Conspicuous Consumption

      After telling her that he thought The Waves was a masterpiece, Virginia Woolf's husband and first reader, Leonard, added that he "thinks the first 100 pages extremely difficult, & is doubtful how far any common reader will follow." I'm not sure if I qualify as a "common reader," but I maybe I am, because Leonard was spot on: It took me about 100 pages to learn how to read The Waves . The rest was pure pleasure. As I move through Woolf's novels, I am delighted to find that she never seems to have let herself get into a rut. In each novel she tries something new. In The Waves it is the presentation of six characters (and a seventh whose voice we never hear) through internal monologues—the stories they tell about themselves at different stages of their lives. Woolf shows us, by the end that, though they are individuals, they also form a sort of grid: they are all part of each other. Waves, we remember, are each separate from the other, but are b...

 It was brave of Virginia Woolf, in the wake of Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse , to try something completely different in her next novel, Orlando . Nothing like what had come before, it is a historical fantasia, and it is hard to imagine that Woolf didn't have fun writing it. Alas, however, it's not as much fun for the reader as it must have been for the author. There is humor and sparkling prose. It's Virginia Woolf we're talking about, after all. But the humor isn't always as humorous as it should be, and the prose, at times, doesn't sparkle brightly enough to hold one's interest. That's my take, but what do I know? It was extremely popular in its day, so much so that it made Virginia, Leonard, and the struggling Hogarth Press financially solvent for the first time. The novel is groundbreaking in its treatment of gender, but in terms of style, it seems less interesting than the narrative experiments Woolf had pulled off successfully in her previou...

 In To the Lighthouse , Virginia Woolf continues the modernist experimentation that first hit full stride in Mrs Dalloway . That is, there is almost no dialogue, and very little action. The novel is almost entirely the internal ruminations of Mrs. Ramsey, her husband, some of her eight children, and their guests at their country place on a Scottish island. The characters into whose minds Woolf guides us see things and people, and these things and people trigger thoughts, memories, fantasies, and everything else that goes through people's minds. As usual, Woolf is a joy at the sentence-level, but what stands out in To the Lighthouse is her attention to form. This is unsurprising and appropriate, as when narrative is obscure, form is what makes things cohere. The novel begins with a proposed trip to the lighthouse, which is ultimately thwarted by bad weather, and ends, ten years later, with a successful trip to the lighthouse. It is this frame that holds all the internal monologues ...

I'm in the midst of my year of reading Virginia Woolf. I plan to read all the novels, at least, but it will be hard to resist going back to the letters, the essays, and the journals. Perhaps because I'm focused on Woolf these days, her name seems to come up a lot, and in the last month or so I've encountered a claim that startled me, but does seem defensible: Virginia Woolf was a better critic than she was novelist. In both cases those who spoke this heresy acknowledged that they were being heretical in that slightly irritating "I know I'm being naughty, but . . . " manner, but again, I don't find the claim indefensible. I look forward to going back to the essays to see if any of them, or all of them taken together, could be as wonderful as Mrs Dalloway.  Someone must have noticed that Mrs Dalloway is one of the great modernist novels of the city—the influence of Joyce's day in Dublin is hard to miss. Mrs Dalloway spends her day, of course, in London ...

  I've decided to read Virginia Woolf's novels in order this year. I began with The Voyage Out and Night and Day ,  both of which are fine books. One sees, though, why they are probably the least read of Woolf's novels. They are competent and professional, but they aren't Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse . They are good, but that's all. With Jacob's Room , though, we see that the Virginia Woolf of those early novels has at last freed herself from Victorian novelistic convention, and begun to make it new. Start with her decision to make Jacob Flanders, the novel's protagonist, a cypher who we know almost entirely from the impressions others have of him. In this she does something that is perhaps parallel to but different from what Joyce (who she dismissed as an "egotistical self-taught working man," even as she acknowledged his influence on Jacob's Room ) did in Ulysses . In Joyce's work we follow different characters' streams of con...

Lauren Groff, in her excellent essay on Virginia Woolf's second novel,  Night and Day , compares it to the drawings Picasso did as a young man. Picasso's draftsmanship was not revolutionary; it was, however, superb: evidence that he had mastered the tradition. In much the same way, Woolf's novel is evidence that she was more than competent in the tradition that gave us the novels of Henry James and of Woolf's friend E.M. Forster. Like Picasso, she would go on to break the traditional mold. Night and Day is not as formally adventurous as her later work. It is, though, daring in its vision of English society moving from the Victorian era to the Edwardian, and especially what that might mean for women. The two women around whom the novel revolves, Katherine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, struggle to see how to live in the new world they are entering. Katherine, the granddaughter of a famous poet comes from a family that might now be called "bourgeois bohemian." They...

Virginia Woolf’s first novel, which takes place mostly on board a ship and in South America, is clearly apprentice work. The young person’s earnestness about the big subjects—love, marriage, and death—is there, and at times predictably leaden. But having said that, the young person making this first attempt is Virginia Woolf , and there are flashes of her future brilliance throughout. Her descriptions of social events, the society in which they occur, and of the people who populate that society are often witty, perceptive, and brilliant, and her engagement with at least one of the big issues, death, is substantial and moving. In her reflections on the place of women in society we see the seeds of A Room of One’s Own . This was the last book I finished in 2025. I look forward to continuing my reading and rereading of Virginia Woolf’s novels in 2026.