I am doing: to suspect, as is usual in such cases, that I have not thought my plan out plainly enough—so to dwindle, niggle, hesitate—which means that one's lost.²³

Woolf had no single, ongoing view of her abilities and talents. Her mood was as variable concerning her work as it was about everything else in life, offering extremes of response to situations. The recurrence of these kinds of anxieties and her sense of being attacked is a persistent theme throughout the diaries. The entries reach periodic crescendos and show how all of her negative emotions overwhelmed her other sense of her work, but they also exhibit an intensity, such as the notion of the wave of life, which was so influential in her work, particularly The Waves: “Down—God, I wish I were dead. Pause. But why am I feeling this? Let me watch the wave rise. I watch. Vanessa. Children. Failure. Yes; I detect that. Failure. (The wave rises). Oh they laughed at my taste in green paint! Wave crashes. I wish I were dead! I've only a few years to live I hope. I cant face this horror any more—(this is the wave spreading out over me).”²⁴ The intensity is of such depth and profundity that reading the diaries is often both moving and extremely disturbing, especially given the fractured and painful view one is provided of Woolf's self-image. Yet, elsewhere she knows “I am glad to be alive & sorry for the dead.”²⁵

Woolf's envy and sense of competition proved to be productive, as one senses she recognized. This is suggested by the way she recorded the dynamics of herself and her artistic development as a kind of rivalry. By this self-imposed literary contest with the likes of Joyce and Richardson to further the modernist revolution, Woolf provided an idea of how she saw herself differently from such fellow modernist writers. Almost as if to justify this self-image she created an art form that sustained that sense of her abilities. She found an artistic sense upon which to base this uniqueness. She saw her writing as less personal and not as obsessed with her own experience. Woolf wanted to reintegrate elements of both the objective and spiritual. Yet, she was less than confident that she could sustain this kind of unity and vision for a major project. She worried that the very nature of a longer novel would crush the spontaneity of observation and the freshness of any situation rendered fictionally. In order to find her new ground, Woolf reflected on the past in a February 1920 diary entry, rereading her first novel, picturing her younger self both in terms of writing and her personality of almost a decade before:

The mornings from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I've not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don't know—such a harlequinade as it is—such an assortment of patches—here simple & severe—here frivolous & shallow—here like God's truth—here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heavens knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn—& then a turn of a sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole I like the young womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences—& my word, what a gift for pen and ink!²⁶

Woolf captured the contradictions of her earlier self and her earlier writing. She perceived it as serious and straightforward, yet often unperceptive and irrelevant. The image of embarrassment is strong in this entry, yet she admired her own thought, her overall ability to write. One can conjecture that this was more than vanity or a dramatic pose, since, given the severity of the mental illness and breakdowns in the intervening period, it is almost as if Woolf had to retrieve and confront a prior self. Within the “failures” she could perceive the talent and potential.

Significantly, this process of self-criticism was effective for Woolf, leading to sharper, more concise and effective writing. The subject matter of Jacob's Room indicates that her relationship with Thoby was a key element in this confrontation with the past. In “A Sketch of the Past” Woolf describes her sexual naiveté in her teens and twenties, a feature she used in characterizing Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out. She recalls the sexual frankness of Stella Duckworth's fiancé, Jack Hills, who told Woolf about men's sexual explicitness and obsessions: “I was incredibly, but only partially, innocent. I knew nothing about ordinary men's lives, and thought all men, like my father, loved one woman only, and were ‘dishonourable’ if unchaste, as much as women; yet, at the same time I had known since I was sixteen or so, all about sodomy, through reading Plato.”²⁷ Woolf was aware that her early writing expressed her restricted view, but in the later work, too, she opted not to depict sexuality explicitly and presented it indirectly. This in part might explain why, by 1931, she had decided that she disliked the younger generation, which was so much more direct.

Such reflections can be seen as typical of Woolf's opinion of herself. Whenever she thought of herself there were two intense strands. The first was an image of her artistic self, involving an assessment of her writing and her overriding doubts. The second was the image of her past life and its current significance at the point of reflection. This may be a response to the effects of her intensity in writing and adopting new forms. Referring to the completion of The Years in April 1937, Woolf promised herself that there would be some rest, but she drove herself onward: “After this one day's respite, I say, I must begin at the beginning & go through 600 pages of cold proof. Why oh why? Never again, never again. No sooner have I written that, than I make up the first two pages of Two [sic] Guineas & begin a congenial ramble about Roger [Fry]. But seriously I think this shall be my last ‘novel.’”²⁸ One doubts her lasting sincerity in the final comment; much as the concept was seductive, Woolf knew of her own drive. A remark in a March 1936 diary entry demonstrates how close her greater achievements brought her to madness again: “And I am so absorbed in Two Guineas—thats what I'm going to call it. I must very nearly verge on insanity I think. I get so deep in this book I dont know what I'm doing.”²⁹

Woolf knew herself as almost driven, for however threatening the creative tension, the void it replaced appeared far worse. She worked constantly on new projects, however debilitating the previous one. The work allowed her to offset the unavoidable aspects of grief presented by a world of conflict. In July 1936, when she heard of the death of her nephew Julian Bell in Spain, Woolf spent several weeks consoling the grief-stricken Vanessa. Julian had died on the evening of 18 July in a hospital after having been struck by a shell fragment while driving an ambulance. Woolf recorded going to Vanessa's studio in Fitzroy Street; against this sense of misery one can see the elements to which she contrasted her writing—the emptiness, meaninglessness, and doubts that often framed her life:

The only thing was a kind of comfort in being there with Nessa Duncan, Quentin & Angelica, & losing completely the isolation, the spectator's attitude in being wanted; & spontaneous. Then we came down here last Thursday; & the pressure being removed, one lived; but without much of a future. Thats one of the specific qualities of this death—how it brings close the immense vacancy, & our short little run into inanity. Now this is what I intend to combat. How? how make good what I protest, that I will not yield an inch or a fraction of an inch to nothingness, so long as something remains. Work of course. … Directly I am not working, or see the end in sight, then nothingness begins.³⁰

In March 1937 Woolf described the power of the activity of writing and the disconcerting feeling that arose once she reflected upon a work's public and critical reception. She was dismayed at the criticism that she anticipated for Three Guineas. The writing was therapeutic in some senses but became a source of further tension. In such a cauldron, Woolf's views of herself were variable and intensely personalized. Rarely could she obtain any kind of objective opinion or evaluation that would last for long. The turmoil of her inner problems would resurface:

I'm going to be beaten. I'm going to be laughed at, I'm going to be held up to scorn and ridicule—I found myself saying these words just now. Yet, I've been absorbed all the morning in the Un[iversit]y part of 3 Gs. And the absorption is genuine; & my great defence against the cold madness that overcame me last night. Why did it suddenly point itself like a rain cloud & discharge all its cold water? Because I was switched off doing Pictures in the morning; & then at the play, I suddenly thought the Book Society had not even recommended The Years. That's true; but the B.S. is not an infallible guide. Anyhow these days of waiting must be a dull cold torture.³¹

As ever, a kind of public humiliation about her work and her social recognition haunted Woolf's thoughts, yet the notion of an indifferent public leaving her to obscurity remained an equally unacceptable scenario. Only the act of writing could prevent this neuroticism.

In June 1938, in response to reviews of Three Guineas, Woolf conjured up an idea that she might achieve some kind of release if she were to remain involved only in some sort of private activity, eschewing the public side of writing, with the external judgement of critics and a readership. To satisfy these people and her self-imposed requirement for continued innovation required a huge effort. Writing for Woolf was a complete process, drawing in her life, personality, emotions, and energies: “And thats the end of six years floundering, striving, much agony, some ecstasy: lumping the Years & 3 Gs together as one book—as indeed they are. And now I can be off again, as indeed I long to be. Oh to be private, alone, submerged.”³² Yet, her dependency on praise and recognition offset this desire for quiet. As she recorded in August 1938, she was quite sensitive to criticism of Three Guineas, especially from her own circle of close friends. Forewarned by John Maynard Keynes's wife, Lydia, Woolf becomes intensely nervous about “his heckling.” Her diary entry provides a glimpse of the contradictory qualities that she found in herself and her writing, a desire for confidence and an undermining sense of others' opinions:

Now the thing to remember is that I'm an independent & perfectly established human being: no one can bully me: & at the same time nothing shall make me shrivel into a martyr or a bitter persecution maniac. The one specific is to write a thorough good book—i.e. Roger [Roger Fry: A Biography]. I've not got the words right about the soul. I mean I stand on my own feet. Maynard and the rest can only puff: & the honesty of my intention in 3 Gs is bound to see me through.³³

Confident as she might appear, Woolf's obsessive nervousness in other instances over reactions to her work show that as a person she was liable to “shrivel” and be bullied. She was often uncertain and knew her own suspicions. Yet, whatever her uncertainties, in terms of writing she persisted with her own judgment and project. She knew the source of her confidence was that as a writer she had fewer potential criticisms to handle and a far simpler creative and production process than that which most writers faced.

