Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated) (2 page)

“The Mark on the Wall” was one of a number of what Woolf called “sketches” that she began to write around the time she and Leonard bought their printing press.
Night and Day
was the last of her books to be published in England by another press. In 1919 Hogarth published her short story
Kew Gardens
, with two woodcuts by Vanessa Bell, and two years later came
Monday or Tuesday
, the only collection of her short fiction published in Woolf's lifetime. Her next novel was
Jacob's Room
(1922), a slim elegy to the generation of 1914, and to her beloved brother Thoby, whose life of great promise had also been cut short so suddenly. Woolf had written to her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies in 1916 that the Great War, as it was then called, was a “preposterous masculine fiction” that made her “steadily more feminist,” and in her fiction and nonfiction she began to articulate and illuminate the connections between the patriarchal status quo, the relatively subordinate position of
women, and war making. Thinking about a novel she was calling “The Hours,” Woolf wrote in her diary in 1923 that she wanted to criticize “the social system.” Her inclusion in the novel of a shell-shocked war veteran named Septimus Warren Smith would confuse many of the early reviewers of her fourth novel,
Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), but others recognized that Woolf was breaking new ground in the way she rendered consciousness and her understanding of human subjectivity.

By the time she wrote
Mrs. Dalloway
, Woolf was also a sought-after essayist and reviewer who, like many of her celebrated contemporaries, was staking out her own particular piece of modernist territory. The Hogarth Press published radical young writers like Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Approached by Harriet Shaw Weaver with part of the manuscript of James Joyce's
Ulysses
in 1918, the Woolfs turned it down. Their own small press could not cope with the long and complex manuscript, nor could Leonard Woolf find a commercial printer willing to risk prosecution for obscenity by producing it. In 1924 the Hogarth Press became the official English publisher of the works of Sigmund Freud, translated by Lytton Strachey's brother James. Woolf's own literary criticism was collected in a volume published in 1925,
The Common Reader
—a title signaling her distrust of academics and love of broad, eclectic reading.

The staggering range of Woolf's reading is reflected in the more than five hundred essays and reviews she published during her lifetime. Her critical writing is concerned not only with the canonical works of English literature from Chaucer to her contemporaries, but also ranges widely through lives of the obscure, memoirs, diaries, letters, and biographies. Models of the form, her essays comprise a body of work that has only recently begun to attract the kind of recognition her fiction has received.

In 1922 Woolf met “the lovely and gifted aristocrat” Vita Sackville-West, already a well-known poet and novelist. Their
close friendship slowly turned into a love affair, glowing most intensely from about 1925 to 1928, before modulating into friendship once more in the 1930s. The period of their intimacy was extremely creative for both writers, Woolf publishing essays such as “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Letter to a Young Poet,” as well as three very different novels:
To the Lighthouse
(1927), which evoked her own childhood and had at its center the figure of a modernist woman artist, Lily Briscoe;
Orlando
(1928), a fantastic biography inspired by Vita's own remarkable family history; and
The Waves
(1931), a mystical and profoundly meditative work that pushed Woolf's concept of novel form to its limit. Woolf also published a second
Common Reader
in 1932, and the “biography” of
Flush
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog (1933). She went with Sackville-West to Cambridge in the fall of 1928 to deliver the second of the two lectures on which her great feminist essay
A Room of One's Own
(1929) is based.

As the political situation in Europe in the 1930s moved inexorably to its crisis in 1939, Woolf began to collect newspaper clippings about the relations between the sexes in England, France, Germany, and Italy. The scrapbooks she made became the matrix from which developed the perspectives of her penultimate novel,
The Years
(1937), and the arguments of her pacifist-feminist polemic
Three Guineas
(1938). In 1937 Vanessa's eldest son, Julian Bell, was killed serving as an ambulance driver in the Spanish Civil War. Woolf later wrote to Vanessa that she had written
Three Guineas
partly as an argument with Julian. Her work on
The Years
was grindingly slow and difficult. Ironically, given Woolf's reputation as a highbrow, it became a bestseller in the United States, even being published in an Armed Services edition. While she labored over the novel in 1934, the news came of the death of Roger Fry, one of her oldest and closest friends and the former lover of her sister, Vanessa. Reluctantly,
given her distaste for the conventions of biography, Woolf agreed to write his life, which was published in 1940.

In 1939, to relieve the strain of writing Fry's biography, Woolf began to write a memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” which remained unpublished until 1976, when the manuscripts were edited by Jeanne Schulkind for a collection of Woolf's autobiographical writings,
Moments of Being
. Withdrawing with Leonard to Monk's House in Sussex, where they could see the German airplanes flying low overhead on their way to bomb London, Woolf continued to write for peace and correspond with antiwar activists in Europe and the United States. She began to write her last novel,
Between the Acts
, in the spring of 1938, but by early 1941 was dissatisfied with it. Before completing her final revisions, Woolf ended her own life, walking into the River Ouse on the morning of March 28, 1941. To her sister, Vanessa, she wrote, “I can hardly think clearly any more. If I could I would tell you what you and the children have meant to me. I think you know.” In her last note to Leonard, she told him he had given her “complete happiness,” and asked him to destroy all her papers.

 

B
Y THE END
of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf had become an iconic figure, a touchstone for the feminism that revived in the 1960s as well as for the conservative backlash of the 1980s. Hailed by many as a radical writer of genius, she has also been dismissed as a narrowly focused snob. Her image adorns T-shirts, postcards, and even a beer advertisement, while phrases from her writings occur in all kinds of contexts, from peace-march slogans to highbrow book reviews. That Woolf is one of those figures upon whom the myriad competing narratives of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Western culture inscribe themselves is testified to by the enormous number of
biographical works about her published in the decades since her nephew Quentin Bell broke the ground in 1972 with his two-volume biography of his aunt.

Argument continues about the work and life of Virginia Woolf: about her experience of incest, her madness, her class attitudes, her sexuality, the difficulty of her prose, her politics, her feminism, and her legacy. Perhaps, though, these words from her essay “How Should One Read a Book?” are our best guide: “The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”

 

—M
ARK
H
USSEY
, G
ENERAL
E
DITOR

Information is arranged in this order: 1. Virginia Woolf's family and her works; 2. Cultural and political events; 3. Significant publications and works of art.