It’s Easter. And I read Virginia Woolf. So this morning a question occurred to me, “What did Virginia Woolf think about Easter?” I turned to Jane de Gay to find out.
Revd Professor Jane de Gay is professor of English literature at Leeds Trinity University and an Anglican priest serving a predominantly Caribbean congregation at St. Martin’s Potternewton, Leeds.
The Woolf scholar and author of the book, Virginia Woolf and Christian Culture (Edinburgh UP, June 2018), wrote a series of posts about Woolf and Holy Week in 2019, the year after her book came out.
Her final one, titled “Easter Sunday,” included this quote from Woolf on Easter Sunday in 1937:
Again I take my tiny little flutter, with the accursed Xtian bells ringing – however, dulled as they are with 500 years or more at Rodmell I cant seriously dislike them. (Diary 5, 72)
Other speakers include Maggie Humm, Claire Davison, Mark Hussey and Jane Goldman.
The conference is being organized by Floriane Reviron-Piégay and Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio and sponsored by the ECLLA unit (Contemporary Studies in Literature, Languages, Arts at Jean Monnet University), with the support of SEW and CORPUS (Picardy University – Jules Verne)
Eighty-two years ago today, Virginia Woolf walked into the River Ouse with a stone in her pocket and drowned. The act was deliberate. The effect on her friends, her family, and the literary world was profound.
Virginia’s attitude to death was very different. It was always present to her. The fact that she had twice tried to commit suicide — and had almost succeeded — and the knowledge that that terrible desperation of depression might at any moment overwhelm her mind again meant that death was never far from her thoughts. She feared it and yet, as I said, she was ‘half in love with easeful Death’ (74).
Leonard went on to write that on Friday, March 28, he “was in the garden” and “thought she [Virginia] was in the house. But when at one o’clock I went in to lunch, she was not there. I found the following letter on the sitting-room mantelpiece”:
Dearest,
I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been (93).
He went in search of her.
When I could not find her anywhere in the house or garden, I felt sure that she had gone down to the river. I ran across the fields down to the river and almost immediately found her walking-stick lying upon the bank. I searched for some time and then went back to the house and informed the police. It was three weeks before her body was found when some children saw it floating in the river (94-95).
The “long-drawn-out horror” of those three weeks produced in him “a kind of inert anaesthesia. It was as if I had been so battered and beaten that I was like some hunted animal which exhausted can only instinctively drag itself into its hole or lair” (95-96).
Save Friday, April 28, at 3 p.m. ET for the Woolf Salon Project No. 24: On Wonder.
Organizers from the International Virginia Woolf Society say, “Grab your favorite unicorn horn, your box of grubs, your strange silks and seabeasts, your astrolabe and ambergris, your magic glasses full of emerald light and blue mystery as we join guest hosts Angela Harris and Eret Talviste for a discussion of two Woolf essays, “The Elizabethan Lumber Room” (1925) and “Sir Thomas Browne” (1923).”
Where to find the readings
“The Elizabethan Lumber Room” appears in the First Common Reader and is available online.You can also find it in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4: 1925-1928, pp. 53–61.
“Sir Thomas Browne”—originally published in the Times Literary Supplement —appears in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919-1924, on pp. 368–72. It is also available via Dropbox.
Check your time zone
Time Zone conversions:
12 p.m. PT (Los Angeles)
3 p.m. ET (New York)
4 p.m. Brasilia
8 p.m. BST (London)
9 p.m. CEST (Paris)
5 a.m. AEST Saturday 4/29 (Sydney)
Salons typically run about two hours, and the event will be recorded for later viewing for members of the International Virginia Woolf Society.
How to join
Anyone can join the group, which usually meets on one Friday of each month via Zoom and focuses on a single topic or text. Just contact woolfsalonproject@gmail.com to sign up for the email list and receive the Zoom link.
The Salon Conspirators — Benjamin Hagen, Shilo McGiff, Amy Smith, and Drew Shannon — began the Woolf Salon Project in July 2020 to provide opportunities for conversation and conviviality among Woolf-interested scholars, students, and common readers during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
This June, Granta Books will publish new ‘unepurgated’ editions of Virginia Woolf’s complete diaries, each introduced by a noted contemporary writer.
The five volumes of Woolf’s Diary edited by Anne Olivier Bell, along with A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals 1897-1909, edited by Mitchell E. Leaska
They are based on Anne Olivier Bell’s 1977–84 editions. But since Olivier Bell promises in her “Editor’s Preface” to The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. II: 1920-1924 that “nothing has been omitted” from the edition she edited (ix), I have to wonder what makes the Granta Books editions “unexpurgated.”
What are these new editions including that the previous editions did not? I guess we will have to wait until June to find out.
The volumes and their forewords
The volume divisions of the new editions remain the same. However, each volume will contain a foreword by a different writer.
Vol. 1: 1915–19: Virginia Nicholson
Vol. 2: 1920–4: Adam Phillips
Vol. 3: 1925–30: Olivia Laing
Vol. 4: 1931–5: Margo Jefferson
Vol. 5: 1936–41: Siri Hustvedt
Each of the five new hardbacks features a modern black and white photograph on the cover and will be priced at £30.
The back story of the diaries
Olivier Bell, wife of Woolf’s nephew Quentin Bell, gave an account of her work editing Virginia’s diaries in the Bloomsbury Workshop publication, Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary (1990).
In that volume and in the “Editor’s Preface” to The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. I: 1915-1919, she shares the fact that before Quentin started researching his biography of Virginia, Leonard Woolf had Virginia’s 30 volumes of diaries and journals, which were written between 1915 and 1941, transcribed and typed up by Kathleen Williams (D1 viii).
However, because Leonard had used scissors to cut out the sections that he included in A Writer’s Diary (1954), Olivier Bell had to type up the missing sections and piece the transcripts back together (Editing, p. 10) for use in establishing a note card chronology for Quentin’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972).
After Leonard’s death and the settling of his estate, Virginia’s diaries were taken from the Westminster Bank in Lewes in 1970 and sent to the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, where they now remain.
More than four-fifths of her diary entries had not been included in A Writer’s Diary. Thus, “an unabridged publication of the complete series of diaries was decided upon” and Olivier Bell would edit them (Editing 16). She was a natural because, she argues, after helping Quentin with his biographical research and marrying into the family, she was already familiar with the material — all 2,317 pages worth — along with many of the characters, the country, the houses, and more.
The project became “too much to accomplish single-handed,” so she enlisted the help of Andrew McNeillie of Oxford to help her. Some of the editing work involved detection — ferreting out Woolf’s vague references to to such things as “this old manor house” at Hounslow or “Miss Arnold who used to lie drunk” (Editing 18-19).
Near the end of her account in Editing Virginia Woolf’s Diary, Olivier Bell writes:
After some twenty years working with her diaries I still find them wonderfully enjoyable — brilliant, funny, informative, moving, a record of her life and observations set down with unsurpassed felicity of language by a woman of extraordinary intelligence, courage, humour and imagination: in short, a genius (23).
More on the new editions
For further information on the new editions of Woolf’s diaries, see pages 26–7 of Granta’s online catalogue:
