Abstract
Above all, Virginia Woolf saw the War as a writer. Her view was detached and sometimes idiosyncratic, as her play with metaphor suggests. Her opposition to war was complete, but she expressed this most directly in a polemic, Three Guineas (1938), written when World War 2 was clearly in sight. When she represents the First War in fiction, she does so in a way that is contemplative, often domestic. The War does not figure in terms of mud or barbed wire but rather through its points of contact with the ‘ordinary’ life left behind, and in its destruction of a secure past. It is not possible to isolate or define Woolf’s ‘view’ on war,2 only to follow its echoes in her work — but these, in Jacob’s Room and in Mrs Dalloway, give a new dimension to the genre of ’war novel’.
Two well-known writers were describing the sound of the guns in France, as they heard it from the top of the South Downs. One likened it to ‘the hammer stroke of Fate’; the other heard in it ‘the pulse of Destiny’. More prosaically, it sounds like the beating of gigantic carpets by gigantic women, at a distance.1
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Notes
Virginia Woolf, ‘Heard on the Downs: the Genesis of Myth’, The Times, 15 August 1916;
reprinted in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. II: 1912–1918 (London: Hogarth Press, 1987) p. 40. Hereafter referred to as Essays, vol. II.
The issue of whether the focus and the structuring principles of Woolf’s work originate from considerations of form or of subject-matter has received much discussion. There is a clear summary of the different positions which recent discussions of Jacob’s Room have taken in E. L. Bishop, ‘The Shaping of Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions’, in Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 32, no. 1 (Spring 1986) pp. 215–16. Hereafter referred to as Bishop. See also n.36, below.
Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940); reprinted in Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays, vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1960) p. 167.
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1979) p. 174. Subsequent references are made to this edition.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Before Midnight’, The Times Literary Supplement, 1 March 1917; reprinted in Essays, vol. II, p. 87.
Virginia Woolf, ‘A Cambridge VAD’, The Times Literary Supplement, 10 May 1917; reprinted in Essays, vol. II, p. 112.
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room (London: Hogarth Press, 1949) pp. 171–2. Subsequent references are made to this edition.
Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again (London: Hogarth Press, 1964) p. 197.
J. K. Johnstone, ‘World War I and the Novels of Virginia Woolf’, in G. A. Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness (London: Cassell, 1968) p. 531.
D. J. Enright, ‘The Literature of the First World War’, in Boris Ford (ed.), The Modern Age (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1961) p. 169.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Novels’ (1919); reprinted in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, vol. III: 1919–24 (London: Hogarth Press, 1988) p. 33.
Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (London: Hogarth Press, 1984) p. 199
Accounts of the social fracture caused by the War are represented in many different modes of writing. For a contrasting view, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1975) who claims that the ‘roster of major innovative talents who were not involved with the war is long and impressive. It includes Yeats, Woolf, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce’ (pp. 313–14). It is true that these writers say little about fighting, but in the wider context they do not ignore the war.
Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1980) p. 9.
This contrasts with David Daiches’s conclusion, that Jacob’s Room was written ‘for the sake of the impressions,… one might say for the sake of the style’ (David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (Norfolk: New Directions, 1942) p. 61.
Other readings (for example, Alex Zwerdling, ’Jacob’s Room: Woolf’s Satiric Elegy’, Journal of English Literary History, vol. 48 (1981) p. 912) argue that the work grows out of a particular subject.
Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf (London: Wishart, 1932) p. 116.
See, for example, George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London: Paladin, 1970) p. 369;
Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London: Macmillan, 1975) p. 30; Aldington, Death of a Hero, p. 219;
Philip Larkin, ‘MCMXIV’, in The Whitsun Weddings (London: Faber & Faber, 1964) p. 28.
Maxwell Bodenheim, ‘Underneath the Paint in Jacob’s Room’, in R. Majumdar and A. McLaurin (eds), Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) p. 111.
Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin Books, 1971) pp. 146–7.
See Arthur Marwick, The Nature of History (London: Macmillan, 1970) pp. 174–6.
Michael Holroyd and Paul Levy (eds), The Shorter Strachey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980) p. 5. Lytton Strachey wrote ‘Lancaster Gate’ in 1922.
See Gillian Beer, ‘Hume, Stephen, and Elegy in To the Lighthouse’, Essays in Criticism, vol. 34 (1984) pp. 33–55.
Woolf develops the image in different ways: a parallel figure is that of the ‘grey nurse’ in Mrs Dalloway. For an illuminating discussion of the succession of female figures and ancient voices, see Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1988) p. 250.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (London: Granada Publishing, 1977) p. 147.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938) p. 72.
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (London: Hogarth Press, 1947) p. 7.
This issue has been raised by many commentators: see, for example, Michelle Barrett, Virginia Woolf, Women and Writing (London: The Women’s Press, 1979) pp. 21–3.
Leonard Woolf (ed.), A Writer’s Diary (London: Grafton, 1978) p. 322.
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Hattaway, J. (1993). Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room: History and Memory. In: Goldman, D. (eds) Women and World War 1. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22555-2_2
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