Virginia Woolf Sums It Up LESSONS FROM THE ENGLISH AUTHOR ON GRIEF AND HARD TIMES BY HARRISON BERRY
There’s no good time to deliver bad news. And so, on a warm summer day filled with birdsong, I took a call from my mother, whose first three words changed my life: “He’s leaving me!” Writing this, I have just received my first injection of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccination. The clouds from a year of quarantine and death have started to lift. With that release comes a new tension between wanting to make sense of what has happened to the world and my life, and the knowledge that, like my parents’ divorce, understanding may forever elude me. So it was for Woolf, whose life and work struggled to reckon with the havoc of the early 20th century. My parents’ marriage lasted 35 years, produced two children, and survived the collapse of the family business. In the months following its seemingly random demise, friends and family would forward their theories of what happened, and my parents would never explain why they split sheets the same way twice. From my mother’s announcement of the divorce to today, I’ve followed Virginia Woolf ’s observation that, “there is also the highly respectable opinion that character-mongering is much overdone nowadays.”
Born to a famous intellectual and a Pre-Raphaelite beauty, Woolf was raised among some of the greatest minds of the 19th century and with the full use of her father’s vast library. She was sexually abused early in life by a family member and, in 1895, her mother Julia died, kicking off a string of family calamities. She had a playful side. Her cadre of friends became the Bloomsbury Group, and in 1910, they participated in the Dreadnought Hoax, dressing as members of the Abyssinian royal family to gain access to the Royal Fleet and humiliate the Navy. A lifelong pacifist, she was deeply affected by the First World War. Her first groundbreaking novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), from which I cribbed the above quotation, obsesses over its titular character, who was killed in that conflict. Its narrator lurks behind bushes and spies on Jacob socializing, but the truth of him confounds: “It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.”
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Thought to have suffered from bipolar disorder, Virginia Woolf was “one of the most professional, perfectionist, energetic, courageous, and committed writers in the language,”
her literary biographer Hermione Lee said.
Her characters reach for the cup of knowledge while Woolf pulls from the tap of grief. In her, depth of feeling meets breadth of output. Even in a sick year—Woolf probably suffered from bipolar disorder—she would send one novel www.idahomemagazine.com
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