Virginia Woolf in 90 Minutes

by Paul Strathern Narrated by Simon Vance

Overview

A highly sensitive and intelligent child, Virginia Woolf grew up in a large family prone to psychological instability. Throughout her life, she was subject to periods of mental breakdown, yet when she was lucid she was capable of a uniquely perceptive and frank introspection.

Under the influence of the Bloomsbury Group and their progressive social attitudes, she became experimental in her life and art, breaking with convention to produce some of the finest and most unique literary works of the twentieth century.

Virginia Woolf in 90 Minutes offers a concise, expert account of Woolf's life and ideas and explains their influence on literature and on man's struggle to understand his place in the world. The book also includes a list of Woolf's chief works, a chronology of her life and times, and recommended reading for those who wish to delve deeper.

A Blackstone Audio production.

Editorial Reviews

Library Bookwatch

"Perfect for both general interest and high school collections."

Boston Globe

Witty and dramatic…I cannot think of a better way to introduce oneself and one's friends to Western civilization.

New York Times

Promise[s] to get readers up to speed…in 100 pages or so with no dumbing down.

The Tennessean - Brian J. Buchanan

These books are not mere outlines for dummies. They're lucid narratives.

Kliatt

Strathern manages to convey essential information and astute analysis in readable prose.

The Tennessean

These books are not mere outlines for dummies. They're lucid narratives.
— Brian J. Buchanan

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169551167
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	01/27/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Virginia Woolf IN 90 MINUTES

By Paul Strathern IVAN R. DEE
Copyright © 2005
Paul Strathern
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-56663-651-3


Chapter One Virginia Woolf's Life and Works

Virginia Woolf was born Virginia Stephen in London on January 25, 1882. A sensitive child, she grew up in a large house in upper-class Kensington, surrounded by a numerous but disparate family and servants. Her father, Leslie Stephen, had been editor of the prestigious Cornhill Magazine, where he had been responsible for serializing novels by the likes of Henry James and Thomas Hardy. Throughout Virginia's childhood he was engaged in the mammoth task of compiling the Dictionary of National Biography, the classic reference work. This entailed hiring more than 650 contributors to write entries filling 26 volumes (which eventually included more than 350 entries by himself). Overwork was exacerbated by an inherent tendency to neurotic instability. This meant that the family house was permeated by emotional tension which flared into occasional scenes between Leslie Stephen and his long-suffering wife Julia, a woman of beauty and artistic sensibility.

The household also included two older half-brothers, Gerald and George, and a half-sister, the children of Julia's earlier marriage, as well as Laura, a daughter from Leslie's earlier marriage. As Laura grew up it would become apparent that she was mentally defective. The boys, Gerald and George Duckworth, were on the other handself-confident, intelligent, and philistine in the conventional British manner. Besides these half-siblings, Virginia also grew up with two brothers and two sisters, three of whom were older than she. Three of these would also exhibit symptoms of mild manic-depressive instability. With such a family, the mother had little time for lavishing emotion upon any particular individual.

Virginia was not sent to school and was largely educated by her father, presumably when he could find the time. His professed belief in a rational approach to life was accompanied by a no-nonsense dislike of religion which was unusual during the high Victorian era of bourgeois respectability. Virginia explored widely in her father's library, and he would question her searchingly on whatever books she had read. According to Virginia, he advised her "to write in the fewest possible words, as clearly as possible, exactly what one meant-that was his only lesson in the art of writing." Her "lessons" from her father consisted of perceptive questioning about the books she had read, and encouragement to express the truth about what they had meant to her. Although she would later say that her father gave her "a twist of the head," adding that "I shouldn't have been so clever but I would have been more stable without it." And she was clever. Alone in her room she soon progressed beyond Shakespeare and the translation of ancient Greek, reading widely in history, literature, and philosophy. By the age of fifteen she was reading Carlyle and attempting to learn German.

But this childhood also had its more normal side. There were daily walks in nearby Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park. Through the summer the family lived in their house by the seaside at St. Ives in remote Cornwall, with the children all learning to swim and playing for hours among the rock pools on the beach. From an early age, all the siblings grew used to entertaining one another with communal bedtime stories. It soon became clear that Virginia's were the most enthralling and amusing, and in no time she was telling a new story every night. From the age of seven she began writing these stories down in a family "newspaper," The Hyde Park Garden News, which reported all manner of family happenings and gossip. In later life Virginia would recall how even at this age she felt a "concern for the art of writing" which she had "been absorbing ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story." She was constantly aware that the family newspaper was perused by the professional eye of her father. As Virginia's older sister Vanessa later noted, "I cannot remember a time when Virginia did not mean to be a writer."

Despite growing up amidst such a numerous and close family, Virginia grew into a complex and hypersensitive child. This was at least partly a result of a number of traumatic formative experiences. When she was around seven, her eighteen-year-old half-brother Gerald lifted her onto a ledge where the dishes were placed outside the dining room:

... and as I sat there began to explore my body. I can remember the feel of his hand going under my clothes; going firmly and steadily lower and lower. I remember how I hoped that he would stop; how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But it did not stop. His hand explored my private parts too. I remember resenting, disliking it-what is the word for so dumb and mixed a feeling? It must have been strong since I still recall it.