Whatever the book sales and the public acclaim, both of which she noted in her diaries with a certain pride, Woolf was a very private person. She had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, but all were drawn chiefly from the educated classes that she describes as part of the patriarchy in Three Guineas. Outside of these circles she knew that she was uneasy, and although she was eager for literary fame, she despised its other trappings. Once achieved, even aspects of fame were worrying, for the emergence of two academic books on her work (one French, one German) struck Woolf as a danger signal. She thought it signified her transition into a “figure” rather than someone appreciated as an active and living writer. She rejected academic honors and resented the incursions into her private life that accompanied celebrity. In March 1937 Woolf depicted herself as a victim, both evasive and angry, harassed by an American journalist. This occurred during one of her periods of depression and headaches, which made the situation even more intense for her:

Yesterday a reporter for the N. York Times rang up: was told he cd. look at the outside of 52 if he chose. At 4.30 as I was boiling the kettle a huge black Daimler drew up. Then a dapper little man in a tweed coat appeared in the garden. I reached the sitting room—saw him standing there looking round. L. ignored him. L. in the orchard with Percy [Batholomew, the gardener]. Then I guessed. He had a green note book & stood looking about jotting things down. I ducked my head—he almost caught me. At last L. turned & fronted him. No Mrs W. didnt want that kind of publicity. I raged. A bug walking over ones skin—cdn't crush him. The bug taking note. L. politely led him back to his Daimler & his wife. But they'd had a nice run from London—bugs, to come & steal in & take notes.³⁴

In the whole affair there is a mixture of tension and vulnerability, emotional responses of which Woolf made much in her characterizations. She was very knowing of her own reactions, and if the depiction of the journalist is ironic, so too is her unconscious view of her own vitriol and indignation. The dramatic episode, starting with the domestic detail of preparing afternoon tea, shows how private she expected her life to be and how taken aback she was by both the intrusion and the interest generated by her work. She knew of the extremity of her responses. Her self-image in this episode is significant, because she saw her literary self almost as another identity, someone she could report on in the third person as “Mrs W.” There is a touch of snobbery in her response, the opposite of the veneration of her social superiors alluded to in one of the essays published posthumously in Moments of Being, “Am I A Snob?”

Late in 1938 Woolf lent the substantial amount of £150 to a friend, Helen Anrep, who was struggling financially and trying to make do without a servant. When Helen appeared to fritter away the money, Woolf became embittered. These conflicts made her aware of her tendency to dwell on issues. The repetition and the sheer effort of existence that permeated both her life and her work depressed her. Often she saw ordinary life outside of creativity as a treadmill, inane and pointless and relieved only by spurts of creativity. In November she wrote in her diary about confiding her frustrations with Helen to her sister; the act of describing these events brought much more to the surface:

Yes & when Nessa came back, whom I so much wanted to see, the old irritation about Helen bubbled up, & I walked all through Finsbury Park this afternoon, telling over & over the story of my loan. I wonder why. Why life suddenly seems empty & endless: & I seem for ever climbing the endless stair, forced; unhelped; unthanked; a mere slave to some harsh—shall I say destiny—or is the word too big for what is probably some superficial reaction; part the old jealousy of Nessa's children is it? And then oh bore of writing out a story to make money!³⁵

Woolf detested writing for money to make up the losses. She saw in this yet another drudgery. Additionally, she feared losing her autonomy; at moments such as these, life seemed an entrapment in which she was subject to forces beyond herself.

