Virginia Woolf

tutorials, biography, criticism, commentary, and web links

tutorials, study guides, web links and commentary

The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

June 15, 2009 by Roy Johnson

love, literature, and friendship Bloomsbury-style

The title of this book is letters to Virginia Woolf – but this is so misleading, that I have changed it for the title of this review. This is a fully reciprocated exchange between these two writers – both of letters and affection. And as in many love affairs the power passes from one to the other and back again. Their relationship began in 1923 around the time that Hogarth Press was publishing Vita Sackville-West’s improbably titled novel, Seducers in Ecuador.

Their early letters are friendly and flattering, with just a touch of flirtation which gives a hint of Things to Come. But once the deed is done, the flattery is replaced by practical arrangements for meeting up, plus a fear that their secret might have been uncovered by Clive Bell. The amazing thing is that for all the sexual pluralism and bisexuality of the Bloomsbury group, they went to a lot of trouble to preserve the semblance of respectability.

The second phase of the affaire is largely Vita’s travelogue as she journeys to join her husband Harold Nicolson in Tehran where he had been posted to the British Legation by the Foreign Office.

When she gets back to the UK, it’s a good thing we have editorial commentary, because you would not guess from the content of the letters that she had transferred her romantic affection to Dorothy Wellesley, just as later, whilst protesting in every letter how much she missed and was very much in love with Virginia, she was also in love with Mary, wife of South-African poet Roy Campbell – an affair which in true Bloomsbury style, she eventually tells Virginia all about.

There’s no detail of what or how much went on in physical terms between them, but to make up for this there is plenty of intelligent comment on the profession of literature passing between these two women who were after all both commercially successful authors. Virginia asks Vita about the difference between poetry and prose:

I don’t believe there is any, with all due respect to Coleridge … All too often the distinction leads people to think they may mumble inanities which would make them blush if written in good common English, but which they think fit to print if spilt up into lines.

In addition, we get all sorts of quaint period details: Hillaire Belloc buying 2,000 bottles of wine at twopence halfpenny a bottle [for younger readers, that’s one penny in today’s money]; six-day cycle racing in Berlin; Vita cutting down an oak tree for fuel during the General Strike; buying an island in the South Seas for five pounds; and Virginia engaged in the joys of early motoring:

Off for our first drive in the Singer: the bloody thing wouldn’t start. The accelerator died like a duck – starter jammed … At last we had to bicycle in and fetch a man from Lewes. He said it was the magnetos – would you have known that?…

Vita’s letters from Tehran are rich and entertaining, and she is much given to Proustian ‘reflections’:

I have come to the conclusion that solitude is the last refuge of civilised people. It is much more civilised than social intercourse, really, although at first sight the reverse might appear to be the case. Social relations are just the descendants of the primitive tribal need to get together for purposes of defence; a gathering of bushmen or pygmies…

In the middle of all this, both women were writing and publishing at a prodigious rate: Vita’s long award-winning poem The Land and her two travel books, Passenger to Tehran and Twelve Days: Virginia’s Mrs Dalloway, The Common Reader, and To the Lighthouse.

The publication of Orlando made them both famous (“The percentage of Lesbians is rising in the States, all because of you”). Yet despite this, you can sense Virginia’s gradual withdrawal, hurt by Vita’s repeated ‘infidelities’ with other women. In the end, the older, less sexually experienced, and more talented woman retreated into her safer world of the intellect.

They continued to meet and correspond through the 1930s, but the sparkle had gone out of things. Vita moved on to relationships with BBC radio producer Hilda Matheson and others, and Virginia became the love object of pipe-smoking lesbian composer Ethel Smyth.

Despite Vita’s snobbery, her emotional cruelty and hauteur (“the BBC – which I look on as my pocket borough”) in the end I warmed to her sheer exuberance, her energy and inventiveness, her intelligence and creative impulse. This is a wonderfully stimulating record of exchanges between oustanding personalities which has quite rightly become a classic of its kind.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Louise de Salvo and Mitchell A. Leaska, The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, London: Macmillan, 1985, pp.473, ISBN 1853815055

More on Virginia Woolf
More on the Bloomsbury Group
More on Vita Sackville-West
More on the novella
More on literary studies

The Moment

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Moment (1947) is the second collection of essays and reviews by Virginia Woolf that were gathered and edited by her husband Leonard after her death in 1941. She herself had supervised the earlier collections The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932) which were published during her lifetime

The Moment and Other Essays includes writing on literary criticism, biographical sketches, political polemics, and book reviews. Some of the essays were being published for the first time; others had appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, the New Statesman and Nation, Time and Tide, the New York Saturday Review, and John Lehmann’s New Writing. The collection includes two essays with the same title, Royalty; the first was commissioned, but not published by Picture Post; the second was published in Time and Tide.

The Moment – critical commentary

There are some essays in this collection that have become quite well known in their own right. On Being Ill for instance takes as a starting point the subject of illness in literature, a topic which she spins out into an extraordinary display of reflections on subjects including solitude, the psychology of reading, and the nature of language.

