The Lady in the Looking-Glass by Virginia Woolf

THE LADY IN THE LOOKING-GLASS 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / La mujer ante el espejo

A Reflection

People should not leave looking-glasses hanging in their rooms any more than they should leave open cheque books or letters confessing some hideous crime. One could not help looking, that summer afternoon, in the long glass that hung outside in the hall. Chance had so arranged it. From the depths of the sofa in the drawing-room one could see reflected in the Italian glass not only the marble-topped table opposite, but a stretch of the garden beyond. One could see a long grass path leading between banks of tall flowers until, slicing off an angle, the gold rim cut it off.

Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf

 

Illustration by T.A.

MOMENTS OF BEING 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Momentos de vida

"Slater's pins have no points."

"Slater's pins have no points—don't you always find that?" said Miss Craye, turning round as the rose fell out of Fanny Wilmot's dress, and Fanny stooped, with her ears full of the music, to look for the pin on the floor.

The New Dress by Virginia Woolf

THE NEW DRESS 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / El vestido nuevo

Mabel had her first serious suspicion that something was wrong as she took her cloak off and Mrs. Barnet, while handing her the mirror and touching the brushes and thus drawing her attention, perhaps rather markedly, to all the appliances for tidying and improving hair, complexion, clothes, which existed on the dressing table, confirmed the suspicion—that it was not right, not quite right, which growing stronger as she went upstairs and springing at her, with conviction as she greeted Clarissa Dalloway, she went straight to the far end of the room, to a shaded corner where a looking-glass hung and looked. No! It was not right. And at once the misery which she always tried to hide, the profound dissatisfaction—the sense she had had, ever since she was a child, of being inferior to other people—set upon her, relentlessly, remorselessly, with an intensity which she could not beat off, as she would when she woke at night at home, by reading Borrow or Scott; for oh these men, oh these women, all were thinking—"What's Mabel wearing? What a fright she looks! What a hideous new dress!"—their eyelids flickering as they came up and then their lids shutting rather tight. It was her own appalling inadequacy; her cowardice; her mean, water-sprinkled blood that depressed her. And at once the whole of the room where, for ever so many hours, she had planned with the little dressmaker how it was to go, seemed sordid, repulsive; and her own drawing-room so shabby, and herself, going out, puffed up with vanity as she touched the letters on the hall table and said: "How dull!" to show off—all this now seemed unutterably silly, paltry, and provincial. All this had been absolutely destroyed, shown up, exploded, the moment she came into Mrs. Dalloway's drawing-room.

A Woman's College from Outside

A WOMAN'S COLLEGE FROM OUTSIDE 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Un colegio de mujeres visto desde afuera

The feathery-white moon never let the sky grow dark; all night the chestnut blossoms were white in the green, and dim was the cow-parsley in the meadows. Neither to Tartary nor to Arabia went the wind of the Cambridge courts, but lapsed dreamily in the midst of grey-blue clouds over the roofs of Newnham. There, in the garden, if she needed space to wander, she might find it among the trees; and as none but women's faces could meet her face, she might unveil it blank, featureless, and gaze into rooms where at that hour, blank, featureless, eyelids white over eyes, ringless hands extended upon sheets, slept innumerable women. But here and there a light still burned.

Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street by Virginia Woolf

Ben Brooksbank, Old Bond Street from Piccadilly, 1955

MRS DALLOWAY IN BOND STREET 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / La señora Dalloway en Bond Street

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself.

Big Ben was striking as she stepped out into the street. It was eleven o'clock and the unused hour was fresh as if issued to children on a beach. But there was something solemn in the deliberate swing of the repeated strokes; something stirring in the murmur of wheels and the shuffle of footsteps.

In the Orchad by Virginia Woolf

IN THE ORCHARD 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / En el huerto

Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence 'Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde oui le rire des filles elate le mieux...' as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.

Blue and Green by Virginia Woolf

 

BLUE AND GREEN 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Azul y verde

Green

The ported fingers of glass hang downwards. The light slides down the glass, and drops a pool of green. All day long the ten fingers of the lustre drop green upon the marble. The feathers of parakeets—their harsh cries—sharp blades of palm trees—green, too; green needles glittering in the sun. But the hard glass drips on to the marble; the pools hover above the dessert sand; the camels lurch through them; the pools settle on the marble; rushes edge them; weeds clog them; here and there a white blossom; the frog flops over; at night the stars are set there unbroken. Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the mantelpiece; the ruffled surface of ocean. No ships come; the aimless waves sway beneath the empty sky. It's night; the needles drip blots of blue. The green's out.