The event served to enforce a sense of shame about her own body, most notably with regard to mirrors. Outside the dining room was a mirror, which seems to have become associated in her mind with Gerald's exploration. Years later she would recall how she felt a sense of shame when anyone caught her looking at herself in the mirror. In her own words, "I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body." Despite her psychological sensitivity, Virginia was always able to look back and examine her feelings with frankness.

At the age of thirteen she underwent another formative experience. In May 1895 her mother died, giving rise to profound contradictory feelings in Virginia. She seems to have got it into her head that her beloved mother somehow continued to exist as a phantom in the house. She was a loving presence, yet at other times had to be killed or she would kill Virginia. According to the family, Virginia was "mad" throughout the ensuing summer. Although she recovered, she no longer felt the sense of loving certainty that her family had once engendered.

She now began turning to a number of older women friends of the family as a focus for her emotions. Most notable of these was Violet Dickinson, an unmarried intelligent woman who was over six feet tall, plain, and in the habit of behaving in a manly fashion-on occasion greeting people with a hearty slap on the back. Virginia began writing letters to Violet, pouring out her feelings of social gaucheness and her anguished reactions to her father. But these letters were more than the usual outpouring of intense teenage woes to a sympathetic auntie figure. Her letters reveal a surprisingly self-aware young woman, expressing her friendship in open and humorous fashion. She invented for Violet an imaginary husband, and teased her about her so-called respectability. This she contrasted to her own irreligiousness, her frequent ridiculous social mishaps (such as her knickers falling down in public), and her expectation that she would end up having lots of illegitimate children.

Her friendship with Violet Dickinson, which sometimes prompted Virginia to write her as many as three letters a week, in part replaced her former closeness to her family-even her relationship to her favorite sister Vanessa developed scratchy, competitive overtones. But it was her relationship to her father that soon became the most difficult. It seems that he intended Virginia to become his literary heir and take over the editing of the Dictionary of National Biography. With this in mind he had guided her education toward biography and history. Despite her evident intellectual brilliance, he refused to let her attend university-while at the same time sending all his sons to Cambridge. As a result, Virginia became filled with resentment toward her father, though much of this appears to have remained repressed.

Then Leslie Stephen became increasingly ill, and as he did so he became more demanding, especially of Virginia. Even when she was younger, her mother had insisted that she accompany her father on his daily walks in the park (mainly to ensure that she herself did not have to fulfill this role). So when Leslie Stephen took to his bed with what had been diagnosed as fatal bowel cancer, the twenty-one-year-old Virginia was the one expected to nurse him. As her father lingered on, her compassion for him was undermined by her surfacing feelings of resentment. Her letters to Violet Dickinson became almost violently emotional: "The waiting is intolerable.... I shall do my best to ruin my constitution before I get to this stage, so as to die quicker."

Leslie Stephen finally died in February 1904, and soon after this Virginia had another serious mental breakdown. According to her future brother-in-law and first biographer Quentin Bell (who married her sister Vanessa), Virginia "heard voices urging her to acts of folly." She persuaded herself that this was due to overeating and began to starve herself. Eventually she went to stay with Violet Dickinson at her house in Burnham Beeches, amidst woodlands outside London. Here, as she lay in bed, she was convinced that the birds in the garden outside her window were singing in ancient Greek, and that the rakish King Edward VII was lurking in the bushes uttering all manner of obscenities. Eventually she tried to commit suicide by leaping from the window, but it wasn't high enough off the ground to cause her any serious harm. According to Bell, "All that summer she was mad." It is almost certain that some time before this her other half-brother George began to behave toward her with a suggestive familiarity that may indeed have been the sexual overtures she took them to be.

Edwardian Britain was a heavily male-orientated, class-ridden society, and neither of her half-brothers appear to have found anything particularly remarkable in their behavior toward Virginia. Even she herself did not emphasize these incidents-continuing to behave in a familial fashion toward her half-brothers, mentioning these disturbing incidents only in a letter and an autobiographical memoir, both of which were composed in her last years. Indeed, in her memoir Virginia claimed that Gerald's earlier molesting had merely confirmed a dislike of sexuality that had always been present in her. All this makes it difficult to ascertain the exact psychological nexus that caused Virginia to develop in the way she did. Whatever the genuine etiology, a combination of a damaged genetic inheritance, an emotionally fraught family atmosphere, incidents of molestation, traumatic deaths, and the comfort of understanding older women seems to have left Virginia a sexually frigid young woman with platonic lesbian inclinations, prone to intermittent mental breakdown. What seems most remarkable is that in between these disturbed episodes, her exceptional intellect and her sanity survived, developing in her a lively sensibility and self-possession which is immediately apparent in her chatty letters to her confidants.

