GETTING ESTABLISHED

Woolf left myriad reflections about her life. They are found in her fiction and in the numerous expressions of her fears about the reception of her work expressed in the diaries she kept from 1915 until her death. From the diaries it is possible to reconstruct the development of her mature career, but there remains much less material on her earlier years, when she started first writing. Woolf took a long time to become established as a novelist. She started the surviving diary when she was thirty-three years old and unpublished. Yet, long before the time of her first novel, something in Woolf seems to have marked her with the desire to become a writer. She possessed an early natural propensity for telling stories in childhood. Certainly, she aspired to please others with her precocious writing and storytelling. Woolf described in the diaries the impulse for her experiments with various kinds of writing, including memories of her avid storytelling as a child. She invented a nightly tale for her father and produced fictional and journalistic writing for the weekly family newspaper, The Hyde Park Gate News, produced by the Stephen children for their parents. Woolf took the lead and encouraged the other children to contribute intermittently from 1891 to 1895. Leslie Stephen's first biographer was certain that he perceived Virginia as his heir in the literary field. Certainly, her father supported her desire to read unchecked, but it appears that his interest waned when he descended into his prolonged, melodramatic, and self-obsessed bereavement after Julia Stephen's death in 1895. Woolf's sister, Vanessa, recalled, “I cannot remember a time when Virginia did not mean to be a writer and I a painter.”¹

Woolf was educated in a haphazard fashion at home, initially by her mother and later by her father. She desired the more structured and classical education given to her brothers and denied most young women by the Victorian patriarchy. From 1897 Woolf pursued her own studies of Greek in lessons from both Clara Pater (Walter Pater's sister) and Janet Case. This was the first major phase of Woolf's intellectual and stylistic development. Concurrently, she began writing essays, few of which remain, in a self-conscious literary apprenticeship. Despite recent critical hostility toward Woolf's father for his role in her education, it still seems generally acknowledged that he encouraged his daughter and at times depended on her as an audience for his own projects. Even in her later development, Woolf saw her father and his social class as a force not only to negate but also to acknowledge as a great influence. As Gillian Beer writes, “Woolf cannot quite shake free of the allure of privilege nor leave behind the paternal. Her work needs them and resists them—needs to resist.”² This reactive quality of Woolf's work is very strong, with an aesthetic and social polemic and a resistance to conventions lying just beneath the surface. She rejected patriarchy and its mundane bourgeois qualities, marking it out as tasteless. As Neville reflects in The Waves, trying to read the significance of the lives of horse dealers and plumbers, “‘Let me denounce this piffling, trifling, self-satisfied world; these horse-hair seats; those coloured photographs of piers and parades. I could shriek aloud at the smug self-satisfaction, at the mediocrity of this world, which breeds horse-dealers with coral ornaments hanging from their watch-chains.’”³

A crucial factor in Woolf's development as a novelist came after her father's death in 1904. She was introduced to the world of book reviewing and journalism, where she honed her writing skills. In reviewing fiction she further developed her own views and understanding of the creative process (although these critical interventions were not always consistent). Woolf began to think about what she should write, describing in her diary an insight she had during a family trip the Pembrokeshire coast: “I was for knowing all that was to be known, & for writing a book—a book—But what book? That vision came to me more clearly at Manorbier aged 21 [sic], walking the down on the edge of the sea.”⁴ She was inspired to write fiction, but this had to wait. Violet Dickinson, who nursed her through the breakdown she suffered after her father's death, introduced Woolf to the editor of the women's supplement of The Manchester Guardian. Her journalism was published anonymously in the supplement in 1905 and 1906. As Virginia Stephen, she published an article in 1905 on London street music in The National Review. Her reflections on London traders and musicians prefigure their recurrence as a motif in her fiction, such as the descriptions of barrel-organ music and an elderly street singer in The Years. Other work appeared in The Academy and Literature, The Speaker, The Cornhill Magazine (of which her father had been editor from 1871 to 1882), and The Times Literary Supplement, for which she continued to write for most of her life. Woolf responded positively to criticism from the Times Literary Supplement editor, Bruce Richmond, a family connection through her half brother George Duckworth. Late in May 1938 she referred in her diary to the value of this experience as she reflected on her decision to cease reviewing and Richmond's response: “A letter, grateful, from Bruce Richmond, ending my 30 year connection with him & the Lit Sup. How pleased I used to be when L. [Leonard Woolf] called me ‘You're wanted by the Major Journal!’ & I ran down to the telephone to take my almost weekly orders at Hogarth House! I learnt a lot of my craft writing for him: how to compress; how to enliven; & also was made to read with a pen & notebook, seriously.”⁵

Woolf's manner of making notes in the process of reading seems remarkably like the method adopted by her father, as recorded in a photograph of her parents at Talland House. They are both reading, and the young Virginia is peering over a chair at their studious activities. John Mepham summarizes Woolf's learning curve in the journalistic field, remarking her awareness of the need to accept cuts and take criticism as factors in the development of her own voice. She created in her journalism “her own distinctly elegant, impressionistic and witty style.”⁶ As Mepham indicates, Woolf's journalism was a serious and ongoing commitment both in terms of time consumed and earnings. The sheer volume of her journalistic output meant that her few early attempts at fiction were modest and consisted mainly of humorous sketches of her friends. These are alluded to in letters and diaries, but few of them survive. There remain autobiographical sketches, including “Reminiscences” (posthumously published in 1976), a memoir of her mother, and another on her half sister, Stella Duckworth, and Vanessa. In these sketches Woolf's language is still essentially Victorian and reveals little promise of the skill of her later writing. Perhaps significantly, the portrait of her mother is far more negative than later ones, as if she were working out her anguish at this point. Woolf's past was not the basis for her fiction. She drew a distinction between her fictional and other writing: “It is a good idea I think to write biographies; to make them use my powers of representation [of] reality [and] accuracy; & use my novels simply to express the general, the poetic.”⁷

In 1908, during what was for Woolf the traumatic period following her sister's marriage to Clive Bell, she began her first serious attempt at a novel. Originally to be called “Melymbrosia,” it reflected the love triangle that she created in her jealous attempt to become close to Clive. She showed him manuscript versions of her drafts and accepted his commentary and judgment. This was the sole time in her life that she revealed substantial information about any text in progress. After this, she never again opened her creativity in process to the scrutiny of others. A further essential in Woolf's progress as a writer came in 1909 when her aunt, Caroline Stephen, died and left her a £2,500 legacy, a considerable sum at that time. This meant Woolf could reduce her journalistic work and focus more wholeheartedly on her novel, eventually published in 1915 as The Voyage Out. Caroline's generosity came after the time Woolf spent in Cambridge with her aunt, indicating her influence and their closeness. During this time Woolf finished a reminiscence of her father, “Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen,” which was included in F. W. Maitland's biography of Stephen. As Mepham comments, “Although this was not published until 1906, it was her first piece of writing successfully written for publication. Her writing career thus opened as it was to go on, with a very intimate relation between her writing and deep and difficult feelings, as if through writing she attempted to put her feelings in order.”⁸

As a result of both her aunt's and her father's legacy, together with money bequeathed by Stella, Woolf was financially independent for most of her life. The only real threat to this stability were the periodic high costs for medical supervision and care during her bouts of insanity. Additionally, the Hogarth Press, which Virginia and her husband, Leonard Woolf, started in 1917 as a mixture of therapy and hobby, became financially rewarding and alleviated any such worries in a practical sense. Initially, the Woolfs printed and bound the books by hand. As they became more sophisticated, Leonard managed the day-to-day aspects of the enterprise. What it meant was that from 1917 and the first phase of printing, Virginia gradually acquired intimate and hands-on knowledge of both the creative and production processes of literature.

