“The only way I keep afloat”: Work as Virginia Woolf's raison d'etre

References and notes

• Woolf , Leonard , ed. 1953 . A Writer's Diary, , 47 London : Hogarth Press . subsequently referred to as AWD.
   Google Scholar
• Bell , Quentin . 1972 . Virginia Woolf, A Biography: Volume Two, Mrs. Woolf 1912–1941 , 88 London : The Hogarth Press . subsequently referred to as Bell II
   Google Scholar
• 1972 . 1922 A Vintage Year: A Selection of Works from the Henry and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature , New York : The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations . the catalogue, written and compiled by Lola L. Szladits, to the exhibition “1922 A Vintage Year” which was organized and arranged by Dr. Szladits. Curator of the Berg Collection, to whom I am deeply indebted for encouragement and guidance in my research, and for permission to reproduce material in the Berg Collection. I have also received permission from Quentin Bell to quote all of the manuscript material in this essay
   Google Scholar
• Woolf , Leonard . 1967 . Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of The Years 1919 to 1939 , 156 London : The Hogarth Press . subsequently referred to as Downhill.
   Google Scholar
• 1971 . “Virginia Woolf's diaries: Some reflections after reading them and a censure of Mr. Holyrod,” . Bulletin of the New York Public Library , 75 September : 301 – 310 .
   Google Scholar
• Woolf , Leonard . 1964 . Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 , 81 149 London : The Hogarth Press . also Downhill, 156. 6. See also subsequently referred to as Beginning.
   Google Scholar
• Woolf , Virginia . 1972 . A Biography: Volume One, Virginia Stephen 1882–1912 , 125 London : The Hogarth Press .
   Google Scholar
• Virginia Woolf took three weeks, November 9–31, 1936, to correct the galley proofs of The Years. See AWD, 272–274. “I have compared the galley proofs with the published version and the work she did on the galleys is astonishing” (Downhill, 156).
   Google Scholar
• Lehmann , John . 1972 . Recollections of Virginia Woolf, , Edited by: Noble , Joan Russell . 25 London : Peter Owen .
   Google Scholar
• 1919 . Night and Day , 254 London : The Hogarth Press . 1930, All subsequent reference are to this edition
   Google Scholar
• 1931 . The Waves , 176 London : The Hogarth Press . All subsequent references are to this edition
   Google Scholar
• 1950 . “Many happy returns,” . In Collected Shorter Poems 1930–1944 , 85 London : Faber and Faber .
   Google Scholar
• Stevens , Wallace . 1960 . The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination , 31 London : Faber and Faber .
   Google Scholar
• 1942 . The Death of the Moth and Other Essays , London : The Hogarth Press . rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961, 170 and 175
   Google Scholar
• 1915 . The Voyage Out 384 London The Hogarth Press, 1929,
   Google Scholar
• 1925 . Mrs. Dalloway , 11 New York : Harcourt, Brace & Company . All subsequent references are to this edition
   Google Scholar
• 1927 . To the Lighthouse , London : The Hogarth Press . See also Mrs. Dalloway, 266;rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1964, 69–70 and 91. All subsequent references are to this edition
   Google Scholar
• 1959 . Opus Posthumous , 179 London : Faber and Faber . subsequently referred to as OP.
   Google Scholar
• 1922 . Jacob's Room , New Edition , 136 London : The Hogarth Press . 1945,
   Google Scholar
• 1928 . Orlando , 133 London : The Hogarth Press . rpt. New York, The New American Library),
   Google Scholar
• 1941 . Between the Acts , 117 London : The Hogarth Press . All subsequent references are to this edition
   Google Scholar
• Dickens , Charles . 1966 . Hard Times, , Edited by: Ford , George and Monod , Sylvere . 125 New York : W. W. Norton & Company .
   Google Scholar
• Dickens , Charles . 1850 . “Preliminary word,” . Household Words , March 30
   Google Scholar
• Collected Papers , 1 223 – 224 .
   Google Scholar
• Woolf , Virginia . 1958 . Granite and Rainbow , 94 – 95 . London : The Hogarth Press . “In English fiction there are a number of writers who gratify our sense of belief… . We get from their novels the same sort of refreshment and delight that we get from seeing something actually happen in the street below… . The novels of the great truth‐tellers, of whom Defoe is easily the English chief, procure for us refreshment of this kind… . Persistently, naturally, with a curious, almost unconscious iteration, emphasis is laid upon the very facts that most reassure us of stability in real life, upon money, furniture, food.”. In order to understand Woolf's respect for facts, see also her plans for The Years (AWD, 197–198), quoted in Section III of the text above; also the final entry of her published Diary: “I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down” (AWD, 365)
   Google Scholar
• Compare these words with Sir William Bradshaw's invocation of Proportion—"health is proportion"—in Mrs. Dalloway, 149–155.