Blue

The snub-nosed monster rises to the surface and spouts through his blunt nostrils two columns of water, which, fiery-white in the centre, spray off into a fringe of blue beads. Strokes of blue line the black tarpaulin of his hide. Slushing the water through mouth and nostrils he sings, heavy with water, and the blue closes over him dowsing the polished pebbles of his eyes. Thrown upon the beach he lies, blunt, obtuse, shedding dry blue scales. Their metallic blue stains the rusty iron on the beach. Blue are the ribs of the wrecked rowing boat. A wave rolls beneath the blue bells. But the cathedral's different, cold, incense laden, faint blue with the veils of madonnas.

---

Society by Virginia Woolf

 

SOCIETY 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / La sociedad

This is how it all came about. Six or seven of us were sitting one day after tea. Some were gazing across the street into the windows of a milliner's shop where the light still shone brightly upon scarlet feathers and golden slippers. Others were idly occupied in building little towers of sugar upon the edge of the tea tray. After a time, so far as I can remember, we drew round the fire and began as usual to praise men—how strong, how noble, how brilliant, how courageous, how beautiful they were—how we envied those who by hook or by crook managed to get attached to one for life—when Poll, who had said nothing, burst into tears. Poll, I must tell you, has always been queer. For one thing her father was a strange man. He left her a fortune in his will, but on condition that she read all the books in the London Library. We comforted her as best we could; but we knew in our hearts how vain it was. For though we like her, Poll is no beauty; leaves her shoe laces untied; and must have been thinking, while we praised men, that not one of them would ever wish to marry her. At last she dried her tears. For some time we could make nothing of what she said. Strange enough it was in all conscience. She told us that, as we knew, she spent most of her time in the London Library, reading. She had begun, she said, with English literature on the top floor; and was steadily working her way down to the Times on the bottom. And now half, or perhaps only a quarter, way through a terrible thing had happened. She could read no more. Books were not what we thought them. "Books," she cried, rising to her feet and speaking with an intensity of desolation which I shall never forget, "are for the most part unutterably bad!"

The String Quartet by Virginia Woolf

 

THE STRING QUARTET 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / El cuarteto de cuerdas

Well, here we are, and if you cast your eye over the room you will see that Tubes and trams and omnibuses, private carriages not a few, even, I venture to believe, landaus with bays in them, have been busy at it, weaving threads from one end of London to the other. Yet I begin to have my doubts—

Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf

 

The Green Woman, 1963
Eugène Samain

MONDAY OR TUESDAY 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Lunes o martes

Lazy and indifferent, shaking space easily from his wings, knowing his way, the heron passes over the church beneath the sky. White and distant, absorbed in itself, endlessly the sky covers and uncovers, moves and remains. A lake? Blot the shores of it out! A mountain? Oh, perfect—the sun gold on its slopes. Down that falls. Ferns then, or white feathers, for ever and ever—

A Haunted House by Virginia Woolf

A HAUNTED HOUSE 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Una casa encantanda

Whatever hour you woke there was a door shunting. From room to room they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure—a ghostly couple.

An Unwritten novel by Virginia Woolf

 

AN UNWRITTEN NOVEL 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Una novela no escrita

Such an expression of unhappiness was enough by itself to make one's eyes slide above the paper's edge to the poor woman's face—insignificant without that look, almost a symbol of human destiny with it. Life's what you see in people's eyes; life's what they learn, and, having learnt it, never, though they seek to hide it, cease to be aware of—what? That life's like that, it seems. Five faces opposite—five mature faces—and the knowledge in each face. Strange, though, how people want to conceal it! Marks of reticence are on all those faces: lips shut, eyes shaded, each one of the five doing something to hide or stultify his knowledge. One smokes; another reads; a third checks entries in a pocket book; a fourth stares at the map of the line framed opposite; and the fifth—the terrible thing about the fifth is that she does nothing at all. She looks at life. Ah, but my poor, unfortunate woman, do play the game—do, for all our sakes, conceal it!

Solid Objects by Virginia Woolf

 

SOLID OBJECTS 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Objetos sólidos

The only thing that moved upon the vast semicircle of the beach was one small black spot. As it came nearer to the ribs and spine of the stranded pilchard boat, it became apparent from a certain tenuity in its blackness that this spot possessed four legs; and moment by moment it became more unmistakable that it was composed of the persons of two young men. Even thus in outline against the sand there was an unmistakable vitality in them; an indescribable vigour in the approach and withdrawal of the bodies, slight though it was, which proclaimed some violent argument issuing from the tiny mouths of the little round heads. This was corroborated on closer view by the repeated lunging of a walking-stick on the right-hand side. "You mean to tell me...You actually believe..." thus the walkingstick on the right-hand side next the waves seemed to be asserting as it cut long straight stripes upon the sand.

