I’m not afraid of Virginia Woolf
I finally make my way to the lighthouse.
Rob James
March 16, 2025
Works of Virginia Woolf have been sitting on my bookshelf for years. I have what might be called “Jeopardy! knowledge” of her highlights. I knew she was a Modernist and a member of the Bloomsbury circle, and I knew the names of her most famous books. Going to college in the 1970s, I knew she was a belated subject of literary and feminist criticism. I read Michael Cunningham’s book and saw the film adaptation The Hours, telling the story of Clarissa Dalloway through three women living in three time periods. But I had not otherwise come to terms with Woolf, her life, or her writing.
Mrs. Dalloway is what I would call a “peripatetic novel”—one that features a character or characters traveling the streets of a city. That kind of work is richly intelligible to residents and wholly inscrutable to those not knowing the pathways. I wrote a book about another peripatetic novel, featuring an invaluable statuette and unsavory characters in constant motion for hundreds of years along the Mediterranean, and from Wednesday to Monday of one week on the streets of my own San Francisco (Robert A. James, Truths and The Maltese Falcon (2023)).
I was therefore delighted to discover that there is now an annotated version of Woolf’s work. It tells us exactly where the characters were walking or driving, and what that journey may have meant. The star of Woolf’s book remains the interior stream of consciousness monologues, mind you, but knowing about the geography traversed adds to its enjoyment.
The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway edited by Merve Emre (2021) is a beautifully documented and illustrated work in its own right. It spurred me finally to make this my first reconnaissance mission through the Woolf canon. (Ancient history for some: my blog title alludes to Edward Albee’s wordplay on a Three Little Pigs song for his serious drama, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”) More readings will be needed, but here is a start.
To begin with the author herself: Virginia Stephen (1882-1941) was raised in an aristocratic family (including her sister, painter Vanessa Bell). Her family considered formal schooling inappropriate for a girl, so she was raised on her father’s library, on private tutoring from women including Walter Pater’s sister, and on the ladies’ division of Kings College London. After some time in Bloomsbury meeting the bohemian circle there, she married Leonard Woolf in 1912, fresh off his colonial service in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The Woolfs set up house in Sussex near the river Ouse. Leonard founded the Hogarth Press and Virginia began a long friendship with the feisty writer Vita Sackville-West.
Suffice it to say Virginia was not a particularly congenial person, having many prejudices I need not elaborate on or quote here. (Her essay “Am I A Snob?” (1936) essentially concluded “yes.”) She suffered from lifelong physical and mental health crises. Further depressed by the poor reception to a biography she wrote, and a pacifist offended by the onrush of war and even by Leonard’s donning a uniform, she committed suicide in 1941 by putting a heavy stone in her dress and drowning herself—in the river Ouse. She left Leonard a rather formal suicide note concluding “I don’t think that two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”
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Her writings include the following. I have read the starred ones; the others at present are unashamedly based on summaries and skims.
The Voyage Out (1915). Rachel Vinrace, a young London woman, travels to South America with Edwardian characters who are lightly satirized.
Jacob’s Room (1922). The first of her stream of consciousness works, with several women passing judgment on Jacob Flanders as he matured from boyhood through Cambridge to adulthood.
*Mrs. Dalloway (1925). A single “day in the life.” Woolf denied any connection to James Joyce’s Ulysses, which she claimed she disliked in installments and disliked even more when published in book form. (Ulysses is the great modern peripatetic novel—I will cover my reactions to Joyce in another blog post!)
The aristocratic Mrs. Dalloway prepares for a dinner party, and in walking around London reflects on her entire life and meets or thinks of people from her past. Seeing adventurous and rakish Peter Welsh makes her wonder why she married stolid conventional Richard Dalloway rather than having an affair with Peter, or indeed with her girlhood crush, the wild Sally Seton.
On the same day, shell-shocked veteran Septimus Smith travels with his Italian wife Lucrezia, musing over his unrequited love for fellow soldier Evans. He has archly cold physicians (probably reminiscent of Woolf’s own medical caregivers) who fuel rather than assuage his depression. (As a further thread, Clarissa’s daughter Elizabeth travels with her rather unfavorably described schoolmistress Miss Kilman.)
