Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

Author:Hermione Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781407066240
Publisher: Random House

Mr & Mrs Leonard Woolf

to

52 Tavistock Square,

London,

w.c.1.

Telephone: Museum 2621.

After Thursday, March 13, 1924.

The ground and first floor were let to a firm of solicitors, Dollman and Pritchard. Leonard and Virginia took the basement (with a room for the Press and a large billiard room at the back – the stock room and Virginia’s ‘studio’) and the two top floors.

And the basement, & the billiard room, with the rock garden on top, & the view of the square in front & the desolated buldings behind, & Southampton Row, & the whole of London – London thou art a jewel of jewels, & jasper of jocunditie – music, talk, friendship, city views, books, publishing, something central & inexplicable, all this is now within my reach.156

Passionate celebrations of London157 filled the diaries and letters and spilled over into Mrs Dalloway. She determined to make the rooms beautiful, to spend money on furniture and decorations (Vanessa and Duncan charged her £25 for their painted panels). A euphoric description went to Jacques:

L. and I on top looking at all the glories of London, which are romantically, sentimentally, incredibly dear to me. The Imperial Hotel, all pink and blue, in Russell Square: St Pancras Church spire, carved from white plaster – do you know it? These are the things I love.158

But she felt haunted. ‘I feel as if I were going on with a story which I began in the year 1904’, she wrote to Vanessa, ‘then a little insanity, & so back.’159 As in her novel, and as in her letters to Jacques, present life was shadowed and intercut with the past. The novel and those letters would come to an end at the same time: Jacques died in March 1925, Mrs Dalloway was published in May 1925. As a writer, she now felt a sense of ‘rush & urgency’ and for the first time the conviction that ‘I might become one of the interesting – I will not say great – but interesting novelists?’160 So she kept on with her persistent urgent tussle between life and death, her vision of her own existence as a battle-ground between these two forces: ‘I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.’ ‘But enough of death – its life that matters.’ And, hearing at a party of Jacques’ death: ‘Nevertheless, I do not any longer feel inclined to doff the cap to death. I like to go out of the room talking, with an unfinished casual sentence on my lips.’161

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