Virginia Woolf's Last Short Story "The Watering Place"

"The Watering Place" by Virginia Woolf (1941, 5 pages)

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

One of my long term  projects is reading  the complete fiction of Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941-UK-there is some background information on her in my prior posts).    I have read and posted on seven of her novels and a few of her essays and short stories. My post on her "Solid Objects", one of my all time favorite short stories, is among the most viewed of the 1129 posts on The Reading Life.    Sometimes the short stories of Woolf seem to be neglected.   Maybe that is because of the towering status of her four most important novels.  

Two days ago I read and posted on Virginia Woolf's first short story "Phyllis and Rosamond" (1906).   Her first story (and also her first published fiction) was a conventional late Victorian comedy of manners work about husband hunting.  It was very interesting to see the start of one of the greatest writing careers of all time.  I thought instead of reading the stories in chronological order like a normal person might I would flash forward to the end of her career and life and read her last story, "The Watering Place".  (My post read research indicates some academic readers of Woolf feel this is an unfinished work based on extra textual evidence but as a reader I did not feel that at all.)

The difference in the two stories is simply huge.   "The Watering Place" is open to many readings and is not a plotted story at all.   It makes heavy symbolic use of deep rooted cultural images like the tides, waves, the ocean fish, sea shells, and toilets.   It is set in a sea side town, no doubt some where in England.  Here is the opening line "Like all seaside towns it was pervaded by the smell of fish".   The toys shops of the town are full of sea shells, and even the people who live there some how resemble sea shells.  The people in the town don't just look like shells they morph into another meaning of shell, that of a hollow vessel.   Everyday at one o'clock a lot of the people in the small town meet up at a restaurant, one with a fishy smell.   "The consumption of fish in that room must have been enormous".   We go into  the ladies restroom (comfort room) and the flushing toilets and water running in the sink mirror in a degraded way the ocean, the waves, and the tides.   We sit in as the women in the room exchange gossip and talk about men.   We cannot help but wonder what this snippet of a line (this story was written toward the start of WWII) reveals:  "But he ought to be more careful.  If he's caught doing it, he'll be court-martialed".   I wondered what this secret could be.

The women are seen as like little fish, with the tide covering and uncovering them.   It is the tide of history or the tide of a flushing toilet or is it both?   Is all life just the flushing of a toilet?


I could not help but feel sad and mesmerized as I read Woolf's last short story.   In thirty five years she went from a pretty typical "woman's story" that 100s of people could have written to a work that sums up the human condition in a few pages from Mount Parnassus,  a work that will keep me thinking for a long time.

I also want to let my readers known about a great new edition of the complete works of Virginia Woolf published as an E-Book by Delphi Classics.   It contains all the novels, all of the essays, her play, all of the short stories (including numerous ones I personally could not find online)  and all of the essays, including ones not in any of the collections of essays.   It has a smart table of contents with is very helpful.   One great thing about the set is that you can search the whole collection for words or expressions.  Just for fun I did a search on "London" and it came up 200 times, "Marriage" came 335 times, and "Ireland" 48 times.   I think to serious students of  Woolf just this feature alone would be worth the very reasonable purchase price.  It would certainly make a post on "Ireland and Virginia Woolf" a lot easier.  "Death" comes up 425 times.  

Further information on this title and the many other works offered by Delphi Classics can be found on their webpage.

Mel u

Virginia Woolf's First Short Story

"Phyllis and Rosamond" by Virginia Woolf (1906, 22 pages)

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

One of my long term  projects is reading  the complete fiction of Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941-UK-there is some background information on her in my prior posts).    I have read and posted on seven of her novels and a few of her essays and short stories. My post on her "Solid Objects", one of my all time favorite short stories, is among the most viewed of the 1129 posts on The Reading Life.    Sometimes the short stories of Woolf seem to be neglected.   Maybe that is because of the towering status of her four most important novels.   

"Phyllis and Rosamond" is a historically important piece because it is the very first work of fiction Woolf published.   It is a story about five sisters, their mother, husband hunting and their relationship to each other and their parents.  It seems to me very much in the mode of a late Victorian comedy of manners story centering on the family issues of the affluent sisters.  The story is narrated as if it were a biography of the sisters.   Two are described as having a pugnacious state of mind which applies itself to political, economic, and social problems.   Two of the sisters are "frivolous, domestic, of lighter and more sensitive temperaments.   These two are then condemned to be what in the slang of the century is called daughters at home".  The fifth sisters vacillates between the two pairs.   The first two sisters will go to college, cultivate their minds and become the wives of men of consequence.   The fun of the story revolves around Woolf's remaking of the husband hunt theme worked so well in the 19th century and the narrative observations on marriage.  

"Phyllis and Rosamond" is a good short story and it was very exciting to see the start of one of the great writing careers of all time.

I also want to let my readers known about a great new edition of the complete works of Virginia Woolf published as an E-Book by Delphi Classics.   It contains all the novels, all of the essays, her play, all of the short stories (including numerous ones I personally could not find online)  and all of the essays, including ones not in any of the collections of essays.   It has a smart table of contents with is very helpful.   One great thing about the set is that you can search the whole collection for words or expressions.  Just for fun I did a search on "London" and it came up 200 times, "Marriage" came 335 times, and "Ireland" 48 times.   I think to serious students of  Woolf just this feature alone would be worth the very reasonable purchase price.  It would certainly make a post on "Ireland and Virginia Woolf" a lot easier.  "Death" comes up 425 times.  

