Not my favourite Woolf narrating a garden party cum theatrical performance which interweave in and out of each others themes. The language can be strikingly beautiful.

A tough read indeed. There were parts where I was completely engrossed and others where my mind fluttered off. Poetic and full of rich imagery in some parts, like the way she describes the paintings or how the birds attacked the tree. Some names confused as to who was who. I enjoyed the challenge.

Read for class.

I have only read A Room of One's Own, which I loved, and this novel. I found it difficult to follow the characters, at times, and I think, unfortunately, some of the things written about are outdated. However, there is beauty in the descriptions of the land, the actors, and the play. The audience is much more criticized, and maybe rightly so, seemingly presenting divided selves to the public and private. Mrs Swithin and Bart are quite likeable, maybe too old to care about society, so focussed are they on their religious versus secular battle, but good natured nonetheless. I may have to try another book of Woolf's to make up my mind about her writing.

Not my favorite novel by Woolf—not by a longshot—but as the unanticipated terminus for one of literature’s great oeuvres it strikes an incredibly powerful and poignant note, its deliberate, hard-fought expansiveness resisting any sense of finality or closure (indeed, the end is revealed to be just another beginning). On this reading I was struck with how the novel itself feels positioned at a stylistic juncture, an attempt to fuse together the gorgeously abstracted soliloquies of The Waves with the more intimate representation of inner consciousness showcased in Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and most particularly, To the Lighthouse I’m not convinced everything attempted actually works—it all sometimes feels like a fascinating experiment rather than a full expression of mastery—but it also feels like the kind of creation that retrospectively turns out to be a threshold to other things. Of course in this case we’ll never know what those other things could possibly have been; as Leonard Woolf’s prefatory note acknowledges, its author was dead before the inevitable final revisions could be made.

So just to get my critiques out of the way: the quotation of long passages of text being performed at the pageant just don’t ever feel fully integrated into the overall narrative—I’m not inherently against the idea of extended quotation but they almost felt like place cards intended to hold place for something else. Also the various characters seem to function more as archetypal “types” than individuated “people,” and though they signal their various concerns and struggles and thought processes but they feel more like, well, a cast performing lines rather than embodied entities.

That said, the distancing effect was certainly Woolf’s intention, as the narrative itself not only sets out to blur distinctions between the generic markers of fiction and drama, but is just one of many boundary lines Woolf plays with: those separating audience and performer, and even author and reader when it comes to generating meaning. There’s a wonderful moment towards the pageant’s climax when a mirror is produced on stage and the narrative voice shifts pronouns, shifting from “them” to “ourselves:” “a burst of applause greeted this flattering tribute to ourselves.” It’s a subtle alteration, but the effect is jarring, and it immediately begs the question of who exactly “ourselves” refers to. The audience watching the pageant within the text, of course, but the reader also is being intentionally imbricated here, and I imagine the author is including herself as well.

In my first status update during my reading I also noted how queer this book struck me at this time around; during my first reading some ten years ago I was not in the place to detect alternate meanings to William Dodge’s silent confession that he’s “a half-man” or Miss La Trobe’s complaint that “she was an outcast” and that “nature had somehow set her apart from her kind.” But apart from covert queer representation—and rather depressing ones at that—there’s also something weird, and rather queer about the way Woolf attempts to present time throughout Between the Acts, with the constant, sometimes startling crash between the historical past and the tenuous present (with rumblings of upcoming war wafting nervously in the air). Time cycles restlessly throughout the text, always refusing to march linearly forward, instead trying to slip into more ambiguous temporal spaces.

As well as impending war there’s also the long shadow Woolf’s death casts across the text—would the text seem quite as elegiac as it does if Woolf had lived and written more texts after it? An impossible question, and one undermined somewhat by the text itself, which continuously waves off the past and even the future to place the emphasis instead on the present moment. This moment. “The hands of the clock had stopped at the present moment” the narrative trumpets. “It was now. Ourselves.”

And when exactly is “now?” The “now” of the text? The “now” of the words first written upon a piece of paper? The “now” of the reader reading the words? For the briefest of instants, the present moment manages to contain them all. [Second reading.]

George grubbed. The flower blazed between angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling, of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete.

