Susan Hill had a mountain of books inside her Gloucestershire farmhouse that she had never made time to read. So she spent a year reading nothing but the unread books that filled her shelves.
The result is Howards End Is On the Landing: A Year of Reading From Home, published in August by Profile Books. Included in the book is a list of 40 titles that “I think I could manage with alone, for the rest of my life,” Hill said.
Among them is one by Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse.
Hill said she chose Lighthouse rather than The Waves, because the latter “always reminds me of the sort of highbrow radio play they used to broadcast on Radio 3.”
A review of Hill’s book in The Guardian calls the book “a mind-map of a novelist in her late 60s who has spent her life reading and writing books.”
If you live in the Bay Area, you can go to Mrs. Dalloway’s party. It’s an evening of short stories written by Virginia Woolf and performed by an ensemble of actors at St. Mary’s College of California.
According to the school’s Web site, “Wry observations and elegant prose come to life onstage through some of Woolf’s most amusing characters-ordinary women and men whose anxious thoughts and social predicaments make this party a night to remember.”
The production is directed by guest artist Delia MacDougall, a founding member of Word for Word Performing Arts Company in San Francisco.
James Joyce detailed Leopold Bloom’s day in Dublin. Virginia Woolf followed Clarissa Dalloway through London on a fine day in June. Ian McEwan told Henry Perowne’s tale on a post-Sept. 11 Saturday in February. And Christopher Isherwood described one day in the life of an ageing professor named George in his 1964 novel A Single Man.
That novel has now been made into a film produced and directed by Tom Ford, who also co-authored the screenplay. And when I read his comments about the impact A Single Man had on him, I saw another similarity to Mrs. Dalloway.
Ford said he first read Isherwood’s novel when he was in his twenties, and the book stuck with him. But it wasn’t until he read it again years later, when he was in his late forties, that he says he found “the book resonated with me in an entirely different way.” Ford called it “a deeply spiritual story.”
That’s how I felt about Mrs. Dalloway. I was 20 when I first read it and was duly impressed by Woolf’s thinking and her magical way with words. But I didn’t really get Clarissa Dalloway.
When I reread the novel 20 years later, I did. After marriage and children and the winding ways of life, I could understand much more about Clarissa.
But not everything. Each time I reread the novel, I get to know her better.
That’s why I think these instructions should be on each of Woolf’s novels: Read. Think. Repeat.
Many people consider mystery novels the perfect escape. Whether you dip into the genre regularly or infrequently, Woolfians may find it hard to resist a literary “whodunit” with Virginia Woolf at its center.
Stephanie Barron preceded this novel with a series of Jane Austen mysteries; she professes to enjoy making things up about real people, knowing they might not approve of her embellishments on their lives.
The White Garden revolves around the discovery of a new diary, believed to be in Woolf’s hand, but started the day after she was supposed to have drowned herself in the River Ouse. Intending to commit suicide that day, she goes instead to Sissinghurst, where she is comforted and cared for by Vita Sackville-West.
And there’s more, much more, including Woolf’s discovery of some nefarious wartime activities involving Maynard Keynes and others in the Bloomsbury circle, but it’s all too convoluted, and I wouldn’t want to give anything away.
And of course there’s the contemporary angle. The diary is found by an American garden designer, who is at Sissinghurst in order to duplicate the White Garden for her wealthy New York employer, while at the same time trying to uncover a hidden secret in her own family. A number of people become involved in the intrigue and with each other, including the Head Gardener at Sissinghurst, manuscript specialists at Sotheby’s, and a Woolf scholar at Oxford.
Barron reminds her readers that this is fiction, hoping that they will enjoy exploring the possibilities and forgive the license that she takes. There’s plenty of that, from the bald facts of Woolf’s death and the implausibility of the plot to some manipulation of the topography, so one has to suspend disbelief and just go with it. And in the process, you can soak up the atmosphere of Sissinghurst, Monks House and Charleston Farmhouse along with Oxford and Cambridge. You could do worse!
A one-woman show about Virginia Woolf is on the St. Mane Theatre stage in Lanesboro, Minn., starting Saturday.
Kristen Underwood developed her play, “Women and Fiction: Virginia Woolf Speaks,” in the early 1990s. It is based on Woolf’s 1928 lecture to women undergraduates later adapted into the influential A Room of One’s Own.
Read more about the play. For reservations, call 507-467-2446.
To find out more about stage productions based on Woolf’s work or life, go here.