Further information on this title and the many other works offered by Delphi Classics can be found on their webpage.

Mel u

Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman by Ruth Gruber

Virginia Woolf:  The Will to Create as a Woman by Ruth Gruber (2005, 192 pages)

Virginia Woolf:  The Will to Create as a Woman by Ruth Gruber is almost two fascinating books.  One of the books is a reprint of Gruber's 1935 dissertation essay on Virginia Woolf that is widely considered the first feminist  reading of the works of Woolf.  The other book is an account, written decades latter, of her personal relationship with Woolf and of how she came to be the youngest PHd in the world at the time, graduating from a German university as the country was coming totally under the domination of Hitler.   Gruber's parents greatly feared for her safety, as she was Jewish.  She was only twenty when she wrote her book on Woolf, which was written and published in English.

In Germany in 1935 in order to receive a PhD it was not necessary to take several years of required courses.  It seems all one really had to do was to write a dissertation and defend it before a committee of professors.  One of Gruber's professors was very interested in Virginia Woolf. still very much a living author, and knew of Gruber's mutual interest and he encouraged her to write a dissertation on Woolf and sponsored her in obtaining a PhD.   It was fascinating to learn how this worked in Germany in 1935 and to see how Gruber dealt with antisemitism among the professors.

The idea for this new book began when a research assistant for Gruber discovered three letters from Virginia Woolf to Gruber, written in the 1930s.   This discovery motivated Gruber to tell the story of her fascination and personal relationship with Woolf and of her university time in Germany.   She also tells us how she made a living  as a travel writer and as a reporter after returning to the United States during the depression years.   She describes her meetings with Virginia Woolf and deals with Woolf's alleged antisemitism (of course her husband was Jewish so maybe this is kind of a matrimonial issue in part).   It was really fun to read of her meeting with Woolf, set up through correspondence, and her reaction to a face to face encounter with a writer she idolized.

The second half of the book, much heavier reading, is a reprint of her dissertation, which was published in 1938.    It was very insightful and of great interest as a historical document.

I endorse Virginia Woolf:  The Will to Create as a Woman by Ruth Gruber to anyone quite into Woolf for sure and I think people with a general interest in literary history in the 1930s and German academia will also really enjoy it.

Ruth Gruber is an award-winning Jewish American journalist, photographer, and humanitarian. She was born in Brooklyn in 1911 and is the author of nineteen books, including the National Jewish Book Award-winning biography Raquela (1978).


In the interests of full disclosure, I was provided with a free e-book by the publisher Open Road Integrated Media


Mel u

"Solid Objects" by Virginia Woolf

"Solid Objects" by Virginia Woolf  (1920-reprinted 1944-4 pages)

From Parliament to Trash Picker

A Descent into Madness?

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

One of my long term reading projects centers on reading the complete fiction of Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941-UK-there is some background information on her in my prior posts).    I have read and posted on seven of her novels and a few of her essays and short stories.    Sometimes the short stories of Woolf seem to be neglected.   Maybe that is because of the towering status of her four most important novels.   To me the short stories can be sort of seen as a "training ground" to read The Wave, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando  and The Lighthouse.   I know not everyone likes short stories (an attitude I shared about 1.5 years ago) but I have found her stories to be pure delights.   

"Solid Objects" is a total gem, a perfect example of a world compressed into a few pages.    I am basically doing this post to urge those who are into Woolf to read this story as soon as they can.    I liked it so much I read it three times.   One time for a first impression, a second time to savor it again and be sure I understood it and a final time just for sheer pleasure.    

As the story opens two upper class males are at the beach.   John is a member of Parliament and a candidate for an important party office.    Charles is his close confidante and good friend.     John sees a shiny piece of glass and picks it up.   In his mind he wonders how it got on the beach.   Is it from a treasure chest that has been on the ocean floor for years?   He picks it up and, to the bewilderment of his friend, takes it home and puts it on his mantel as a treasure.  

A huge change begins to overtake John as he develops an obsession.

"John found himself attracted to the windows of curiosity shops when he was out walking, merely because he saw something which reminded him of the lump of glass. Anything, so long as it was an object of some kind, more or less round, perhaps with a dying flame deep sunk in its mass, anything — china, glass, amber, rock, marble — even the smooth oval egg of a prehistoric bird would do. He took, also, to keeping his eyes upon the ground, especially in the neighbourhood of waste land where the household refuse is thrown away. Such objects often occurred there — thrown away, of no use to anybody, shapeless, discarded. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece."

One day on the way to an important meeting at Parliament John spots a very unusual piece of colored glass in the trash.   He cannot reach it so he forgets the meeting and returns home to fashion a special took for picking up items like this.    John becomes totally consumed by his search for great found objects.     A once distinguished member of Parliament basically becomes a trash scavenger.  

"He now began to haunt the places which are most prolific of broken china, such as pieces of waste land between railway lines, sites of demolished houses, and commons in the neighbourhood of London."

He begins to neglect his duties and he is not reelected to Parliament.     When his friend Charles goes to visit him to console him for his defeat John seems barely concerned at all and wants instead to show off his newest finds.  

John gets more and more into his new pursuit.   He begins to dig through garbage dumps with his special stick and a bag to place his treasures in.   People begin to pretty much forget about him.

"Day after day passed. He was no longer young. His career — that is his political career — was a thing of the past. People gave up visiting him. He was too silent to be worth asking to dinner. He never talked to anyone about his serious ambitions; their lack of understanding was apparent in their behaviour."

