She was born when the British Army landed in Egypt in 1882 and died in 1941, a few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor which launched the United States into World War II. She grew up under the Empire at the time of Queen Victoria, in an English society at the height of its influence in the world, but rigid and very conservative. Coming from a wealthy family in London’s Kensington district, she lost her parents before reaching the age of 25. She experienced severe depression from a young age, a disease she struggled with all her life. She was 18 in 1900, barely emerging from the Dickensian century.
She signed reviews, essays, short stories, poems, novels, she was a writer in everything. She appeared in the literary world at a time when still very few women were shining there. It was in the time of Marcel Proust, whose On the side of Swann’s appeared in 1913, just two years before Woolf’s first novel, The crossing of feelings. This book was aptly named, this title could have crowned all his work. Virginia Woolf is the writer of interiority. With her, the plot does not matter. Basically, as with James Joyce – incidentally also born in 1882 and died the same year as her – or with Proust – whom she admired to the point of being “in a daze” while reading it – the characters do not. do not count in his work, only the movements really matter. His characters thus disappear behind the feelings, as if carried away by the current of a river. “As with Proust they disappear under time”, to use the phrase of François Sureau in The gold of time.
His most famous novel, Mrs Dalloway, is published in 1925 by Hogarth Press, a publishing house that she created with her husband, a gesture of rebellion if there is one, to say the least of emancipation. It is because Virginia Woolf feels cramped in a world that leaves little room for women. It was then the suffragette movement, which fought for the right to vote for women in the United Kingdom, a right that they would partially obtain in 1918 – they could only vote from the age of 30 – then on par with the men in 1928. There is still little room for women on the labor market, which condemns them to precariousness and dependence. In A place of your own (also known as A room of your own, translation of A Room of One’s Own), an essay that she published at the end of the 1920s, she exposes this “historical” precariousness of women which makes them practically invisible in public life, particularly in literature. “I was thinking of the security and prosperity of one gender and the poverty and insecurity of the other,” she writes. It is because while everything may seem possible for women, the road to success remains strewn with obstacles. As I reread Woolf, I couldn’t help but think of Pauline Marois, whom I had the chance to meet, and who recalled that on her career, there had always been “tests that were added to the tests. As if the validity of his political life had to be constantly questioned.
A great among the great
The year of publication of Mrs Dalloway is also that of the publication of Gatsby the magnificent, of Scott F. Fitzgerald, et al Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos. A little earlier, in 1919, Proust had won the Goncourt with In the shade of young girls in bloom whileUlysse, by Joyce, was released in 1922. Ernest Hemingway will publish The sun is also rising, his first real success, in 1926. Today, with nearly 100 years of hindsight, Woolf’s writings still appear alongside his famous contemporaries in the various “ideal libraries” that are presented year after year as an extension of the concept developed by the writer Jorge Luis Borges. But that would not be of any help for Virginia Woolf who made her heroine Clarissa Dalloway say, not without irony: ” She felt that it was very, very dangerous to live even for one day. “
Marguerite Yourcenar and Virginia Woolf met in London in the mid-1930s, with no real current flowing between the two. The author of The black work then had the mandate to translate The Waves (Waves), published a few years earlier. It will be remembered that Yourcenar also translated James Baldwin. In the current debate on the subject, one comes to wonder if it would still be possible today: Yourcenar translating Baldwin, icon of black American literature. Which is infinitely sad, of course. And this quote from Waves : “Sometimes I think that I am not a woman; that I am the ray of sunshine that illuminates this barrier, this corner of the ground. Sometimes I think I am the seasons, the month of January, the month of May, the month of November: that I am part of the mud, the fog and the dawn. It is good and it is beautiful. “His novels are like long poems,” said Jean Barbe on Radio-Canada radio a few years ago.
The integrity of the writer
Stock recently launched a new edition of the Full Journal 1915-1941 by Virginia Woolf. A few years after her death, her husband Leonard Woolf had taken extracts from them and published them under the title Journal of a writer. He considered that “the journal was too personal to be published in full as long as [vivraient] many people he alludes to ”. Yet it is a fascinating diary, where we perceive the personal and literary struggles of the writer. We feel the author constantly grappling with doubt and a painful pain in living while continuing to build a rich and abundant work. Some pages read with the same pleasure as the most beautiful passages of his novels like The lighthouse walk or Waves. And always this obsession for the truth in the written word, a bit like Hemingway. It is moreover this question, that of the integrity of the writer, which is at the heart ofA place to oneself. “What we mean by integrity, in the case of a novelist, is the conviction he gives us that here is the truth. Yes, that feeling that makes us say: “I never thought it could be like this; I’ve never known people who behave like that. But you convinced me that it is, that it is like this, ”writes Woolf. This “writer’s integrity” is difficult to achieve for a woman of her time, she notes. Because women do not then have the material freedom which makes intellectual freedom possible. Freedom that she defined in a way as “a place of one’s own”.
In his collection of chronicles Coffee Live, Chantal Thomas speaks of a form of resistance which it is necessary to show nowadays to cling for long hours to a book, “this very discreet friend, who answers only when questioned”, to resume the words of Giovanni Pozzi. Virginia Woolf’s books are rich, because they never cease to arouse in us questions about our place in existence. “A book is not made of sentences put end to end, but of sentences constructed – if the image can help, specifies Woolf – in the form of arches or domes. “ Tormented woman, she committed suicide at almost 60 years old, 80 years ago this year. His death itself is a matter of literature. Pockets full of pebbles, she walked towards a muddy river near her country house in Rodmell, England; his body was found three weeks later. A few days before her disappearance, she noted in her diary “a curious impression of the seaside. Everyone bracing themselves, fighting against the wind, seized, reduced to silence. Entirely emptied of its flesh ”. It was spring 1941.
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