The Hogarth Press project came about after the period of major breakdown that Woolf experienced following her marriage, during which she attempted suicide by taking an overdose of veronal, a sleeping medicine. The press later became a relatively valuable commercial enterprise that helped Woolf to maintain financial independence. Late in April 1938, Woolf made note of this in her diary: “Rain & dark. A lost dog in the Square; political lull. Income Tax up to 5/6. Our earnings prodigious. Income tax last year about £6,000. … Press worth £10,000. & all this sprung from that type on the drawing room table at Hogarth House 20 years ago.”⁹ In certain moods the survival of the Hogarth Press surprised Woolf. As it grew, she cultivated the professional relationships that shaped the press and much of literary modernism in England. She undertook many of the mundane operating tasks. Gradually, and with hard work, the business flourished through a shrewd selection of authors, such as Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, Vita Sackville-West. The friendships and literary fellowship with such a disparate range of writers helped Woolf to decide which features of her own work she wished to develop. She recognized other aspects she found less palatable. It was during this period that Woolf produced an account of contemporary fiction, “Modern Novels” (1919), revised and republished as “Modern Fiction” in 1925.

Apart from Woolf's first two novels, which were published by her half brother Gerald Duckworth's firm, all of her subsequent major works were published by the Hogarth Press. This gave her creative independence and freedom. Once freed from having to submit her work to the scrutiny of publishing-house readers, Woolf abandoned the restrictions of her first two novels. She began to experiment with first-person stream-of-consciousness narrative in the story The Mark on the Wall, published by the Hogarth Press in 1917, and she continued to adapt. In October 1937, when the Woolfs decided against their plan to sell the press to Leonard's assistant and later partner, John Lehmann, Virginia reviewed the significance of the venture. She knew it had created a space for furthering her literary experiments: “We have decided, gradually, completely, not to sell the Press; but to let it die off, saving for our own books. This is a good conclusion I think. It keeps the right to adventure; cuts off some money. We c[oul]d not face writing for publishers. Thus I carry out my own theories anyhow. And we get fresh scope for experiment & freedom.”¹⁰

Woolf's editorial responsibilities did not restrain the virtuosity and changing nature of her books. Publishing her own books meant that she and Leonard could both assess her work critically and catch the kind of problems of inconsistent detail that appeared in The Voyage Out. Perhaps another factor in the development of Woolf's writing style was her interaction with the group of young people who became the Bloomsbury Group. This involvement helped her to write in ways reflecting the issues of creativity, metaphysics, and new ideas in modern painting and sculpture, which were all at the forefront of Bloomsbury interests. Such factors had a crucial part to play in shaping how Woolf approached the writing process. They militated against any acceptance of traditional methods and helped her to establish her reputation as a well-regarded literary novelist of influence.

TECHNIQUES

Woolf's technical ambitions and challenges were drawn from her experience of life as a woman and a human individual: “These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my experiences as a body, I do not think I solved.”¹¹ Woolf's technique can be investigated by examining her writing and considering her opinions about the process of writing. She expressed the latter in different contexts. Also suggestive are the kinds of writing and techniques that influenced Woolf. Her own technique involved not only questions of how a text should finally appear but also the personal and psychological process of creation.

Woolf inscribed scenes in her writing that both draw upon her earlier authorial ambitions and show readers something of how she understood the writing process to work in practice. One such episode is found in The Waves, when Bernard reflects on and anticipates the writer's craft and method:

When I am grown up I shall carry a notebook—a fat book with many pages, methodically lettered. I shall enter my phrases. Under B shall come “Butterfly powder.” If, in my novel, I describe the sun on the window-sill, I shall look under B and find butterfly powder. That will be useful. The trees “shades the window with green fingers.” That will be useful. But alas! I am so soon distracted—by a hair twisted like candy, by Celia's Prayer Book, ivory covered. Louis can contemplate nature, unwinking by the hour.¹²

The passage conveys an outline and synthesis of the impressionistic elements and methods found in Woolf's more-advanced works. It also shows her both parodying and yet recognizing the need for collection of material and note-taking. Underpinning Bernard's words is the underlying difficulty of the writing process. There is the synthesis of a response to nature but also a sense of being drawn back into the familiar and domestic mystery of objects. That words cannot ever be objects is both obvious and profound.

Of course, Woolf's exact relationship to Bernard's method is uncertain. She might have partially identified with the technique described, rejected it, or intended the passage entirely as a parody. She might have been intentionally uncertain, since she was ambivalent about her own work. Woolf was capable of vacillating between great pride (almost arrogance) about her craft and abject fear of its insignificance. One is aware of a quality of self-consciousness, with the writer reflecting within the text on writerly questions, aesthetic considerations, and the elusiveness of any stance. In different kinds of writing by Woolf, clusters of possible readings of her texts as being about art itself are suggested. The reader senses this in the parody of different literary styles in Orlando (1928) and the reference to textual struggles in Jacob's Room, when Jacob edits his letters to his mother: “Jacob had nothing to hide from his mother. It was only that he could make no sense himself of his extraordinary excitement, and as for writing it down—”¹³ Throughout To the Lighthouse Lily Briscoe makes similar reflections about creativity in her thoughts on painting and life. For Woolf and her characters, creativity is never simple, although simplicity might be its goal.

Woolf's vision of women and of female writers in particular is very focused. She often expressed her views outside of her fiction, but these comments reveal something about how she saw herself in a tradition of women's writing. In “The Duchess of Newcastle,” one of the essays in The Common Reader (1925), she writes approvingly of one female kind of creativity in her reflections on the seventeenth-century thinker and playwright Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle: “She could even achieve the miracle of getting her plays acted in London and her philosophies humbly perused by men of learning. There they stand, in the British Museum, volume after volume, swarming with a diffused, uneasy, contorted vitality. Order, continuity, the logical development of her argument are all unknown to her. No fears impede her.”¹⁴ Apart from the last comment about fearlessness, Woolf might be summarizing her approach in much of her own work. Inevitably, there have been a great many studies on her, but if there remains any consensus, it is that ultimately she is both a very complicated person and a complex writer. She defies easy or immediate summary.