In a very brilliant closing scene Charles asks John why he has given up.   John tells him  he has not given up at all.    Each man is talking about something very different.    John means to the horror of Charles that he has only just begun his life work of looking for treasures only he can understand in the trash of London.

I have told much of the plot of this story, I know.   I do not regret it as the wonder of it is not so much in the very clever plot but in how subtly John's descent into madness is portrayed.   Or maybe it is his escape from Madness or a move from one obsession to another.   

This is a very good short story I endorse totally.   I think it may have something important to say about the meaning and import of Virginia Woolf.

Do you have a favorite Woolf short story?   Please share your experience with us

You can read this story HERE

Mel u

Anton Chekhov-Two Stories from 1886-Virginia Woolf-"The Russian Point of View"

"The Husband" by Anton Chekhov (1886, 4 pages)
"The Chorus Girl" by Anton Chekhov (1886, 5 pages)
"The Russian Point of View" by Virginia Woolf (1925, 4 pages-essay)


The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

Every time I read a work by Anton Chekhov (1860 to 1904-Russia) I tell myself I need to read more of his work.    (So far I have posted on two of his short stories and one of his short novels, My Life.)    He has a good claim to the title "world's best short story author".    Frank O'Connor devotes a chapter to Chekhov in his The Lonely Voice-A Study of the Short Story.     I plan to return to Chekhov soon and look at the stories O'Connor talks about.  Today I just want to talk briefly about two of his short stories from 1886 and an essay by Virginia Woolf on  the major Russian writers.

"The Husband" and "The Chorus Girl" have some important similarities.   Both stories are about marital infidelity and the reactions of the victimized spouses.   In "The Husband" a wife may not actually commit adultery but she clearly behaves in a way that it outside the bounds of proper wifely behavior.    In "The Chorus Girl" a husband does commit adultery with a chorus girl.   In both stories Chekhov shows us how guilt is used to punish straying spouses.

"The Husband" is centered in a small town in Czarist Russia.   Something very exciting is going to happen soon.   A military regiment will be staying in the town for a while.   The tavern owners, food suppliers, drink merchants, and brothels all know they will make a lot of money.   All of the women of the town (single and married) are very excited over a big party  that has been announced.    The wife in the story has been married a few years but she still feels she is attractive.   She goes to the party with no intention but to have a good time and one must admit have her sense of self worth validated by having the young soldiers show interest in her. On the dance floor she feels more beautiful than she has for years.   Her husband goes to the party looking for her.   He drags her out and we see the terrible consequences that the husband's condemnation has on the wife.   The wife is not a fully innocent party.   As the story closes we know she will pay a life long price for one evening of good times.

You can read "The Husband"  HERE

"The Chorus Girl" is a very interesting study in the uses of guilt to manipulate people and the penalties the wronged can extract from those who stray from conventional morality.   Chorus girls in the 1880s were sort of the exotic dancers of their day.   Even if nothing happens, no husband wants to have to explain to his wife what his relationship with a chorus girl might be.    Married women assume chorus girls are gold diggers if not out right prostitutes and treat them that way.    This is really a brilliantly told story.   In just a few pages it has clear exposition of the lives of the characters, it has drama (a married man is having an affair with a chorus girl) and it has a big development  when his wife confronts the chorus girl.   The wife demands to know what presents he has given her and how much money she has received from her husband.   The wife will not allow herself to believe it when the chorus girl tells her she has real feelings for the husband and has  never been paid at all.   Maybe what happens next is sad or maybe it is poetic justice but you will have to read this great story to find out.

"The Chorus Girl" can be read HERE

In her 1925 essay included in her The Common Reader, "The Russian Point of View" Virginia Woolf talks about Tolstoy,  Dostoevsky,  and Chekhov.  (She does not mention Turgenev.)   I really do not feel comfortable paraphrasing Woolf.    She gives us a brilliant account of the power of each of the three great Russian writers. Dostoevsky for his capture of the soul, Tolstoy for his panoramic creations and his great sanity and Chekhov (she spells it Tchekov") for his minute observations and incredibility subtle observations and his creation of whole worlds in a few pages.

You can read her essay HERE

Both of these stories center on guilt.   In just a few pages they bring marriages in the provinces of Czarist Russia to life for us.  More than this, even if you have no idea when or where the stories take place, you will still feel their power.

No translated by credit is given for the stories but I think  it is Constance Garnett.

Do you have a favorite Chekhov story?

Mel u

Virginia Woolf: Two Short Stories-"The Legacy" and "The Man Who Loved His Kind"

"The Legacy" (1944, 6 pages)

"The Man Who Loved His Own Kind" (1944, 5 pages)




The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project


One of the Reading Life projects I am working on is the complete fiction of Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941-England).    In addition to the major novels, Woolf published around 25 shorter works of fiction.    Both of these stories are included in her anthology (1944) The Haunted House and other Stories.   I have previously posted on nine of her short stories.    


"The Legacy" is a very powerful work about love, marriage, vanity and legacies.  As the story opens Angela Clandon, wife of a very prominent politician, has just passed away and her husband, Gilbert, is reading a list of legacies she has left to the people that were important to her.    One of  the  first legacies is to her secretary, Sissy Miller.    Gilbert thinks to himself that his wife was so considerate she has left a legacy to everyone that mattered to her.   All of their married life of many years (they never had any children)  his wife kept a diary.    Whenever he tried to look at the diary, she hid it from him.   There was one diary notebook for each of the fifteen years of their marriage.    Angela obviously knew she was dying and left legacies for everyone.   


