As far as suicide notes go, it was pretty cheerful. “You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier,” Virginia Woolf scrawled comfortingly to her husband.
Yes, yes, I read Virginia Woolf as a young feminist intellectual. I found Woolf dry and unfocused. And frankly, given the slums I lived in with a bunch of homos who never stopped drinking and snorting Special K while I studied, in the heart of Toronto’s Crackville, I didn’t pay as much attention to Room of One’s Own as I should have. Still, I knew the gist- you need space and peace of mind to write- and I wasn’t buying it. After all, I was writing like mad with barely a pot to piss in, was filling notebooks and lit mags with my brilliant ramblings.
I’m not the only one who found the snooty modernist world of the British middle class feminist intelligentsia to be absolute dullsville. But what did I know of the world or of myself? Just because I’d scrawled some racy anarchist poetry didn’t really give me position to contest one of the greatest modernist thinkers, a woman who paved the way for many female writers, myself included.
Of course, as one ages ungracefully, they begin to see how their path was made easier by their teachers, the pioneering risk takers who paved the way. Perhaps arrogance and know-it-all attitudes are inborn to youth to save them from the unimaginable horrors of impossibilities. Maybe I thought I was such a bohemian, hanging out at fetish bars and reading Lynn Crosbie and Kathy Acker. But there had been other writers before me, many much better writers with much wilder, crazier lives than mine. For all that I found her work dry and dusty, Virginia was much beloved by many literary camps- the modernists, the feminists, the lesbians, the lesbian feminists, and yes, the arty bohemian crowd.
Woolf was an intriguing figure and a diligent worker. Part of an unconventional collective, the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf discussed art and literature with other members, hobnobbed with homosexual intellectuals, including one who was briefly her fiancé, suffered from intense episodes of mental illness, and enjoyed scandalous affairs. Determined to do it herself when the world wouldn’t do it for her, Woolf started up the Hogarth Press with her husband. She self-published her own titles- The Waves, To The Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Orlando, Mrs. Dalloway- but she also published some influential writers like E.M. Forrester, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and a 24-volume Freud translation. (She rejected James Joyce’s Ulysses. Oops.)
Woolf was productive, popular, and deeply loved by her husband. But in 1941, she filled her pocket with heavy stones and walked into the lake. She may have already tried this- ten days prior to her disappearance, she returned from a walk soaking wet and said she’d fallen into the lake. Reminiscent of Puritan punishment- not suffering a witch to live- Virginia Woolf hovered over the face of the deep until death became her. How elegant, how dramatic, how regrettably fatal. Her body was found on April 18- my birthday.
Woolf was just shy of 60, and she had battled lifelong depression. She understood depression as an illness that took something from her, referring to it as a “terrible disease” in her suicide note. Most likely severely bipolar, she swung from happy, incessant chatterbox to dark melancholy. Her first nervous breakdown was at the tender age of thirteen.
Woolf was also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. She wrote about her stepbrother in Sketches of the Past: “I remember how I hoped that he would stop…but he did not stop.” Woolf was often candid about sensitive topics, especially as she had a supportive husband and community. And while she acknowledged the sexual abuse and her skewed sense of self, it is believed that her intermittent madness and the abuse were separate sorrows.
I cannot put feelings into a dead woman’s heart, but my sense is that Virginia had a life of great happiness, with momentary lapses of reason that were unbearable. While her suicide cut short a fascinating life and doubtless more amazing writing, Woolf had been highly productive, and quite content in between her bouts of sorrow, when she felt a burden to her loved ones and to the world.
Much is made of Virginia’s lesbian swinging, and her mannish appearance, giving her a devoted following of women. The Bloomsbury Group encouraged open experimentations and friendships of every ilk, and yes, some swinging. Indeed, Virginia was briefly engaged to a homosexual member of the circle, but instead she married Leonard Woolf. They were more or less equals: while contemporary feminists trying to pin her mental breakdowns on him, it is likely he helped keep her alive. He watched carefully for evidence of breakdowns, supported her creatively, encouraged her work, and nurtured her when she was flagging. She was not miserably stuck in a mismatched straight marriage, though she did write in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth: “It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination.”
Indeed, she had a twenty-year relationship with Vita Sackville-West. Leonard never tried to keep her from this friendship, which did take occasional physical turns. The friends, frequently apart, wrote intimate letters that let us glimpse into their souls. While it may make things more interesting to picture constant Sapphic acrobatics, a sordid romance played out in various literary salons, the truth is likely not so juicy. “I love Virginia – as who wouldn’t? but really, my sweet, one’s love for Virginia is a very different thing; a spiritual thing, if you like, an intellectual thing,” Sackville-West wrote to her husband. “Virginia is not the sort of person one thinks of in that way; there is something incongruous and almost indecent in the idea.” She did admit they’d “gone to bed” but the solid friendship was the mainstay of their intimacy, and the details are unlikely to make it into either Penthouse or On Our Backs. In any event, though Woolf was not the lipstick and bonnet type: she described herself as incredibly ‘dowdy’ and felt that no woman cared less for personal appearance than she did.
Virginia Woolf, 1998, by Joel Isaacson
Her predilections for gender equality, however they played out in her personal life, were part of her contribution to literature at large. Certainly, she has had many critics, who, like my former youthful self, found her tawdry, dry, and whiny. There are others who complain of the tinges of anti-Semitism that showed occasionally despite her marriage to a Jew. Overall, Virginia’s stream-of-consciousness style and frank examinations of gender, relationships, and creativity have inspired everyone from African American author Toni Morrison to pagan-persuasionist Camille Paglia to the postmodernist smorgasbord The Simpsons cartoon! There’s a band – and a song- named Shakespeare’s Sister, alluding to Woolf’s insistence that a woman equally as talented as Shakespeare would have missed the boat due to the silencing of female creativity (in A Room of One’s Own.) Of course, the movie The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s critically acclaimed novel, rightfully revived interest in Woolf’s work and suicide. Countless plays, novels, short stories, movies, and other creative and critical works have been born out of Woolf’s vision.
Where should the new Woolf initiate commence his or her study? I suggest finding a room of one’s own, a big pot of tea, and a few cats. Woolf’s books aren’t long, but their mucky wordiness and lack of contemporary cinematic effects require a few hours without distraction and an unhurried cigar would be suitable. The plots are secondary to the psychological reflections and descriptions, so read slowly for full reward. Once you get used to the winding flow, the rewarding insights about the impermanence of relationships is stunning. Mrs. Dalloway is probably the place to begin- for here Woolf writes about a mannish cigar-smoking woman, the lesbian kiss that character Clarissa recounts as the happiest of her life, a mentally unstable fellow with desperate hallucinations who commits suicide, a possibly homosexual husband, and all the other delicious elements that make for good scandalous reading.
Meet writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Her book The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos is available through Indigo or Amazon. Her work appears all over the Internet. She loves interesting people, but she also really enjoys writing about food and health.
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