Re-reading Virginia Woolf

Most of this past year has found us all living more alone than ever, and with more stress. I have turned to my usual mix of murder mystery novels and historical fiction – some more worth reading than others. I’ve tossed aside the usual number of unsatisfactory novels and read some really wonderful ones 

I also decided to re-read the novels of Virginia Woolf. I was more than a little obsessed with Virginia Woolf and her work when I was young, reading all of her novels and her diaries and letters, as well as biographies and work by and about other members of the Bloomsbury Group.

That, though, was a long time ago. I have since re-read her most popular and accessible books, To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway but not the others – until now.

I have just read The Waves again for the first time in almost 50 years. I’m not ashamed to admit that I remembered nothing of the story. But I did, once I slowed down, and read in the daytime when I was not tired, find that it is just as wonderful an experience as it was so long ago.

The novel begins with a group of six children at a summer house by the sea. It is an idyllic setting, and time in the lives of the children who are all about to go off to boarding school. We will follow them from first page to last as they become adults, and then elderly, and some to their death. We see in the boys and girls their future as men and women, the influences of their youth always part of who they are.

So satisfying is the beauty of the prose, the imagination and the imagery, the play of words, the writer and her characters always questioning. Each character is unique, but all are connected by their childhood friendship, meeting often throughout their lives. “Everything that happens for a moment to a child is a memory lasting forever”.

We know that Virginia Woolf did not live to be old, yet she could write, “They say that one must beat one’s wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines”.

Though the story includes the death of a young man known by all, but not one of the original circle, who is said to be based on the author’s beloved brother, it is the passage of time and the aging of the characters that I found most interesting. One, a writer, a storyteller muses, “I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them”. This is why we read Virginia Woolf!

Virginia Woolf was a fiercely intelligent woman, though she struggled with anxiety and depression, she left a tremendous amount of work. Her novels may be set in the past, but they are timeless – the reading absorbing, and a complete escape from all that was going on beyond my chair this past year.