‘The Art of Fiction’ is one novelist’s response to the theorising of another – her critique and appreciation of E.M. Forster’s now classic study of fiction, Aspects of the Novel (1927). She agrees with his analysis of plot and structure, but playfully rebukes him for not paying more attention to the very medium of literature, which is words.

She is a writer (and a reader) who is inclined to look at the most fundamental aspects of her subject – which is the production and consumption of literature. In ‘Re-Reading Novels’ for instance she tackles head-on the problem of reading long Victorian novels such as Vanity Fair (1847) and (Meredith’s) Harry Richmond (1870).

First, there is the boredom of it. The national habit of reading has been formed by the drama, and the drama has always recognised the fact that human beings cannot sit for more than five hours at a stretch in front of a stage. Read Harry Richmond for five hours at a stretch and we shall only have broken off a fragment. Days may pass before we can add to it; meanwhile the plan is lost; the book pours to waste; we blame ourselves; we abuse the author; nothing is more exasperating and dispiriting.

She argues with Percy Lubbock’s notion of the novel’s ‘form’ — in The Craft of Fiction(1921) — that it is not something analogous to visual ‘shape’ in painting, but an arrangement of feelings with which we are left after the first reading of a text, and which might be re-arranged on a second or subsequent reading.

It’s a popular myth about Woolf and her fellow Bloomsbury artists and writers that they were elitist and not interested in politics. An essay such as ‘The Leaning Tower’ shows how the exact opposite was true. She analyses the tradition of English literature from an ideological, almost Marxist point of view, showing how the education of its writers was based on class privilege. It is no accident that the majority came from families who had the wealth to afford a public school and university education. She ends her survey with a rallying cry for an end to class divisions altogether, and the hope that ordinary men and women will borrow more books from public libraries. But then this essay was delivered as a paper to an audience of the Brighton Workers’ Educational Association in 1940 – so maybe we should not be surprised at its radical message.

This is not to say that all the essays and sketches are deadly serious. The attitudes she struck were obviously determined by the publications for which she was writing. There are shorter and more lightweight pieces such as her satirical account of the life of Benjamin Haydon, monumental painter and diarist, her reflections on the relationship between painting and literature, and even some thoughts on the poetry of fishing.

But whether the essays are short and witty or long and serious, she always has something thought-provoking to say. For instance, on individual writers, she admits her reservations regarding D.H.Lawrence, but produces a deeply felt appreciation of Sons and Lovers. She recognises that people have stopped reading the novels of Walter Scott altogether – but still manages to find something admirable in his ambition. And although she believes that David Copperfield is part of the national consciousness, she confesses that considered as a human being she ‘would not cross the road to dine with … Dickens.’

The Moment – study resources

The Moment – Amazon UK
The Moment – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Moment – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Moment – complete contents

The Moment: Summer’s Night
On Being Ill
The Faery Queen
Congreve’s Comedies
Sterne’s Ghost
Mrs. Thrale
Sir Walter Scott. Gas at Abbotsford
Sir Walter Scott. The Antiquary
Lockhart’s Criticism
David Copperfield
Lewis Carroll
Edmund Gosse
Notes on D. H. Lawrence
Roger Fry
The Art Of Fiction
American Fiction
The Leaning Tower
On Rereading Novels
Personalities
Pictures
Harriette Wilson
Genius: R. B. Haydon
The Enchanted Organ: Anne Thackeray
Two Women: Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley
Ellen Terry
To Spain
Fishing
The Artist and Politics
Royalty
Royalty

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Platform of Time

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf’s Memoirs of Family and Friends

This is a new collection of largely unfamiliar memoirs, edited by the Bloomsbury scholar S.R.Rosenbaum (who also edited The Bloomsbury Group). It includes the first ever publication of Woolf’s long sought-after and newly recovered talk on her role in the famous (and infamously silly) Dreadnought Hoax which she delivered to Rodmell Women’s Institute in 19940. The Platform of Time collection also includes the complete version of her memoir of her nephew Julian Bell, who was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

The Bloomsbury Group were very fond of writing memoirs. They even had a Memoir Club where members read out their compositions for each others’ amusement. And Virginia Woolf’s family was also much given to written records of their relationships. Her own father Sir Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph albumn and wrote an epistolary memoir to commemorate the death of his wife Julia in 1895. It’s now available as The Mausoleum Book.

The Bloomsberries also wrote sketches of their relatives and friends, on some occasions to reinforce the friendship network, and on others to provide an obituary for the Times. There are examples of both in this collection: two very warm sketches Woolf wrote in memory of her father, recounting the cheerful way he read to his children, taught them each morning, and played with them sailing toy boats in Kensington Gardens. These recollections counteract the rather severe portraits of Leslie Stephen given elsewhere

Many of Woolf’s memoirs ooze with the sort of confident generalisations of the post-Victorian era celebrating itself in the coterie of what they would call the national press, but which was in fact a tiny minority, talking to itself. Speaking of her aunt, the famous Victorian photographer Julia Cameron, Woolf writes:

Mrs Cameron had a gift for ardent speech and picturesque behaviour which has impressed itself on the calm pages of Victorian biography. But it was from her mother, presumably, that she inherited her love of beauty and her distaste for the cold and formal conventions of English society.