At the party, Clarissa is disappointed to see that Sally Seton is now a matronly aristocrat who announces her annual income (“ten thousand a year” not sure if that is pre-tax or after-tax) and the mother of five boys. Peter is ever Peter, getting a divorce to marry a woman in India who is married herself, but still finding time in London to stalk yet another girl (it is just another fantasy of his, as he can “make up the better part of his life”). Clarissa learns that some veteran she doesn’t even know (Septimus) has committed suicide by jumping out of a window; she feels some connection with him, and thinks it possible he ended his life “to preserve the purity of his happiness.”
This highly concentrated plot description is rather beside the point. Mrs. Dalloway is treasured for its deep introspection into the ways our minds flit from subject to memory and back again. I love the epiphanies like the recurrent striking by Big Ben of “The Hours” (an original name for the book, and the title of Michael Cunningham’s riff).
*To the Lighthouse (1927). A complicated work indeed. Part I is set before World War I, with aloof intellectual Mr. Ramsay throwing cold water on his 6-year-old son James’s desire to sail to a lighthouse near their Skye summer home. Mrs. Ramsay is the loving parental figure for their eight children. They have house guests including the painter Lily Briscoe and the academic-social climber Charles Tarnsley, who fawns over Mr. Ramsay and opines that “women can’t paint, or write.” (Woolf must have heard that a few times.)
Woolf’s characters are mindful of what is termed by them “masculine intelligence.” She offers a snippet of the Ramsay-Tarnsley conversation, and the omniscient narrator abruptly says “that was what they talked about.” Mrs. Ramsay, listening to the men, muses:
“A square root? What was that? Her sons knew. That was what they were talking about now; on Voltaire and Madame de Staël; on the character of Napoleon; on the French system of land tenure; on Lord Rosebery; on Creevey’s Memoirs: she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence … upholding the world, so that she could trust herself to it utterly.”
In fact, most descriptions of learning in Woolf seem rather superficial—Woolf just writes that a character “reads Virgil” or that others think “Vronsky” from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is a fine name for a villain. One’s life work is said to consist in the extension of knowledge from A to Q, or maybe R, confident that someone in the future will take it all the way to Zed. It is not clear to me whether these expressions represent Woolf’s own view of intellectual pursuits.
Part II transpires after the war. Mr. Ramsay is coping with loss of his wife and two children, and doubting the enduring value of his academic work. Lily doesn’t stroke his ego. There is a shocking bracketed interlude:
“[A shell exploded, twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, fortunately, was instantaneous.]”
In Part III, ten years after Part I, there is a redemption of sorts, as Mr. Ramsay and 16-year-old James finally make the trip to that lighthouse. Back on shore, Lily finishes her painting around the time she reckons the Ramsays arrive at their destination. She muses that the execution of a work of art is more important than its legacy. “It is finished. … I have had my vision.”
Orlando (1928). An Elizabethan courtier lives forever, changing sex from time to time. “Praise God I’m a woman!” Orlando waxes poetic on anything, it seems. “The grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing hairy satyrs for the woods.” Woolf’s model Vita Sackville-West reportedly loved Constantinople, but Woolf herself reported being uncomfortable rubbing shoulders with the mass of humanity in the Hagia Sophia.
*The Waves (1931). This famous work features no fewer than six speaking characters, all apparently loosely based on Bloomsbury denizens we are supposed to know, plus the presence of a seventh, Percival (patterned after Woolf’s brother, who died young). It has been called a “playpoem.” I will have to take a second lap through this one, given its high reputation, as I was completely lost on first reading.
*A Room of One’s Own (1928). A female writer needs money, a personal place (“with lock and key,” added Alice Walker!), and peace and quiet in order to write. (If a woman tries to fish in the stream, the constable will shoo her away saying ladies are not permitted on the grassy bank.) Woolf imagines the frustrations of a Julia Shakespeare never able to create works like her brother Will’s, and describes the privations experienced by the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and George Sand in doing so primarily on their own. She says Jane Austen succeeded as a writer only by submitting to the patriarchy—she was under the lifelong care of men and was forced to write in the common sitting room, far from having means, solitude, and a room of her own.
Three Guineas (1938) extends the Room argument to pernicious impacts of the patriarchy on education, the professions, and war (concluding patriarchy leads to fascism). (The social import of a “guinea,” by the way, is that it is an amount of money (21 shillings) not represented by a banknote—upper-class goods, like horses, were then sold using this upper-class currency.)
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There, I have made my first stroll through the Woolf pack. I am motivated next to walk the streets of Dublin on June 16, 1904!