"To him, of course, she had left nothing in particular, unless it were her diary. Fifteen little volumes, bound in green leather, stood behind him on her writing table. Ever since they were married, she had kept a diary. Some of their very few — he could not call them quarrels, say tiffs — had been about that diary. When he came in and found her writing, she always shut it or put her hand over it. “No, no, no,” he could hear her say, “After I’m dead — perhaps.” So she had left it him, as her legacy." 


Gilbert begins to slowly read these diaries.    As the diaries begin in the first year she mentions often how handsome he is and how she loves him.    As the years go by she mentions him less and less.    His vanity is offended by this.    He begins to find an increasing number of references to "B.M.".   He soon knows he is a man but he is puzzled  by what role she played in Angela's life and is troubled by the fact that he has never heard of him.    Then in one shocking  entry he finds out that B.M. was in their house while he was on a business trip.   He discovers that B.M. is introducing her to political ideas that the very conservative Gilbert finds shocking.   B.M.  seems to be a radical Marxist of some kind.    As the years of the diary goes by Gilbert is hardly mentioned at all.     "The Legacy" is another beautifully written work by Woolf.   I know you think you know the meaning of the legacy now but there is a surprise that deepens our understanding of the blindness of Gilbert.


"The Man Who Loved His Own Kind" is about two old friends who run into each other after a 20 year hiatus.   Mr Dalloway (the husband of Mrs Dalloway) invites Prickett Ellis to a party.    Both men practice law.   Ellis accepts the invitation knowing he finds parties a bore and is inept at small talk.     This is a very subtle story about class differences.    The class difference between the two men is not a huge gap, just a small one and that make the story much more interesting.    At the party Ellis is not really able to comfortably converse and Dalloway sees this and bring over to him a woman he feels he will get along well with.    I will leave the rest of the plot untold.    


Frank O'Connor in The Lonely Voice-A Study of the Short Story says that short stories (or at least the best of them) are typically about members of "submerged groups", people that  need someone to speak for them because of their marginal social status.   The short stories of Woolf i have read so far do not all answer to this description.   Her central characters are normally well educated, well off people.   Of course, O'Connor could simply say the stories of Woolf are  below the quality of the writers he covers in his book.   

Both stories can be read HERE

Woolf's short stories are a very important part of her own legacy to the world.  

Do you think if it were not for the novels, that we would still be reading the short stories of Woolf?

Mel u

"The Searchlight" by Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf and her Father

"The Searchlight" by Virginia Woolf (1943, 5 pages)


The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project




"The Searchlight" was first published in a collection of Virginia Woolf's (1882-1941-UK) A Haunted House and Other Stories in 1944.    It was not published elsewhere prior to her death.  






"The Searchlight" is a bit of a strange story.    As it opens a group of friends are enjoying a drink at an outdoor cafe in London one night..    The time is just before the start of WWII.    We know this because of air raid search lights are plying the sky, testing their capability in a soon to come war.


The lead figure in the conversation is a rather elderly financially comfortable lady.    She obviously likes to tell stories and is a bit disconnected from reality.    Tonight's story is about her great-great-great-grandfather.    The story is set around 1820.    He seems the source of her wealth.    She tells her friends (family?) that her grandfather began to "let himself go" when his wife died.   He moved a country girl in with him and people were offended by this and stopped coming to call on him.    Her account of the activities of her ancestor does not fully make sense.   Either there is something wrong with him or her.   I suspect she is in the opening stage of mental problems brought on by old age.    


I really liked this passage, especially the part about the books!


"She paused. "There they lived," she went on, "the old man, the woman and the boy. She wasn't his wife, or the boy's mother. She was just a farm hand, a girl the old man had taken to live with him when his wife died. Another reason perhaps why nobody visited them-why the whole place was gone to rack and ruin. But I remember a coat of arms over the door; and books, old books, gone mouldy. He taught himself all he knew from books. He read and read, he told me, old books, books with maps hanging out from the pages. He dragged them up to the top of the tower-the rope's still there and the broken steps. There's a chair still in the window with the bottom fallen out; and the window swinging open, and the panes broken, and a view for miles and miles across the moors."


Something really fun and interesting happens involving a telescope and if it had not happened our speaker would never have been born.


I think it is a misdirected to try to seek out a "meaning for this short narrative.    The pleasure in the story comes from the wonderful prose of Woolf and our efforts to figure out what really happened back in 1820.    I also enjoyed wondering what the relationship of the elderly lady was to her younger companions.   If one wanted you could see the partial illumination of the sky as mirroring the mind of the older lady and as a commentary on the nature of perception.




This delightful story can be read HERE.


Do you have a favorite Virginia Woolf Short story?

Mel u

"A Society" by Virginia Woolf A Wonderful Short Story

VW and her Father

"A Society" by Virginia Woolf (1921, six pages)

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

"A Society" by Virginia Woolf (1882-1941-UK) was included in her first collection of short stories, Monday or Tuesday.     As the story opens a group of female friends have just finished their tea and they begin talking about their normal topic of conversation, namely how wonderful men are and how lucky any woman permanently attached to one is.     They start talking about the sad fate of a  member of the group, Poll.   Poll was left a fortune by her father under the condition  she read all the books in the London Library.     Unfortunately, Poll is so unattractive that not even her money will  attract a man to consider marrying her.    Poll begins to say how she hates having to read.    A discussion ensues based on some readings from books she has selected.   The men worshiping ladies cannot believe that men could have written such bad books.