Woolf's method of writing changed over time, becoming less overtly concerned with social issues and apparently more personal. Nevertheless, a challenge to the conventional became its primary characteristic. By varying her narrative viewpoint, adapting free indirect discourse, and reworking the concepts of biography, Woolf indicated subtly that a traditional worldview was unacceptable. E. M. Forster commented that something over and above art for art's sake may have underpinned her refusal to be specifically political or socially improving in what she chose to write: “Improving the world she would not consider, on the ground that the world is man-made, and that she, a woman, had no responsibility for the mess.”¹⁵

While revising or writing, Woolf often read classic English literature. She knew the worth of her chosen books, but the relationship was often a little more complex in her case. To soothe her nerves in the process of rewriting The Years she chose to read The Trumpet-Major (1880), by Thomas Hardy, a friend and former colleague of her father. In February 1936 Woolf read Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850) as a break from working on The Years, a task she described succinctly in March: “Never have I worked so hard at any book.”¹⁶ She often used such writers as a model to encourage herself in her writing, seeing in them examples of good style, even if her own approach was not directly imitative. Indirectly, part of Woolf's technique was derived from such models of past literature. Still another part may have derived initially from the example of the female members of her family, suggesting a gendered and domestic manner of writing. Her “aunt” Anny Thackeray Ritchie (Leslie Stephen's sister-in-law from his first marriage) prepared a preface for a new edition of Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford (1853), published when Woolf was a precocious nine-year-old. Anny indicated an understanding of fictional methods that went beyond the simple Victorian concept of novel-writing as mimesis—the idea that descriptive fiction is a mere copying of the actual world:

The writer is writing of what she has lived, not only of what she has read or even looked at as she passed her way. It is true she read Adam Smith and studied Social Politics, but with that admirable blending of the imaginative and the practical qualities which was her gift, she knows how to stir the dry skeleton to life and reach her readers' hearts. … This power of living in the lives of others and calling others to share the emotion, does not mean, as people sometimes imagine, that a writer copies textually from the world before her.¹⁷

This synthesis of intellect, emotion and lived experience suggests the kind of narrative employed by Anny's good friend, Henry James. Anny added a female viewpoint to her own fiction, which was admired by George Eliot. This female perspective may have had a subliminal, suggestive effect on Woolf, despite her father's scorn of Anny's work. In a practical sense of family tensions, Anny was an ally with the young Woolf against her father. Anny was the basis for Mrs. Hilbery in Woolf's second novel, Night and Day. Moreover, as Carol Hanbery MacKay points out, both Anny and Woolf may have drawn on the improvisatory writing method of Anny's father, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, a method that Leslie Stephen resisted.¹⁸ Anny knew this style of writing well, having acted as her father's amanuensis and researcher. As MacKay notes, Woolf admired Anny's impressionistic style in conveying a sense of childhood, especially in her novels The Village on the Cliff (1867) and Old Kensington (1873). When the publishing firm Jonathan Cape expressed an interest in republishing these books (although later the proposal was abandoned), Woolf was enthusiastic about writing full introductions to them. What also excited her was Anny's resistance, in both life and art, to Victorian gloom. Clearly, at least in this last sense, Woolf's “aunt” was an inspiration to her.

In her journalism Woolf explored the potential of words in both their ordinary contexts and the literary scene. She worked out an ongoing (and sometimes contradictory) series of critical notions about literature of the past and present, from which her own techniques developed. These essays should not necessarily be interpreted as constituting any kind of manifesto, program, or strict methodology. However, they are useful in understanding what Woolf saw as effective writing. They also indicate exactly what she abhorred. Many of the more effective essays she revised and gathered in 1925 for The Common Reader, her first nonfiction collection, published only weeks before Mrs. Dalloway. The essay “Modern Fiction” is clearly relevant and is often cited, but Woolf's reviews of Montaigne, Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, and Greek literature are equally revealing about her views on the fictional process. Significantly, she alludes to her father's literary presence negatively, and to Anny's more sympathetically.

It was in such essays as those collected in The Common Reader that Woolf's reversal of Victorianism and avowal of a gendered reading began. However, this must be interpreted with textual care, as Mepham makes clear, pointing out why many studies of Woolf's writing should be read with caution:

Open any a book on Woolf and you will find a discussion of her “method” and of her views about the aims of the modern novel, that relies heavily upon a series of quotations from her article “Modern Fiction.” The very same passages are always quoted. They are often taken to be Woolf's clearest definition of what she was attempting to do in her work. They tell us that on any ordinary day a myriad of impressions falls upon the ordinary mind and that the task of fiction is to record these impressions as they fall, in the order in which they fall. We are also told that life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged, but a luminous halo. After seventy years of repetition, these passages have become apparently immovably fixed as the main reference points for the exposition for Woolf's work.¹⁹

As Mepham points out, nothing about “Modern Fiction” indicates that in Woolf's view her critical points should or even might be applied to her own work. First published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1919 as “Modern Novels” just after the completion of Night and Day, the essay came years before the main body of Woolf's work, well before she reflected, in “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” also in The Common Reader, that James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) “was a memorable catastrophe—immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”²⁰ In “Modern Fiction” her opinion is that “[i]t is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature.”²¹

In “The Russian Point of View,” also from The Common Reader, Woolf is more instructive. She explores Anton Chekhov's narrative of the soul and its human relations as “emphatic points” that confound traditional fictional expectations: “Once the eye is used to these shades, half the ‘conclusions’ of fiction fade into thin air; they show like transparencies with a light behind them—gaudy, glaring, superficial. The general tidying up of the last chapter, the marriage, the death, the statement of values so sonorously trumpeted forth, so heavily underlined, become of the most rudimentary kind. Nothing is solved, we feel; nothing is rightly held together.”²² Such artificial traditions of fiction are arguably central to Woolf's own first two novels. They begin to be challenged in the third, Jacob's Room. In Woolf's journalism there are observations that indicate the kind of writing that she not only admired but also felt was exemplary for the writer. In “Jane Austen” she finds in Austen's writing complexities that make her “a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears on the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet it is composed of something that expands in the reader's mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial.”²³ Woolf argues of Defoe that “his chief virtue … is that he deals with the important and lasting side of things and not with the passing and trivial” and that “he achieves a truth of insight which is far rarer and more enduring than the truth of fact which he professed to make his aim.”²⁴ In the essay “Montaigne” Woolf outlines the limitations of writing and the written tradition, relating Montaigne's success to the knowledge of oneself and “soul,” her term for the variability, complexity, and self-awareness of the individual. Her description of vital individuality has an almost Emersonian quality: “Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”²⁵

Woolf's famous reservation about the works of Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy (as representative of the Edwardian Age and its conventional writing) in “Modern Fiction” is “that they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and enduring.”²⁶ In contrast, Austen contrived to draw from triviality and the commonplace a universality that “gently subsides again to become part of the ebb and flow of ordinary existence.”²⁷ This is the key element to understanding Woolf's major criticism of “materialists” such as Bennett, Wells, and Galsworthy in “Modern Fiction.” There is some sense of the bizarre quality of existential being that she thinks eludes the best of these writers in their works: “Is it worth while? What is the point of it all? Can it be that, owing to one of those little deviations which the human spirit seems to make from time to time, Mr. Bennett has come down with his magnificent apparatus for catching life just an inch or two the wrong side? Life escapes; and perhaps without life nothing else is worth while.” Woolf is really insisting that life is more than a catalogue of material elements. Her own fictional method involved a search for a frame and sense of vision that could convey some of this greater possibility through narrative: “Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this the essential thing. …”²⁸