The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf

THE MARK ON THE WALL 

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / La marca en la pared

Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall. In order to fix a date it is necessary to remember what one saw. So now I think of the fire; the steady film of yellow light upon the page of my book; the three chrysanthemums in the round glass bowl on the mantelpiece. Yes, it must have been the winter time, and we had just finished our tea, for I remember that I was smoking a cigarette when I looked up and saw the mark on the wall for the first time. I looked up through the smoke of my cigarette and my eye lodged for a moment upon the burning coals, and that old fancy of the crimson flag flapping from the castle tower came into my mind, and I thought of the cavalcade of red knights riding up the side of the black rock. Rather to my relief the sight of the mark interrupted the fancy, for it is an old fancy, an automatic fancy, made as a child perhaps. The mark was a small round mark, black upon the white wall, about six or seven inches above the mantelpiece.

Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf

KEW GARDENS 

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf / Jardines de Kew

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown, circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface, and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves. Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July.

 

A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf – review

This collation of Virginia Woolf's thoughts on her writing provides a fascinating insight into her work and the workings of her mind

Anita Sethi

Sunday 30 December 2012

"G

reetings! my dear ghost," Virginia Woolf addresses her older self whom she imagines might one day read the diary entry she is writing. The pages are haunted with such hypothetical selves but also with her fictional characters as they are brought into being, from imagination to printed page. It was her husband Leonard Woolf's aim in publishing A Writer's Diary, he explains in the preface, to distil from his wife's26 volumes of diaries "everything which referred to her own writing", so giving "an unusual psychological picture of artistic production from within". First published in 1953, here reissued with an engaging preface from Lyndall Gordon, it chronicles the period from 1918 to Woolf's final entry four days before her suicide in 1941.

Virginia Woolf

How Virginia Woolf’s work was shaped by music

Emma Sutton

March 26, 2021

Many of Virginia Woolf’s early reviewers noted parallels between her literary innovations and those of contemporary composers, such as Claude Debussy. Woolf’s interest in music was overlooked after her death. However, 80 years on, we are now beginning to explore how her extraordinary experimental uses of narrative perspective, repetition and variation derive from her close study of particular musical works and specific musical forms.

Virginia Woolf / Diary

 

VIRGINIA WOOLF

Diary entry

Virginia Woolf was a lifelong diarist, and her journals reveal deep connections with other modernist writers and their work. In this entry, Woolf hints at lukewarm feelings for James Joyce and records the first time she met T.S. Eliot: “He produced 3 or 4 poems for us to look at—the fruit of two years …. I became more or less conscious of a very intricate & highly organised framework of poetic belief; owing to his caution, & his excessive care in the use of language we did not discover much about it. I think he believes in ‘living phrases’ & their difference from dead ones; in writing with extreme care, in observing all syntax & grammar; & so making this new poetry flower on the stem of the oldest.”

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

It’s important to listen to imaginary voices – just ask Virginia Woolf

 

It’s important to listen to imaginary voices – just ask Virginia Woolf

Arman Zhenikeyev

January 24, 2017

Centuries ago, hearing voices in one’s head was thought to be a sign of communication with God – and if not that, then with the devil. In more recent years, it is associated with madness. But the concept of imaginary voices is also one that is profoundly literary. Fiction can be “experimental” in the scientific, as well as artistic, sense: a vehicle for investigating the role of voice in ordinary thinking as well as in creativity. Authors, too, can experience inner voices as “auditory verbal hallucinations”.

Virginia Woolf

The Diary of Virginia Woolf review – a book for the ages

Woolf’s epic and unmatchable record of her life, times and writing process

Hermione Lee
Thursday 22 June 2023

“Imeant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual,” Virginia Woolf wrote on 17 February 1922, when she had just turned 40. Her diary is full of pain: deaths, losses, illness, grief, depression, anguish, fear. But on every page life breaks in, with astonishing energy, relish and glee. The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageousself-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written, and it’s excellent to see it back in print.

Virginia Woolf’s own copy of her debut novel was found in Sydney and is now online.

 

Virginia Woolf, 1927

Virginia Woolf’s own copy of her debut novel was found in Sydney and is now online. Here’s what it reveals

This article is more than 1 month old

Mark Byron for the Conversation

Copy of The Voyage Out with writer’s handwritten annotations was discovered in University of Sydney library in 2021 and has now been digitised

Monday 14 July, 2023

One of just two copies of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), annotated with her handwriting and preparations to revise it for a US edition, was recently rediscovered in the Fisher Library Rare Books Collection at the University of Sydney.

Bought in the late 1970s, it had been misfiled with the science books in the Rare Books collection. Simon Cooper, a metadata services officer, found it in 2021 and immediately understood the value of his discovery.

