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doors open before me." At the same time, having fini shed
Jacob's
R oom,
she is reading aga in (Sophocles and Euripides in Greek),
"struggling with Henry James's ghost stories for
The T imes,"
prepar–
ing an article on Ha rdy and putting toge ther her critica l essays in
The
Common R eader.
All along
Mrs. Dalloway
is brewing, and she is
trying to learn Russian. The combination of feverish work and socia l
activity (apparently unimpeded by Leona rd ) brings on a short bout of
her illness. She recovers.
As she moves toward a rtistic self-awareness, a Kea tsian sense o f
death in life makes her acutely responsive to moments of "sheer
beauty . . . beauty superabounding so tha t one a lmos t resents it, no t
being capa ble of ca tching it all
&
holding it a ll a t the moment. " She
feels "extraordinary emotions." " . . . I have to control my excitement–
as if I were pushing through a screen ... Wha t thi s portends I don 't
know. It is a general sense of the poetry o f existence tha t overcomes
me ... I have a sense of the flight of time; and thi s shores up my
emotions.' ,
Having discovered her identity as a writer, she reso lves to think no
more about fame: " I am to write what I like;
&
they' re to say wha t they
like." One could call this her feminism, but it reall y has to do with her
disC()Very of her art. " I have found out how to begin (a t forty ) to say
something in my own voice
&
that interests me so much I fee l I can go
ahead without praise." The crea tive need turns her inward , for she is
forging a new way of seeing.
When she turns to her fiction now, she is in her element: " I feel my
force flow straight from me at its full es t . . . free use o f the faculties
means happiness." Nor is she timid before her ambition: " In thi s book
[Mrs. Dalloway],
I have almost too many ideas. I want to give life
&
dea th , sanity
&
insanity; I want to criticize the social sys tem
&
show it a t
work, at its most intense... ." She is not sure tha t the absence of a
"reality gift" in her fiction is a flaw. " I insubstantize, willfully to some
extent, distrusting reality-its cheapness." When she returns to the
topic of the soul, she speaks of its "violent moods." " How describe
them, even with a waking mind? I think I grow more and mo re poetic.
Perhaps I restrained it
&
now, like a plant in a po t, it begins to crack
the earthenware."
Her art has given her psychic strength , and as she reaches the end
of
Mrs. Dalloway,
she a ffirms this new awa reness:
" It
is poe try I want
now ... I want the concentra tion
&
the romance, the words a ll glued
together, fu sed, g lowing... ." She no longer fee ls the need to shuttl e
back and forth between life and art: " How entirely I live in my