Certainly, this more-generous portrayal of life is not found in Woolf's earliest novels. Published in 1915, only four years before her attack on Bennett and other writers of uninspired detail, her first novel, The Voyage Out, opens with a combination of convention and fanciful humor:

As the streets that lead from the Strand to the Embankment are very narrow, it is better not to walk down them arm-in-arm. If you persist, lawyers' clerks will have to make flying leaps into the mud; young lady typists will have to fidget behind you. In the streets of London where beauty goes unregarded, eccentricity must pay the penalty, and it is better not to be very tall, to wear a long blue cloak, or to beat the air with your left hand.²⁹

Experimentation occurs only at the thematic level in The Voyage Out. At this point Woolf was simply incapable of developing the formal qualities and possibilities of narrative that she sought in her subsequent work: “Many books had been tried and then let fall, and now Terence was reading Milton aloud, because he said the words of Milton had substance and shape, so that one could merely listen to his words; one could almost handle them.”³⁰ The tentativeness of Woolf's initial fiction is perhaps confirmed by her identifying the character Mrs. Thornbury as seventy-two years old at one point and, at another, supplying her implausibly with an undergraduate son at Cambridge. Woolf also gives Mrs. Thornbury parents of her own, who are energetic enough to “spoil their grandchildren.”³¹

Such discrepancies may have been the result of numerous drafts; Mepham points out that in “the final version of the novel, she censored material which she felt brought into the light too openly her most private thoughts and feelings.”³² This revision for self-protection was repeated in Woolf's subsequent novels. Even in The Voyage Out, an attempt at satire on the upper-middle classes, there is a hint of the metaphysical indeterminacy and the challenge to conventional order that informs her later texts. In chapter 11 Arthur is about to declare his passion to Susan:

“Odd things happen to one,” said Arthur. “One goes along smoothly enough, one thing following another, and it's all very jolly and plain sailing, and you think you know all about it, and suddenly one doesn't know where one is a bit, and everything seems different from what it used to seem. Now to-day, coming up that path, riding behind you, I seemed to see everything as if—” he paused and plucked a piece of grass up by the roots. He scattered the little lumps of earth which were sticking to the roots—“As if it had a kind of meaning. You've made the difference to me,” he jerked out, “I don't see why I shouldn't tell you. I've felt it ever since I knew you. … It's because I love you.”³³

These observations remain far less important than the satire on romance and the portrayal of young women's social entrapment within conventional expectations to marry. The latter reflects a phase Woolf endured when she rejected a string of what she considered to be unsuitable suitors. This scene is unsubtle compared to her later work. Woolf employed techniques in The Voyage Out that she was later to improve upon.

Woolf's aesthetic perspectives became the center of her texts. Increasingly, she brought together a combination of narrative and theories of art and being. Her family relationships offer some clue as to why she reacted so radically to the stultifying traditions of literary realism, the assumption that writing could be transparent. She did not agree that literature could in any way “report” on a stable and concrete world of easily understandable objects. Her urge to undermine this kind of narrative was a determined one. What Woolf did as an alternative was a matter of juggling elusive narrative qualities. Jane Goldman reflects on the earlier critical reaction to Woolf's apparent fictional worldview: “The elusive qualities of Virginia Woolf's ‘moment’ have exercised critics for some time, yet her phrase ‘menacing with meaning’ has not survived into the common lexis of debate: rather, the Woolfian moment is considered a moment of pure being, a mystical experience, beyond the everyday, beyond history, and beyond meaning.” Goldman maintains that it is important to “place the Woolfian moment in the context of ‘the real world,’ that is in the material and historical realm beyond merely the personal and subjective; to understand some of the feminist implications of Woolf's aesthetics.”³⁴

In Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (1970) Harvena Richter sees Woolf as having combined and extended the perceptual coordinates of reality, drawing on G. E. Moore's view of perceptual experience as “diaphanous” and William James's concept of a “halo” or “penumbra” surrounding consciousness:³⁵

The moment of being becomes the emotional unit out of which the larger complex of [Woolf's] fiction is spun. That complex depends on an intricate relationship of emotions: a web of personal feelings radiating from each person and at times forming a tangling or intersecting of strands. This criss-crossing forms the conflicts or tensions which affect each character. The patterns of these inner tensions as they shift from changing moment to moment make up the form of her novels.³⁶

In her novels Woolf refuses to prepare the reader for the convoluted turns of the plot, so the unfolding of events evokes a sense of the unfamiliar and unexpected. She exaggerates the surprising qualities of even mundane things. This means that the kind of consent manufactured by traditional realist novels is almost entirely absent, and the outcome can be shocking and disturbing. The casual reference to Mrs. Ramsay's and all the other deaths in the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse retains an emotional power. Unprepared, the reader experiences a shock at the disturbance of the relationships built up in the preceding portion of the novel. The lack of a center of narrative viewpoint conveys an almost metaphysical poignancy. This is even more intense than the stream-of-consciousness technique employed by many other modernist writers.

According to Richter, Woolf used “psychological techniques which help place the reader in the mind of the character: the discontinuity of thought and its patterns, the simultaneity of perceptual experience, the ‘scrambled’ data of consciousness, the moment of present time.”³⁷ In expanding the use of the parenthetical remark, Woolf was not entirely original since the device was employed by both Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll. Overall, her technique involved various strategies. In arranging her material Woolf used the logic of unconscious elements. She depended upon leaps of intuition, symbolism, emotional connections, and a general reference to the common mood of feelings between otherwise unconnected physical elements. She combined surface links with underlying ones, such as the bells in Mrs. Dalloway that relate to the memory of a clock striking.

Not long after Woolf's suicide, in the 1941 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, Forster made some astute critical points. He perceived in Woolf an intensity achieved by few writers, describing her creative and narrative process: “She liked receiving sensations—sights, sounds, tastes—passing them through her mind, where they encountered theories and memories, and then bringing them out again, through a pen, on to a bit of paper. … They had to be combined, arranged, emphasised here, eliminated there, new relationships had to be generated, new pen-marks born, until out of the interactions, something, one thing, one, arose … analogous to a sensation.”³⁸ This combination was stretched to embrace the full range of human sensation, challenging any singular or narrow sense of the normative. Forster is correct that rather than being simply impressionistic—although an impressionistic sense is one aim of certain sections of her work—Woolf's narratives arrange the sensations of life in symbolic, repetitive, aural, and aesthetic patterns. Certainly, repetition (especially the doubling of effects or references) remained a key technique, which the reader must recognize as essentially important to all levels of aesthetic meaning in Woolf.

