140
PARTISAN REVIEW
novel,
The Wise Virgins).
"Now this is the man that Virginia mar–
ried," is Poole's ominous pronouncement.
But Virginia as "victim" is even less believable than Virginia as
repressed feminist. Mrs. Woolf herself in her rational moments (which
was most of the time) never doubted that her husband was acting in her
behalf. "I think of you and want you ... you have given me the best
things in life, " she wrote to him from her retreat. The recriminations,
speculative at best, contribute nothing to our understanding of the part
that Virginia Woolf's mental and spiritual states played in the develop–
ment of her art. Ultimately
The Unknown Virginia
Wool/sinks under
the author 's delusion that strictly subjective evidence offers a greater
guarantee of the truth than evidence garnered from observation.
A chronicle of artistic growth dominates the second volume of
Virginia Woolf's
Diary.
In
1920
she has reached the age of thirty-eight
and is beginning to recognize her poetic sense of life, which she speaks
of as her "soul." The years
1920-1924
are crucial in her development as
a writer: she has completed a short story volume,
Monday
or
Tuesday,
is at work on
Jacob's Room,
and is gestating a new kind of novel ,
tentatively titl ed
The Hours,
which is to become
Mrs. Dalloway.
Whatever disenchantment and pain life has brought her, on her thirty–
eighth birthday she acknowledges being "a great deal happier than I
was at twenty-eight; and happier today than I was yesterday having this
afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel."
It
will
have "no scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but
the heart, the passion, the humor, everything bright as fire in the
midst. "
Living in Richmond now, away from " the Atheneum world with
its reviews, editions, lunches
&
tittle-tattle," she is aware of an altered
relationship to Bloomsbury. At one function she attends, she notes:
"the quality gone; raucous common sense; serious literary criti cism
&
what annoyed me every attempt of a different sort snuffed out directly."
Yet she admits: " I grow weary of 'going outLO tea' and I can't res ist it.
To leave a door shut that might be open is in my eye some son of
blasphemy." She enjoys a night spent with her sister in Charleston and
records: "Leonard came over next day
&
found me neither suicidal nor
homicidal. " But a month later, on the first day of winter, her mood has
changed: "Why is life tragic; so like a little strip of pavement over an
abyss. I look down; I feel giddy; I wonder how I am ever to walk to the
end.... And with it all," the entry ends, "how happy I am."
She announces in the summer of
1922
that "Leonard and I are
becoming celebrities. . . . I found myself thinking of fame
&
seeing
