Today is April 8, 2024, a much-hyped eclipse day where I live in Ohio. To view it, all I
have to do is step outside my door and put on the cardboard glasses I picked up for free at my local library.
Virginia Woolf’s total solar eclipse was June 29, 1927, and she traveled more than 300 miles to experience something that had not been visible in England for more than 200 years, pulling out her “smoked glasses” to view it (Diary 3, 143).
Carrying luggage and a china box filled with sandwiches, Virginia was one of a party that included Leonard Woolf, Vita Sackville-West, Harold Nicolson, Eddie Sackville-West, Quentin Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner and Ray (Rachel) Strachey.
By train to North Yorkshire
They boarded a special overnight train at London’s King’s Cross station that departed for Richmond in North Yorkshire at 10 p.m. on June 28. Richmond was one of the locations within the belt of totality, which would initially follow a path across North Wales and the north of England. London, on the other hand, was
Upon arrival at 3:30 a.m. the next day, they boarded an omnibus, becoming part of “a train of 3 vast cars, one stopping to let the others go on” while noticing “many motor cars . . . [that] suddenly increased as we crept up to the top of Bardon Fell” (142).
There, they noticed “people camping beside their cars,” and they joined those who had already staked out their viewing positions. Virginia noticed that “Leonard kept looking at his watch” and that they were surrounded by “[f]our great red setters” and “sheep feeding” (143).
Meanwhile, Virginia worried that due to the unpredictable weather, they would not be able to view the eclipsed sun during its 24 seconds of totality. “The moments were passing. We thought we were cheated; . . . The 24 seconds were passing” and still no blackout of the sun (143).
The above observations are included in Virginia’s two-and-a-half-page diary entry about her experience of the 24-second eclipse on June 30, 1927, which began with the sentence,
“Now I must sketch out the Eclipse” (Diary 3, 142).
The portion that describes the eclipse itself is written in prose but has the kind of poetic language and reflective tone that marks Virginia’s work. It links the exterior event with the powerful interior effect it had upon her. Her description follows:
At the back of us were great blue spaces in the cloud. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. The 24 seconds were passing. Then one looked back again at the blue: & rapidly, very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker & darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank & sank; we kept saying this is the shadow; & we thought now it is over — this is the shadow when suddenly the light went out. We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment: & the next when as if a ball had rebounded, the cloud took colour on itself again, only a spooky aetherial colour & so the light came back. I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down, & low & suddenly raised up, when the colours came. They came back astonishingly lightly & quickly & beautifully in the valley & over the hills — at first with a miraculous glittering & aetheriality, later normally almost, but with a great sense of relief. The colour for some moments was of the most lovely kind — fresh, various — here blue, & there brown: all new colours, as if washed over & repainted. It was like recovery. We had been much worse than we had expected. We had seen the world dead. That was within the power of nature…. We were bitterly cold. I should say that the cold had increased as the light went down. One felt very livid.Then — it was all over till 1999. What remained was a sense of the comfort which we get used to, of plenty of light & colour. This for some time seemed a definitely welcome thing . . . How can I express the darkness? It was a sudden plunge, when one did not expect it: being at the mercy of the sky: our own nobility: the druids; Stonehenge; & the racing red dogs; all that was in one’s mind (143-4).
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More on Woolf, astronomy, eclipse
It should not be a surprise that Virginia would travel overnight to view a total solar eclipse. She had a lifelong passion for telescopes and astronomy. Her diary and writing journals record her observations of the stars and planets.
After all, an eclipse is a special event. Only one or two eclipses per century are visible from anywhere in the UK. The last solar eclipse in the UK was in 1999. The next one will occur in August 2026.
For more on the topic of Woolf and the total solar eclipse, see The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998). In it, Jane Goldman offers a detailed study of Woolf’s eclipse accounts appearing in both her diary and in an essay titled “The Sun and the Fish” published in Time and Tide (1928). That essay is included in The Captain’s Death Bed: And Other Essays and in Essays Of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, 1925-1928 (2008).
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