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Virginia Woolf at our door

28/3/2012

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Image: Nick Nichols
71 years ago today Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones and walked into the river Ouse. Her body was not recovered for 3 weeks. The last thing she ever wrote was a heartbreaking letter to her husband Leonard.

I can never make up my mind about Woolf, or rather I should say about her writing. When I first  discovered her writing I was enthralled by the long, vague, lifting remember reading sentences; by the focus on minutiae and the psychological rather than the plot. It was a revelation to read novels where very little happened – but so much was said, explored, mentioned.

It’s not just her writing that fascinates – her membership the self-consciously artistic, intelligent and bohemian Bloomsbury set, her affair with Vita Sackville-West, and her views on women writers all threaten to overshadow her literary achievements.

A Room of One’s Own is probably her most famous piece of non-fiction. Essentially a series of essays/ lectures examining women’s place in fiction, it begins by looking at the history of women’s writing – and lack of it. She imagines a sister to Shakespeare – Judith – and the difficulties she would face even attempting to emulate her brother’s work. (Incidentally of course this means you can thank Woolf for Sacred Heart).

The most famous  assertion in A Room of One’s Own is the one suggested in the title: 'a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction'. This idea is also at the heart of many criticisms levelled at Woolf – that she was incapable of thinking outside her upper-middle class circle, of thinking about the challenges women from different backgrounds may face, of sympathising with women (and men) for whom having a room was a matter of economic, class-based or racial, disadvantage and discrimination.

I think she was a gateway to feminism to me, a realisation that some questions, discussions and arguments were older than I had thought. Perhaps if she had lived longer she would have expanded or refined her views but she was killed by depression.

Squeamish Louise
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Squeamish Kate link
28/3/2012 12:04:58 am

This is only tenuously linked but my favourite Vita Sackville-West story (other than Orlando of course) is about her affair with Mary Garman, Garman's husband asked Vita not to wear such big earrings because his wife's thighs were getting shredded.

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