And next week, The Center for Fiction will welcome Seshagiri for a conversation with Woolf scholar Anne Fernald on the book, which is considered Woolf’s first work of experimental fiction.
The talk is available in person or as a livestream on Thursday, Oct. 16 at 7 p.m. EDT.
If you live in or near New York City, you may want to head over to 115 Lafayette St. in Brooklyn to attend in person at a cost of $10. If not, register for the livestream; it’s just $5.
I don’t always watch the evening news, but when I do, I watch PBS Newshour. I watched yesterday, and I am glad I did. Why? Because they included a feature on The Life of Violet, edited by Urmila Seshagiri, which I wrote about Tuesday.
The segment is part of their art and culture series, Canvas, and includes an interview with Seshagiri. It also takes us to Longleat House in Wiltshire, England, where Seshagiri discovered the typescript in the archives.
The good news is that you, too, can watch the segment about this newly discovered collection of three short stories by Virginia Woolf when she was just 25 years old. It is available online.
The Life of Violet, edited by Urmila Seshagiri and just out today from Princeton University Press, is the newly discovered revised typescript of three early short stories by Virginia Woolf based on the life of her friend and mentor Violet Dickinson.
Witty, whimsical, lighthearted, and just plain fun, the book is an important discovery that I hope helps dispel the myth that Virginia Woolf was a sad, humorless writer beset by depression and suicidal thoughts.
It should be no surprise that Woolf’s humor is often overlooked. That is often the case, and something Woolf recognized in her 1905 essay, “The Value of Laughter,” which was originally published in The Guardian.
Humour, we have been told, is denied to women. They may be tragic, or comic, but the particular blend which makes a humorist is to be found only in men.
Its history
Woolf drafted the three comic stories that make up The Life of Violet in 1907, at the age of 25. Before leaving to spend several weeks in Playden, Sussex, just north of Rye, she sent Dickinson the draft she had “very hastily polished off” (A Passionate Apprentice, 367).
That version, typed in violet ink and titled “Friendships Gallery,” is housed today in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. Until lately, it was considered the only version in existence.
But in 2022, Seshagiri discovered a professionally typed revision—with corrections Woolf made by hand in 1908—at Longleat House in Wiltshire, England, after learning about its existence via email several years earlier. It had sat in the Longleat House archives for 80 years, after disappearing into the collection of Dickinson’s papers.
About the book
The Life of Violet is a three-part mock biography of Mary Violet Dickinson (1865-1948). It uses three whimsical, comic, interrelated stories—”Friendships Gallery,” “The Magic Garden,” and “A Story to Make You Sleep” to relate Dickinson’s fanciful life as a giantess (the real Violet was six feet two) who defies the societal norms of English life.
She has a full social life without marrying and inspires others to “have a fire” of creativity within them (12). She lives in a cottage of her own that “was the beginning of the great revolution which is making England a very different place from what it was” (24). And she becomes a giant sacred heroic princess, who brings “[a]ll the most delightful things you can think of” (35) to a Japanese village, which she saves from monsters by laughing and waving her umbrella.
Foreshadowing
The Life of Violet also foreshadows literary things to come from Woolf. As a mock biography, it is a harbinger of Orlando (1928). With its focus on Violet’s cottage of her own in “The Magic Garden,” we see the original stirrings of ideas leading to A Room of One’s Own (1929). But most of all, its overall use of language, its wit, its whimsey, and its feminist thought, both sound and feel like Woolf.
A quote from Anne Fernald, editor of Mrs. Dalloway: A Norton Critical Edition, speaks to The Life of Violet’s thematic importance:
The stories are lighthearted, but in them we see how, as early as 1907, Woolf was concerned with the major themes of her career: the need for a room of one’s own, the value of an ordinary woman’s life, and the imperative to remake the way fiction is written.
In this new volume, Seshagiri stays true to Woolf. She incorporates Woolf’s handwritten edits, which incorporates edits suggested by Dickinson. And she reproduces the page layout, language, spacing, and spelling of Woolf’s revised transcript.
The extras
By including detailed “Explanatory Notes,” she also makes it easy for readers who may not be familiar with Woolf or the social and historical context of her time.
The volume also includes a preface, an afterword that provides a detailed explanation of the history of these early short stories, as well as photographs.
Those moments — in the nursery, on the road to the beach — can still be more real than the present moment. – Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” p. 67.
The second edition of Moments of Being (1985) consists of five pieces that make up Virginia Woolf’s only autobiographical writing, with the exception of her diaries and letters. This edition is now available online as a PDF that is searchable using the “Find” option under your browser’s “Edit” tab.
This edition incorporates 27 pages of a 77-page typescript version of “A Sketch of the Past” acquired by the British Library in the early 1980s. This addition of entirely new material includes Woolf’s description of her father, Leslie Stephen, and the ambivalence of her relationship to him as a result of her reading of Freud.