One of the ladies comes up with a great idea:

But now that we can read, what prevents us from judging the results? Before we bring another child into the world we must swear that we will find out what the world is like.”
So we made ourselves into a society for asking questions. One of us was to visit a man-of-war; another was to hide herself in a scholar’s study; another was to attend a meeting of business men; while all were to read books, look at pictures, go to concerts, keep our eyes open in the streets, and ask questions perpetually. We were very young. You can judge of our simplicity when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were to be directed to finding out how far these objects were now attained by men. We vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were satisfied.

The ladies go about this project for several years.   The reports of their visits are very funny, very clever and wicked social satire.    The interactions of the women with each other and the descriptions of their investigations are just so wonderful.    One lady disguises her self as a char-woman  and visits the rooms of Oxford dons.    I had to read her report three times it was so well done.

"A Society" can be read online

Mel u

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf-Her First Novel

The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf (1915, 384 pages)

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

I have  had Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941-UK))  on my must read soon list for a very long time but it seems I kept getting sidetracked from reading her.    When I won a copy of The Waves from a very gracious blogger  (links to all my posts on Virginia Woolf can be found at The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project link above) I decided this was my push to at last read one of her masterworks.   I had just completed Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and this helped put me in a mind set for reading The Waves.     I really enjoyed  The Waves a lot.     I took the approach  of just letting the prose go over me in waves (lots of water images in the work) and did not stress over achieving what some would call an intellectualized understanding of the book.    I knew then I wanted to read a lot more Woolf.    I decided to first read Hermione Lee's wonderful biography Virginia Woolf  to expand my background knowledge.     By then I knew Woolf has four consensus masterworks,   The Waves, Orlando, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.    I decided to read the other three of these works next.    My thinking was that by doing this if I end up only reading four of her works I will have experienced her best novels and if I do go on to read all of them I could go back and reread the major ones.  I have now read the Woolf "big four".

I also decided to read some short fiction along the way.     In addition to this I read Flush,her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, a really fun book and easy to follow.    I also read Jacob's Room.    I read her very famous A Room of One's Own, a few short stories and some essays.    

I am still pondering how to proceed on with Woolf.    I think for now the best course of action for me is to read her books in the order she wrote them.   That way I can see her develop as a writer.    

Woolf's very first novel, The Voyage Out, is not an experimental ground breaking work.     As the novel opens young Rachael Vinrace is embarking on a voyage to South America on a cruise ship owned by her father.   There is a nice mix of passengers on the ship so we are treated to some satire of the pretenses of the passengers.    On a cruise trip people tend to over  state their station in life and take the attitude that they will probably never see their fellow passengers again so there is little risk in being "found out" in an exaggeration.

The voyage is Rachael's first real taste of freedom.    Like Woolf herself she was raised in an intellectual family with a dominating father.    One can feel Rachael starting to come into her own as person as the cruise advances.  

It is not my plan to do much more than brief posts on Woolf's early works.   I will say that the South America that Rachael arrives at is unlike any part of South America that actually ever existed.    The logical ports of debarkation at the times were in Brazil or Columbia.     I would love to read Woolf's reaction  to Brazil in 1915 but this is not to be here.  

The best parts of The Voyage Out were,  to me, the conversations.    I not  know it for a fact but I think a lot, maybe most, of the readers of The Voyage Out are in a "doing Woolf" mode.    The Voyage Out is, leaving aside its historical interest, an interesting beautifully written book of its period.

   If someone asked me based on my experience so far what their first Woolf should be, I think I would suggest Flush.  From there  I would say dive into which ever of the "big four" that seems most interesting to you.

My next Woolf novel will be Night and Day, a story of the romantic and personal attachments of two women. (1919)

For those who have read The Voyage Out, do you think it would still be read or even in print if Woolf never wrote her four masterworks or never became a cultural icon?

Mel u

"Lappin and Lapinova" by Virginia Woolf

Leonard and Virginia Woolf

"Lappin and Lapinova" by Virginia Woolf (6 pages, 1930-1944)

Greetings to our readers from Kayseri-please feel free to leave a comment and look around-Mel u

The Reading Life Staff is happy to welcome all Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice visitors-please feel free to leave any comment or question you may have

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project-


One of the long range Reading Life Projects I am currently working on is all the fiction of Virginia Woolf  (1882 to 1941-UK.    I started out with the "Big Four", Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, and Orlando.  In part my thinking was that if I get side tracked or lose interest in the project at least I will have read her masterpieces.   I then read Jacob's Room followed by Flush.   I read her classic work A Room of Her Own, plus a few essays and short stories.

"Lappin and Lapinova" was one of  the stories included in her final collection of short stories, A Haunted House and other Stories.    It is narrated in a simple straightforward way that would have been quite comfortable to short story writers conditioned by the work of Saki and O. Henry.  

As the story opens Rosalind and Ernest Thorburn had just gotten married.    They are very much in love.   One morning Rosalind begins to think that her husband does not look like an Ernest.   Instead she decides that he looks like a rabbit.    Ernest in no way to outsiders resembles a rabbit ("lapin" is French for rabbit) but soon he and his wife have constructed a private mythology in which they see each other as rabbits.   One wonders if VW had the same image in mind of the romantic proclivities of rabbits as readers might now.    This mythology gives the couple a private world of their own.   To me VW does a wonderful job of  creating the happy early times in a marriage  ( a cynic would say "before reality set in").  