As Woolf noted at the New Year in 1931, “Here are my resolutions for the next 3 months; the next lap of the year. First, to have none. Not to be tied. … To make a good job of The Waves. To care nothing for making money.”³⁶ This intense sense of herself became transposed to many of her characters in crisis. Rachel Vinrace, Clarissa Dalloway, Lily Briscoe, Septimus Smith, and many others incorporate this sense of Woolf's identity. This feeling was the most undermining of senses in her emotional vocabulary, as in the images of life as an endless stair and a form of slavery. In such periods of negativity, the world of books could seem insignificant and her world very narrow. Early in 1931 Woolf wrote of a meeting with Aldous Huxley and his wife, seasoned travelers and greatly active in many spheres. Woolf complained to herself about the life she and Leonard led:

And I feel us, compared with Aldous and Maria, unsuccessful. They're off today to do mines, factories … black country; did the docks when they were here; must see England. They are going to the Sex Congress at Moscow, have been in India, will go to America, speak French, visit celebrities,—while here I live like a weevil in a biscuit. The fog thickens. … Lord how little I've seen, done, lived, felt, thought compared with the Huxleys—compared with anyone. Here we toil, reading & writing, year in year out. No adventure, no travel; darker grows the fog.³⁷

For later readers used to Woolf's international reputation and influence, the notion of viewing her work and her world as narrow and limited is difficult to accept. Yet, as for many writers, writing for her was the product of a closed and solitary series of months or even years of resisting other temptations and opportunities. The very combination of repetition and hard work necessary for her successes could seem not only burdensome in itself, but, in her worst moments, it caused her to see herself as innately unadventurous or even parochial. This sense malaise is found as a tinge that colors many of her characters, individuals profoundly uneasy with the patterns into which they have been drawn. When Clarissa Dalloway returns home after shopping, the tedium and routine displace all of the excitements of the day, her almost monastic and celibate existence becoming too confining.

There were consolations. Even abuse and hostility from the general public could lead Woolf to see her work in a positive light. In June 1938 she anticipated (and later received) outraged mail from traditional readers she hoped to antagonize with Three Guineas: “I foretell a great many letters on Tuesday night: some anonymous & abusive. But I have already gained my point: I'm taken seriously, not dismissed as a charming prattler as I feared.”³⁸ Even if one is charitable toward Woolf, taking into account the era in which she lived and the facts of her mental illness, in truth she had a dim view of the mass of people. She was aware of this reaction and knew of its somewhat irrational features. In July 1938 she wrote of her negative mood, tinged with an underlying concern for the threat and imminence of war: “Yet how dumpish we were—starting off to the Movies, after dinner—L. asking me what I wanted to see, I not wanting to see anything—the crowds of deformed & stunted & vicious & sweating & ugly hooligans & harridans in the Tott. Ct. Road—the usual sticky heat—all this brooded, till I was saying, step out, on, on, in my usual desperate way.”³⁹ Woolf's painful self-awareness was combined with a sense of often extreme social and public reserve. As Quentin Bell makes clear in his biography of his aunt, Woolf was sexually reserved, afraid of arousal, and curiously indifferent to clothing to such a degree that it became almost a fetish. Woolf commented upon this reserve frequently in her diaries and letters. As Bell says, this disposition led to a personal awkwardness quite at odds with her literary ambitions: “Virginia for her part really more than half wanted to be invisible. The whole business of clothes was a nightmare to her; and she was happiest when she could forget that anyone looked at her.”⁴⁰

When World War II arrived, Woolf seemed concerned at times with what posterity would make of her. She was disillusioned with the changing intellectual and literary scene, where she was noticed less. Feeling older and reading the change in the mood of the times, she was inclined to assess Bloomsbury's worth retrospectively, seeing herself as aging and less relevant. In January 1940 the decline in her work's reputation moved her to wonder whether Keynes might eclipse her in the regard of future generations. A conversation with him that she cited in a diary entry nevertheless made it clear that they thought her work's reputation would survive, despite her competitive urge for greater posthumous fame than his: “Which of our friends will interest posterity most? Maynard? So that if I had any regard for the future I would use this hour to record what he said. About his parents. Lying extended on the sofa the other night with the two fog lamps burning, & Lydia a sort of fairy tale elf in her fur cap. We were talking of my legacy. …”⁴¹ Legacy and posterity were quite separate issues for Woolf than the successes and plaudits of the contemporary scene. Others, such as Vita Sackville-West, achieved a level of fame and fortune that Woolf thought to be unmerited. She was skeptical of the merits of Vita's award-winning poetry and best-selling novels, despite the benefits of these publications to the Hogarth Press and despite their passionate love affair. Woolf could not help but to see such issues comparatively, and in January 1940 she was appalled at Vita's earnings compared to her own. Evidently, although Woolf charted her own sales figures and financial returns closely, she could not believe that the market offered a true literary judgment. Rather, she respected a long-term view. Woolf provided another picture of her writing schedule, one she could not alter even for large journalistic commissions:

