It wasn’t until my junior year of college, when I took a tutorial on
her work at Oxford University, that Virginia Woolf managed to escape the
prim ranks of Women Writers to which my high school teachers had
consigned her and became instead the nexus of my reading life. My tutor,
Shane, was a sharp, wry Beckett scholar who had taught me Ulysses earlier
in the year; he refused to forgive Woolf’s snarky dismissal of Joyce—a
“queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples,” she famously called
him—but as I read my way through every one of her novels, my own
admiration for her only intensified. By the time I finished To the Lighthouse in the fourth week, I was convinced that her work held an inimitable power to move and express me.
That spring my parents visited me in England, where we embarked on a
short, Woolf-inspired road trip. Three months had passed since my
father, free of cancer for the first time in nearly a decade, had
undergone an operation to replace his bladder; at every stop, he
wandered away from the car and lit a cigarette. We went first to Knole,
the historic family estate of Vita Sackville-West that was the model for
Orlando’s own ancestral residence, and next to Charleston, the country
home of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell, Virginia’s older sister.
We visited Berwick Church, where Grant and Bell had painted every
inch of wall as they had their home, and finally Monk’s House, Leonard
and Virginia’s own country home in nearby Rodmell. There was a shaded
pool in front, slithering with silver fish and calling to mind Woolf’s
preferred metaphor for consciousness, and, in the back, a bare and
sunlit room in which she wrote. Her ashes had once been buried beneath
an elm, but the tree had subsequently died, and in its place—off to one
side and ensconced in purple columbine—was a bronze bust in her
likeness. It was a warm, brilliant day, but coupled with my recollection
of those places is the image of my father, his body bent as though he
were walking into the wind, lighting a cigarette and drifting away from
the houses toward the deep green of the woods or fields in the distance.
I returned to America the following year. Burned out by Oxford, I had
decided against writing an honors thesis, but I felt guilty about it,
and when I happened upon the critic James Wood’s essay on Woolf’s
mysticism, I changed my mind. I fervently disagreed with Wood’s
arguments, and yet the decision to respond was personal, not
intellectual: Wood had reminded me how much I missed her, how much her
work had come to feel like home.
Within a few weeks, she had once again become the most tangible of
muses. An old Cuban poster of my mother’s hung above my computer,
advertising a 1967 production of Quién Le Teme a Virginia Woolf?
(“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” I would whisper to the stylized
canine lurking at the poster’s edge, loving the question’s suitability
and silliness: “Not me! Not me!”) A postcard reproduction of George
Charles Beresford’s lovely 1902 portrait was wedged in my mirror frame; a
friend had sent it to me long before it meant anything. “Here she is—,”
he’d written, “young + fresh + far from suicide, gazing off to the left
of your room.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/katharine-smyth-forgetting-virginia-woolf/
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