Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Julie Kane

There is considerable evidence that Woolf - a prolific letter-writer, faithful diarist, and legendary conversationalist - preferred to keep her innermost thoughts to herself. The contrast between the gossipy, trivial concerns of her letters and diaries and the deep philosophical concerns of her novels is downright jarring. So is the gap between the books Woolf admitted to reading (canonical all, with frequent recourse to the Bard), and the books William Kennedy spied her reading in her cubbyhole at the Hogarth Press: "She reads the most extraordinary books, such as The Sexual Life of Savages" (31). In a 1919 letter to Janet Case, Woolf alluded to the things one leaves unspoken:

and then there's the whole question, which interested me, again too much for the books sake, I daresay, of the things one doesn't say; what affect does that have? and how far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? (Letters 2:400)

Another hint of deeply private thoughts left unspoken flashes forth in a 1929 diary entry, following a debilitating headache: "And two ideas come to me - to break my rule & write about the soul for once; & to write some exact dialogue" (3:241). Rules, one might note, are normally established to control impulses viewed as being unacceptable. One can't help thinking of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse - a character modeled on Woolf's own late mother, Julia Stephen: "She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband" (52).

There is also evidence that the young Virginia Stephen may have refrained from discussing her metaphysical interests out of fear of ridicule from her father, one of the foremost agnostic philosophers of his age. She ruefully recalled having compared her father to her cousin Florence Helen Duckworth's finance, Bernard Holland:

[Holland] interested me because I imputed to him 'imagination' - the quality I most admired & missed most in my father & his agnostic friends. . . . I read a book he wrote anonymously about being a Roman Catholic & got a faint seductive whiff of a world where people were very brilliant & thought about their souls. (Diary 3:246)

Quentin Bell's account of a dinner party attended by Virginia and her half-brother George Duckworth circa 1900 also shows her learning to suppress her interest in metaphysical philosophy when in the company of others. She made the mistake of discussing Plato with Lady Carnavon at the dinner table, committed some sort of conversational blunder, and turned to find George "crimson with embarrassment" (Bell 1:77). Later he reprimanded her for having brought up a subject considered inappropriate for young women. Significantly, she was speaking of Plato, the most mystical of Western philosophers, when she got her lesson in self-circumscription. And ironically, that lesson came from the half-brother whose physical advances may have doubled the message that one's most private experiences must be kept to oneself.