Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Note on the Text
- Prologue
- 1 Women's Future, Women's Fiction
- 2 A Shape that Fits
- 3 Women and Writing: A Room of One's Own
- 4 Writing the City: ‘Street Haunting’ and Mrs Dalloway
- 5 The Novel as Elegy: Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse
- 6 Writing Lives: Orlando, The Waves and Flush
- 7 Fact and Fiction: The Years and Three Guineas
- 8 Into the Heart of Darkness: Between the Acts
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
6 - Writing Lives: Orlando, The Waves and Flush
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations
- Note on the Text
- Prologue
- 1 Women's Future, Women's Fiction
- 2 A Shape that Fits
- 3 Women and Writing: A Room of One's Own
- 4 Writing the City: ‘Street Haunting’ and Mrs Dalloway
- 5 The Novel as Elegy: Jacob's Room and To the Lighthouse
- 6 Writing Lives: Orlando, The Waves and Flush
- 7 Fact and Fiction: The Years and Three Guineas
- 8 Into the Heart of Darkness: Between the Acts
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I doubt that I shall ever write another novel after O. I shall invent a new name for them.
(D. iii. 176)Yesterday morning I was in despair: You know that bloody book which Dadie and Leonard extort, drop by drop, from my breast? Fiction, or some title to that effect [Phases of Fiction]. I couldn't screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas.<…> it sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night <…>
Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 9 Oct. 1927. (L. iii. 428–9)I'm glad to be quit this time of writing ‘a novel’ & hope never to be accused of it again.
(D. iii. 185)As she was completing and revising To the Lighthouse, Woolf began to record in her diaries her impulses towards two very different kinds of writing. One would be a kind of ‘play-poem’ (D. iii. 139); ‘away from facts: free, yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel & a play’ (D. iii. 128); ‘an abstract mystical eyeless book’ (D. iii. 203). Many of the ideas and images circulating around this ‘play-poem’ were to be realised in The Waves. The second impulse was the desire for ‘an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is so closely considered. I want to kick up my heels & be off ’ (D. iii. 13):
I sketched the possibilities which an unattractive woman, penniless, alone, might yet bring into being. <…> It struck me, vaguely, that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun. Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called ‘The Jessamy Brides’ – why, I wonder? I have rayed round it several scenes. Two women, poor, solitary at the top of a house. One can see anything (for this is all fantasy) the Tower Bridge, clouds, aeroplanes. Also old men listening in the room over the way.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Virginia Woolf , pp. 116 - 149Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004