— Virginia Woolf / To the Lighthouse.
A photograph of a young Virginia Woolf with Clive Bell.
Pretty awesome picture. Yes yes yes.
— Virginia Woolf / Moments of Being.
I was reading through the letters of Vanessa Bell the other day and found something interesting.
Madge Vaughan had married a cousin of the Stephens in 1898 and was therefore an old acquaintance of both Vanessa and Virginia (cf 2nd part of this post).
In 1920, Madge V. had meant to rent Charleston, Vanessa’s house, while she was away on a holiday. However, she’d apparently been taken with the gossip surrounding Angelica, Vanessa’s daughter (whose father was Duncan Grant, and not Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell), and had written, asking for an explanation. Vanessa’s answers are absolutely brilliant, inspiring and, almost a century later, still very relevant.
See below.
— Mrs. Dalloway (via stuffedartichokes)
— Virginia Woolf,The Voyage Out. (via fuckyeahvirginiawoolf)
My book tells me this was ‘adapted from Malcolm Muggeridge’s BBC Television conversations with Leonard Woolf at Monks House, Rodmell, in March 1967.’
I suppose there must be a video of it? I hope it surfaces or gets broadcast at some point - maybe we just really need to raid the BBC archives.
Anyway, it’s quite long, but very interesting. He’s absolutely brilliant.
*
Leonard and Virginia Woolf lived together for many years here at Rodmell, on the edge of the South Downs. It was a countryside they grew to love. Their marriage was a close and intimate parternship of two intellectuals. Founder members of what came to be called the Bloomsbury Set. She was the daughter of a distinguished man of letters, Sir Leslie Stephen. Brought up in a highly literary atmosphere. Leonard Woolf’s background was different. He was born in 1880 into a comfortable middle-class Jewish family.
We were really very well off until I was twelve when my father died. He was Q.C. and made vast sums of money. But he spent it all in on living in a too large house, with too many children and too many servants. Then he died quite suddenly and my mother was left with nine children and no money coming in. We were immediately much poorer. We transferred ourselves to a smaller house and had three servants instead of about eight and had to be very careful with money. But we didn’t worry very much about it.
You were a really clever boy at school, weren’t you? You found your books easy.
Yes, I think I did from the start. I never had any difficulty with learning things. I liked working and I liked being what used to be called a ‘swot’, and you were always despised if you were a swot. I have always been an unredeemed intellectual and really I think that in England one is under grave suspicion if you are an intellectual.
— V. Woolf / Night & Day
Virginia liked sitting among the vines or going for walks among the unfamiliar French lanes, but what I remember most vividly is one night when a superb thunderstorm broke over Vézelay and we sat in darkness while the flashes intermittently lit up her face. She was, I think, a little frightened, and perhaps that drove her to speak, with a deeper seriousness than I had ever heard her use before, of immortality and personal survival after death.
Vita Sackville-West, 1941.
I’ve been reading through Recollections of Virginia Woolf - it’s almost like the written equivalent of those BBC recordings I mentioned a little while ago. It’s quite laid back and focuses more on her personality, rather than her books. It includes interviews of people outside of Bloomsbury too. Here, Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen.
- When you think of Virginia Woolf, and remember her appearance, does any particular image come into your mind of what she was like?
She was a tremendous beauty, I think that is remembered by people who knew her, but I don’t know if it is realized generally. Her movements were very fluid - and when one says ‘energetic’ that’s the wrong word, because they weren’t jerky movements. She walked beautifully, when one saw her on the skyline or walking across a field. Her head was beautifully placed on her shoulders. Her hands were lovely and her movements were those of a young person. I remember somebody describing her to me before I’d seen her: I’d said, ‘How does she look, what is her personality?’ And they said, ‘Oh, it’s a spontaneous, easy and unconsciously graceful movement.’ And I think one feels that in her work, in a curious way. She said to me of somebody else (I don’t know whether I ought to say who it was), ‘I would always know from the way she wrote that she was a beauty.’ I don’t think she had that in mind with regard to herself, but I think it was a very powerful factor, more than she knew, in her feeling about herself.
Having no religious belief, she was the more conscientious about her life, examining her position from time to time very seriously, and nothing annoyed her more than to find one of these bad habits nibbling away unheeded at the precious substance. What was the good, after all, of being a woman if one didn’t keep fresh, and cram one’s life with all sorts of views and experiments?
V. Woolf / Night & Day.
On a lighter note, these are the recordings of Lottie Hope and Nellie Boxall I mentioned yesterday. Lovely.