There is quite a sympathetic portrait of Ottoline Morell, who during her own lifetime had to endure the affront of writers who accepted her generous hospitality at Garsington and Bedford Square, then went home to write spitefully satirical accounts of her.

The collection also includes what are called ‘fantasy memoirs’ – fanciful inventions based loosely on the lives of Saxon Sydney Turner and John Maynard Keynes. These are witty, allusive sketches which explore the outer limits of biography – something she was to bring to a stunning climax in Orlando, her meditation the life of her then lover Vita Sackville West.

In fact many of the sketches reveal more about the author than they do about their ostensible subject. For instance, you would never guess from her encomium to the celebrated war poet and ‘hero’ Rupert Brooke that he in fact never saw military action, and died of a mosquito bite.

One of the longest pieces is her account of attending a meeting of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, along with her husband Leonard Woolf. Life as We Have Known It is a thoughtful and reflective meditation on the women of the co-operative movement in the 1930’s, a very practical piece of feminist sympathising, and a paean for social-democratic values which foreshadows the arguments she was to develop in Three Guineas a few years later.

This is a useful collection from the Hesperus Press, which produces reprints and updated compilations which are given a scholarly editing and are elegantly designed and printed. If you don’t have these pieces in other forms, this is an excellent edition.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf, The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, London: Hesperus, 2008, pp.262, ISBN: 1843917114

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Voyage Out

May 30, 2015 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s first full length novel. It was written and re-written many times between (probably) 1907 and its eventual publication by Duckworth in 1915 (the publishing house run by her step-brother Gerald Duckworth). It was originally called Melymbrosia, and an earlier version was completed in 1912. This alternative version was published with that title in 1962. But when her own publishing house the Hogarth Press produced a Uniform Edition of Woolf’s works in 1929, it was the later 1915 version that was used as the definitive text.

first edition 1915

The Voyage Out – critical comment

The principal theme

Virginia Woolf was to devote a great deal of her career as a novelist and essayist to issues of women’s education and their position in society – from her earliest story Phyllis and Rosamond (1906) to her epoch-making attack on patriarchy Three Guineas (1938). Her first novel is no exception – as an exploration of a young woman who has received no formal education and who has been brought up at home in a manner which does not prepare her for any sort of independent adult life.

there was no subject in the world which she knew accurately. Her mind was in the state of an intelligent man’s in the beginning of the reign of Queen Elizabeth; she would believe practically anything she was told. invent reasons for anything she said. The shape of the earth, the history of the world, how trains worked, or money was invested, what laws were in force, which people wanted what, and why they wanted it, the most elementary idea of a system in modern life—none of this had been imparted to her by any of her professors or mistresses

Rachel is intensely conscious of her lack of formal education, her powerlessness in society, and her exclusion from the male-dominated world of governance and decision-making. Her one consolation is that she has been left undisturbed to develop her artistic flair for piano-playing.

The experimental novel

Virginia Woolf is rightly celebrated as one of the most talented innovators of the modernist period for the work she produced between Jacob’s Room in 1922 and The Waves in 1932. For that reason her earlier first novel The Voyage Out (1915) is often classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’. That is partly because its main subject is a young woman’s ‘coming of age’, partly because the narrative follows a linear chronology, and partly because the book contains a substantial proportion of well-observed middle-class social life which could have come from any number of nineteenth century novels – from Jane Austen to George Meredith.

But the novel is far from conventional – for a number of reasons. First, it does not have a ‘plot’ as such. A group of people go on a cruise from London to Latin America. Whilst there, they organise an expedition into the interior, and when they get back one of them dies of fever. There is no mystery to be solved; there are no surprising coincidences or revelations; the one serious romance between the characters is abruptly terminated by Rachel’s death; and the narrative is even denied any structural closure. There is no return journey to the starting point:.

Instead we are presented with what Rachel Vinrace calls for during the events of the novel – “Why don’t people write about the things they do feel?” . Despite all the symbolism of a first journey away from home, a first love affair, and the dawning of mature consciousness which Rachel experiences, the bulk of the novel is taken up with what people say and think about each other. This was a bold alternative to the plot-driven novels of the late Victorian era.

[In fact Woolf’s next novel, Night and Day (1919) is far more conventional. Another young middle-class woman, Katharine Hilbery, is facing the limited social choices offered to her in life – but the novel is grounded in a family saga and a rather complex love quadrangle.]

Point of view

The other major innovation Woolf developed in this novel is what might be called the floating or roaming point of view. Novelists very often choose to relay their narratives from the point of view of a single character or a narrator who might be a character or a surrogate for the author. Woolf uses a combination of a reasonably objective third person narrative mode with passages in which the point of view switches from one character to another. She does this in order to explore three separate issues which she developed even further in her later novels.

The first of these issues is what might be called the relativity of human perception – how one person perceives another, and how this perception might change from one moment to the next. The second is to explore the distance which separates human beings, even when they feel that they closely understand each other. The third is to explore the differences between what a person does and what is said – or to point directly at internal contradictions in the human psyche. Very often people say things they do not mean, or they make statements about themselves which are contradicted by their behaviour.

