Word: woolfe
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...England and America women poets have often fared poorly. Bemoaning the inequalities that have dogged their sex, Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One's Own, "When one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet or some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor crazed with the torture that her gift...
...Father to Mahatma Gandhi and Frank Sinatra-all represented by china penises, propped up by quantities of Laurentian burblings about roots, darkness and the archetypal perceptions of the blood. Who, today, would take such an effusion seriously, and what museum would bother with it? To represent Virginia Woolf as a clump of pottery labia majora is on a par with symbolizing Mozart as a phallus. It mashes the complex truths of a great artist's life and work into one obsessive stereotype-all in the name of "history...
Modern letters are hasty and utilitarian, usually meant for one pair of eyes only. But by that token the best of them, like Woolf's, are also vibrant with immediacy, intimacy and often indiscretion ("Why," she asks, "is it so pleasant to damn one's friends?"). With her aristocratic sense of decorum she may have felt that their very privacy was what made them unpublishable. If so, she failed to reckon on this age's voracious, ransacking appetite for all that is private in a writer's life. As significant as her novels...
...Woolf scribbled as fluently as she talked, and almost as fast. Letter writing for her was a compulsion, a sport and an antidote to solitude, but it was also a matter of principle. It was a way of cherishing friendships, with all the sacred personal values that friendships implied in Bloomsbury. "Life would split asunder without letters," she maintained in Jacob 's Room. Her massive correspondence shows her weaving a variegated web to hold it together. She pours out affection and admiration to her sister, Vanessa Bell, whom she wonderfully characterizes as a mixture of pagan goddess and Moll...
...element is conspicuously missing, it is a strong masculine presence for her sensibility to play off against. The most important man in her life is rarely addressed because he is so constantly with her: her husband, Leonard Woolf. Yet there are glimpses of her devotion to and dependence on him, as when she mentions the "immortal rhythm" of their quiet times together in Sussex. This final volume closes with the simple, moving note she left him when, at 59, fearing the loss of her artistic gift and sensing the onset of another bout of madness, she decided to drown herself...