In addition, a number of passages, such as Woolf’s reflections on her methods of writing and on the nature of consciousness, are expanded and clarified, the Preface to the second edition notes (193).
The second addition includes an introduction by Hermione Lee, along with these five essays:
“Reminiscences,” begun in 1907
“A Sketch of the Past,” begun in 1939 and completed in 1940
Three Memoir Club contributions, papers delivered between 1920 and 1936:
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, p. 76
Yesterday, after weeks of drought in Northeast Ohio, the skies clouded over and the rain came down as both a drizzle and a downpour, continuing all afternoon and into the evening. At last!
Although I considered staying cozy and dry at home, I had a meeting to attend. So I grabbed my raincoat, started my car, flipped on my wipers, and drove along streets shining wet with our much-needed rain.
When I arrived, I would find food. I would find wine. But more importantly, I would find a gathering of mostly women doing their best to resist the tyranny under which we are all living at this terrible time in the history of the United States of America.
Not in my lifetime
I have not been around forever, but I can say that we are living in a time like none I have experienced before.
Not during my childhood, when some whites and many Blacks of all ages lay their lives on the line to demand civil rights. Not during my college years, when students faced teargas (and in the case of Kent State University on May 4, 1970—bullets) to protest the Vietnam War and women of all ages marched for equal rights.
So it is no surprise that I—and many others—feel anxious. And afraid. And disillusioned, depressed, and angry. But many of us also feel resolute, determined, and strong. Because we are committed to the belief that wecan take our country back if we keep our minds free, keep the truth safe, and work together to take action.
Woolf’s words apply today
At this moment I find that Virginia Woolf’s words quoted above speak to me more than ever. They soothe my soul and give me hope that despite everything the felon’s regime is doing to destroy our freedoms, we will always have the freedom of our minds. That is the one thing that no one—not even autocrats—can control.
But here is how they persist in trying.
Libraries — and their books — under threat
Libraries are not locked yet, but they are under threat. Federal grant funding has been eliminated, and book bans are widespread.
School is back in session, but public schools, which Thomas Jefferson and John Adams believed were necessary for an educated populace and a successful democracy, are losing funding to unregulated charter and private schools through voucher programs pushed by the right.
In addition, our felon in chief has made it legal for individuals to donate up to $1,700 to an organization that supports private schools and take a 100 percent tax credit for their donation.
Our federal Department of Education is being dismantled. And diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have been banned across the board.
At the state level, Texas has mandated that some time each day be allotted to prayer and Bible study. Ohio has passed a law that requires schools to give students “release time” to attend religious instruction during school hours. And according to a Pew Research Report, “Just over half of U.S. adults (52%) say they favor allowing public school teachers to lead their classes in prayers that refer to Jesus.”
Colleges and universities are still open, although the felon’s administration has withheld or threatened to withhold billions of research dollars from Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton and the University of California, Los Angeles until they succumb to his demands.
Professors are still teaching, although they are being closely watched, with at least 60 of them suffering recent retaliation due to comments they made on social media regarding Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Campus women’s centers and LGBTQ+ centers closed before fall semester. And ethnic studies programs are either dead or under threat.
Media censored
The media—public broadcasting, legacy media, and the major television networks—are still functioning, although in the case of for-profit media, their hands are increasingly tied and their mouths shut so their business mergers will receive government approval.
The felon’s toadies in Congress cut $1.1 billion of funding for NPR and PBS this year. The felon himself filed lawsuits against the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, CBS News (Paramount), and ABC News for simply reporting news he did not like.
And two of the main comedic truth tellers of our time—late night TV hosts Stephen Colbert (CBS) and Jimmy Kimmel (ABC)—have either had their show’s tenure cut short or suspended because they dared to criticize the felon in the White House.
Woolf’s eternal relevance
Today, in the face of this rising tide of autocratic populism, Woolf is more relevant than ever. Her methods of thinking, reading, and writing—as both critic and creator—remain effective fighting tools for us today and into the future.
Like her, we must value and preserve the freedom of our minds, so we can wage a smart fight against those who would take away our freedoms. As Woolf wrote in her diary during World War II:
“This idea struck me: the army is the body: I am the brain. Thinking is my fighting” (D5 285).
And so we must do as Woolf advised in Three Guineas (1938):
Think we must. Let us think in offices; in omnibuses; while we are standing in the crowd watching Coronations and Lord Mayor’s Shows; let us think as we pass the Cenotaph; and in Whitehall; in the gallery of the House of Commons; in the Law Courts; let us think at baptisms and marriages and funerals. Let us never cease from thinking – what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? (62-3)
We must use our thinking to resist the horrors we confront in the news each day, as Woolf did in the face of even graver threats. For ignorance is the handmaiden of tyranny—and we will never become handmaids.