   Google Scholar
• See also AWD, 48–49, 52, 53, 62, 70, 100, 123, etc., for similar lists of projects in which Mrs. Woolf pegs out her future.
   Google Scholar
• The reference is not to the novel, but to the short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” in the course of writing which she conceived a plan for seven more stories. See the Jacob's Room Holograph, Part III, dated March 12th 1922” at p. 131, dated ‘Oct 6th 1922. Thoughts upon beginning a book to be called, perhaps, At Home: or The Party” (Berg Collection).
   Google Scholar
• Jacob's Room Holograph, Part III, “Oct 6th 1922,” March 12, 1922.
   Google Scholar
• The reference is to Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
   Google Scholar
• 1935–1939 . “The Searchlight,” . Ariicles, Essays, Fiction and Reviews , 8 January 31 1939 (Berg Collection)
   Google Scholar
• 1947 . The Moment and Other Essays , 123 124 – 125 . London : The Hogarth Press .
   Google Scholar
• Woolf , Leonard . 1969 . The Journey Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of. the Years 1939 to 1969 , 54 London : The Hogarth Press . See Viriginia Woolf's unpublished Diaries (Berg Collection) and. Subsequent references to this volume of Woolf's autobiography abbreviated as Journey.
   Google Scholar
• See Journey, 75. Leonard Woolf misquotes his wife's Diary. For the correct wording see AWD, 360: “a supported on fact book”.
   Google Scholar
• 1950 . The Captain's Death Bed , 112 London : The Hogarth Press . Compare the opening of the “mountain top vision” fragment with the first paragraph of “All about books,” written in January 1931, published in
   Google Scholar
• Compare the last sentence with a long and very important passage in Night and Day, 447–448.
   Google Scholar
• 1900 . Scrambles Among the Alps, 1860–69 , 261 London : John Murray . In March 1940, Mrs. Woolf was reading Edward Whymper (AWD, 330), pioneer alpinist and friend of Sir Leslie Stephen whom Whymper describes as “fleetest of foot of the whole Alpine brotherhood” (). The following month, she was thinking about her father in the course of contemplating her memoirs. In May she resumed work on Between The Acts, finishing the pageant, but not the novel, in November 1940. As the crowd disperses after the pageant, a voice is heard to say “ T was telling them, the Brookes have gone to Italy. They've seen the volcano. Most impressive, so they say— they were lucky—in eruption’ “ (232). On December 29, 1940, she “opened Matthew Arnold” in order to copy out lines from “Thyrsis” (AWD, 360). It seems unlikely that she closed her Arnold without at least seeing the title, Empedocles on Aetna. Sometime between November ‘40 and February ‘41 she wrote out the fragment of her mountain top vision, beginning with the description of a crater.
   Google Scholar
• Whymper , Edward . 1880 . The Ascent of the Matterhorn , 284 – 298 . London : John Murray . It should also be noted that the sentence, “In the 40ies five men, in the 60ies 4 men had perished … when a rope broke,” is clearly an allusion to the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1965. On the descent, a rope broke and four men, D. Hadow, C. Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas and Michael Croz, a guide, were killed. For an account of the accident see (Whymper was, of course, a member of the party that made the first ascent). These pages include engravings of the broken rope, also of the English Church in Zermatt, at the foot of the mountain, to which Woolf was most probably alluding when she wrote: “the graves in the valley said that several men were buried there who had fallen climbing… . The peasants will buy spring flowers to lay on their graves.” Finally, Herr Melchior, the name of the proprietor of the hotel in which the lady who is writing is staying, appears on p. 316 of Whymper's Matterhorn book. Melchior Anderegg was the name of Sir Leslie Stephen's favourite Alpine guide
   Google Scholar
• 1970 . The Listener , 83 ( 2129 ) January 15 : 88
   Google Scholar
• Nietzsche , Friedrich . 1956 . The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals, , Edited by: Golffing , Francis . 29 New York : Doubleday & Company . subsequent references to Tragedy.
   Google Scholar
• 1925 . The Common Reader , 39 London : The Hogarth Press . New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1953),
   Google Scholar