‘The house sings with colour and with life’ / How the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home

Kate Moss photographed at Charleston house for British Vogue, 2021.
Photograph: Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott/Art Partner

‘The house sings with colour and with life’: how the fashion world fell for Charleston, the Bloomsbury set’s country home

From Virginia Woolf and her circle to Kate Moss’s Vogue shoot, the unconventional Sussex farmhouse has captured imaginations across the decades

How to get the Charleston look in your own home

Jess Cartner-Morley

Saturday 12 August 2023

The most fashionable house in England isn’t on an elegant London street or in a chocolate-box Cotswolds village, but at the end of a long, narrow, often muddy country lane riven deep in a fold of the Sussex Downs. Inside, there is not a single midcentury cocktail cabinet, rainforest shower or Italian designer sofa to be found. Instead, Charleston is a thickset farmhouse of doughty 17th-century stone, scrambled with roses, dormer windows nosing from a slope of weathered tile.

 

Kate Moss at Charleston, Wearing Kim Jones Fendi Couture Lensed by Mert & Marcus 2021

Update: The Guardian Fashion 8/12/23 tells readers how to get the Bloomsbury set’s Charleston vibe in their own homes, linking into Anne of Carversville’s 2021 feature “Kate Moss at Charleston, Wearing Kim Jones Fendi Couture Lensed by Mert & Marcus”.

 

Kate Moss
Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott 

 

Kim Jones Reveals His Deeply Personal Debut Fendi Couture Collection For “Pioneering Women” 

As its newly appointed artistic director of womenswear, Kim Jones is bringing a deeply personal, British sensibility to Fendi. In an exclusive preview of his debut couture collection, Jones talks to Olivia Singer about drawing inspiration from the Bloomsbury Group, while Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott photograph Kate Moss dressed in his designs, styled by Edward Enninful, at Charleston, the artistic set’s Sussex home. 

BY Olivia Singer
23 January 2021

Instead of sitting amid the high-vaulted, light-drenched glamour of the Fendi ateliers to talk with Kim Jones about his first collection for the Roman house, we go for a country walk in Sussex on an awfully grey day prior to lockdown, blustery and bleak with thick mists rendering it almost dark in mid-afternoon. We’re a long way from the Italian capital, where scores of seamstresses are in the process of weaving lattices of pearls and ornately embroidering couture gowns for his upcoming debut, but, nonetheless, it soon makes a lovely sort of sense. Jones recently bought a holiday home here, in the quiet village of Rodmell – a stone’s throw from the house where he spent much of his upbringing, and a few doors down from Virginia Woolf’s cottage – and he’s brought me here to give me a tour of his childhood. “As a teenager, I spent a lot of time cycling round all these villages,” he smiles, sidestepping a growling tractor. “This first collection feels almost autobiographical. What I’m referencing feels really personal.”

The Perfect Choice by Fleur Jaeggy

 

The Perfect Choice  

by Fleur Jaeggy

Translated by Gini Alhadeff

Fleur Jaeggy / La elección perfecta

The pain her son had caused her by choosing to die on a day in spring was less than she had expected. He is happy now, she said. And she herself felt almost relieved. She would have liked to die that way. Or she might have chosen a different method. But which? Pain let itself be pushed about like a paper kite and she, the mother, after having pondered the various ways of dying, was in absolute agreement with her only son, on the perfect choice. It couldn’t have been otherwise. She shut her eyes in order to see the scene, she knew the place by heart. Meanwhile she thought that she would have to change her will. The son had let himself fall off a rock, on the glorious Via Mala, where as a child they had taken him to see the gorges. Jörg looked unhappily at the water down below, lizard green, deep down. The mother dragged him way up, so as to have him look below. To force him to look down. His step faltered. He was sickly, wan. And this did not please the mother who held him by the hand. The boy looked at the emerald ring, the same colour as the water. Beyond the limits of the visible. And today, years later, he went down. No one forced him. Of his own will. His will pushed him to the end. Almost as though to recover his eyes as they’d been back then, that had settled with hatred on the pools of water. He hardly realised that he was going down, falling, the green water rocking him and the sharp edges of the rocks had already torn him apart. Fossil lances. He left the bicycle padlocked. Out of habit. He had been advised to ride a bike to attempt to calm his insomnia. You must tire yourself out. You must tire yourself out a great deal. With some physical exercise. The insomnia lessened. At the same time tiredness increased. The doctor is pleased. And the mother who had got him used to sleeping pills, too. They were a dynasty of insomniacs. Of insomniac women. The men were more given to sleep. They had always slept, the mother said on a sour note. Why then could her son not sleep? The tiredness had to be increased so that the insomnia could decrease. The only son had become so tired that he no longer cared about the insomnia. He didn’t even notice. He stayed up all night, it seemed to him that he had a great deal to do, in the doing of nothing.