Reality and Virginia Woolf

Woolf's character, as the popularity of her diary testifies, has proved of irresistible interest. It has been aerated in a foam of interpretation. Scholars, actors, biographers, novelists, critics, musicians, film directors, marketing executives-even choreographers have produced their versions of her, and the versions of course range widely. The popular conception is therefore merely an area of maximum overlay; it is thus necessarily limiting. The ethereal, snobbish, neurasthenic Mrs. Woolf who results from the general compilation (she was sexually abused! went mad! committed suicide! the subheads cry-one imagines her in a loose fringed shawl caressing a cup of tea, with her eyes not quite in focus) has proved curiously salable, though she is still capable, especially in England, of provoking hysterical loathing. She is beloved in America. It is easy to imagine the popular Woolf writing Mrs. Ramsay. But it is almost impossible to imagine this fragile, mystical creature writing the rude comedy of the dwarf with beautiful feet.

For her own part Woolf was deeply interested in the question of what made a personality; it was part of being interested in herself. It was also part of being interested in reading, in writing, and in the past. She is preoccupied with the idea of biography, autobiography, the lives of obscure women, her own life. She wishes to contest the distinction separating biography and the novel, and writes fictional biographies between her more serious novels. "In fact," she writes in a letter, "I sometimes think only autobiography is literature-novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you and me." And of course she is one of literature's great diarists. She represents her difficult narrative method, with the heavy demands it lays upon the reader, as a personal inevitability; she is incapable, she says, of writing any other way. Her novels' relative plotlessness, too easily confused with formlessness, seems to encourage the idea that they are pure expression, like the song of Keats's nightingale, a full-throated ease of inspired self-disclosure. And yet the mature novels are all strictly formal-indeed, their success or failure depends on whether their experimental forms can deploy Woolf's fictional gifts and compensate for her weaknesses-and Woolf is of all writers the one most scrupulously determined to keep her own personality, however absorbing it might have been, out of her fiction. "Sydney comes in & I'm Virginia," she tells her diary in 1922; "when I write I'm merely a sensibility."

When, in 1920, she has the idea for Jacob's Room, her first concern is how she will keep "the damned egotistical self from invading its pages, and how she might "provide a wall for the book from oneself." The writers for whom she reserves her highest praise are those, like Shakespeare and Jane Austen, whose work is free from the taint of personal concern. She finds Ulysses a failure because Joyce's ego is constantly impinging on the book. Impersonality, not personality, is the goal of her narrative consciousness. She wishes to be true for her what Coleridge (who considered authorial impersonality a criterion of genius) wrote of Shakespeare: "It is throughout as if a superior spirit more intuitive, more intimately conscious, even than the characters themselves, not only of every outward look and act, but of the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings, were placing the whole before our view; himself meanwhile unparticipating in the passions."