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PARTISAN REVIEW
I'm a great deal happier ... today than I was yesterday having this
afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel. Suppose
one thing should open out of another-as in an unwritten novel-only
not for 10 pages but 200 or so-doesn't that give the looseness and
lightness I want. ... Conceive (?) "Mark on the Wall," "K.G.," ["Kew
Gardens" ) and "Unwritten Novel" taking hands and dancing in unity.
What the unity shall be I have yet to discover; the theme is a blank to
me; but I see immense possibilities in the form I hit upon more or less
by chance two weeks ago.
Similarly, her first intuitions about
The Waves
were purely formal
ones:
Why not invent a new kind of play; as for instance:
Woman thinks .
He does .
Organ plays.
She writes.
They say.
She sings.
Night speaks.
They miss.
I think is must be something on this line-though I can't now see why.
Away from facts ; free; yet concentrated; prose yet poetry; a novel and
a play.
Or consider her early sense of
Between the Acts:
Will another novel ever swim up? If so, how? The only hint I have
towards it is that it 's to be dialogue: and poetry; and prose all quite dis–
tinct. No more long closely written books ...
It came over me suddenly last night as I was reading . . . that I saw the
form of a new novel. It's to be first the statement of the theme; then the
restatement; and so on: repeating the same story: singing out this and
then that, until the central idea is stated.
Before there is theme there is already a vision of form, and even after the
substance of the novel has been thought out the commitment is always to
the design.
Such a commitment does not make her, as many have claimed, a
theoretician of the novel. Intuitions about form affect her in much the same
way as a fresh image will stimulate a poet's creative process. Neither an
abstract nor purely intellectual fascination, formal considerations provide
Woolf with the emotional ap.d imaginative impetus into each new book.
Her absorption with forl'!'tal matters makes the thematic content of her
novels relatively unimportant to her fictional inspiration, and it is a fact that
