Abstract
On her death in 1909 Caroline Stephen left her niece a generous legacy. Virginia’s capital was now and for the next few years enough for her to be able to live on the income. From 1910 onwards, for this reason but also later because of illness, her journalistic writing was reduced, eventually to zero. She had started to write a novel, Melymbrosia, in 1908. She now took this up full-time. It seemed in early 1912 to be almost finished. But then she began to rewrite it drastically. It became The Voyage Out and was eventually delivered to the publisher in 1913. Because of her mentally unbalanced state, publication was delayed until March 1915. It was not until 1916 that she started to write again for the Times Literary Supplement.*
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Chapter 3
For the history of The Voyage Out and its various drafts see Virginia Woolf, Melymbrosia: An Early Version of The Voyage Out, ed. Louise DeSalvo (New York Public Library, 1982) and Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage: A Novel in the Making (Macmillan, 1980).
The concept of the ‘moratorium’ derives from the work of Erik Erikson and is discussed in relation to Virginia Woolf by Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (Norton, 1988). Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (University of California Press, 1986) applies the concept to the case of Jacob Flanders in Jacob’s Room.
Leonard Woolf, The Wise Virgins cited Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf (Cambridge University Press, 1978) p. 95.
Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (Macmillan, 1984) p. 61.
Cited by S. P. Rosenbaum, Victorian Bloomsbury, p. 66.
For more details see George Spater and Ian Parsons, A Marriage of True Minds: An Intimate Portrait of Leonard and Virginia Woo//(Jonathan Cape and the Hogarth Press, 1977) chapter 6.
J. M. Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs’, op. cit., also in ed. S. P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group, p. 64.
Gerald Brenan, Personal Record 1920-72 (Jonathan Cape, 1974) p. 156.For another excellent account ofVirginia Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends by Gerald Brenan see the extract from his South from Granada reprinted in ed. S. P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group, p. 283f.
Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, p. 62.
S. P. Rosenbaum, The Bloomsbury Group, p. 77.
Ibid., p. 67.
From a draft of The Voyage Out cited by Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage, p. 43.
For the best class analysis of the Bloomsbury Group see Raymond Williams, The Bloomsbury Fraction’ in Problems in Materialism and Culture (Verso, 1980).
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (Hill and Wang, 1978) p. 73.
Cited by Louise DeSalvo, Virginia Woolf’s First Voyage, p. 47. Compare the ‘censored’ version, VO 139.
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© 1991 John Mepham
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Mepham, J. (1991). 1910–15: Moratorium and Crisis. In: Virginia Woolf. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14145-6_3
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