Setting

The novel begins in London, then moves via a very convincing storm at sea to Portugal, where the Dalloways join the ship. This part of the narrative is quite credible, and is possibly based on a journey at sea Virginia Woolf made to Portugal with her younger brother Adrian in 1905. But after the Dalloways are dropped off (almost parenthetically) in North Africa the location switches with virtually no transition to the fictitious Santa Marina.

The implication is that this is located somewhere near the mouth of a ‘great river’ – presumably the Amazon. But despite adding historical background details of European colonialism in the region, and a sprinkling of exotic vegetation which Woolf adds to the narrative, the topography of the story never becomes really convincing.

It is significant that one feature of the indigenous vegetation that she mentions repeatedly is cypress trees – ‘at intervals cypresses striped the hill with black bars’ – which are characteristic of the Mediterranean but certainly not of tropical Latin-American vegetation. This might be ignored were it not for the fact that she was to do something very similar in later novels.

The background events of Jacob’s Room (1922) concerning Betty Flanders are supposed to be set in Scarborough, on the East coast of Yorkshire, but these scenes are never as convincing as the others set in Cambridge and London. And nobody in their right mind can read To the Lighthouse (1927) without visualising its setting as St Ives and the Godrevy Lighthouse where Woolf spent many summer holidays in her childhood. Yet the novel is supposed to be set in the Hebrides. This remains completely unconvincing throughout the whole of the novel.

Weaknesses

There are a number of minor characters who are written into the story line of The Voyage Out, but who then disappear from the text as if they have been forgotten. Mrs Chairley the Cockney housekeeper; Mr Grice the self-educated steward; the briefly identified Hughling Elliot; and even a major figure such as Willoughby Vinrace, captain of the Euphrosyne, owner of the shipping line, and Rachel’s own father who disappears half way through the narrative, never to reappear.

It is not clear from the structure or the logic of the novel why Rachel has to die. There are no practical or thematic links to what has gone on before in the events of the narrative; nobody else is affected by the ‘fever’; and the conclusion of the novel (‘woman dies suddenly’) is not related to any of the previous events.

It is true that Woolf was surrounded by many unexpected deaths amongst her own friends and relatives (her mother, her brother, her friend Lytton Strachey) but this biographical connection does not provide a justification for the lack of a satisfactory resolution to the narrative.

The Voyage Out – study resources

The Voyage Out – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Voyage Out – Collins Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out – Collins Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Voyage Out – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Voyage Out – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Voyage Out – Kindle edition

Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

The Voyage Out – plot summary

Chapter I. Ridley Ambrose and his wife Helen are leaving London to join their ship, the Euphrosyne which is due to take them on a cruise to South America. They join their niece, Rachel Vinrace, whose father owns the ship. A fellow traveller, Mr Pepper reminisces critically with Ambrose about their contemporaries at Cambridge. They are then joined by the captain Willoughby Vinrace.

Chapter II. The story switches between Helen’s reflections on Rachel, Mr Pepper’s bachelor interests and habits, and Mrs Chairley’s rage against the ship’s linens. It then covers Rachel’s lack of formal education, her talent for music, and her upbringing by aunts. She searches for coherence and meaning whilst she is critical of the adults who surround her.

Chapter III. In Portugal, Richard and Clarissa Dalloway are taken on board as extra passengers. At dinner there is conversation on the arts and politics, after which Clarissa writes a satirical letter criticising the other guests. Her husband joins her, and they both feel superior but sympathetic towards their fellow travellers.

Chapter IV. Clarissa meets Mr Grice, the self-educated steward, and then shares confidences with Rachel after breakfast. They read Jane Austen on deck, and Rachel discusses political philosophy with Richard Dalloway, who reveals his traditional and deep-seated male chauvinism.

Chapter V. The ship encounters a stormy passage at sea, which lays everybody low for two days. Helen comforts Mrs Dalloway with champagne. Meanwhile Richard Dalloway follows Rachel into her cabin and kisses her impulsively. That night Rachel has disturbing dreams.

Chapter VI. The Dalloways leave the ship. Rachel confides her mixed feelings about the incident to Helen, who advises her about Men and The Facts of Life. The two women agree to be friends, and Helen invites Rachel to stay at their villa whilst the captain sails up the Amazon, to which her father agrees for slightly selfish reasons.

Chapter VII. The ship reaches Santa Marina. Its colonial history is described. The Ambrose villa San Gervasio is dilapidated. After a week Mr Pepper decamps to a local hotel because he thinks the vegetables are not properly cooked at dinner.

Chapter VIII. Three months pass. Helen reflects on the inadequate education of young women. Helen and Rachel post letters then walk through the town to the hotel where they encounter guests playing cards. They are observed by Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter IX. In the hotel, people are preparing for the night. Hirst and Hewet discuss the possibility of organising a party excursion. Next day there is desultory chat over tea until Ridley Ambrose joins with Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter X. Rachel is reading modern literature and reflecting philosophically about the nature of life. She and Helen receive an invitation to Hewet’s expedition. The outing presents the radical young figure of Evelyn Murgatroyd, and Helen meets Terence Hewet,

Chapter XI. The party splits up at the top of the climb. Arthur declares his love to Susan. Their embraces are observed by Hewet and Rachel: she recoils ambivalently from the spectacle. They are joined by Hirst and Helen, whereupon they all agree to tell each other about themselves. The party then returns to town amidst a display of fireworks.

