Virginia Woolf by Nigel Nicolson

Author:Nigel Nicolson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Leonard and Virginia Woolf at Monk’s House in 1926, with Pinka (Flush) in the foreground. A photograph taken by Vita.

The general strike of May 1926 was more of an excitement than a diversion. The Hogarth Press was only marginally affected by it, because their sole employees, Angus Davidson and a secretary, did not strike, and printing by outside firms was interrupted only for the nine days that the strike lasted. The main public services were kept going by volunteers. Buses, underground trains and taxis no longer ran, but London’s traffic was sustained by bicycle and its communications by telephone and the radio. The strike obliged Virginia to take political sides. Hitherto she had been lukewarm. Now, in support of Leonard, she stood by the strikers, if not as valiantly as he did. “If ever a general strike was justified,” he wrote in his memoirs, “it was in 1926,” and he organized in their support a petition by leading intellectuals, which only Galsworthy refused to sign. The strike was suddenly settled, to the disadvantage of the miners who had started it. “Everyone is jubilant,” Virginia reported to Vanessa. “We are going to have a strike dinner, and drink champagne with Clive, the Frys, and other spirits.” Her support for the strikers was couched in terms of dislike for authority, including the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, whose radio appeal she thought ridiculous. She did not explain her reasons, not even in A Room of One’s Own, where she quoted Baldwin’s broadcast. She was as uncertain in her political judgments as Leonard was firm in his.

It was in the middle of this shindy that she wrote the magical chapter in To the Lighthouse, “Time Passes.” On Vita’s return from her first journey to Persia, their love affair continued intermittently with exchange visits to Rodmell and Long Barn. Virginia was at heart more passionate, Vita on paper more outspoken. While Virginia could write in her diary, “It is a spirited, creditable affair, I think innocent (spiritually) and all gain I think, rather a bore for Leonard, but not enough to worry him,” there was no “I think” in Vita’s replies from Persia on her second visit in 1927: “I always get devastated when I hear from you. God, I do love you. You say I use no endearments. That strikes me as funny, when I wake in the Persian dawn, and say to myself, ‘Virginia, Virginia.’ ”

After two months in Teheran (“God, the people here!” by whom she meant not the Persians but the diplomats and their wives), she embarked with Harold and two friends on an arduous crossing of the Bakhtiari mountains to the Persian Gulf, the subject of her second book of Persian travels, Twelve Days. At the same time Virginia and Leonard were in Italy, loving it so much (“We found wild cyclamen and marble lapped by the water”) that they thought of taking a villa in Rome’s campagna. Vita and Virginia reunited in May, exhilarated by work and travel. Each was buoyed up by success.

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