Ernest comes from a very big family whereas  Rosalind is nearly alone in the world.   Ernest's family seems to be country gentry and one bucolic party day things take a turn for the worst.   I do not want to giveaway the plot of the rest of this delightful story.  

Woolf in a few pages does a brilliant job of depicting how subtle things can have a great effect on relationships.   She shows us how delicate love can sometimes be.     One could read this story and say private myths are needed to support a marriage or you could say the near opposite that they hide from shallow participants the real nature of their relationships.

"Lappin and Lapinova" is a delightful story that will well repay the few minutes it takes to read it.   You can read it online.  

Mel u

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf-Update on The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927, 256 pages)

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

I have  had Virginia Woolf on my must read soon list for a very long time but it seems I kept getting sidetracked from reading her.    When I won a copy of The Waves from a very gracious blogger  (links to all my posts on Virginia Woolf can be found at The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project link above) I decided this was my push to at last read one of her masterworks.   I had just completed Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and this helped put me in a mind set for reading The Waves.     I really enjoyed  The Waves a lot.     I took the approach  of just letting the prose go over me in waves (lots of water images in the work) and did not stress over achieving what some would call an intellectualized understanding of the book.    I knew then I wanted to read a lot more Woolf.    I decided to first read Hermione Lee's wonderful biography Virginia Woolf  to expand my background knowledge.     By then I knew Woolf has four consensus masterworks,   The Waves, Orlando, Mrs Dalloway, and To the Lighthouse.    I decided to read the other three of these works next.    My thinking was that by doing this if I end up only reading four of her works I will have experienced her best novels and if I do go on to read all of them I could go back and reread the major ones.  I have now read the Woolf "big four".

I also decided to read some short fiction along the way.     In addition to this I read Flush, her biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog, a really fun book and easy to follow.   It might not be a bad first Woolf.   I also read Jacob's Room.    I read her very famous A Room of One's Own, a few short stories and some essays.    

As I began To the Lighthouse I knew that much like The Waves the novel makes use of the stream of consciousness rather than plot action or conversations between the characters.     The central characters of the novel are Professor Ramsey, a well known philosopher and author,  his wife, their children and various guests at the Ramsey's home in Hebrides Islands.    All of Woolf's work seems quite social and to involve groups of people and their relationship to each other and their common experiences.    The opening section of the novel, "The Window" is taken up with interactions of the Ramsey's and their guests.  In section II, "Time Passes" we learn of the events of ten years in the lives of the Ramsey family.   One of their sons was killed in WWI and Mrs. Ramsey has passed away.     The relationship between the Ramseys is a brilliantly done depiction of mutually dependency in marriage.   In the last section the family finally makes the trip to the lighthouse.    Much like Parade's End I see To the Lighthouse  as a kind of Cubist novel in which we are shown how reality is created through a consensus of perceptions once one passes mere physical reality.

Of course the language is beautiful and lots of references are made to books and art that anyone will love.   I know people spent a life time reading Woolf and that there is a vast secondary literature on her and I respect that.    Leonard Woolf said To the Lighthouse was Virginia Woolf's best novel.    I suppose the sensible thing to do now would be to read her remaining novels in order of publication and then come back to the "big four".   Probably I will pretty much do that but for now I think I will next read her book length essay Three Guineas,   dealing with some of the political thoughts of Woolf, next.

All of the Woolf I have read so far can be read online at the University of Adelaide Library web page.

Mel u

"Squire Patrick's Lady" by Thomas Hardy and "The Novels of Thomas Hardy" by Virginia Woolf

"Squire Patrick's Lady" by Thomas Hardy (1890, 8 pages)

"The Novels of  Thomas Hardy" by Virginia Woolf  (10 pages   1928-essay)

Not to long ago I read and posted on one of Thomas Hardy's short stories, "The Withered Arm".      Of course it is a masterwork of the story teller's art.    I am currently reading my way through The March of Literature by Ford Madox Ford,  almost an encyclopedia of literature that only an awesome force of intellect like Ford could produce.    In The March of Literature Ford describes the work of Hardy (1840 to 1928-UK) as being like the root of a 400 year old tree.     Most days I am in the habit of checking to see what the short story of the day is on East of the Web: Short Stories.    A few days ago the story of the day (normally a story of a canon or near canon status writer) was "Squire Patrick's Lady" by Thomas Hardy.    

As you might expect from an author described as "like the root of a 400 year old tree" Hardy looks back to the Old Testament and the Greeks rather than forward to the moderns writers.   There is a lesson to be learned in this story about the consequences of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons.    As the story opens the wife of Squire Patrick is dying.    She calls her husband to her side and says she has a lie in her heart that she must reveal to her husband before she passes.     There so much in this short story but I do not want to give away any of the plot line.   The language does somehow feel ancient even though Hardy was a contemporary of Joyce, Mansfield and Woolf.    It is a searing account of the corrosive effects of the class system, among other things.    I find it hard to imagine someone reading this story and not being glad they have done so.