The challenge in Woolf's mature work to normative thinking and rationality is achieved by what Richter describes as an “[o]blique angle of vision.”³⁹ This means that Woolf's narratives present things from unexpected angles, from positions adjacent (almost as if looking over the shoulder) to the characters. This creates unusual angles of vision, either physically (as if describing from a basement) or from the perspective of a character one might not expect to be authorized as the narrative center. Richter explains how this “angle of vision” functions in a section of Mrs. Dalloway presented from the perspective of the mentally troubled character Septimus Smith:

As the reader becomes accustomed to the angle of Septimus' vision, he realizes that it is one of a dissociated world: objects and events are dislocated; normal spatial relationships change, with corresponding shifts in meaning; scenes are fragmented and reassembled in bizarre ways. This is the schizophrenic's landscape, in which internal and external reality are confused and private meanings (externalizing inward anxieties) are projected onto the perceptual world.⁴⁰

Woolf's oblique angle of vision and shifting voice replace the static implications found in traditional point of view or characterization. In Forster's view, “She has all the aesthete's characteristics: selects and manipulates her impressions; is not a great creator of character; enforces patterns on her books; has no great cause at heart.”⁴¹ For Forster, Woolf's fiction is redeemed by its sense of humor, energy and complex centeredness:

It is not the spoken voice of the character or the conventional narrator; it is the inner voice whose exact nature resists definition yet attempts, through language and rhythm, to articulate feeling. It is the tone of the internal monologue, but it represents more than mere verbalized consciousness. It is verbalized being; giving voice to the total moment, transcending self and time, its vibrations strike the inner ear of the reader as a familiar voice. Since it is at once conscious and unconscious, personal and impersonal, individual and collective, it is the voice of everyman, and, conversely, of no man.⁴²

Forster saw that the different modes of voice offered a variety of narrative methods. These include a narrative from within the character, resembling an interior monologue. There is another voice of an overriding intelligence (a point of view that can be mistaken for a narrator), which almost hovers above characters with access to obscure areas of personality. The third major type of voice reveals by reaching into past hidden truths. Woolf had a virtuosity in achieving in rapid sequence transitions between such voices or perspectives, accomplished through technical and metaphorical sophistication. From Jacob's Room onward, her choice of words is revealing and indicates to the reader an idea of perception that is personally derived and makes few objective claims. She uses verbs of perception or understanding that offer a sense of provisionality, such as appeared, imagined, felt, thought, looked, seemed, and so forth.

Forster's main objection to Woolf's writing, despite his praise, holds perhaps a valid point: “Now there seem to be two sorts of life in fiction, life on the page, and life eternal. Life on the page she could give; her characters never seem unreal, however slight or fantastic their lineaments, and they can be trusted to behave appropriately. Life eternal she could seldom give; she could seldom portray a character that was remembered afterwards on its own account. …” According to Forster, this is because of the poetic urge, an aspect of Woolf's writing almost universally noted by critics of all kinds: “Belonging to the world of poetry, but fascinated by another world, she is always stretching out from her enchanted tree and snatching bits from the flux of daily life as they float past, and out of these bits she builds novels.”⁴³

Woolf's writing was often controlled by the general regime imposed on her in an attempt to stabilize her physical and emotional health. When considered well enough by her husband and her doctors, she spent from two to three hours in the morning at her creative work, often revising later in the day. She appears to have had a favored method of writing. She wrote with a board on her lap rather than at a desk. Leonard guided his wife after each manuscript. He read through each first draft, suggesting revisions or expressing general approval. His concern for her health meant that he limited his interventions. Virginia appears to have benefited from Leonard's restraint since it allowed her free reign for new ideas and experimental forms. Moving consciously from one context to another, she was dissatisfied at reworking approaches or material that simply repeated previous successes.

Using the diaries, as some scholars have done, it is possible to chart some of the stages Woolf recorded in her conception and development of her work. The diary entries for early 1931 are instructive in providing a view of how her projects overlapped. The original plan for one book, which was eventually split into the nonfiction work Three Guineas (1938) and The Waves, was that it should concern the sexual and professional life of women. Woolf's inspiration came from delivering a lecture to the London branch of the National Society for Women's Service in January 1931, at the invitation of one of Lytton Strachey's sisters, Pippa, who was secretary to the society. The lecture drew Woolf's attention away from The Waves, for the “didactive demonstrative style conflicts with the dramatic: I find it hard to get back inside Bernard again.”⁴⁴ Much later than planned, she rewrote The Waves, correcting toward the end of June the retyped version: “This work I began on May 5th, & no one can say that I have been hasty or careless this time; though I doubt not the lapses & slovenliness are innumerable.”⁴⁵ In July she recorded in her diary the laborious effort in three versions of The Waves in the form of a table, calculating the months involved. She charted her progress from the first serious beginning, on about 10 September 1929, through various revisions of two versions and on to the typescript version, which was at that point unfinished. She added, “Then remain only the proofs.” This was a process she disliked intensely. “I am in rather a flutter—proof reading. I can only read a few pages at a time.”⁴⁶ In fact, often Woolf's many final revisions were marked heavily on the printer's proof copies, but this was not to be the case with The Waves.

Leonard's caution, Virginia's own instinct, and her obsessive concern for critical responses to be positive combined differently. Sometimes she was capable of cutting radically and savagely, and on other occasions she pruned more judiciously. Leonard wrote,

She always got into a terrible state about a book when she had finished it. In fact, it was always one of those dangerous times for her health because the strain was terrific. When she finished The Years, which was one of the most popular of her novels, she thought it was hopelessly bad and got into such a state about it, and we went away and she put it out of her mind. Then she came back and started on it again and she cut out an enormous chunk in the middle. That is the only time in which she ever scrapped anything entirely.⁴⁷

Woolf never anticipated her husband's agreement. After earlier recording that he was reading the manuscript of Three Guineas, in February 1938 she wrote with relief of his overall approval: “One cant expect emotion, for as he says, its not on a par with the novels. Yet I think it may have more practical value. But I'm much more indifferent, thats true: feel it a good piece of donkeywork, & dont think it affects me either way as the novels do.”⁴⁸ As ever, for Woolf the subsequent practicalities of proofs and checking the text were inordinately stressful. These processes raised the very issue of a book's quality and their completion meant the end of her ability to engage in further revisions. A book's fate always became for Woolf an emotional issue. With each publication it seemed as if she felt the text became an extension of her own psychological vulnerability. In April 1938, still working on Three Guineas, she attempted to alleviate the combination of boredom and stress by inviting the younger writer Elizabeth Bowen to tea.

Clearly, although there were many biographical and family derivations for Woolf's raw material, rarely were they left unmeditated. She changed the characterization as necessary. Formal education was not a part of Woolf's life, but it is a theme in The Waves. Susan, who is modeled on Vanessa, has entirely different experiences from those of Woolf's sister. Susan's life typifies the Stephen daughters' class and upbringing but strongly reflects the Swiss alpine environment so beloved of Leslie Stephen: “I cannot be divided, or kept apart. I was sent to school; I was sent to Switzerland to finish my education. I hate linoleum. I hate fir trees and mountains.”⁴⁹ Parental coercion and rebellion is a strong theme in the novel. This makes the curious structure of monologues and assertions particularly appropriate, since it mixes the qualities of expiation, revelation, and polemic with those of the consciously pictorial and poetic.

