Is Virginia Woolf Important? What a reviewer learned from annotating ‘Mrs. Dalloway ‘

[ad_1]

In the introduction to The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, Merve Emre describes Virginia Woolf as the hostess of his 1925 modernist classic: flitting from room to room, presenting each of her characters to us in such a way that their consciousness merges with ours in a collective. flux. It’s an apt metaphor for a book whose main character, Clarissa Dalloway, races errands for her own party, which will bring a dramatic conclusion to the stories of its characters, with London’s elite battling the traumas of WWI.

As editor and annotator of this new edition, Emre operates in much the same way, bringing the reader to a new understanding of Ms. Dalloway. His hundreds of notes, some quite critical, along with maps, illustrations and photographs, make a precious gift for the great novels of many fans: careful accounting of the Woolfs process. Reviewer, professor and previously author of The Personality Brokers, Emre spoke to The Times from his home near the University of Oxford about Woolf’s conflicting politics, its modern relevance, and what we can learn from the analysis of his suicide note.

Congratulations on this wonderful book!

Can I tell you something about the cover? If you go to Woolf’s house, Monks House, there is an amazing mirror that Woolf’s sister, painter Vanessa Bell, designed and then put in this fabric frame, and right in front of the mirror is the portrait of Virginia Woolf you see on the cover. So when you stand in the room, the painting appears reflected in the mirror! When I sent the designers over from Norton, they saw this and immediately designed this beautiful blanket. It just blew me away.

Of all Virginia Woolf’s books, why Mrs. Dalloway?

It hits that sweet spot in his career, the middle period of his novels, and with it a much more deliberate and determined understanding of his own craft, which you see in the newspapers and drafts. In addition, Mrs. Dalloway is the first novel that I can remember reading with another person and writing to her. This impulse to identify with a character seems to be one of the most pervasive impulses we have.

The story continues

Why do readers need an annotated version?

My approach is that the annotator is a kind of companion with the author, a friendly voice or a sometimes critical or combative voice. I transcribed the entire manuscript myself and had never been so close to a text before.

In doing this, I realized how political a Madame Dalloway novel is! Many of my students ask: Why should we care about a posh old woman throwing a party? But when you read it you realize how concerned she is about British imperialism and how satirical it is. It’s about a whole society emerging from confinement and mass death and how to grieve without compensation.

You have lived in America and the UK. Is there a difference in the way Woolf is read in the two places?

I can only give an impressionistic answer, which is that in the UK she was canonized in higher education as one of the greatest modernists of her time and as a great feminist writer, about which I feel more ambivalent. One of the things that’s been interesting about writing these annotations is coming to terms with the limits of your feminism, along the class lines.

I think sometimes people see Woolf as a traditional high society figure, especially those who haven’t read his work. But this is not quite true.

One of the arguments that convinced me a lot is that the reason she is able to parody colonialism so well is that she harbors the same prejudices as the characters. I’m not very interested in judging dead writers for the beliefs they had 100 years ago, but I’m interested in how beliefs are refracted in their novels. What she does in Mrs. Dalloway ‘is quite interesting from an aesthetic point of view, and you can keep in mind the beauty of the style and the politics.

How does that fit in with his daring weirdness?

Woolf’s understanding of sexuality is radical, and she stirs up where it might seem conservative by today’s standards. Sally and Clarissas kiss, even very young I was trying to figure out what it was: is this a lesbian romance or not ?! Its refusal to settle in these categories is part of its great charm.

Does Woolf’s stream of consciousness influence autofiction today?

I don’t think autofiction is a stable or useful category. Novelists have drawn on their own lives since Cervantes. It’s just that now we have so many more social media verification mechanisms, author interviews that make autofiction seem distinct from fiction. But I don’t think it is. I joked with a friend that it should be called verified realism.

And what influence have the annotations had on your own work?

It has made me a much better reader to read someone so closely and familiarize myself with all the versions and parts that go into different editions of the same book.

For example, the first American edition contains a very famous phrase, which comes immediately after Clarissa learned of Septimus’ suicide: He made her feel beauty; made him feel the pleasure. Woolf excised it in the British edition but kept it in the American edition. Classy woman derives pleasure from the death of a working class veteran ?! It’s an indictment of his character but it’s a question for the editors of any new edition, what to do with that line.

I’ve always thought of this line in the sense that someone else’s suicide forces us to re-evaluate our own choices.

Woolf has extensively edited the scene of Septimus’ suicide: Life was good. The scorching sun. In a draft, she adds this line, the scorching sun. One way to read this is that he kills himself so that he is not confined or institutionalized, he chooses life by killing himself.

When you read the drafts of Woolf’s suicide note, you see these same ideas reflected. In the second draft, all the I’s, I can’t read, etc. are deleted, so that the note ends up being entirely about [her husband] Leonardo. It’s very disturbing in part because she self-destructs even through the act of writing.

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

[ad_2]