Word: woolfe
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...morning last month British Novelist Virginia Woolf sat down at her desk as usual, but instead of revising her new novel, she wrote a note to her sister saying: "Farewell to the world." She also wrote a note to her husband, Leonard Woolf, editor of London's Political Quarterly. Then she took a walking stick and went for her favorite walk across the rolling Sussex Downs to the River Ouse. What Virginia Woolf did, what passed in her stream of consciousness beside the water no one else knew. But when her husband, following her footprints across the fields, rushed...
...family was inclined to think that Virginia Woolf was a suicide. They did not agree that her suicide had been brought on by the war. The Woolfs have spent most of World War II in an isolated cottage, Monk's House, near the village of Rodmell, Sussex. There was plenty of action, with airplanes frequently roaring overhead, dropping incendiaries. Virginia helped to give first aid. When a bomb demolished her London home, destroying valuable murals by Duncan Grant and her sister, Vanessa Bell (wife of Art Critic Clive Bell), she observed: "Every beautiful thing will soon be destroyed...
More unsettling than the war, her family thought, had been her literary worries. Three weeks ago Virginia Woolf finished a short novel, Between The Acts, written while she was working on her biography of Roger Fry. Husband Woolf was enthusiastic about the new book. His partner in the Hogarth Press, John Lehmann, called Between The Acts "a work of remarkable poetic power, in which her sensibility is even more naked and delicate." But Virginia felt that the end of her book was not good, the whole work was not up to the exacting Woolf standard...
Perhaps, as she stood beside the Ouse, Virginia Woolf repeated those lines to herself as Clarissa Dalloway had done. Perhaps, in the midst of World War II, she had come to feel as Clarissa Dalloway did after World War I: "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." Perhaps, as World War II and the war's changes closed over her, Virginia Woolf came to feel at last like war-shocked Septimus Smith, whose suicide she had described in Mrs. Dalloway: "Human nature, in short...
Since then Woolf has done more than 300 such interviews. Mussolini, who grieved to him that dictatorship interfered with violin practice, put on a full-dress show to illustrate how he terrified his aides, and winked broadly at Woolf as the last one left. Said Coolidge-a Woolf favorite-"I am afraid I am hard to draw. I think I would be a much better model if I raised whiskers like one of the Smith Brothers...