Vita is offered £1,850 for a 25,000 word story. My righteous backbone stiffens. Then what about my £200 dog story? Ah, but I wouldn't for any money write 25,000 words. I think I've proved that to be true in this way: the humiliation, that is obstinate refusal of the brain to comply & one's drubbings, & re-writings, & general despondency, even for 2,000 words, make it not so much morally, as physically, intellectually a torture.⁴²

Although Woolf, who had been rejected by Vita after their close relationship, was known for her cutting comments and humor, much of this repartee was a defense mechanism to fend away intimacy and attacks. It became habitual, as Woolf half admitted when forced by one of Vita's friends to examine her critical attacks and her underlying assumptions.

In September 1926 Vita visited Woolf with an acquaintance, George Plank. It would appear by her own admission that Woolf attempted some of her caustic wit, so famed in Bloomsbury, and suffered a counterattack of Plank's caustic response. Rather more robust than many of Woolf's admirers, he made clear his disapproval of her attitude, and she saw the illusion of her persona crumble: “I saw myself, my brilliancy, genius, charm, beauty (&c. &c.—the attendants who float me through so many years) diminish & disappear. One is in truth rather an elderly dowdy fussy ugly incompetent woman vain, chattering & futile. I saw this vividly, impressively.”⁴³ Woolf searched for the cause of her mood and her dismissive response to this visitor. She attributed her behavior in part to Plank's assumption that the Woolfs could afford to pay and house a full-time gardener. As ever, she felt marginalized with respect to the wealthy class in which she mixed socially. Even the reviews of her books made her feel less than brilliant an issue that became an ongoing theme, especially with The Times Literary Supplement, always responsive but staid and prosaic:

As for the Common Reader, the Lit. Sup. Had close on 2 columns sober & sensible praise—neither one thing nor the other—my fate in the Times. And Goldie [G. L. Dickinson] writes that he thinks “this is the best criticism in English—humorous, witty & profound.”—My fate is to be treated to all extremes & all mediocrities. But I never get an enthusiastic review in the Lit. Sup. And it will be the same for Dalloway, which now approaches.⁴⁴

Woolf wanted a critical response to her writing that acknowledged the more-extreme aspects of her vision and character. To be merely worthy was insufficient; this judgment resonated too much with her father's ultimately bitter fate, captured in Mr. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Woolf was striving consciously to go beyond such mediocrity. She looked on her work as if it might touch upon something mystical or reach a metaphysical dimension, a territory she admitted that she found it hard either to envisage or describe. This is why she created worlds within her novels, a mental image of these possibilities. This exploration was the role of literature, the central reason she endured so many breakdowns and crises. Soon after being shaken by the encounter with Plank, Woolf tried to define this synthesis of elements:

I wished to add some remarks to this, on the mystical side of this solitude; how it is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with. It is this that is frightening & exciting in the midst of my profound gloom, depression, boredom, whatever it is: One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think. The interesting thing is that in all my feeling & thinking I have never come up with this before. Life is, soberly & accurately, 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? &c. But by writing I don't reach anything. All I mean to make is a note of a curious state of mind. I hazard the guess that it may be the impulse behind another book. At present my mind is totally blank & virgin of books.⁴⁵

In Woolf's idea of an existential solitude, there is something left beyond the self, an essence. The limitations in writing itself are touched upon in her admission that she barely managed certain features of reality itself, but her “curious state of mind” was the driving force. Always in her writing Woolf perceived a struggle to express spontaneity and this curious quality and depth of objects.