Shortly after Hardy died Virginia Woolf wrote an essay about his work "The Novels of Thomas Hardy", which was  republished in The Common Reader, Series Two.    I have not found myself comfortable paraphrasing the essays of Woolf.   I have noticed most who have blogged on her essays pretty much just quote them.     Of course Woolf speaks in glowing terms of the work of Hardy.   I found her dividing up of literary artists into conscious and non conscious writers very interesting.     Hardy is among the non conscious creators who simply write what is in their heart without self-conscious artifice.  

Mel u

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929, 111 pages)

"A poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born".  Virginia Woolf

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

A Room of One's Own first published in October of 1929 was based on a series of lectures that Woolf (1882 to 1941) gave at a woman's college in Cambridge. In many quarters,  A Room of One's Own has the status almost of a holy text.       Most  know it based on one assertion:   a woman needs money and a place of her own to write creatively.     Like most of the small amount of Woolf's essays  I have read I do not find her work really admits of paraphrase in any fashion that does not diminish the power and beauty of her words.   I  would say to readers of this post that you know you will probably get around to reading A Room of One's Own one day.   My only suggestion is to move up the read by date to as soon as possible.   It has a great deal to say about the reading life as well as the writing life.   

I want to quote a bit from the work so the reader can get a feel for the exquisite prose of Woolf.

At the same time, on the other side of Europe, there was a young man living freely with this gypsy or with that great lady; going to the wars; picking up unhindered and uncensored all that varied experience of human life which served him so splendidly later when he came to write his books. Had Tolstoi lived at the Priory in seclusion with a married lady ‘cut off from what is called the world’, however edifying the moral lesson, he could scarcely, I thought, have written WAR AND PEACE .

You can read A Room of One's Own in just  few hours.   It can be read online here .   I am very glad I have at last read this canon status work and I think most others will also feel the same way once they finally read it.

I hope to post on To the Lighthouse and Three Guineas soon.

Mel u

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light

Mrs. Woolf and the Servants:  An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury by Alison Light (2008, 376 pages, Non-Fiction)

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

A  few months ago I won a copy of The Waves by Virginia Woolf.   I had never up to that point read any of Virginia Woolf's work and I really was glad I now had the motivation to do so.   I liked The Waves a lot while conceding I was far from "understanding" it.   I then read Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando.   I also read a few of her better know short stories and a couple of essays.    I then had pretty much decided to start The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project which would involved reading at least all the fiction of Woolf.   If you take a look at it, the sheer volume of it is not real huge as most of her works are under 300 pages.   I also read three very good biographies related to Woolf and her intimates.   I read Hermione Lee's wonderful biography Virginia Woolf.   I then read Victoria Glendinning's biographies of Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia, and also her biography of  Vita Sackville-West, considered to be the inspiration for the lead character in Orlando.  I also read two of Woolf's shorter works, Jacob's Room and Flush.

As you read these secondary works and the novels of Woolf you begin to wonder who does the cooking, who cleans the clothes, who washes the dishes,   who scrubs the floors, who serves the meals?     Mrs.  Woolf and the Servants  by Alison Light goes a very long way toward answering  these questions.   Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941) always had full time servants from  the day she was born until her death.      Mrs. Woolf and the Servants is more than just a fascinating book about Virginia Woolf.   It is also a very illuminating social history of the domestic servant in England from the 1880s up to WWII.     Light  made me reflect  when she said no more than 100 years ago most women with jobs were servants.     To be a servant in some cases was to endure a life of constant petty humiliations designed to insure the servant knew who the master was.   Of course many who had servants said things like "our servants are practically members of the family" and meant it.      What that  translated to in practice varied a lot.    Most servants did not stay with their employers very long and with the changing social condition in England brought on by the demand for women in factory jobs in WWII   fewer and fewer women "went into service".   There were even social commentators who saw the decline of women going into services jobs as a sign of the decline of British society.     Light  helps us understand all these issues.

Having full time servants since birth effects people deeply just as growing up knowing at 13 or 14 you will "go into service" has its own devastating effect.   My guess is most book bloggers located in the Philippines have full time servants and probably grew up with servants living in the house.   We have to ponder as parents how this will shape our children's perceptions of life.   

I was very struck by something Light said about Katherine Mansfield.   Mansfield, I think, grew up with full time servants.    Once she  left her parents home in New Zealand she at times had to cook her own food, wash her own dishes etc.   Light says the first time Mansfield washed a cooking dish and found out that fat from mutton did not dissolve in water and go down the drain she began weeping.   It seems many of the young Bohemians of post WWI London were willing to indulge in all sorts of social and sexual experimentation as long as it did not mean you had to answer your own door or wash your own linen.

Light gives us exact details about the lives of many people that worked for Virginia Woolf.    In a very interesting postscript to the book she gives us short biographies of the servants who worked longest for Virginia and Leonard Woolf.     

I think anyone interested in Virginia Woolf and her circle would really enjoy reading this book.   I know I did. It also is a very good work of social history of the life of women "in service" in the first half of the 20th century.    I think Mrs. Woolf and the Servants:  An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury is a valuable contribution to the social  history of women.

I will next be posting on A Room of Her Own.


Alison Light is a part-time professor of modern literature at New Castle University and edited Flush for Penguin Classics.

