Blogging Woolf

Today is the first day of spring as well as the day that the solar eclipse will be visible in the UK and Scandinavia. Here’s what Virginia Woolf had to say about both.

Virginia Woolf on spring:

I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now. One does, I think, as one gets older. — Jacob’s Room

Virginia Woolf on the solar eclipse in 1927, which she traveled to Yorkshire to view:

very very quickly, all the colours faded; it became darker and darker as at the beginning of a violent storm; the light sank and sank; suddenly the light went out. There was no colour. The earth was dead.

The partial eclipse in the UK today will see 85 percent of the sun blocked out in southern England and 98 percent in the Hebrides.

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.