Virginia Woolf: A Portrait by Viviane Forrester

Author:Viviane Forrester [Forrester, Viviane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Feminist, Biography, Literary
ISBN: 9780231153560
Google: AXipBgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0231153562
Barnesnoble: 0231153562
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

A final note: shortly after Adrian’s death, Karin committed suicide.

Virginia moved to Fitzroy Square, still in Bloomsbury, with her younger brother; Adrian would escort her to dances, concerts, costume parties, which she enjoyed; they would travel together, sometimes with Clive and Vanessa, to Paris, Florence, Milan, Bayreuth, Portugal, and the English countryside.

Despite an active, conventional social life, or perhaps because of it, Virginia, now deserted, would struggle against a heavy, undermining boredom, a dull solitude. Torments that heighten what foments in her, which they feed: an unchanneled rage to write. “I begin to feel the desire of the pen in my blood.” “When I see a pen and ink, I cant help taking to it, as some people do to gin.” She vows she will become “the writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.” When Madge Vaughan affirms that she considers her a genius (as Violet already has said), Virginia thinks the idea plausible and comments on it seriously, concluding: “I cant help writing—so there’s an end of it.”38

She pursues her occupation of literary criticism, but it is primarily her solitude, bitter as she finds it, that allows her to devote herself entirely to the sensual pleasures that would make her into the writer she already is. For example, she writes to Violet, “I could be wed—pure simple notes—smooth from all passion and frailty.” She continues: “Now do you know that sound has shape and colour and texture as well?” She is already in the mind of the books, in the fullness of that thinking, and in the pungency of the circumstances that often surround the one who thinks.39

Nevertheless the lack of other, more ordinary sensual pleasures, any love life for example, weighs on her. “I have been talking to young men for the last fortnight—Lamb and Sidney-Turner, but they remain so disinterested that I see how I shall spend my days a virgin, an Aunt, an authoress.” She imagines Nessa’s progeny: “Who was cousin Mia? Dont you like Uncle George? Why has Aunt Goat never married? I think you very beautiful Mama!” And this worry, trivial as it may seem, opens into gulfs of agonizing emptiness; she is overcome with “dreadful weariness … that we should still be the same people, in the same bodies; wandering not quite alive, nor yet suffered to die, in this pale light.” She is twenty-five years old.40

Long walks over the course of solitary days in the country or by the sea, and the difficult, underground labor of a work about to be born, throbbing in her veins but there alone, which she herself does not yet know but which needs, demands to emerge and, by its nonexistence, heightens an atmosphere of isolation, desertion, a certain futility. A profound state of disarray.

The void as a wall.

Which her great perversity, or more bluntly, her bitchiness, will get her through. Or rather, will distract her from.

Without the slightest scruple, the least pity (and moreover without really alleviating her depression), she is going

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