Zoë Strachan

Julia Briggs

Allen Lane, £30

7^th April 2005

But, you may say, what more could conceivably be written about Virginia Woolf? Well, we’re often so busy thinking of her as a mad, abused, lesbian adulteress that we forget she was, as Hermione Lee said in her exemplary 1996 biography, “one of the most professional, energetic, courageous and committed writers in the language”, not to mention Joyce’s fiercest modernist rival.

Giving the Rede Lecture two months after Woolf’s suicide in 1941, her critic and friend E M Forster baulked at any attempt to “sum up” a life and work of such complexity. However, he surmised, “There is after all one little life-line to catch hold of – she liked writing. These words, which usually mean so little, must be applied to her with all possible intensity.”

These words might equally have been Julia Briggs’ starting point in her attempt to square the paradox inherent in writing any life of Virginia Woolf: while being part of the seething mass of sexual intrigue and artistic jealousy that was the Bloomsbury set, Woolf “always felt that the life of the mind was the only ‘real life’: its ‘great events & revolutions’ were always, for her, the most affecting, the most absorbing, even though ‘people talk of war & politics’”. She wrote to Stephen Spender that, “‘I think action generally unreal. Its the thing we do in the dark that is more real; the thing we do because peoples eyes are on us seems to me histrionic, small boyish’”. Likewise her fiction was primarily concerned with “the inner life, and finding ways of re-creating that life in narrative”.

Here Briggs aims to represent and make interesting, “‘this thinking; this sitting in a chair day in, day out, with a cigarette and a sheet of paper and a pen and an inkpot’” which so frustrated Orlando’s fictional biographer. She tries to decipher how Woolf wrote, book by book, mentioning life events or social and political background where relevant, thus mirroring Woolf’s own technique in Mrs Dalloway: “my tunnelling process, by which I tell the past by instalments, as I have need of it”. The ‘Aftermath’ of each chapter considers the response the books met when they left their author and went out into the world. In 1915 this very newspaper said of Woolf’s debut, The Voyage Out, “a more wearisome, long-winded, purposeless tale would be hard to find. We should advise careful thought before plunging again into print”. Thankfully Virginia was more amused than disheartened.

As well as being a prolific writer of fiction and criticism, she was a keen writer of her own life - “‘How I interest myself!’” – and Briggs’ main and much-quoted source is Woolf’s diary. During the writing of The Waves in particular, “Woolf’s careful self-documentation (‘I want to trace my own process’) unfolds a story of the artist’s extraordinary faith in her own vision long before she could see where it might take her – the somnambulist picking her way along the tightrope of words.” Yet she was equally prone to ghastly dips in confidence (“‘Shall I ever write another novel?’”), perhaps not an uncommon opposition amongst writers.

Despite this autobiographical streak, Briggs notes “how little we actually know of her thoughts and reading”. Virginia showed her diaries to her husband Leonard, and often wrote with a tantalising obscurity and lack of self-analysis, for example regarding her curiously contradictory relationship with her sister. While adoring Vanessa and using her as inspiration for several of her lead female characters, Virginia was desperately jealous. She began her first novel during Vanessa’s first pregnancy. Deemed too fragile to have children of her own by her husband and one of their doctors, Virginia began to see illness “as a form of ‘lying in’, a process that brought the work to birth: ‘these curious intervals in life – I’ve had many – are the most fruitful artistically – one becomes fertilised”. Ironically, when she was ill she was often confined to a room of her own but prevented from engaging in the only activity which made her feel better – writing. 

The context of the work adds poignancy. Flush, her biography of the Browning’s pet spaniel, is one of Woolf’s jollier books despite the tragic circumstances which surrounded its writing. Conceived as a parody of Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria, Woolf imagined it as a joke she could share with her friend. Unfortunately Strachey died of cancer before it was finished, and shortly afterwards Dora Carrington, who been in love with him, borrowed a rifle and shot herself. Completing the book lost its appeal, though Woolf did so, and Flush became a runaway success with the “Middlebrow” readers she scorned.

Biography succeeds when the author loves their subject passionately, but not blindly. That Briggs adores Woolf is written across every page, but she’s well aware of her subject’s less savoury characteristics. Woolf knew she was a snob, and acknowledged the trouble she had writing about “the lower classes”. In 1930 she agreed to write an introduction to a collection of testaments gathered from working class women by her friend Margaret Llewelyn Davies, then a few years later she sacked her cook Nelly after eighteen years of service. Conversely, Virginia’s correspondence with Agnes Smith, an unemployed weaver who had admired her work, continued until her death. Woolf also enjoyed sneering at other novelists, including Compton Mackenzie, for being “old Prostitutes” (i.e. writing for money) forgetting that they lacked the privileged security of her private income. Briggs is slightly less harsh on her “casual” anti-Semitism, perhaps because Woolf herself didn’t explore it in much detail. Despite her Jewish husband, “It was as invisible to her as sexism was to the rest of Bloomsbury”.

In the Epilogue Briggs comes full circle and concludes that “Woolf’s life, like that of Sylvia Plath, is too often read in terms of her death, as if that was the most interesting or significant thing that happened to her.” And yet it seems her death cannot be ignored. Her suicide note is reprinted here, “‘I feel certain that I am going mad again . . . I begin to hear voices. I can’t concentrate’”, and we are left with that haunting image prefigured by so many references to drowning in her work and her diaries: Virginia wading into the River Ouse, placing a stone in her pocket. Barthes should have said that the deadness of the author depends on the manner of their demise, but in the pages of this book at least, Virginia Woolf is very much alive.

            It’s written in an immensely readable style, and Briggs tightrope walks the line between biography and literary criticism admirably. Most of all she allows her subject space to breathe, to reveal herself through her writings, creating a deliciously furtive sense of peering over Virginia’s shoulder as she sat at her table in Monk’s House, paper before her, pen and cigarette in hand. Rereading Woolf’s work becomes irresistible, and I found myself referring back to the novels with renewed enthusiasm and increased knowledge. What better display of the success of a literary biography?