Why should you read Virginia Woolf? - Iseult Gillespie

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How best can we understand the internal experience of alienation? In both her essays and her fiction, Virginia Woolf shapes the slippery nature of subjective experience into words, while her characters frequently lead inner lives that are deeply at odds with their external existence. Iseult Gillespie helps make sense of these disparities to prepare you for the next time you read Virgina Woolf.

Lesson by Iseult Gillespie, animation by Sarah Saidan.

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What if William Shakespeare had a sister
who matched his imagination,

his wit, and his way with words?

Would she have gone to school
and set the stage alight?

In her essay "A Room of One's Own,"

Virginia Woolf argues that this would
have been impossible.

She concocts a fictional sister
who's stuck at home,

snatching time to scribble a few pages

before she finds herself
betrothed and runs away.

While her brother finds fame and fortune,
she remains abandoned and anonymous.

In this thought experiment,

Woolf demonstrates the tragedy
of genius restricted,

and looks back through time for hints
of these hidden histories.

She wrote, "When one reads
of a witch being ducked,

of a woman possessed by devils,

of a wise woman selling herbs,

or even a very remarkable man
who had a mother,

then I think we're on the track
of a lost novelist,

a suppressed poet,

of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen."

"A Room of One's Own" considers a world
denied great works of art

due to exclusion and inequality.

How best can we understand
the internal experience of alienation?

In both her essays and fiction,

Virginia Woolf shapes the slippery nature
of subjective experience into words.

Her characters frequently lead inner lives
that are deeply at odds

with their external existence.

To help make sense of these disparities,
the next time you read Woolf,

here are some aspects of her life
and work to consider.

She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen
in 1882 to a large and wealthy family,

which enabled her to pursue a life
in the arts.

The death of her mother in 1895
was followed by that of her half-sister,

father, and brother
within the next ten years.

These losses led to Woolf's first
depressive episode

and subsequent institutionalization.

As a young woman, she purchased a house

in the Bloomsbury area
of London with her siblings.

This brought her into contact
with a circle of creatives,

including E.M. Forster,

Clive Bell,

Roger Fry,

and Leonard Woolf.

These friends became known
as the Bloomsbury Group,

and Virginia and Leonard married in 1912.

The members of this group were prominent
figures in Modernism,

a cultural movement that sought
to push the boundaries

of how reality is represented.

Key features of Modernist writing include
the use of stream of consciousness,

interior monologue,

distortions in time,

and multiple or shifting perspectives.

These appear in the work of Ezra Pound,

Gertrude Stein,

James Joyce,

and Woolf herself.

While reading Joyce's "Ulysses,"
Woolf began writing "Mrs. Dalloway."

Like "Ulysses," the text takes place
over the course of a single day

and opens under seemingly
mundane circumstances.

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would
buy the flowers herself."

But the novel dives deeply
into the characters' traumatic pasts,

weaving the inner world of numbed
socialite Clarissa Dalloway,

with that of the shell-shocked veteran
Septimus Warren Smith.

Woolf uses interior monologue
to contrast the rich world of the mind

against her characters'
external existences.

In her novel "To the Lighthouse,"

mundane moments, like a dinner party,
or losing a necklace

trigger psychological revelations
in the lives of the Ramsay's,

a fictionalized version
of Woolf's family growing up.

"To the Lighthouse" also contains
one of the most famous examples

of Woolf's radical representation of time.

In the Time Passes section,

ten years are distilled
into about 20 pages.

Here, the lack of human presence
in the Ramsays' beach house

allows Woolf to reimagine time
in flashes and fragments of prose.

"The house was left.
The house was deserted.

It was left like a shell on a sand hill
to fill with dry salt grains

now that life had left it."

In her novel "The Waves,"

there is little distinction between
the narratives of the six main characters.

Woolf experiments
with collective consciousness,

at times collapsing the six voices
into one.

"It is not one life that I look back upon:

I am not one person:
I am many people:

I do not altogether know who I am,

Jinny, Susan, Neville, Rhoda or Louis,

or how to distinguish
my life from their's."

In "The Waves," six become one,
but in the gender-bending "Orlando,"

a single character
inhabits multiple identities.

The protagonist is a poet who switches
between genders and lives for 300 years.

With its fluid language
and approach to identity,

"Orlando" is considered
a key text in gender studies.

The mind can only fly
so far from the body

before it returns
to the constraints of life.

Like many of her characters,
Woolf's life ended in tragedy

when she drowned herself at the age of 59.

Yet, she expressed hope beyond suffering.

Through deep thought,
Woolf's characters are shown

to temporarily transcend
their material reality,

and in its careful consideration
of the complexity of the mind,

her work charts the importance of making
our inner lives known to each other.