Chapter XII. A dance is held to celebrate Susan’s engagement to Arthur. Rachel is patronised then insulted by Hirst, whereupon Hewet makes excuses for him. Hirst then goes on to unburden himself to a sympathetic Helen. At dawn Hirst and Hewet walk back to the villa with Helen and Rachel.

Chapter XIII. Next day Rachel takes books by Balzac and Gibbon into the countryside to read, her mind full of impressions from the dance. She feels strangely moved by reading Gibbon, as if on the verge of some exciting discovery, and she thinks a lot about Hirst and Hewet.

Chapter XIV. Guests at the hotel read letters from friends and relatives back home. Susan is obsessed with the subject of marriage. Hewet can’t stop thinking about Rachel, and he goes up to the villa where he overhears her talking to Helen about her dead mother. He goes back to the hotel in a state of excitement, and is then quizzed by Evelyn about her flirtatious entanglements. Last thing at night he sees a woman coming out of someone’s bedroom.

Chapter XV. Some days later Helen and Ridley are visited by Mrs Flushing who is on a ‘collecting’ trip with her nouveau riche husband. They are joined by Hirst, Hewet, and Rachel who has tired of reading Gibbon. When Rachel and Hewet go for a walk, it leaves Hirst free to engage Helen in an intimate conversation, during which he reveals his fears and weaknesses, as well as expressing his admiration for her.

Chapter XVI. On their excursion Rachel and Hewet discuss the life of the typical unmarried middle-class girl (and its limitations) plus the issues raised by women’s suffrage. As he tells her about his literary ambitions she feels romantically attracted to him. He is excited yet dissatisfied by their intimacy and the tension between them.

Chapter XVII. Rachel is powerfully disturbed by her feelings for Hewet, and a distance grows between her and Helen. One Sunday there is a service in the hotel chapel. Rachel is distressed by the absence of any genuine religious belief, and she objects to the spirit in which the service is held. When Mrs Flushing invites her to lunch, she erupts into a criticism of the sermon. Mrs Flushing proposes a river trip to visit a traditional native village. Hirst and Hewet argue over religion, literature, and Rachel.

Chapter XVIII. Hewet realises that he is in love with Rachel, but he is in doubt about the idea of marriage. He wonders what her feelings are and cannot make up his mind about what to do.

Chapter XIX. Evelyn complains to Rachel about two men with whom she is romantically involved. Then she becomes enthusiastic about social reform – including the rescue of prostitutes. Rachel feels oppressed by her appeal to intimacy. She then meets Mrs Allan who invites her to her room and asks her to help her get dressed for tea. Rachel feels oppressed by this appeal too, and escapes into the garden, but she is irritated by the chatter and the discussion of plans for the excursion, and she then quarrells with Helen.

Chapter XX. The Flushings, along with Hewet and Hirst plus Rachel and Helen go on the expedition. They sail upstream in a small ship. Hewet is very conscious of Rachel’s presence. They go on a walk together in to the forest – to declare their love for each other. When they return to the ship they feel detached from their companions.

Chapter XXI. The expedition continues. Hewet and Rachel try to discuss the consequences of their love – which seem to lead inevitably towards marriage, about which neither of them is sure. The expedition reaches the native village. Hewet and Rachel are completely absorbed in each other. At night, back on the ship, they ask Helen for advice. She reassures them that they will be happy.

Chapter XXII. Hewet and Rachel become engaged. Whilst she plays the piano, he writes notes for his novel – on women, which reveal his traditional chauvinism. They plan their future and get to know about each other’s past lives. They become very nostalgic for England – both the countryside and London.

Chapter XXIII. Rachel is annoyed by people’s inquisitiveness now that she is engaged. A message from home brings news of the suicide of a housemaid. A ‘prostitute’ is expelled from the hotel. Hirst admits to himself that he is unhappy, but he brings himself to congratulate Hewet and Rachel.

Chapter XXIV. Sitting in the hotel, Rachel comes to an appreciation of her independent identity, even though she is joining herself to Hewet for the rest of her life. Miss Allan finishes her book on the English poets. Evelyn envies Susan and Rachel for being engaged, but she herself dreams of becoming a revolutionary.

Chapter XXV. Rachel develops a headache and is confined to her room. The headache gets worse and she becomes delirious. ‘Dr’ Rodriguez reassures them it is nothing serious, but Rachel gets steadily worse. Hirst is despatched in search of another doctor and returns with Dr Lesage. He confirms that Rachel is seriously ill – probably with fever. Hewet, Helen, and Hirst wait anxiously for days. Rachel starts to hallucinate, then eventually she dies.

Chapter XXVI. News of Rachel’s death quickly reaches the hotel. It is thought she was unwise to go on the expedition where she has caught the fever. Mr Perrot makes a final appeal to Evelyn, but she turns him down,, as she is leaving for Moscow.

Chapter XXVII. Life returns to normal at the hotel. There is a tropical thunderstorm, and people prepare to return home.