In The Waves the figure of Bernard as an aspirant writer allows a window upon Woolf's approach to narrative. He prides himself on his “double capacity to feel, to reason,”⁵⁰ but worries after trying to provide details about a fellow railway traveler (just as Woolf earlier used fictitious train passengers as the starting point for a discussion of character in fiction in the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”): “The fact is that I have little aptitude for reflection. I require the concrete in everything. It is so only that I lay hands upon the world. A good phrase, however, seems to me to have an independent existence. Yet I think it is likely that the best are made in solitude. They require some final refrigeration which I cannot give them dabbling in warm soluble words.”⁵¹ The minutiae of life in all its factuality, such as the man's searching for his railway ticket, intrudes on Bernard's quest for the perfect phrase. This failure is commented upon by Neville, who reflects that however effective Bernard's description of people appears, he fails to capture their feelings. At the end of The Waves Bernard addresses his reader, explaining that to explain oneself requires stories, but their expression leaves reality and becomes extravagant and flamboyant. He is unable to convey what he sees in the “helter-skelter” quality of clouds, with “the confusion, the height, the indifference and the fury.”⁵² Such notions inspired Woolf's narrative innovations. Certainly, in her own relationship with real things and events, what might be called an aesthetics of deferral is involved: she puts off what the nature of a thing might be, circling it. The result is that the narrative approaches things askance, from different perspectives. As Bette London notes, “Woolf can never quite dismiss the possibility that the true reality yields itself to direct attack”:

Woolf's fictions are generated from a place of covered speech. Her practice repeatedly masks what it unveils, interrogates what it asserts, cancels what it inscribes. Refusing finally to endorse or reject the dominant literary modes, Woolf's art proliferates prohibitions without admitting the provenance of the censoring authority. It replicates the censoring practice without the underpinning belief—a kind of self-censorship without origin or end. Speaking through, between, and around the subjects it sets itself, Woolf's fiction fills its spaces with self-canceling effects. Rejecting silence as it does direct speech, it makes its resistance the site of verbal prolixity. In not speaking out, paradoxically, it finds its own distinctive speech.⁵³

As Woolf's writing became more assured, the techniques within the novels themselves become more complex, indicating her wish to develop the novel form. She continually revised the effects of her work, aiming perhaps further to surprise her readers. Variously, she evoked the experience and formal characteristics of dreams, fantasies, and daydreams, all of which are used in such a manner that dream experiences or fantasies are interpenetrated by other realities. The dream device draws from other literary sources, such as Cervantes and Louis Carroll. Another recurrent technique in Woolf's work is the expression of viewpoint through behavior and attitudes, as in the appalling image of a squashed toad and snake in Between the Acts. Woolf often used such symbols and actions to express an intensity of emotion, as in Mrs. Dalloway, with Septimus Smith's drawing of stick insects, many of which are obscene and chaotic. These render his vision of his own mind and of the state of the external world that he inhabits in his illness. In a sense, this use of symbolic play, with its simplification of shapes and physical forms, is reminiscent of the modernist, antirealist painting that resisted Victorian visual conventions. But, unlike the Postimpressionist painters, Woolf maintained an insistence on an emotional perspective. Visuality is emotionally charged in her use of both technique and symbol, as in the vision of the world through the bereaved Betty Flanders's welling tears at the beginning of Jacob's Room. The reader engages in the suffering and its physical immediacy.

In both Jacob's Room and The Waves Woolf made a challenge to conventional narrative and a more decentered view of the social world by depicting the adult world through the eyes of a child. The use of ambiguity may have stemmed from her development of an effect on the reader that she regarded as one characteristic of great writers. In the essay “Charlotte Brontë” (1916) Woolf notes, “There is one peculiarity which real works of art possess in common. At each fresh reading one notices some change in them, as if the sap of life ran in their leaves, and with skies and plants they had the power to alter their shape and colour from season to season.”⁵⁴ Woolf sought such a release from the classificatory and rational nature of the conventional novel, exploring this quality of great art and believing it to be capable of capturing some of the essence of life.

SUBJECT TO REVISION

Woolf was aware that her writing was undergoing a transition during her work on To the Lighthouse: “March 9th 1926—I observe today that I am writing exactly oppositely from my other books: very loosely at first; not tight at first; & shall have to tighten finally, instead of loosening as always before. Also at perhaps 3 times the speed.”⁵⁵ Although she revised all of her novels, she produced fewer completely revised drafts as her career progressed. Writing “Melymbrosia” (the working title of The Voyage Out) as a response to Vanessa's perceived betrayal in marrying Clive Bell after their brother Thoby's death, Woolf integrated work on the novel into her flirtation with Bell. His encouragement may have been important, but the sisters' rivalry explains why it was to be the only manuscript Woolf revealed to anyone during the process of writing. It appears that she used the draft as a repository of feeling and desire. The final version was to be both personally and emotionally less revealing than earlier drafts. The rivalry of Helen Ambrose and her niece, Rachel Vinrace, for Terence Hewet's attention runs parallel to the real-life situation. Helen attacks Rachel, and in an excised section they tumble and fight with each other in the grass, where “they rolled indiscriminately in a bundle, imparting handfuls of grass together with gestures which under other conditions might have been described as kisses.”⁵⁶ Rachel's difficulties in forming emotional relationships mirror Woolf's own predicament, despite a flurry of courtship activity that included several offers of marriage (including the homosexual Lytton Strachey's withdrawn proposal). Rachel's sudden death (and the illness of other hotel guests) reflects the experience of the family on their return from Greece with Thoby and Violet Dickinson suffering from typhoid. Woolf made the illness unaccountable and enigmatic in the novel. In her revisions she attempted to make the novel more visual. She reworked some passages, while in others she substituted new sections for deleted ones, altering the bias. In the transitions the changes are significant. As Louise A. DeSalvo notes, “All overt references to Rachel's homosexual love for Helen were eradicated; all overt links between Richard Dalloway and Willoughby Vinrace were expunged, so that although the draft discusses Rachel's frigidity and links it to her fear of men, the equation between Willoughby Vinrace and Richard Dalloway is missing. Helen's overt sadism was pushed underground—instead of overtly victimizing Rachel, she is largely unaware of her envy.”⁵⁷

Woolf made further changes to The Voyage Out for the first American edition, published by George H. Doran, and a proposed second edition similar to the Doran version for Duckworth. Duckworth in fact published a second edition from the Doran sheets. Woolf altered dialogue in an attempt to make it more convincing, deleted detailed descriptions of Rachel's life in Richmond (the outer district of London where Woolf was living at the time of the revisions to the novel). In chapter 16 detailed histories of both Rachel and Terence were deleted. In the English edition Rachel describes a typical day for Terence in full detail (including visiting the poor with an aunt and taking tea); the American edition offers less detail, making Rachel's past more shadowy and indistinct and suggesting that the two are unwilling to be open with each other. Woolf excised references to Rachel's submission to her father's authority, making her articulation of her agony at being a woman much vaguer, far less authoritative, and more in keeping with someone in emotional turmoil. Rachel's delirium and death became far more personalized in progressive drafts, from a detached description to a more hallucinatory, symbolic and emotional one, with Rachel disassociated from her body and the world.⁵⁸