In an August 1933 diary entry Woolf wondered whether another breakdown threatened because her creativity and everyday life could not be reconciled: “I long to write The Pargiters. No. I think the effort to live in 2 spheres: the novel; & life is a strain; … I only want walking & perfectly spontaneous childish life with L. & the accustomed when I'm writing at full tilt: to have to behave with circumspection & decision to strangers wrenches me into another region; hence the collapse.”⁴⁶ Increasingly, the energy required must have seemed too great, especially as critical response to her work diminished throughout the 1930s. Toward the end of her life Woolf's enthusiasm for her writing waned, with war literally overhead in the shape of German planes flying over Monk's House, the Woolfs' country home. She was concerned about her physical decline, unable to draw a straight line with a steady hand, but her notion of her creative originality and independence continued and was reconfirmed. She came to feel less concern for what others said about her work and more interest in her writing as a living process: “[T]he idea came to me that why I dislike, & like, so many things idiosyncratically, now, is because of my growing detachment from the hierarchy, the patriarchy. When Desmond praises [T. S. Eliot's] East Coker, & I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying, I am I; & must follow that furrow, not copy another. That is the only justification for my writing & living.⁴⁷ Within three months of making this December 1940 diary entry, Woolf killed herself.

Quentin Bell sees a withdrawal and incongruity in Woolf's final phase as war accelerated:

As the battle approached, and it became more and more likely that we should be defeated, Virginia's existence seemed to become unreal or at least incongruous; the activities and sentiments of her daily life were completely at variance with the appalling struggle on which her fate depended. Thus when she sent off the proofs of the Life of Roger [Fry], she could speak of “peace and content” well knowing how grotesquely such a statement must read on the third day of the Battle of France.⁴⁸

One might add that this incongruity and grotesqueness might have been felt by most of the civilian population in England. Woolf saw in the bombing of London an erasure of the concrete links with her past, an environment where a spiritual sense had once been possible and which was now literally in ruins. Drawing from this sense of threat and potential loss, Woolf projected her final self-image in the bossy, isolated, and embattled Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts. As Bell admits “Never had a novel of hers flowed so rapidly, so effortlessly from her pen; there were no checks, doubts, despairs, struggles or revisions.”⁴⁹ Despising her audience, interruptions, and tradition, Miss La Trobe reworks the history of England in a pageant that owes much to Woolf's Orlando as a precursor. Miss La Trobe seems indifferent to plot or traditional notions of the self, as the novel makes explicit, and more interested in brewing emotion. At the end of the pageant, as the audience departs, she hopes she has unified their attention and their sense of themselves: “Now Miss La Trobe stepped from her hiding place. Flowing, and streaming, on the grass, on the gravel, still for one moment she had held them together—the dispersing company. Hadn't she … made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony … for one moment … one moment.”⁵⁰ Four months after finishing her draft, Wolf ended her own agony in a less visionary, aesthetic fashion.

Notes

1. Suzanne Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Anaïs Nin (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 135.

2. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), pp. 10-11.

3. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), p. 5.

4. Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography, p. 150.

5. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 269.

6. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, volume 5 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1985), p. 304.

7. Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (Oxford: Oxford University Proof, 1984), p. 61.

8. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 3 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1982), p. 16.

9. T. E. Apter, Virginia Woolf: A Study of Her Novels (New York: New York University Press, 1979), p. 2.

10. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 304.

11. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 3, p. 180.

12. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 307.

13. Woolf, Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, second edition (London: Hogarth Press, 1985), p. 80.

14. Ibid., p. 65.

15. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1983), p. 133.

16. Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 22.

17. Allie Glenny, Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating Distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf (London: Macmillan, 1999).

18. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 2 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1981), pp. 13-14.

19. Ibid., p. 248.

20. Ibid., p. 249.

21. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 3, p. 160.

22. Ibid., p. 107.

23. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 2, p. 69.

24. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 3, p. 110.

25. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4, p. 85.

26. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 2, p. 17.

27. Woolf, Moments of Being, p. 104.

28. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 22.

29. Ibid., p. 20.

30. Ibid., pp. 104-105.

31. Ibid., p. 64.

32. Ibid., p. 148.

33. Ibid., p. 163.

34. Ibid., pp. 72-73.

35. Ibid., p. 189.

36. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4, p. 3.

37. Ibid., p. 11.

38. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 149.

39. Ibid, p. 225.

40. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, volume 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1972), p. 137.

41. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 255.

42. Ibid., p. 262.

43. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 3, p. 111.

44. Ibid., p. 17.

45. Ibid., p. 113.

46. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4, p. 172.

47. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 347.

48. Bell, Virginia Woolf, volume 2, p. 215.

49. Ibid., p. 222.

50. Woolf, Between the Acts (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970), p. 98.