Blogging Woolf

In the closing lines of Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Virginia Woolf wrote these lines for Peter Walsh: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was.”

A variation on that theme popped into my head last Saturday when I attended a party at Pure Intentions, an organic wheat grass grower in Akron, Ohio. As I opened the door into the building, the first thing I saw was Woolf.

“Oh, it’s Virginia,” I said aloud, for on the wall facing the doorway was a large, unique and haunting portrait of Woolf with eyes that followed me wherever I went.

What made the heavy framed portrait even more mesmerizing was the fact that her features, facial contours, hair and clothing were all formed from the text of A Room of One’s Own (1929).

The portrait’s appropriate title, A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf, suggested so many weighty layers of meaning that my own head felt filled with a tumbling jumble of words and their various meanings.

Kathy Evans, owner and operator of the wheat grass business and its School of Energy, said someone gave her the portrait. She explained that she hung it above an overstuffed chair so that Woolf could look down on the intelligent folks who settled in for a good read.

I wished I had asked more questions about the Woolf portrait, but I thought I would be able to Google it and find one for myself. So far, no luck.

Perhaps I will have to go back to Pure Intentions for another look and more questions. For I just can’t get the Woolf face made of words out of my head.