Wouter’s Comments (group member since Dec 30, 2012)

Wouter’s comments from the Moments of Reading: A Virginia Woolf Reading Group group.

Agnes wrote: "For someone reading through the works of VW on one’s own, I recommend starting out with The Voyage Out, a milquetoast intro. Then wade in some more with Night and Day and then with Jacob’s Room. By..."

I disagree. The Voyage Out and Night and Day are very different from Virginia Woolf's later voice, which she developed from Jacob's Room onwards. Reading these two novels will give you a wrong impression on Virginia Woolf.

The Voyage Out and Night and Day are interesting novels when you want to know how she wrote before Jacob's Room, but these are late Victorian novels. In comparison to her later work, her first two novels were mediocre.

If you want to start with Virginia Woolf, I would recommend either Jacob's Room or Mrs Dalloway.

During week 16 I will start a reading group with some of my secondary school students. If you are interested in reading along, please notify so I can share the material here.

Added:

BBC Culture: Between the Acts: Virginia Woolf's last book

When I read The Years I had some difficulty getting into the story, but when I found the website Mantex (http://www.mantex.co.uk/2013/12/06/th...) things became clearer to me on how to approach the novel. Virginia Woolf was experimenting with writing novels without plot. The first novel was Jacob’s Room and The Years is no different. Normally you would have a plotline according to Freytag’s pyramid with an inciting incident, a rising action and a climax. The Years lacks all of these making it more difficult for the reader to get through the different stages of the novel.

So what is going on? The Years tells us about the Pargiter family in how they grow up after their mother has died. We move from one person’s viewpoint to another. Sometimes this happens seamlessly where the point of view is taking over by another person in the room and the camera, so to speak, follows that other person. The stories are like vistas without a specific purpose of working towards a climax.

This is also where the strength of the novel lies: (poetic) descriptions on life. The beginnings of every chapter reminded me of the intermezzos in The Waves in which nature is described with a lot of similes (especially the ‘as if’ struck me as a common Woolf device).

The autumn wind blew over England. It twitched the leaves off the trees, and down they fluttered, spotted red and yellow, or sent them floating, flaunting in wide curves before they settled. In towns coming in gusts round the corners, the wind blew here a hat off; there lifted a veil high above a woman's head. Money was in brisk circulation. The streets were crowded. Upon the sloping desks of the offices near St. Paul's, clerks paused with their pens on the ruled page. It was difficult to work after the holidays.

(The Years, chapter ‘1891’)

But the main issue, as Mantex tells us, is that The Years attempts to give us gabs in the story to ‘communicate the failure of communication’ yet ‘the narrative offers very little incentive for this effort to be made.’ It is said that The Years was the most heavily edited and revised novel of all the Virginia Woolf books and she may have been a bit too audacious On top of that characters are named differently by people making it difficult to keep track of who is who.

I wouldn’t say The Years was disappointing. It is not as daunting as Ulysses by James Joyce, but if there is no plot something needs to compensate for that. In The Waves this solved by using poetical language, whereas The Years lacks such a consistent substitution. Even more, communication may be flawed, but as human beings we are interested in people’s stories. But the gabs were too big and the snippets too small. As people we are interested in other people’s lives, Virginia Woolf did not give me an incentive to do so. However, but her style, though less poetic, compelled me to finish the novel as usual.

A genealogy can be found here.

Personally this is a special book for me. I have kept the novel unread since I graduated university (I graduated on Virginia Woolf and read all her novels, most essays, diary entries and letters). I loved the idea to have one unread Virginia Woolf novel on my shelf to read many years after. I think I can read it now :).

No worries. I need to finish my current novel as well. Let's say the first of April.

The Years is a 1937 novel by Virginia Woolf, the last she published in her lifetime. It traces the history of the genteel Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "present day" of the mid-1930s.

A genealogy can be found here.

Although spanning fifty years, the novel is not epic in scope, focusing instead on the small private details of the characters' lives. Except for the first, each section takes place on a single day of its titular year, and each year is defined by a particular moment in the cycle of seasons. At the beginning of each section, and sometimes as a transition within sections, Woolf describes the changing weather all over Britain, taking in both London and countryside as if in a bird's-eye view before focusing in on her characters. Although these descriptions move across the whole of England in single paragraphs, Woolf only rarely and briefly broadens her view to the world outside Britain.

Wikipedia.org

London. A rainy day in 1880. The Pargiter children sit in their cluttered Victorian drawing-room staring through the windows and waiting for their mother to die. Her death will set them free to live their lives as they please. Or so they imagine. But the Victorian age is also a long time dying, and the scars it leaves fade slowly.

This is the story of the Pargiter family from the 1880s to the 1930s, a period of immense and exciting change. For some, the causes of their youth become the conservatism of another era. For others the search goes on, for new experiences, for wider horizons.

The Years was, during Virginia Woolf's lifetime, her most popular work and it remains her most accessible. Written with sympathy, insight and lively wit, it explores the ways in which the forces of society oppress the individual spirit.

Start reading: Friday 1 April 2016
End reading: Monday 18 April

Prior knowledge on Virginia Woolf is helpful, though not required.

As usual, discussion topics will rise as we read the novel (feel free to open a new thread in this topic).

The Voyage out is one of Virginia Woolf's earlier (Victorian) novels before she found her own voice (though both The Voyage out and Night and Day are good novels). Finish The Voyage Out and then we will start reading The Years. How much time do you need to finish The Voyage out and to acquire The Years?

I will set things up to see if more people are interested in reading The Years.

Hi Monica,

This group has not been very active lately. However, we can always revivify it :). There is one novel I haven't read yet of Virginia Woolf which is The Years. Maybe we can start with that one and see who will join us. I would also be interested in re-reading Mrs Dalloway or The Waves.

Added: Virginia Woolf letter urging friend to go on living goes to auction

Added:

Smith College Libraries: Woolf in the World: A Pen and a Press of Her Own Page Proofs of To The Lighthouse

Berfrois: Names, Texts and WWI in To the Lighthouse

General talk about Mrs Dalloway. If you have a specific question or themes you can create a new topic. Also, you can start a question here and continue in a new topic when you think it should deserve a separate topic.

Hi and welcome, as a teacher who is becoming a dad soon I am a bit busier than usual :). Charisse, could you take lead? I can add extra information or thoughts.

Hi Maria,

If I'm correct you're looking for something about Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse apart from a biography (not by Virginia Woolf, because then I would recommend Moments of Being, an autobiographical writing).

There is a book called Virginia Woolf and the Poetry of Fiction (ISBN 0-415-00326-6) with a chapter called "To the Lighthouse: an elegy". If you are interested in this single chapter, send me a message.

Another way to understand classics better is to buy the Penguin Classic editions. They have a lot of annotations and good introductions.

My options for a next read would be: To the Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway.

You make me wonder where you found the information that she had so many contacts, yet can't find the resources. You have me confused.

With einsalgänger I didn't mean socially (though maybe the word was ill-chosen). Of course Virginia Woolf was socially very active, otherwise a work such as Mrs. Dalloway wouldn't be possible. I meant that Virginia Woolf didn't have a lot of contact with other women concerning her work; only a selected few. I don't recall reading she had a lot a debates with fellow women writers about her novels.

The Bloomsbury group was a quite a closed group. Not every socialist would be invited into their circle. Also, I don't think being a female writer would get you automatically into contact with Virginia Woolf, and I think the same would be applicable to feminist writers. Virginia Woolf was more than a feminist, namely a writer with very strong ideas about modernism and the style of writing that goes along with it.

This would be based on my readings of her letters and diary many years ago and should not be taken as fact. Maybe you can find some answers in those diaries and letters.

I haven't actually raised the question myself (maybe because I am a man), though I find it an interesting one. The first thing that would come to mind is that Virginia Woolf didn't have a lot writer friends. Her (Bloomsbury) circle was very limited and women were scarce there.

I think other questions should be answered as well before pin-pointing the reason why she didn't have (a lot of) contact with female modernist writers.

Did she have a lot of contact with modernist writers in general? James Joyce wasn't a good friend though both a considered iconic for the age. I think Virginia Woolf was an einselgänger (wasn't Charlotte Brontë that as well?) and not one who would share her ideas with others easily.

How important and well-versed were the female writers of the age? Virginia Woolf is one that comes to mind very quickly, though I must admit other names I can come with with are always connected to and less versed than Virginia Woolf: Vita Sackville West and Katherine Mansfield.

I also like the first pages a lot. The story seems to get adrift once we live the bedroom of the boy Jacob. There are glimpses of future work, yet still raw; unpolished. Woolf wonders through the everyday, the inventions we have made up as humans to make sense of it all.

"...the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery" (p. 57)

"It seems then that men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows." (p.60)

Jacob’s Room was Woolf’s first novel where she started using her own voice. After The Voyage Out and Day and Night Jacob’s Room set the course to a wholly different approach of her novel. Virginia Woolf became fascinated how the minds work, how it stores things, the act of speech and, most importantly, the vision; is the moment of being, the train of thought, what made Virginia Woolf famous.

Important to notice is Virginia Woolf’s hatred for symbolism: “I can’t manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalized way … directly I’m told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me” (VW in Letters to Roger Fry). Critics often talk about recurring images rather than symbols in the works of Virginia Woolf.

Some readers compare Jacob's Room too much with her later work especially To the Lighthouse. In my opinion this is unfair towards Jacob's Room. Although To the Lighthouse is one of Virginia Woolf's masterpieces, Jacob's Room is an important work in the development of Woolf's writing voice and has unique writing qualities.

Feel free to open new topics in this folder with news points of view, interests and questions.

Jacob’s Room (155 pages) reading time 4 weeks

Week 1 (June 21th): I – III (3-37) 34 pages
Week 2 (June 28th): IV – VII (38-76) 38 pages
Week 3 (July 4th): VIII – XI (77-117) 40 pages
Week 4 (July 11th): XII – XIV (118 – 159) 41 pages