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Woolf in chic clothing

January 30 2003

No one's afraid of Virginia Woolf ... a snob and feminist icon.

Virginia Woolf was a difficult novelist with a reputation for battiness and bad dress sense - a heroine for many, but hardly a candidate for Hollywood stardom. Maria Alvarez tracks a remarkable transformation.

'Most people just think of her as this mad woman who committed suicide," says British actress Eileen Atkins, who played Virginia Woolf in an award-winning one-woman show, A Room of One's Own. That, at least, is about to change.

The film adaption of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-winning novel, The Hours, the story of Woolf's effect on two women from different eras, won a handful of awards at the Golden Globes. The award for best actress went to Nicole Kidman, who played Woolf while wearing a huge prosthetic nose. The film seems set to make Kidman - and Woolf - even greater stars than they already are. So who was the real Virginia Woolf? And how did she become such an iconic feminist figurehead?

The reincarnation of Woolf - a "difficult" modernist novelist with a reputation for battiness and bad dress sense - as a Hollywood A-list heroine is not an obvious one. Until her suicide in 1941, Woolf was a member of the Bloomsbury set, a self-appointed coterie of artists and intellectuals renowned for their bohemian attitudes to food, sexuality and art.

She had been born into a Victorian upper-middle class, intellectual family in 1882, the daughter of the biographer Sir Leslie Stephen, but despite the privileged beginnings her childhood was not happy. Her mother died when she was 13, and the young Virginia suffered sexual abuse at the hands of two of her stepbrothers, a fact many consider to be responsible for a perceived frigidity and asexuality in her life and work. Three other deaths (that of her stepsister, a brother and her father) followed in fairly quick succession. In her teens she first began to suffer from the breakdowns (often accompanied by hallucinations and manic depression) that plagued her all her life and led to her suicide. In 1941 at the age of 59 she filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river.

So why has Woolf become such a feminist heroine? Perhaps because she admitted the degree to which she was hampered in her position as a woman. Critics have long highlighted, for instance, the fact that Woolf acknowledged it was the death of her father that released her, at the age of 25, to be a writer. Part of her experimental strategy involved overthrowing what he had stood for.

Despite not having a formal education like her brothers, she began writing essays and reviews in her early 20s, and went on to acquire a reputation for her experimental novels. When they were published, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, both explorations of consciousness with women at their centre, were met with a mix of admiration and bafflement; today they are considered classics.

But Woolf has always had her critics, many of whom have been preoccupied with her central position in the infamous Bloomsbury set. It was an undeniably snobbish and eccentric group - Woolf, for instance, had several Sapphic flirtations, most notably with the author and aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, whom she celebrated in her cross-dressing, transsexual novel, Orlando. For many, her open, class-bound snobbery and unabashed highbrow aestheticism, when combined with socialist leanings, were a difficult mix. She was hardly shy of controversy in any case: her famous feminist polemics, Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own, the latter famously arguing that an income and a creative space is a precondition for female creativity, were heavily criticised by her friends and husband as being too political.

Woolf's position in the canon of literary greats was insecure for many years, partly as a result of the influence of the critic F.R. Leavis, and his wife, Q.D. Leavis, who constantly attacked her credentials as a writer. It was only in the 1960s that her remarkable cultural renaissance began when feminist literary critics trumpeted her case. They have not been responsible for just her huge reputation, but for a mushrooming popularity, particularly among successive waves of educated younger women.

That reputation, particularly in the United States, is now enormous (her class and elitism are viewed less problematically by American critics). Since the 1970s, Woolf has been interpreted and reinterpreted into countless literary incarnations. The resulting multiplicity of critically determined Woolfs has made her one of those figures with an enormous reputation but a highly disputed one.

Woolf's biographer, Hermione Lee, explains the continuing appeal: "She's kept pace with all movements and fashion. There are aspects to her which are very contemporary." She points to Woolf's indeterminate sexuality, her experience of sexual abuse, her resistance of the "patriarchy" of the literary establishment, her supposed anorexia, and her mental illness as typically feminine - and deeply contemporary - concerns.

We may be no closer to agreeing what Woolf means, however. Feminist icon or snobbish Bloomsbury bitch? Sister to all women or cosseted daughter of the establishment? A great writer and coy feminist, or a feminist treasure but questionable novelist? Mainly mad or mainly sane? This is not just a case of postmodern proliferation. Woolf was a protean creature: cruel-tongued, needy, lucid and mystical all at the same time.

The film The Hours sympathetically perpetuates one stereotype of Woolf - the restless, tortured, "mad" artist in enforced exile from real life, and ultimately torn apart by this alienation. She is contrasted with Vanessa Bell, her sister, sane and busy and preoccupied with her children. A more "real", rounded woman, the film suggests.

A residual reaction to the author's supposed snobbery still persists, and not just among her vituperative male detractors. (This was, after all, the woman who labelled James Joyce "underbred".) But while she clearly had faults, the drive to claim Woolf as a contemporary has occasionally encouraged critics to forget that she was also of her time.

"In the '80s it became fashionable to see her as a victim of childhood sex abuse," Lee says. "It depoliticised her. I came in the early '90s to try to get rid of this image of her as elitist, precious and protected - and as a victim. Kidman is very good at the rather angry side, but [she shows only] the charmless side. It wasn't that tragic." Lee's biography presents a more rounded Woolf - waspish, contradictory and divided.

American literary critic and author Elaine Showalter argues that Woolf's breakdowns coincided with crises in her femininity (her mother's death, for instance, occurred at the onset of menstruation, and perhaps abuse, and another, later breakdown came after being warned by her doctors and husband against having children). Natasha Walter, author of The New Feminism, sees the breakdowns, which came just after she finished her books, as being very much tied to her work, and to an internalised guilt about writing being a denial of femininity.

Novelist Deborah Moggach, who admits having real problems with Woolf's snobbery, concedes: "She's right about writing being ultimately genderless. And about having a room of one's own. A great deal of creative work is creating a space, keeping the core of yourself separate for work."

The Hours will ensure that a new generation of women will reinvent and reappraise Woolf. "She's not a feminist icon," Showalter says, "and not everything is a masterpiece. But she was an inspiring, paradigmatic figure of female literary struggle."

The Guardian




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