If one wants to compare life to anything,” writes Virginia Woolf with mock astonishment in “A Mark on the Wall” (1917), “one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour—landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one's hair!” (4). With that striking, comical image, Woolf hints at both the exhilaration and the banality of life—and of the Tube. Hurtling through underground tunnels is a rollercoaster experience, but it is also involuntary and disorientating. You go at high speed but you are out of control, a passive subject swept along until you are dropped, dishevelled, at a destination. In this paper I want to unravel some of Woolf's complicated, changing feelings about the fundamental urban experience of being “blown through the Tube” deep below the streets of London.

In fact, the Tube appears relatively little in her work. Woolf herself tended not to use it unless she had to: she much preferred to be out in the open, walking or on the omnibus, winding through the traffic, looking out at the crowded streets. The District Line from Richmond would always be associated with the misery of living out in the suburbs. She complained a great deal in her diary about having to leave parties at eleven o’ clock in order to get the train home, thereby missing all the most exciting bits. For her, one of the many joys of living in the center of London was that she could wander home in roundabout ways, taking a detour and enjoying the night air. This is what she describes so often and so passionately: those lamplit explorations when the whole structure of London is revealed, when daytime incidentals are hidden, when the city is most profoundly hers.

So there are not very many Tube journeys in her writing, but when they do appear they are rich in figurative significance, dense with historical and social reference, and with fascinating implications for Woolf's aesthetics. Take the small, intriguing instance of her Underground thinking which occurs in “Craftsmanship,” a talk she gave for the BBC in April 1937.