This is my eleventh work of Woolf's, and despite not having read to entirety even the novel section of her vast bibliography, I feel in a way that I have come full circle between my introduction to [b:The Voyage Out|148905|The Voyage Out|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328874751s/148905.jpg|1412170], her first (although there's [b:Melymbrosia|741136|Melymbrosia|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1328748254s/741136.jpg|944744] to consider), and this, her last. I won't say that this is perfect, as not only does Woolf stick too closely to her writerly comfort zone to allow for much brilliance, there's a spot of nastiness in the latter half of the story that cannot be excused. However,. the consequence of Woolf being so aware of her strengths and weaknesses make for a pitch perfect choice of setting and structure and trellis upon which to nurture her script upon, such that she is able to touch upon the full historical spread of [b:Orlando|18839|Orlando|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443118010s/18839.jpg|6057225] without barely a hint of suspension of disbelief, the odes to aesthetics of [b:Mrs. Dalloway|14942|Mrs. Dalloway|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1479336522s/14942.jpg|841320] without the severe tragedy of WWI, the incoming doom of [b:The Waves|46114|The Waves|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1439492320s/46114.jpg|6057263] without the sometimes alienating storminess of the flow and plunge. It's certainly not her best, but it is such a perfectly balanced portrait of what it means for writing to be 'Woolfean' that I would fully recommend as someone's introduction to the writer if it weren't so much Woolf's novelistic farewell.

Of course, there's the whole of English literature to choose from. But how can one choose? Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I've read, what I haven't read.

If Woolf wasn't inspired by Hamlet in the writing of this, I'll eat my hat. I also, for reasons of personal taste, got very strong vibes of the movie adaptation of Waters' [b:The Little Stranger|7234875|The Little Stranger|Sarah Waters|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1407105269s/7234875.jpg|5769396] (I haven't read the book, but I just might, as the film continues to haunt me) for this, although while that more modern rendition is the horrific fallout of Britain's aristocratic dream, this is the heyday winding down into slow, and yet behind the scenes unstable, retirement of the benevolent nobility and their earnest villagers. I'm apparently not yet cynical enough to not find Woolf's pantheon of Victorian matrons watching the world enter WWII heartbreakingly nostalgic, so with her customary flights of prose that will forever constitute my bread and butter, I was half in love with some of the characters, half put out by some of the more odious results of limitations of typical Anglo/Eurocentrism, half in mourning as one particular character's self-destructive throes combined with incoming storm building on the continent that is soon, even in the 1939 of the novel's setting and especially in 1941 during the novel's publication, to become much, much, much worse. Knowing what I do about Woolf's motivations, I even see some of her in the life-of-the-party Manresa, for Leonard Woolf, passing on the final judgment of whether this novel without its final edits could be considered complete in the wake of his wife's plunge into the Seine, was Jewish. I wouldn't defend any instance of her anti-Semitism discovered in her work (especially considering her use of the n-word in this particular work), but she and Leonard obviously lived and worked together to a unique pitch of perfection rarely seen in couples and even more so in literary ones (the husband more often than not engulfing the wife in the halls of ivory tower remembrance as if in revenge of the fate of male praying mantis' at the hands of their female mates), so in terms of what she gave and the fears she had as Hitler approached (her name was also, in addition to her husband's, on that list of Jewish people and Jewish associated people in England that the Nazis had their hands on), I'd say, whatever hurt she gave out, she at least balanced it somewhat with good.

For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see the hidden, join the broken. Look and listen. See the flowers, how they ray their redness, whiteness, silverness and blue. And the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, crowd together, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forward and the black cow stands still.

I have a good seven more books of unread Woolf on my shelves, , and after this, I am more committed to reading them than I have been in a while. I've had my rough spots (still debating whether to lower my rating for [b:Jacob's Room|225396|Jacob's Room|Virginia Woolf|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1388466257s/225396.jpg|3272732] or not), but she's still lasted longer in the face of a more vigorous pursuit than I have attempted with any author in my adult years (the idiot decision of Goodreads to get rid of the Most Read Authors stats feature at least got rid of evidence of my having read sixty-one of R.L. Stein's works, at least). I understand that her writing is bigoted and blinkered in more than one area as evidenced by just this one novel, but she has come the closest to my soul than any other author, and it'd take a great deal to wrench her away and make me believe I did not have a debt to repay. I don't plan on reading any more of her works this year, but I have also been more conservatively strategic about my challenge plans, so I'll have at least half the year or so to devote to far less hindered reading. I'd also like to acquire even more of her works, especially the diaries and essays, as the more I read of the mainstream, the more I am drawn to the collected bits and bobs and on and on, so it won't hurt to glance through the ever present Woolf section of the sale more than I have been doing of late. That, however, is for this weekend. For now, I am satisfied with what I've wrought.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke.