Virginia Woolf
By Ira NadelReaktion Books, 2016What has not been written about Virginia Woolf? This was the looming question, both frustrating and enticing, that hung over me in my earnest undergraduate dissertation meetings. It had me rooting through archive boxes and spurred me to spend dark cold evenings poring over bibliographies of criticism on Woolf. Ultimately, I was drawn over and over again to the solid rooms that housed Woolf’s ephemeral characters. Moreover, I was interested in the rooms that she herself had lived and worked in – these “rooms of one’s own.”Likewise, this question of originality applies to new biographies on Woolf: What can they contribute? How will they develop our understanding of Woolf’s life? Approaching Ira Nadel’s new biography on Woolf, I felt an instant kinship with the book, which Reaktion describe as “featuring new details about Woolf’s homes and personal life … a fresh insight into her work, focusing on how place as much as imagination fashioned her writing.” Their promise that this biography “reveals the modernist writer’s response to her dwellings and surroundings” paired with the fact that each chapter was dedicated to a specific home, made me certain that the interiors of these buildings would be a central concern. I eagerly imagined that I would be transported into Woolf’s sitting rooms; I saw myself eavesdropping on dinner and as the mark on the wall watching her writing.Thus I came to the biography expecting to be immersed in Woolf’s interior life, both literally and psychologically. Opening the pages I expected to read of Woolf in her St Ives bedroom as a child, the curtain blowing in the salty sea breeze. But instead Nadel’s biography opens unexpectedly at the London Scottish Drill Hall where Virginia Stephen and Leonard Woolf are on an unlikely date at the inquiry into the sinking of the Titanic. The opening is a fresh perspective with which to frame the narrative of Woolf’s life. It introduces us to Woolf’s psychology whilst submerging us in the midst of her existence, on the cusp of her marriage and at the age of thirty. Nadel writes how
The catastrophe [of the Titanic] captivated the young Virginia Woolf, who became absorbed with the disaster, writing to a friend in April 1912, shortly after the sinking but before the inquiry, that she wanted to write a full account of the wreck, adding an odd detail in her letter that at that depth ships do not sink ‘but remain poised half way down, and become perfectly flat.’ The image of the suspended ship (clearly an imagined contrast to the wreck on the seabed) represents the uneasy balance of Woolf’s mental and creative life, and the essential repression of traumatic events in her past, which unexpectedly surface to create her mental instability but also her creative energy.
If, as Woolf posited, life is “a bowl that one fills and fills” then this biography opens with the bowl half full; the ship suspended half way.Nonetheless, it seems that we must again begin with Woolf’s end. Nadel’s dark opening paints our initial impression of Virginia Woolf as a tragic prophetess, her frequent use of water in her work seen to foreshadow her suicide, drowning herself in the river Ouse in 1941. Beyond this sensationalist portrait, the trope of water is powerfully unpacked in Nadel’s introduction as a metaphor for Woolf’s experiences as a writer: “To get to the depths is Woolf’s goal,” Nadel states; her life is a “voyage out”; her “only way [to] keep afloat is by working." This watery beginning recalls Olivia Laing’s To the River in which Laing walks the length of the Ouse in search of what, she terms, “for a time it seemed [Woolf] possessed, like some freedivers, a gift for descending beneath the surface of the world." As a result, the focus of the introduction colours the subsequent body of the biography, revealing the depths behind the dark Victorian interiors of Woolf’s childhood home Hyde Park Gate in London to her seventeenth-century cottage Monk’s House in Rodmell, Sussex.These homes, the pivots upon which this biography is arranged, are each given a dedicated chapter in chronological order. We begin in respectable Kensington at Hyde Park Gate with Woolf’s literary father Sir Leslie Stephen’s library, the young Woolf’s writing desk, and formal dinner every evening. The dense Victorian atmosphere of the interiors at Hyde Park Gate is impressed upon us by Nadel who writes of the black and gold furniture, the Virginia creeper at the windows, and the strict adherence to social decorum. Here interior space and psychological atmosphere intertwine. As Nadel writes “Hyde Park Gate was the shaping force of an extinct life, and one that Woolf would shed in 1904 following the death of her father. But for her first 23 years, formal behaviour – dressing every night at 7.30pm for dinner at 8pm – especially with guests, reigned."In 1904 we make the move with Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell to the whitewashed walls and intellectual and societal freedom provided by 46 Gordon Square which, Nadel tells us, “opened up their lives”:
Tall, clean rooms with white and green chintzes replaced the former heavy fabrics. Objects were dispersed as interior space was reconfigured. Spaciousness and clarity were paramount. There was a freedom of expression achieved through the agency of things.
However, as the biography progresses these homes recede into the background and the relationship between domestic space and Woolf’s daily life takes a back seat. Indeed, although each chapter introduces us to the buildings that Woolf lived and worked in, there is less detail than I had expected from a biography arranged by place. I felt that an opportunity had been lost, for example, in the opening of Chapter 6 on 52 Tavistock Square, where Nadel sweeps over the interiors with the single sentence “The Woolfs took a ten year lease on the property, which Vanessa and Duncan Grant decorated, moving in on 15 March 1924.” Bell and Grant’s Bloomsbury interior design, coming out of the innovative style they developed at the Omega Workshops, is only glimpsed in a few photographic illustrations in the book. In these photographs Woolf is depicted at Monk’s House seated in an Omega style printed fabric armchair designed by Bell (below) and in front of her hand-painted fireplace. However, Nadel passes over the collaboration of the artistic and literary styles of Bell and Woolf, overlooking the importance of domestic aesthetic to creative work.Clearly, Nadel and I had different expectations from this book. So what is its focus, I asked myself, if rooms are not the central concern? The answer is that this is truly a Critical Life; the biography focuses on Woolf’s writing and its relationship with both her own and others’ critical thought. In the introduction Nadel states this biography’s focus is on “how to read Virginia Woolf’s life, as well as her work." The word “read” is pertinent here as Nadel’s constant eye on the interrelation between Woolf’s life and her writing stresses how the two cannot be separated. Indeed, place is less literally described in this biography than related to her work, each chapter detailing the works that Woolf wrote at each of her homes. As the readers of Nadel’s biography, we are submerged in Woolf’s writing process, her experiments, and her fears. This positioning of Woolf as writer first and foremost over her periods of depression, her complex relationships, and her family connections is important.Nadel not only discusses Woolf’s fiction but refers to her diaries as her “longest work” and looks to journalism, stating that “this aspect of her writing is as valuable in understanding her career as her nine novels, not only for how essay writing became a way of polishing her prose, but because for the first ten years of her professional life her salary derived entirely from her journalism." Moreover, Nadel makes interesting comparisons between Woolf’s writing and critical theory, and relates her work to that of others. For example, Nadel explores how
The powerful nature of Woolf’s friendships suggests what Deleuze calls ‘the folds of friendship,' constantly ‘folding, unfolding and refolding,' as he writes his book on Foucault. This also describes Woolf’s engagement with others. Woolf actually employs the fold psychologically and metaphorically in her writing. At the end of ‘On Being Ill,' she uses a metonym – a crushed fold in a Victorian curtain – to communicate the agony of Lady Waterford confronting the death and burial of her husband. This echoes a section of ‘Reminiscences,' where the young Woolf attempts to describe the death of her mother to her nephew Julian: ‘Written words of a person who is dead or still alive tend most unfortunately to drape themselves in smooth folds annulling all evidence of life.
Here Nadel relates Woolf’s experience of friendships and the difficulty of processing feelings to the undulating and heavy Victorian drapes at Hyde Park Gate. This is an example of Nadel subtly bringing the relevance of the interior space on Woolf’s interior life into the frame whilst focusing on her writing and its importance for philosophy. Nadel blends his analysis of Woolf’s work with details from her life and the critical theories of others to build a picture of her vast importance for both academics and those who find solace in her writing. This merging of Woolf’s life with her work and critical theory is typical of Nadel’s biography, successfully providing a wide-reaching yet succinct critical introduction.Furthermore, this biography functions as an accessible and thorough yet concise introduction to Woolf’s life, interests and relationships. Nadel discusses the range of Woolf’s influences, from food, photography and music to post-Impressionist art, and her key relationships. But it is in the little known details that Nadel’s biography truly delights. These include how Vita Sackville-West’s Tudor palace Knole had “hundreds of rooms – there was supposedly one for every day of the year” where there “was allegedly a pet tortoise with a monogram picked out on its shell in diamonds.” Another lesser known gem is that the valuable paintings at Charleston, the home of Bell and Grant near Woolf’s Sussex cottage Monk’s House, were “wired up so that, if disturbed, an alarm would go off at the Lewes police station” and were hung on the walls “almost against the ceiling” to protect them from thieves. This makes Nadel’s biography interesting reading for all from the beginning student of Bloomsbury to the life-long academic.The end of Nadel’s final chapter Monk’s House II brings us back to his opening:
From the outset, from her early curiosity about the sinking of the Titanic, Woolf, the sea and death were interwoven. Instead of the lyrical sense of sinking down into the depths and falling dreamlike to the bottom, she knew that such action did not happen with ease. One had to put stones in one’s pockets. She did.
The inevitability of Woolf’s suicide in the River Ouse proffered here by Nadel is questionable. As Nadel notes himself, at the time of her suicide, Virginia and Leonard Woolf had been preparing to kill themselves together in the event of Nazi invasion. This would have been by lethal injection, given to the Woolfs by Virginia’s brother Adrian. Clearly, the historical context of Woolf’s suicide is a deeply annihilating moment of the 20th century in which many people felt, as Woolf put it, “we live without a future.” Yet, in these final paragraphs Nadel figures Woolf’s life as a line leading straight to the point of her drowning, simplifying her death.The final words on Woolf in Nadel’s epilogue, however, leave us with a more complex image. He draws on a description by Elizabeth Bowen who noted that although “one could not but be aware, of an undertow often of sadness, melancholy, of greater fear… the main impression was of a creature of laughter and movement,” one who - as Woolf’s niece Angelica Garnett remembered - “quivered with interest in the doings of other people.” Nadel places Woolf at the very centre of the Bloomsbury Group and uses Woolf’s own words on Jane Carlyle to describe the innovative modernist writer herself: “few people, indeed, have been able to cast so brilliant an image of themselves on paper.”____Zoe Wolstenholme has worked with the art and literary collections at The Charleston Trust and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, writing for the Charleston Attic and Kew’s Library Art and Archives Blog. She currently blogs for Blogging Woolf and her academic work can be read in Intellect’s Clothing Cultures.
