Re-reading Hermione Lee’s
biography of Virginia Woolf in preparation for a get together with friends to
talk about Woolf’s work—and Lee’s, for all that, for the bio, Virginia Woolf, A Life, is an incredible
achievement. Lee is tremendously thorough and she writes so well. But aside
from that it is a true work of love, not only of the life of its subject but of
the collective life of “dear Reader”. Philo-sophy in its widest sense.
Here, for example, is an aspect of Woolf
through Lee,
Painting overlaps
with remembering in To the Lighthouse,
and Virginia Woolf—like Lily Briscoe redoing her painting in the Ramsays’ house
and garden—spent a lifetime making her own ‘views’ of St Ives [Wales] [….] When
[Woolf] comes to [inventing] Mrs Ramsay […] she has given herself plenty of
practice:
For the great plateful of blue water
was before her, the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on
the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats,
the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed
to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.
When Virginia Woolf
describes Talland House [in St Ives] in her memoirs she does it like a picture:
she says it looked ‘like a child’s drawing of a house, remarkable only for its
flat roof, and the crisscrossed railing that ran round the roof, again, like
something that a child draws’.
Lee’s comments, I should add, come
from the second chapter of her book, titled ‘Houses.’ The main theme at that
point is to look into ways in which Woolf remembered her rich and very active
childhood and ways in which she wrote about those experiences. An interesting
reading, I think, for those in search of green sand dunes and platefuls of blue
water.