OUP World Classics edition

The Voyage Out – characters

Mr Ridley Ambrose	a classics scholar, translating Pindar
Helen Ambrose	his wife (40)
Rachel Vinrace	their niece (24)
Willoughby Vinrace	a shipping line owner – Rachel’s father
Mr William Pepper	a dogmatic Cambridge friend of Ambrose
Mrs Emma Chairley	the Vinrace housekeeper (50)
Richard Dalloway	a former member of parliament (42)
Clarissa Dalloway	the daughter of a peer – his wife
Mr Grice	the self-educated steward
St John Hirst	a clever but boorish Cambridge don (24)
Terence Hewet	former student at Winchester and Cambridge
Evelyn Murgatroyd	a strong-willed feminist
Arthur Venning	a romantic young man
Susan Warrington	a romantic young woman
Wilfred Flushing	a nouveau riche art collector
Alice Flushing	his wife, an artist
Miss Allan	an elderly teacher of English
Mrs Thornbury	a wise old woman (72)
Dr Rodriguez	the (dubious) town doctor
Dr Lesage	the replacement doctor

Virginia Woolf’s writing

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Years

December 6, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Years (1937) was the largest of Virginia Woolf’s novels. Its focus is the passage of time as it traces the Pargiter family history from 1880 up to the ‘Present Day’. The novel met with high praise when it was first published. David Garnett said the book “marks her as the greatest master of English” and is “the finest novel she has ever written” (New Statesman & Nation). Subsequent critical assessments have been more mixed. The novel sold very well in England and America making its way on to American best-seller lists.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

central London

The Years – critical commentary

In 1922 Virginia Woolf broke with the conventions of traditional prose fiction in her experimental novel Jacob’s Room. This involved abandoning plot and suspense; adopting a shifting point of view; and creating a discontinuous narrative which switched from one character and location to another, with few marks of transition or causality in between.

The same techniques are at work in The Years, but the sense of fragmentation and the lack of unity is exacerbated by the fact that Woolf cut whole swathes out of her original composition – leaving enormous gaps between the ‘chapters’ or ‘sections’ of the novel in which events are left unrecorded and unexplained.

We know from Woolf’s original manuscript of the novel (when it was called The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay) that this is the most heavily edited and revised of all her novels. As Mitchell Leaska points out in his introduction to the published manuscript version:

many parts of the novel are highly ambiguous. Throughout the published text of The Years we come across splinters of memory, fragments of speech, titles of quoted passages left un-named or forgotten, lines of poetry or remnants of nursery rhymes left dangling in mid-air, understanding between characters incomplete, and utterances missing the mark and misunderstood. In one sense the novel eloquently communicates the failure of communication.

The reader is able to reassemble some sense of what has happened in those gaps by piecing together hints that are dropped in the remaining sections – but it has to be said that one of the weaknesses of The Years is that the narrative offers very little incentive for this effort to be made.

There is quite a bewildering array of characters, and keeping track of them is not made any easier by the fact that many of them are known by their pet names or nicknames. Magdalena is known as Maggie, Sally as Sara, and Nicholas Pomjalovsky is called Brown. It is interesting to note that the only character who appears all the way through the novel and provides some sense of continuity is Eleanor, who is not given a nickname.

There are also characters who appear in the narrative, assume a certain importance in the events of the section (or chapter) in which they appear – only to disappear and never be mentioned again. This might well reflect the facts of social life as we experience it, but it does not make for a very compelling work of literary art.

There are other problems too. We know that uppermost in Woolf’s mind during the composition of the novel were issues of women’s roles in society – materials for which she wisely cut out of the novel and eventually found their way into Three Guineas. But having cut them out, the novel is curiously denuded of political content.

The section entitled 1914 ends with a rhapsodic scene of Kitty wallowing in her sense of ownership on her family estate ‘in the North’ – with absolutely no mention of the catastrophe about to engulf Europe – which we know to have been an active concern for society at the time.

It might be argued that the character’s lack of awareness is a criticism of upper-class complacency in the face of international power-politics – but unfortunately the same thing is true of the final section of the novel Present Day in which the whole family assembles for a party in 1937 without any mention of the second catastrophe into which Europe was sliding. This is at best curious and at worst a serious flaw – especially when we know that Woolf herself lived in a milieu in which international politics was an active and regular subject of debate.

Authors are not obliged to use their own lives for the material of their fictions of course, and it could be argued that Woof is showing a typical upper-class family in all its privilege and neglect – but there is very little sense of criticism within the text.

The Years – study resources

The Years – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Years – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Years – plot summary

1880. Colonel Pargiter leaves his club in Piccadilly and visits his mistress in Westminster. Then he goes home and joins his children for afternoon tea. His daughter Delia goes upstairs to visit her mother who is an invalid, whilst another daughter Rose defies house rules and goes out to the shops. Later, whilst the family are having dinner, Mrs Pargiter has a fainting fit, and there is a general feeling that she is dying. That evening Rose is frightened by the image of a man she has seen exposing himself in the street.

At Oxford University Edward Pargiter is cramming for an examination in Greek. He share a gift of port with two fellow undergraduates Hugh Gibbs and Ashley. Kitty Malone (a relative of the Pargiters) goes to a history lesson with Lucy Craddock, then has tea with the poorer Robsons, which she enjoys compared with the stiffness of college life. News arrives of Mrs Pargiter’s death, and both branches of the family take part in the funeral service, which is viewed sceptically by Delia.

