Virginia Woolf Season Begins
Blog post by Lisa Hutchins
The Voyage Out lecture by Alison Hennegan, 14 November 2020
Life feels extremely challenging at the moment – once again we find ourselves in lockdown, only this time without glorious spring weather and long light evenings to help ease the burden. Now we have sudden heavy showers, roof-shaking winds, cancelled plans and darkness by 4.30pm.
All the advice for getting through this difficult second lockdown seems to centre around doing the things that make you feel good. Well, for me, taking an opportunity for a deep dive into the works of a favourite author for two hours, in the company of many other people who also love that author’s works, can offer an absolutely perfect antidote to our everyday difficulties. From this point of view, the current Virginia Woolf Season from Literature Cambridge could not be better timed, offering as it does the opportunity to study each of her major works, fiction and non-fiction, in order of publication.
My first experiences of reading Virginia Woolf centred on the ‘big three’ of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse and Orlando, and I would guess this is not unusual. In fact, I was going on a two-week hike along the Cornish coast and only had space in my rucksack for a single volume. I chose a three-in-one Great Classic Library edition of Woolf’s works which could stand a bit of rough treatment. I did this without much forethought because reading Woolf was something I had been meaning to do for years and had never got around to. Well, I found out what I had let myself in for on the first night in a guesthouse, after a long train journey down to Padstow, and because I had literally no other reading matter available, I had to persevere. A day or two later, with much encouragement from my partner who is a lifelong Woolf enthusiast, I had got my eye in and started to seriously appreciate the novels. By the end of the holiday I had read the lot and was an enthusiastic convert.
In the years since I have read many of Woolf’s other works, filling in gaps whenever opportunities presented themselves, and I have learned more about her world with visits to the places in London, Kent, Sussex and Cornwall that were important to her. Mostly I sought out essentials like A Room of One’s Own and discovered engaging curiosities, like Flush which I read with great appreciation. It took another 20 years or more, and quite a bit of help from Literature Cambridge, to come to terms with The Waves, but that is another story. However, some of the works at the beginning and end of Woolf’s writing career I have read maybe once, or not at all, and have no proper feel for. For me, this Woolf season is an opportunity to broaden and deepen my understanding of Woolf’s whole body of work. I have learned since that walking holiday that it is very much worth the effort.
Something I always enjoy about Literature Cambridge events is hearing from scholars, Alison Hennegan being the perfect example, who are so knowledgeable about Woolf’s works, life and times that they can make amazing connections and draw out less-than-obvious themes. Her season-launching first lecture on The Voyage Out considered what luggage the young Virginia Stephen packed for her journey as a writer. We considered her relationship with her parents and whether the death of her father in 1904, which contributed to a serious mental breakdown, might also have served as something of a liberation. Alison looked at women who were important in Woolf’s life at this time, and at the complex journey of her first novel through many drafts to publication. She discussed the nature of Woolf’s education and the wider intellectual context in which she worked, looking at authors considered canonical at the time but much less well-regarded in our current era. She pointed in particular to the work of Walter Pater, a critic and essayist who Woolf is likely to have read extensively, and also discussed her interest in the poet Christina Rossetti.
Lisa Hutchins, Padstow
It is a particular pleasure that a close look at an individual work by Woolf can lead one to explore other authors who may have been important or influential to her, or who have written about novel aspects of her life. As a result of previous sessions I have sought out Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West and the perhaps underappreciated modernist Henry Green. I am also looking forward to reading Alison Light’s Mrs Woolf and the Servants, which I hope will shed some nuanced light on Woolf’s frequently-mentioned ‘servant problem’. I now also look forward to reading more of Rossetti’s work with these new insights in mind, and to taking part in other events in this fascinating and very welcome season.
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The Virginia Woolf Season studies all 12 of Woolf’s major books in 2020-21 and beyond. Live online lectures and seminars with leading scholars.