Mel u

"The Duchess and the Jeweler" by Virginia Woolf

"The Duchess and the Jeweler"  by Virginia Woolf (1938, 6 pages)


The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

"The Duchess and the Jeweler" by Virginia Woolf   (1882 to 1941-England) was first published in 1938 and then republished in A Haunted House and Other Stories in 1944.     This story is a straight forward traditional short story about a fabulously wealthy jeweler who now has among his clients the richest people in London.   He began his life in a very different way.    I found this work really beautifully written.     Oliver has come along a long way since his young days:

"Behold Oliver," he would say, addressing himself. "You who began

life in a filthy little alley, you who… " and he would look down at his

legs, so shapely in their perfect trousers; at his boots; at his spats. They

were all shapely, shining; cut from the best cloth by the best scissors in

Savile Row. But he dismantled himself often and became again a little

boy in a dark alley. He had once thought that the height of his ambition—

selling stolen dogs to fashionable women in Whitechapel

Oliver receives a call from Duchess of Lambourne, "daughter of a hundred Earls".    She awaited him in the  office of his shop.    Oliver derives an immense pleasure from thinking how a man of his origins could make the Duchess wait.     

I will tell no more of this story as the ending is really well done.   There is a controversy about whether or not this story can be construed as anti-Semitic.    It was a well known fact that all the wealthy jewelers in London were Jewish.    Woolf knew her readers knew this.    Many  will construe the  references to the long quivering nose of the jeweller as playing to anti-Semitic stereotypes.    

he was the richest jeweler in England; but his

nose, which was long and flexible, like an elephant's trunk, seemed to

say by its curious quiver at the nostrils (but it seemed as if the whole

nose quivered, not only the nostrils) that he was not satisfied yet; still

smelt something under the ground a little further off. Imagine a giant

hog in a pasture rich with truffles; after unearthing this truffle and that,

still it smells a bigger, a blacker truffle under the ground further off

In just  few short pages Woolf takes us deeply into the mind of the jeweler in this very interesting (leaving aside what else it might be) story.    I saw a few posts on this story indicating some people greatly dislike it for what seems to be its anti-Semitic  tone.   Of course that does not affect the literary merit of the story.     

This story can be read  online here

Mel u

"An Unwritten Novel" by Virginia Woolf

"An Unwritten Novel" by Virginia Woolf (1921, 8 pages)

The Virginia Woolf Reading Life Project

"An Unwritten Novel" appeared in Monday or Tuesday, the only collection of short stories by Virginia Woolf (1882 to 1941-UK) published in  her life time.   In 1944 her husband Leonard Woolf republished it in a larger collection of her short stories, The Haunted House and other Stories.

Have you ever seen a stranger on a train, bus or plane and wondered what their life was like?   Have you ever tried to read the interior life of  someone you do not know and never will from their face?     That is what "An Unwritten Novel" is about.    The narrator is on a bus or train and she begins to look at the faces of five  fellow travelers:

Five faces opposite — five mature faces — and the knowledge in each face. Strange, though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third checks entries in a pocket book; a fourth stares at the map of the line framed opposite; and the fifth — the terrible thing about the fifth is that she does nothing at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game — do, for all our sakes, conceal it!

One problem I have on posting in Virginia Woolf is the feeling that restating the story can only take away from the beauty and artistry of the work.  The tendency is to over quote.    One by one the elderly passengers get of the train until only the fifth passenger remains.    The narrator without really speaking to her begins to project an entire life onto her.   The  train reaches the woman's stop and she is met by her adult son.   At first the narrator is shocked at this does not match at all the details of the life she has constructed for the the woman in her unfinished novel of her life.

I will remember this line a long time:   "But she had communicated, shared her secret, passed her poison she would speak no more".


I have decided  in my beginning readings of Woolf just to let the prose roll over me, what I understand, I understand.    

Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me — adorable world!    

 

Mel u

"Monday or Tuesday" by Virginia Woolf

"Monday or Tuesday" by Virginia Woolf-1921- 3 pages-

The Reading Life Virginia Woolf Project

"Monday or Tuesday" is not a traditional  short story at all.    It in fact is not clearly even a story and might be better called a prose poem or word collage.    The work begins with a heron flying over a church.   We see the country side from the point of view of the soaring heron.   In the second paragraph we descend to the  world of the streets of London:

Desiring truth, awaiting it, laboriously distilling a few words, for ever desiring —(a cry starts to the left, another to the right. Wheels strike divergently. Omnibuses conglomerate in conflict)— for ever desiring —(the clock asseverates with twelve distinct strokes that it is midday; light sheds gold scales; children swarm)— for ever desiring truth. Red is the dome; coins hang on the trees; smoke trails from the chimneys; bark, shout, cry “Iron for sale”— and truth?

There is a lot to ponder here in these marvelous images.    First I am pushed to wonder who or what is "desiring truth"?   Why do coins hang from the tree?   Is "Monday or Tuesday" sort of a prose version of  William Blake's "London"?    There is also the contrast of natural images in movement like the flying heron and the loud jarring sounds of the omnibuses as they travel about London.   Trees do not have leaves or flowers but coins.   I wondered if there is a play on the two meanings of "omnibus" (below is from Google Dictionary lookup

omnibuses plural

1. A volume containing several novels or other items previously published separately
   
   • an omnibus of her first trilogy
2. A bus

Both meanings fit the context.    

Maybe "Monday or Tuesday" does not need to be given an overly left brain reading.    The images are beautiful and I suspect with the proper speaker it would be a wonderful listen.   Maybe Woolf was just having some fun.

I read this in the collection A Haunted House and Other Stories as edited and republished by Leonard Woolf in 1941 from the 1921 original.     It was the only collection of short stories published during Virginia Woolf's life.  

Mel u