I cant express my feelings about your back. Fate is a brutal sledge hammer missing all the people she might knock on the head, and crashing into the midst of such sensitive and exquisite creatures as my Violet. I wish I could shield you with my gross corpse.... [At Cambridge we] went to a divinely beautiful service in Kings Chapel. Nothing comes up to the Church Service in these old Cathedrals; though I dont believe a word of it and never shall.

After the death of their father the younger generation of the Stephen family moved into a house at Gordon Square, across London in Bloomsbury. Here Virginia began to meet her brother Thoby's university friends who were frequent visitors during the Cambridge vacations. On Thursday evenings regular discussion groups were held, at which the intellectually minded young undergraduates would discuss such topics as the definition of good or the meaning of beauty. Virginia found all this a little too high minded for her tastes but was pleased to be among such lively company, whose members regarded a woman as someone with ideas of her own. Her half-brothers Gerald and George had always maintained a more conventional disregard of women's opinions. One of Thoby's Cambridge friends was an odd young man with a beard, named Lytton Strachey. After having tea at Gordon Square, he wrote to Thoby's Cambridge friend Leonard Woolf, describing Virginia as "rather wonderful, quite witty, full of things to say, and absolutely out of rapport with reality."

In 1906, Thoby organized a family expedition to Greece, which included his younger brother Adrian as well as Vanessa and Virginia. Violet Dickinson decided to come along as "foster mother," and the group traveled by train and steamer to Athens, venturing out into the countryside on mules to see the ruins. Greece was a backward and remote country at the time, and the trip involved a certain amount of hardship. When they arrived home, Vanessa was stricken with appendicitis, accompanied by severe depression. On top of this, Thoby and Violet Dickinson fell ill with what was diagnosed as malaria. Astonishingly, Virginia remained healthy in mind and body, nursing the sick as best she could, in the course of which she refound her closeness to her sister Vanessa. But she could only watch in horror as the doctors rediagnosed Thoby's ailment as typhoid, from which he died in just four weeks. Stricken with grief, his friend Lytton Strachey passed on the news to his friend Leonard Woolf, who was now working as a colonial administrator in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka).

Partly under the influence of Strachey and his Cambridge friend, the brilliant young economist John Maynard Keynes, the conversations at Gordon Square now began to lose their high moral tone and became much more free ranging. Strachey was open about his homosexuality and encouraged others to be frank and honest about their feelings-sexual, moral, and aesthetic. Virginia and the recovered Vanessa competed in their willingness to be open about such subjects, being particularly forthright about "copulation" and homosexuality.

Homosexuality was still very much illegal in Britain and regarded with outrage-particularly in light of the Oscar Wilde trial, which had scandalized society just a decade earlier. This was a society that managed to combine hypocrisy with sexual ignorance. Unlike male homosexuality, lesbianism was not illegal-for the simple reason that Queen Victoria, when asked to sign the bill banning homosexuality, had refused to believe that such a thing as lesbianism could even exist. The minister presenting the bill had blanched at the thought of contradicting his redoubtable queen on this difficult topic, let alone explaining the mechanisms of its practice, and as a result lesbianism was not included in the bill outlawing homosexuality.

The scandalous freedom of speech practiced by Virginia and her sister Vanessa would have been scandalous among any but the close-knit group of intellectuals who formed their social circle. Yet what the two sisters said, and what they each did, were very different matters. Vanessa soon married, and Virginia was left to fend for herself amidst this new "openness." She would later recall:

I was rather adventurous, for those days; that is we were sexually very free ... but I was always sexually cowardly.... My terror of real life always kept me in a nunnery. And much of this talking and adventuring in London alone, sitting up to all hours with young men, and saying whatever came first, was rather petty.

Virginia's openness included an honesty toward herself as well as others. And though she was afraid of sex, she soon began to realize that there was little danger to her among the guests at her Bloomsbury home. Most of Strachey's male friends were more interested in each other. Despite this, Virginia found that she enjoyed defying conventions. She felt liberated by this new attitude of disregard for the stifling upper-class British mores of the period-especially with respect to reticence. Encouraged by Strachey, she became an avid gossip. But this liberation had its more serious aspects. It encouraged her to think for herself, in ways she had never before encountered in her sheltered upbringing. She became determined to examine what she really felt.

For some time now, Virginia had been writing book reviews for various papers. It was Violet Dickinson who had encouraged her in this direction, introducing her to an editor friend. Virginia had been asked to provide an essay as an indication of her literary abilities. As she confided to Violet Dickinson:

I dont think my chances are good. I dont in the least want Mrs L's candid criticism; I want her cheque! I know all about my merits and failings better than she can from the sight of one article, but it would be a great relief to know that I could make a few pence easily in this way.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Virginia Woolf IN 90 MINUTES by Paul Strathern Copyright © 2005 by Paul Strathern. Excerpted by permission.
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<%TOC%> Contents Introduction....................7
Virginia Woolf's Life and Works....................13
Afterword....................107
Virginia Woolf's Chief Works....................113
Chronology of Virginia Woolf's Life and Times....................115
Recommended Reading....................119
Index....................122

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