British author, dead 60 years, makes a comeback
By Hillel Italie
Associated Press
The obsession can begin at any time. In high school, for example.
"I first read Virginia Woolf when I was 15," says author Michael Cunningham, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Hours," features both Woolf's work and the author herself. The book has been made into a film starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep, opening today.
"This older girl, who I had a crush on, threw me a copy of 'Mrs. Dalloway' and said, 'Why don't you read this and try to be less stupid.' I had never seen anything like her writing. I remember thinking, 'She's doing with language what Jimi Hendrix does with guitar."'
Or in the middle of a successful career. "I hadn't read her as a kid. ... She had sort of a presence, but I didn't know any details," says actress Nicole Kidman, who read Woolf in preparation for her role as the author in the recent film version of Cunningham's book.
"Her inner life is so powerful. And to play a writer of that brilliance, I had the thought of electricity entering her mind, passing down through her hand and through the pen. I feel my life now is imbued by Virginia Woolf."
More than 60 years after drowning herself in a river near her home in Sussex, England, Woolf continues to inspire writers, movie stars, academics and many others. She is the rare writer profound enough for scholars to scrutinize and famous enough to have her likeness — the still, somber eyes; the strong, sensitive nose — printed on Barnes & Noble shopping bags.
Her books sell hundreds of thousand of copies each year and both her work and her life have been sources for contemporary artists. "Mrs. Dalloway" and "Orlando" are among the Woolf books adapted into movies, and the author has become a dramatic character in an acclaimed play, "Vita & Virginia," and in the film version of "The Hours."
Woolf desired fame, but also feared it. "You have the children," she once wrote to her sister, Vanessa. "The fame by rights belongs to me." But in the early 1930s, with two books already written about her and a third on the way, she wondered if her life would triumph over her work.
"This is a danger signal," she noted in her diary. "I must not settle into a figure."
Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, in 1882. Her mother, Julia Duckworth, was a member of a prominent publishing family, and her father, Leslie Stephen, was a literary critic whose friends included the writers Henry James and George Eliot. Virginia was educated at home, and in a letter to a friend she recalled "mooning about alone among my father's books; never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schools — throwing balls; ragging; slang; vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!"
In her early 20s, she helped form the Bloomsbury group of writers and thinkers who advocated socialism, pacifism and atheism. Members included novelist E.M. Forster, biographer Lytton Strachey and political theorist Leonard Woolf, whom Virginia married in 1912.
Virginia Woolf was soon writing for newspapers and published her first novel, "The Voyage Out," in 1915. She later became a leading "modernist," believing literature needed to free itself of plot and conventional narrative. Novels such as "Mrs. Dalloway" and "The Waves" were books of interior monologues and shifting perspectives, devoted less to the straight line of storytelling than to the random ways of the mind.
She led a daring, troubled, modern life. She openly questioned the worth of marriage and had an intense affair with the author and playwright Vita Sackville-West. Sexually abused as a child and orphaned in her early 20s, Woolf suffered from periods of severe depression and first attempted suicide in 1913. (One Web site offers comparative charts of her mood swings and literary output.)
On March 28, 1941, she filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself.
"Most writers just stay home and write," Cunningham says. "Compared to Virginia Woolf, the lives of people like James Joyce are pretty tame."
During the 1940s and 1950s, her reputation was that of a minor and "difficult" author. Her books were not widely taught and few books were written about her.
The cult of Woolf began in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the women's movement revived interest in her work and her fame became even greater, ironically, thanks to a play that had nothing to do with her except the title, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Edward Albee had seen the phrase on a mirror at a Greenwich Village bar and used it for his 1963 Tony Award-winning drama about a bickering couple, portrayed on stage by Uta Hagen and Arthur Hill. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton played them in Mike Nichols' 1966 film version.
"We're hoping 'The Hours' is going to shift the popular culture perception of Woolf, because many people confuse her with the Edward Albee play," says Vara Neverow, president of the International Virginia Woolf Society, one of several such organizations. Neverow, head of the English faculty at Southern Connecticut State University, read Woolf as an undergraduate and became a fan.
"She's on the borderline of high culture and low culture, masculine and feminine," says Brenda Silver, a professor of English at Dartmouth College and author of "Virginia Woolf, Icon."
"She was so many things; she was so hard to pin down. She was into deconstructing literary forms and the identities formed by society. Now, she is the one we're trying to deconstruct."