In the view of many critics, all of Woolf's revisions are revealing. As she polished a text, the drafts tended to become less personal and revealing. According to Mepham, “The drafts display crucial emotions, for example, anger, feminist resentments against men, sexual desires, fears and confessions, which are then covered over again in the final rewriting.”⁵⁹ In the original drafts of To the Lighthouse, Mr. Ramsay is far more verbally abusive and threatening toward his wife. He is more eccentric and more prone to fantasies, such as dying in military glory at Balaclava. His fluctuation between terrorizing and babyish behavior is far more explicit in the original drafts than in the published version. Similarly, the eight Ramsay children's characteristics are more pronounced in the original drafts. One daughter, Cam, is rejected because of her wildness, anger, and refusal to demean herself by subservient gestures to the men, all in a family where emotion is suppressed. There are underlying hints at injury to Cam from her bird-shooting, militaristic brothers. Cam's absentmindedness and crisis are far more central to the novel and its structure. Mrs. Ramsay is oblivious to the emotional depths and traumas of her children; her covering up a boar's head of which Cam is fearful merely buries the underlying causes of the girl's anguish, which may be thematically and symbolically interpreted as a reference to the incestuous abuse Woolf underwent. DeSalvo points out that in the final version of “Time Passes” Woolf excised an image of a boar's snout breaking the harmony like a mirror: “In one version, the snout in the mirror ‘thrusting itself up meant death, and starvation, pain, it was difficult to abolish its significance and continue.’”⁶⁰ DeSalvo relates the images to the Duckworth brothers' abuse of the young Virginia. Thus, Mrs. Ramsay's covering of the boar's skull becomes far more significant and questionable, implying a silent complicity after the event.

Certainly as Herta Newman makes evident by drawing from the original plans for To the Lighthouse, Woolf intended to center the narrative on her father. It is possible that traumatic memories of her abuse brought the image of her mother to the forefront. Woolf's revisions diminished the tone of anger and revulsion. In the manuscript a page of penciled notes conveys strong emotions and the idea of their suppression in the Ramsay family far more openly than they are conveyed in the published version of the novel:

James hated him.
Felt the vibration in the air
Felt the emotion
A bad emotion?
All emotion is bad to chi
Felt his mothers emotion
What her emotion was
The fatal male sterility
Must have sympathy
Plunges his great beak in
She is pouring forth life
Radium from every [cch.?]
A prodigal waste of feeling.
J. does not feel any emotion to his father(61)

Woolf's final stylistic revisions were considerable, reaching for a clarity of expression. In the final version of To the Lighthouse Mr. Ramsay muses that philosophy is like a progression through the alphabet, and he knows “He would never reach R.”⁶² In the holograph version this image of insufficiency is followed by a telling section. It demonstrates how Woolf's specific changes often derived from a conscious attempt to reach for the right vocabulary and image:

But how many men in a thousand million men press on to /reach/ Z? One perhaps. And his fame lasts how long? Perhaps two thousand years? And what are two thousand years in the long in the roll of ages? And What indeed? The very stones one kicks with the tow of ones boot have /will/ outlasted Plato. Shakespeare. His little light would shine, not very brightly for a year or two, & then be seen no more, & merged in some bigger light, & that in a bigger still—
Roam on. The light is we sought is
Shining still. I wandered till I died.(63)
And after all, who could blame the leader of that
Forlorn party, if, before before death stiffened his
limbs l beyond all movement, he does, a little
Consciously take on /strike/ an attitude of her raise his numbed fingers
To his brow, st square his shoulders, so that when his
Rescuers come they shall perceive that he died at his post, the
Fine figure of a soldier?
I wandered till I died
Roam on. The light we sought is shining still,
Mr. Ramsay murmured between clenched teeth.(64)

The revisions offer a picture of how the overall shape of the conflict in Mr. Ramsay's mind is established from the start. In the final version there are considerable differences in the passage. Ramsay stands by a geranium urn, implying the classical thought and philosophy that overshadows him. Woolf introduced the image of Ramsay thinking of himself as the leader of a lost expedition, drawing on her father's commitment to a male intellectual identity expressed in outdoor pursuits. A parenthetical aside stands in humorous contrast to Ramsay's lofty seriousness: “And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge.) What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.”⁶⁵

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Despite her later successes, throughout her work Woolf battled against the accusation from others (and her own doubts) that her stories lacked sequential logic and that this undermined the other qualities of life she intended to portray, the transcendent feelings. Often she wondered whether she achieved her goals. This self-questioning emerges in a scene from The Waves in which Neville analyzes Bernard and his propensity for order. Neville feels that in spite of his own hope for a different way of seeing things, it is confronted with the logic of Bernard's wish for a sequential, conventional narration:

“And now,” said Neville, “let Bernard begin. Let him burble on, telling us stories, while we lie recumbent. Let him describe what we have all seen so that it becomes a sequence. Bernard says there is always a story. I am a story. Louis is a story. There is a story of the boot-boy, the story of the man with one eye, the story of the woman who sells winkles. Let him burble on with his story while I lie back and regard the stiff-legged figures of the padded batsmen through the trembling grasses. It seems as if the whole world were flowing and curving—on the earth, the trees, in the sky the clouds.”⁶⁶

To tell of that moment rather than to experience it is to risk descending into Bernard's patter. This represents Woolf's fear of failure in trying to squeeze the magical and almost metaphysical quality of experience into her work. This tension plays out in the two characters' different views. The backdrop is nature mediated by the reality of the game of cricket, with its intricate rules. Nevertheless, for Bernard's stories briefly enchant the boys more than the formality of the cricket match. In a sense, Woolf makes her reader aware of the merely temporary ability of narrative to supersede concrete details, to which, of course, attention always returns.

An earlier change, almost an acceleration of experimentation, in Woolf's style occurred with her third novel, Jacob's Room. Her stylistic advance and discovery of further narrative possibilities came partly in response to the lack of any real critical acclaim for her first two novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day. The change in Woolf's writing was also perhaps a response to elements latent in her work, many of them prefigured by aspects of the works of Joyce, Mansfield, Marcel Proust, and Dorothy Richardson. The psychological and stream-of-consciousness techniques were major shifts, but in their subjectivism they drew upon new concepts of objective reality. The authorial voice became less important than the narrative structure in conveying to readers a need to identify with various characters and contexts. The viewpoint produced by the reading process had to adapt fluidly and rapidly. Woolf used and drew upon memory, free association, internal monologue, and cinematic devices because of the accusation that she was too conventional. She added a poetic refrain of repetitiveness and a feminized, ambivalent elusiveness. The abandonment and parody of plot was essential, but it can be overstated. In Woolf (and in most modernists) there remains more than a residual hint of authorial summary and control (however much they are diminished). The movement (and progression) in chronological time in The Waves, if reconstructed, conveys the sense of a social and understandable narrative sequence.