1891. Eleven years later Milly Pargiter has married Hugh Gibbs. Eleanor is running the family home for her ageing father and supervising repair works on the lodgings of the poor. She has lunch with her father then goes to the law courts to watch her brother Morris try a case, but she leaves feeling oppressed by the atmosphere in court. In the busy London streets, learning that Parnell has died, she visits her sister Delia in a poor rooming house – but she is not at home.

Colonel Partiger is in town on the same day, having ended his relationship with Maria. He visits the home of his brother Digby and sister-in-law Eugenie, feeling envious of Digby’s domestic comforts.

1907. Sir Digby and Lady Eugenia Pargiter are on their way to a summer evening party with their daughter Magdalena (Maggie). Whilst they are out their very imaginative younger daughter Sara (Sally) lies in bed listening to the sounds of a dance in a house nearby, turning over philosophic concepts of being and reading Edward Pargiter’s translation of Antigone.

Her sister and mother return late at night and the young girls pester their mother for romantic anecdotes about her younger life.

1908. A year later Sir Digby and Lady Eugenia Pargiter have both died. Martin Pargiter, back from India and Africa, visits their house, which has been closed and sold. He then visits Eleanor and his father, who has had a stroke. Rose visits from her suffragette work in the North. The siblings resurrect memories of childhood.

1910. Rose, now forty, visits her cousins Maggie and Sara who live in poor ‘rooms’ in a working class area south of the river. They compare memories of childhood and their respective families. After lunch, Rose takes Sara to a political meeting in Holborn where Eleanor is the secretary. It is also attended by Kitty (Lady Lasswade) who afterwards is driven to the opera (Siegfried) where she is joined by her cousin Edward, who is still a bachelor.

Maggie and Sara finish their dinner, after which Sara gives a slightly dotty but accurate account of the meeting. Their neighbourhood is full of noise and drunks, and the section ends with the announcement that Edward VII has died.

1911. Old Colonel Pargiter has died. Eleanor, now fifty-five, returns from a trip to Mediterranean countries to visit Morris at his mother-in-law’s house in Dorset, where she meets an old friend Sir William Whatney. She wonders what to do with her life now that she has no more domestic responsibilities.

1913. Eleanor sells the family house, and Crosby the housekeeper retires to Richmond. However, she still looks after Martin’s laundry. He lives in Ebury Street, Belgravia and is still not married.

1914. Martin leaves home and walks towards the city where he is due to see his stockbrokers, wondering what he might have been had he not been in the army. At St Paul’s he meets Sally and takes her for lunch to a very crowded chop house. She gets tipsy, then rather cryptic and mystical in her conversation. Afterwards they take a bus, then walk through Hyde Park into Kensington Gardens where she is due to meet Maggie. Martin confides in Maggie about a woman with whom he is unhappily in love.

In the evening he goes to a formal dinner party given by Kitty in Grosvenor Square. He is bored by the extremely stiff and lifeless conventions of upper-class society, but he does what is expected of him. He and Kitty both claim to be interested in each other, but do nothing about it.

After the guests leave Kitty changes and is driven to the station where she catches the night train for the family estate in the ‘North’. She arrives in the very early morning, and after breakfast goes for a walk on the estate, feeling an ecstatic bond with the countryside and a sense of continuity and ownership, even though she knows that the estate will pass into the hands of her eldest son.

1917. Eleanor goes to dinner with Maggie and Renny in Westminster where she meets the gay Pole, Nicholas. They are joined by Sara who rapidly becomes tipsy. When an air raid starts, they move down into the cellar and continue dinner there. Various responses to the war are expressed in fragments of unfinished conversation. After the raid is over the visitors leave and rejoin the almost empty streets where traffic is beginning to circulate again

1918. An ageing and ailing Crosby is shopping in Richmond, clinging on to the last domestic position that separates her from poverty.

Present Day. Eleanor, now in her seventies, has been to India. Her nephew North returns from sheep farming in Africa to visit Sara, having been impressed by Nicholas . They discuss their previous correspondence and have a low class dinner where she boards. Eleanor and Peggy (who is now a doctor) travel to Delia’s house to a party, their fragments of conversation reflecting links to the past and differences in generations within the family.

North and Sara exchange their enthusiasm for poetry and anti-Semitism whilst waiting to go to the party. They are joined by Renny and Maggie. At the party Peggy has to politely endure boring stories from her uncle, whilst she is quietly reflecting on what we can know about other people. The younger Pargiters (now in their sixties and seventies) meet and tease each other about incidents in their shared childhood.

North feels an outsider’s rage against the stiff social conventions and views the party as degenerate animals which ought to be destroyed. Eleanor meanwhile tries to make sense of the long life she has lived, but in the end she falls asleep.

Eleanor eventually feels that she finds happiness simply being amongst younger living people. Peggy on the other hand is painfully conscious of the hardships and misery in life. She criticises North in an unprovoked attack. North feels himself completely alienated, and sees the guests as a middle and upper-class club to which he does not belong.

