November 9, 2024
cover of Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World

Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World (Gillian Gill)

“An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her.

How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies—of strength, style, and creativity—shaped Woolf’s path to the radical writing that inspires so many today.

   Gill casts back to Woolf’s French-Anglo-Indian maternal great-grandmother Thérèse de L’Etang, an outsider to English culture whose beauty passed powerfully down the female line; and to Woolf’s aunt Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who gave Woolf her first vision of a successful female writer.  Yet it was the women in her own family circle who had the most complex and lasting effect on Woolf.  Her mother, Julia, and sisters Stella, Laura, and Vanessa were all, like Woolf herself, but in markedly different ways, warped by the male-dominated household they lived in.  Finally, Gill shifts the lens onto the famous Bloomsbury group.  This, Gill convinces, is where Woolf called upon the legacy of the women who shaped her to transform a group of men–united in their love for one another and their disregard for women–into a society in which Woolf ultimately found her freedom and her voice.”

summary courtesy of Amazon

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I took a seminar on Virginia Woolf in my undergrad at the young and ignorant age of nineteen and I found myself jealous of her ability to turn a phrase but completely frustrated with the modernist stream-of-consciousness technique she employed. I would finish my Jacob’s Room readings for class the next day and breathe a sigh of relief because that meant I could move on to the next task on my endless to-do list. I was in college. I had a million things to do, and delving deep into the sometimes obtuse work that Virginia produced was not a top priority. Now that I’m out of education and reading her for my own personal edification, it all sits a bit differently. I’m 23, which is not very old at all, and yet I can feel myself looking at her with totally different eyes. I’m a bit besotted, honestly. I get it. 

Gill draws a rich portrait of Woolf’s forebears and the way that they sit in her foundations, as well as making a point at every turn to emphasize her importance in the literary canon. She says, “Woolf had an original mind, lived at an important point in history, read everything she could put her hands on, and labored every day well or ill, mad or sane, to write novels, meet her book review deadlines, scrawl a pile of letters, work up bits of dialogue and thumbnail sketches, and recovery in her diary the things her mind was busy with…A writer by profession, she published a great deal of what she wrote and kept even more.”

At the crux of this book is a truth that Gill phrases as being that “behind every great woman we can name is a long line of able, energetic, talented women for whom greatness was not an option”. I have found that the inverse is also true. We are all of us curious young women sitting in the shadows of the great women who came before us, wondering if they felt what they would mean to us, the generations of women to come. Virginia Woolf, this heroine to the mad little girls, has rendered a service that she will never know about, and it devastates me that I cannot reach across the years and tell her.

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