Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

A lot of mysteriously evasive stuff. Playful too. This collection of eight stories from 1921 was important to me because of the window we get from an author who had only yet published two somewhat conventional novels. Nothing here is conventional. Lines require different mindsets, hard to find mindsets. Sometimes it’s oddly very beautiful. Often, it’s super-insecure.

lines like this: "Yet, the moment after, if the door was opened, spread about the floor, hung upon the walls, pendant from show more the ceiling--what?" It takes a moment to realize "the moment after" is the subject of the sentence, rather than simply a time descriptor. Which is elegant, but where does one store the meaning of the sentence in your mind?

There are many aspects of the stories like this. Although usually the point of the story becomes clear, it can leave an almost mystical feeling, trying to understand the full texture of the story, the way, for example, the ghostly couple exist in the opening story, holding hands, making noises. Are they real? Is this Woolf's deceased parents? Am I thinking the right mindset? Am I close? That whole mindset has a religious or spiritual tone to it. ... I mean, I think it does.

I don't know that these stories will stick, that they or can as they can be so elusive. Well, other than that ghostly couple who come to mind as soon as I think about the title. But the nature of the mindset here will be something I carry over, as venture on to the next Woolf novel, [Jacob's Room], one that is apparently very difficult.

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/384249#9194944 show less

Review of title story In a couple of pages, Virginia Woolf summons Schrodinger's ghost story: both the antithesis and apotheosis of the genre. The unspecified, slippery sense of things not being quite right, not easily explicable, works regardless of your belief, or lack of, in ghosts or gods.

It opens by addressing “you”:
“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.”
A little later:
“But it wasn't that you woke us.”

I loved the imagery, ambiguity, deliberately odd language show more (fluid tenses, vague pronouns), opacity despite all the glass, poetic phrasing, and a candle that seems more dead than alive (it “burns stiff and still).

There are no white sheets, clattering chains, or “whoooooo”.
“Our eyes darken, we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak.”
Just impressions amid minds clouded by… who knows what?

Real or dream, and what does it mean?

Image: A dead rose and its reflection. “The windowpanes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass.” (Source)

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12, King James Version

Quotes

• “The trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun.”

• “The wind roars up the avenue. Trees stoop and bend this way and that. Moonbeams splash and spill wildly in the rain.”

• “Death was the glass; death was between us.”

• “The wind drives straightly; the flame stoops slightly. Wild beams of moonlight cross both floor and wall.”

See also

• “‘Safe, safe, safe,’ the pulse of the house beat gladly.”
Very different from the heart that beats in the house in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart, which I reviewed HERE - although that is also addressed to “you”.

• Julio Cortázar's short story, House Taken Over, which I reviewed HERE.

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

Published in 1929, the titular essay starts out as a lecture on the relationship between women and writing fiction. It is creative and thought-provoking, and not what one would expect an essay to be (at least I didn’t expect it). Woolf writes as other characters, such as Mary Seton or Mary Carmichael, but this is very much a work of non-fiction that addresses the reasons it was so difficult in the past for women to write fiction, including societal mores of earlier eras when women had show more limited (or no) access to funds, education, or private time. She lauds the accomplishment of early women fiction writers such as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters.

She takes issue with the men of her own and earlier times who wrote about women. She analyzes several of their works and find that they primarily portray women in limited roles in support of men. Some of these works make outlandish statements that refer to the lesser status of women in the traits such as morality and mental abilities. It made me very glad I did not live back then. While there are still issues in present day, it is certainly nothing like what women of the 19th century (and earlier) had to face. For example, it was acceptable for a husband to beat his wife, and women could not own property. Woolf’s style of expression is unique and creative. I found an edition of this work that included the titular essay (5 stars) and five short stories (4 stars), one of which, my favorite of the bunch, even mentions Clarissa Dalloway. show less

Virgina Woolf's first novel has a few surprises for me. For starters, it doesn't feel Modernist, but more like a traditional novel. It's full of intellectual elements, and games, with literary titles popping up in more and less serious ways. And it has some kind of spiritual whole to it. The title is a perfect one for such a ground-breaking first novel, and it's plot-relevant. And it has an odd humor to it. And some very dark elements.