North meets his uncle Edward and admires him for what seems to be his attitude of being above the mediocre mass, and he wishes to find some new way of being for himself. Nicholas tries to make a speech of thanks to the hostess, but he cannot command attention. Finally, as dawn breaks over the square, the party comes to an end and the guests begin to go home.

The Years – principal characters

Colonel Abel Pargiter	head of the family, with two fingers missing
Rose Pargiter	his invalid wife, who dies
Eleanor Pargiter	the eldest daughter (‘no beauty’) who does charity work
Milly Pargiter	daughter
Rose	daughter, imaginative suffragette and spinster
Martin	son, who joins the army
Morris	son, apprentice at law, who becomes a barrister
Edward	Oxford university classics scholar
Dr Malone	an Oxford Don
Rose Malone	his wife, Rose Pargiter’s cousin
Kitty	his large daughter, later Lady Lasswade
Lucy Craddock	Kitty’s private history tutor
Celia	Morris’s wife, Eleanor’s sister-in-law
Sir Digby Pargiter	Colonel Pargiter’s younger brother
Eugenie	his wife
Magdalena (Maggie)	his daughter
Sally (Sara)	his daughter
René (Renny)	a Frenchman
Nicholas Pomjalovsky (Brown)	a gay Pole
North	Morris’s son, Eleanor’s nephew
Crosby	the Pargiter’s housekeeper
Mira	Colonel Pargiter’s mistress

The Years – further reading

Charles Hoffmann, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions of The Years‘, PMLA 84 (1969), 78-89.

Mitchell A. Leaska, ‘Virginia Woolf, the Parteger: A Reading of The Years‘, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 172-210.

Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.) The Partigers by Virginia Woolf: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’ (London: Hogarth Press, 1978).

Jane Marcus, ‘The Years as Greek Drama, Domestic Novel and Gotterdamerung’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 176-301.

Victoria Middleton, ‘The Years: “A Deliberate Failure”‘ Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 158-71.

Madeline Moore, ‘The Years and Years of Adverse Male Reviewers’, Women’s Studies 4 (1977), 247-63.

Grace Radin, ‘I am not a hero: Virginia Woolf and the First Version of The Years‘, Massachussetts Review, 16 (1975), 195-208.

Grace Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).

Eric Warner, ‘Reconsidering The Years‘, North Dakota Quarterly, 48/2 (1980), 16-30.

First edition – cover design by Vanessa Bell

The Years – textual history

The novel we now know as The Years has an extremely complicated genesis – both in conception and execution. The first glimmerings of its birth appeared in 1931 when Virginia Woolf delivered a speech to the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service, an organisation which dealt with employment for women. It was entitled ‘Professions for Women’ and dealt with her own experiences as a writer. She contrasts the comparative ease of her own entry into the world of letters with the heroic efforts of Ethel Smyth the composer:

She is of the race of the pioneers: She is among the ice-breakers, the window-smashers, the indomitable and the irresistible armoured tanks who climbed the rough ground; went first; drew the enemy’s fire; and left a pathway for those who came after her.

During the two years that followed, Woolf was doing the reading and research for what would eventually become both The Years and Three Guineas, but at first these formed one work in her mind. In October 1932 she began work on The Partigers: A Novel-Essay. Her plan was to alternate ‘extracts’ from the novel with essays offering critical commentary on the fictional narratives. The subject of the novel was to be what we now call a ‘family saga’ covering the lives of the Partiger family between 1880 and 2023.

By January 1933 she had completed the first part of the book, which deals with the year 1880 – and it is interesting to note that the essay portions come before the fictional chapters. But a month later, having decided that this formal construction made the work too much like propaganda, she decided to leave out the intervening essays. This material was not lost however: it was to form the basis of what eventually became Three Guineas.

For the next two years she produced 200,000 words of a novel for which she didn’t even have a title. It was at various stages called Here and Now, Music, Dawn, Sons and Daughters, Daughters and Sons, Ordinary People, The Caravan, and Other People’s Houses, before she eventually settled on The Years.

Next came the task of editing down this mass of material into what would be a single publishable volume. She did this by a process of ruthless pruning and simply leaving out explanatory passages, so that the narrative jumps from one character and scene to another with no smooth transitions. Even so, the typescript still came to 740 pages. She did all this editing and re-typing work herself, and the book put a great strain on her fragile mental and physical health. She described it as the novel which almost killed her.

But there was more work to be done. She wanted the work printed in galley proofs before she allowed her final judge, husband Leonard, to read the novel: these proofs amounted to 600 sheets. The strain of all this, the indecision, and the fact that she had been paid in advance by her American publishers, put an enormous strain on her fragile state, and led to a severe illness which lasted three months. Leonard gave his guarded approval to the results, knowing that any censure from him would lead to her complete breakdown.

When she returned to editing the proofs she cut out what she described as ‘two enormous chunks’ (fifty pages of the current OUP text). When the final proofs appeared, one set was edited for the American market and the other for the Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. There are even differences between these two sets of revisions – but relatively minor.

After all this indecision, anguish, and revision, The Years was quite successful on publication, and in America even became a best seller. By the end of 1938 the novel had earned her £4,000, which in contemporary terms is worth between £300,000 and £400,000.