The physical and emotional trauma Woolf experienced in the process of writing her first novel indicated what was to become a pattern of suffering during the process or after completion. This would seem to indicate that writing was an intensely personal and physical process of emotional turmoil for her. Although the relationship between creating fiction and illness may not have been as simple as Leonard Woolf later thought, certainly the process of writing caused Virginia great anguish in various ways. She either agonized about a novel in the process of writing it (after The Voyage Out, always without any critical advice), sometimes becoming ill, mostly feeling a huge lack of confidence. She suffered acutely while Leonard read a manuscript and, later, while waiting for reviews. This was an intensely personal and somatic trial, clearly due in part to the intensity of emotions in her writing and her feeling that she was being judged. Woolf herself refused for most of her life to see any unconscious emotional disturbances in her illnesses, preferring to analyze physical symptoms and causes or to accept an idea of a hereditary failing. The curious and essentially unexplained death of the apparently healthy young Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out was a self-projection in this sense. Woolf's work, her identity, and the different phases of her writing were inextricable.

Woolf's writing was a constant reworking of earlier concepts and approaches; she responded to critical assaults by confronting the accusations. She answered the attack that she couldn't deal with character first by making it central—in Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando—and then by presenting it in a fragmented and almost provocative fashion, as in The Waves. In Orlando Woolf ponders teasingly whether the secrets of a writer's soul, the qualities of mind and life experiences, are not written large for the reader to see and require neither biography nor criticism. Despite this almost arrogant belittling of criticism, in private Woolf could be far less confident about the nature of her work and extremely vulnerable while waiting for its public reception, as is seen in a diary entry written while she was waiting for Three Guineas to be reviewed:

Am I right though in thinking that it has some importance—3 Gs [Three Guineas]—as a point of view: shows industry; fertility; & is, here & there as “well written” (considering the technical problems—quotations arguments &c) as any of my rather skimble skamble works? I think there's more to it than to A Room [A Room of One's Own]: which, on rereading, seems to me a little egotistic, flaunting, sketchy: but has its brilliance—its speed. I'm suspicious of the vulgarity of the notes: of a certain insistence.⁶⁷

Interestingly, Woolf could not properly conceive of the full implications of a work until after it had been published. Many of her positive assessments of her work came only after the public response to a particular work was known. Despite her intense worries about critical reception, this fear did not cause her to limit her scope. Woolf risked unpopularity with the feminism of Three Guineas. She knew that the disorganization in terms of plot and characterization in The Waves would both antagonize and confuse many readers. To a great degree, despite all her wish for acclaim, Woolf remained a writer who ultimately satisfied herself.

Since the appearance of feminist criticism on the contemporary critical reception of Woolf, it has become increasingly impossible to extricate the dynamics of her writing from the facts of her life as a woman. Together, her writing and life help to form an idea of her gendered analysis of her world. Certainly, Woolf's books were drawn from her life experiences in a way that makes it difficult simply to retreat into the texts, ignoring the writer and her times. Critics have recognized this crucial shift in Woolf studies, and the autobiographical and feminist aspects are seen as part of a larger project rather than as discrete and separable elements.

Notes

1. Vanessa Bell, Sketches in Pen and Ink, edited by Lia Giachero (London: Hogarth Press, 1997), p. 63.

2. Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), p. 2.

3. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1959), p. 70.

4. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, volume 2 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1981), p. 197.

5. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1985), pp. 144-145.

6. John Mepham, Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1991), p. 21.

7. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4 (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1983), p. 40.

8. Mepham, Virginia Woolf, p. 15.

9. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 137.

10. Ibid., p. 113.

11. Woolf, Killing the Angel in the House: Seven Essays (London & New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 8.

12. Woolf, The Waves, pp. 36-37.

13. Woolf, Jacob's Room (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), p. 131.

14. Woolf, “The Duchess of Newcastle,” in The Common Reader: First Series, edited by Andrew McNeillie (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 73.

15. E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf: The Rede Lecture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. 8.

16. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 16.

17. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, preface to Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford (London & New York: Macmillan, 1891), p. xvii.

18. Carol Hanbery MacKay, “The Thackeray Connection: Virginia Woolf's Aunt Anny,” in Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, edited by Laura Marcus (London: Macmillan, 1987), p. 71.

19. Mepham, Virginia Woolf, p. 67.

20. Woolf, “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” in The Common Reader: First Series, p. 235.

21. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader: First Series, p. 146.

22. Woolf, “The Russian Point of View,” in The Common Reader: First Series, p. 177.

23. Woolf, “Jane Austen,” in The Common Reader: First Series, pp. 138-139.

24. Woolf, “Defoe,” in The Common Reader: First Series, pp. 92, 93.

25. Woolf, “Montaigne,” in The Common Reader: First Series, p. 61.

26. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” p. 148.

27. Woolf, “Jane Austen,” p. 142.

28. Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” p. 149.

29. Woolf, The Voyage Out (London & New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 3.

30. Ibid., p. 308.

31. Ibid., p. 301.

32. Mepham, Virginia Woolf, p. 41.

33. Woolf, The Voyage Out, p. 126.

34. Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 1.

35. Harvena Richter, Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 21.

36. Ibid., pp. 30-31.

37. Ibid., pp. viii-ix.

38. Forster, Virginia Woolf: The Rede Lecture, p. 7.

39. Richter, Virginia Woolf, p. 84.

40. Ibid., pp. 88-89.

41. Forster, Virginia Woolf: The Rede Lecture, p. 9.

42. Ibid., p. 129.

43. Ibid., pp. 16, 17.

44. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 4, p. 6.

45. Ibid., p. 30.

46. Ibid., pp. 35, 38.

47. Leonard Woolf, quoted in S. P. Rosenbaum, Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press (Austin: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center/University of Texas at Austin, 1995), p. 239.

48. Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 127.

49. Woolf, The Waves, p. 97.

50. Ibid., p. 77.

51. Ibid., pp. 68-69.

52. Ibid., p. 239.

53. Bette London, The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990), p. 117.

54. Woolf, “Charlotte Brontë,” in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, edited by McNeillie, volume 2 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), p. 27.

55. Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, transcribed and edited by Susan Dick (London: Hogarth Press, 1983), p. 17.

56. Louise A. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf's First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 87.

57. Ibid., p. 102.

58. Ibid., p. 148.

59. Mepham, Virginia Woolf, p. 3.

60. DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf's First Voyage, p. 177-178.

61. Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, p. 69.

62. Woolf, To the Lighthouse (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), p. 35.

63. A transposition of two lines from Matthew Arnold's poem “Thyrsis” (1867): “… I wander'd till I died. / Roam on! The light we sought is shining still”; they were not used in the final version of the novel.

64. Woolf, To the Lighthouse: The Original Holograph Draft, pp. 68-69.

65. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p. 35.

66. Woolf, The Waves, pp. 37-38.

67. Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, volume 5, p. 134.