We follow the strange Rachel Vinrace, a sheltered show more 24-year-old woman raised by her aunts who hasn't done a lot of things. She is obsessed with music and a great piano player. But she hasn't had a romantic relationship. She hasn't formulated her ideas. Humanity is still a great curiosity to her. She's very open to other people's ideas but responds with uninformed sort-of gut responses that may be original or quirky but don't always seem to make much sense. And when things aren't working for her, she returns to the music. This gives her a sort of counter-to-convention mind.

A novel of characters, we see Rachel through many different eyes. Within the book she will travel via her dad's company ship on the voyage out from London to Brazil, with a small group that gain boarding, including Rachel's aunt and uncle, and notably, briefly but prominently, Richard and Clarissa Dalloway. Then she will stay in fictional Santa Marina, Brazil, near a hotel full of English travelers. Latinos and natives are hidden in the background. This is basically an isolated community of well-to-do English adults - married and single, young and older. And they all have some sort of response to Rachel.

These characters may be intelligent and intellectual, or not, but they are all far more conventional than Rachel. So, in a way, they can't see her. One stunning character is Helen Ambrose, based on Woolf's deceased mother, who is Rachel's aunt and tries to play a mothering role. Another prominent character is Terrence Hewet, an intellectually minded wealthy bachelor with a lifetime income, who is also lazy and charming and writing a book he never actually writes. He will find Rachel irresistible and eventually become engaged to her. But there is a dark humor in the clash between his well-meaning, conventional, if young and idealistic, perspective and Rachel's unconventional mind.

There are several mysterious and dark elements of the book, which plays on the exotic locality either onboard the boat, or in Brazil. Rachel's dreams are eerie and striking. There is a sort of heart-of-darkness moment, which is also an engagement scene laying a gentle critique on the concept of marriage.

There are several feminist elements in here, and mostly they come across as a criticism of marriage. Engagement does not make people happy but instead stresses them out and darkens their outlook! Marriages are typically a mess hidden under the covers of convention. Helen is worldly, but her husband Ridley is lost in his office in his academic literary study, translating the ancient Greek poet, Pindar, famous for his odes to obscure Greek Olympian winners. And I cannot overlook Evelyn Murgatroyd, a young, comically and fiercely independent personality, compared to Napoleon, who welcomes and spurns marriage proposals. The illegitimate daughter of a servant, she storms through the book, placing herself in people's way, demanding understanding, needing affectionate attention. She needs men to propose to her, and she need's to reject them. They're simply too small for her character. Altogether, marriage here seems like a terribly dangerous thing.

The book is playfully literary throughout, giving a strong intellectual undertone. We note Rachel hates Jane Austen and Gibbon. But everyone has something literary going on. Ridley Ambrose's Pindar. St. John Hirst, another bachelor based on Lytton Strachey, is incredibly erudite, and socially awkward, especially with woman. He demands Rachel read Gibbon so he can evaluate her intellect! I do love that he reads [[Swinburne]]'s Sapphics during church. But all the characters, even the less scholarly, have literature on the their mind. Even a member of the ship's crew tells Helen of his love for Shakespeare's [Henry V].

And, since I'm already going on way too long, I want to say something about the pace, especially early on. It's not a fast-moving book. But when we are onboard the ship, floating, going seemingly nowhere, constrained by surrounding water, forcing everyone to interact, however awkwardly, it struck me both how mysterious it is, and how [[William Faulkner]] would play with similar themes. Faulkner's second novel, [Mosquitos], is a boat trip in the Louisiana swamps where the boat goes aground and everyone is stuck. Like this novel, his novel is full of conventional and very literary characters and a very impressionable young woman. His characters are more outrageous, and his heroine way more sexualized, but that pace, still, with confined, forced clashes of interaction, ties into the same elements here. Layering that with the maybe [Heart of Darkness] moment, we might have a little Conrad-Woolf-Faulkner literary train, although it probably only exists in my mind.

It's awkward to try to analyze Woolf as her work is so complex, and there is so much serious stuff out on her. It feels like mistakes might strike sparks and spontaneously combust off the screen. But, under that warning, I found that overall the book makes for and ponders a sort of clash, on different levels, between intellectual and rawer humanity, and in that way provides a gentle critique on conventional English cultural norms. Christianity, academia, unfair finances, sexual attraction and marriage all come under some criticism. And the impossibility of communication, of reaching Rachel, seems to provide another, counter theme. The deeper and surficial minds at play.

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/378447#9149888 show less