Hope in Dark Times: the last works of Virginia Woolf

In October of 1932, several months after her fiftieth birthday, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “…how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.” In this Delve seminar we will explore three extraordinary literary lightning bolts that Woolf produced during the later years of her life, from the 1930’s through to the first years of World War II and the Battle of Britian. The rise of fascism provoked Woolf to attempt to locate its origins within European civilization and the patriarchal order. Dark times strengthened her longstanding commitments to anti-imperialism, pacifism, and feminism. “Writing and thinking” she wrote, are “my fighting.”

We will begin the seminar with “A Sketch of the Past” (1939), Woolf’s memoir of her childhood and youth in London and Cornwall (the setting of Woolf’s To The Lighthouse)—a section of the full memoir that Woolf intended to write but left unfinished at her death. One of the best, most moving first-person accounts of a writer’s origins and formation, it is as formally innovative as any of her novels.

We will then read Woolf’s feminist anti-war essay Three Guineas (1938), the sequel to A Room of One’s Own and the most devastating of her attacks on patriarchy and its relationship to fascism. It was the object of scathing reviews (many of the men closest to Woolf, including her husband, disliked the book) as well as effusive praise from, among others, pioneers of the feminist movement, and working-class men and women. The book uses a rich variety of rhetorical strategies, most notably a form of derisive humor, to undermine the patriarchal order and evoke possibilities for other ways of thinking and living.

The seminar will conclude with Woolf’s final novel Between the Acts (1941). It unfolds, like Mrs. Dalloway, over the course of a single day, just before the start of Second World War. It is a meditation on English history and literary history, time, marriage, sexuality, creativity, and community. Described as her most lyrical novel, a short book, and, yet, somehow epic, Between the Acts was hailed by W. H. Auden as her “masterpiece.”

Together we will explore these three works for what they can tell us about Woolf’s response to fascism and war during the last years of her life, for the ways in which our own times mirror hers, and for her thoughts about how we might prevent war in the future and build a better, more just world.

Texts:
Three Guineas
A Sketch of the Past
Between the Acts