Books: How Time Passes

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The best steeplechasers are bred in Ireland. From England come literary thoroughbreds. Virginia Woolf's stepgrandfather was William Makepeace Thackeray. Half the most scholarly families in Eng-land—the Darwins, Maitlands, Symondses, Stracheys—are related to her. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography, kept open house for the great literary men of his day (Meredith, Stevenson, Ruskin, Hardy, John Morley, Oliver Wendell Holmes). The classic dead crowded the shelves of his library. Though Virginia Woolf's experience was as restricted as Jane Austen's, her reading knew no bounds. She began early to write reviews for the august London Times Literary Supplement, and still does. When she and her husband, Leonard Woolf, founded the Hogarth Press (1917), they began by publishing limited editions of such promising newcomers as Katherine Mansfield. John Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster; went on to commercial success and the most promising writer of them all, herself. Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), a conventional, competent piece, was well received in spite of the War. The pages of her second (Night and Day) now seem browned at the edges. In 1921 she cut loose from convention, published a book of sketches (Monday or Tuesday) written in an experimental associative-train-of-thought style which in the next ten years she developed into full flower. With Jacob's Room (1922), she captured the critics, began to win the reading public as well. Of her other books, Mrs. Dalloway is the most popular, but critical consensus has hailed The Waves as her masterpiece.

The Woman. Of the Englishwomen of letters before Virginia Woolf (Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes) none had her advantages. She was brought up as a young lady of the Edwardian era, with all a young lady's privileges but no prunes and prisms. She was too delicate to go to school, and no Edwardian restrictions were put on her reading. She never lost her faith for she was never taught any. And her huge connection (her eight brothers and sisters had two different fathers) gave her entree into the useful worlds of English literature and English society.

When Adeline Virginia (she dropped the Adeline early) was 13, her beautiful mother died. After her father's death, nine years later, she kept house in London with her sister Vanessa and two brothers.

In appearance a pure preRaphaelite, she was actually more like an emancipated Bryn Mawr girl. With her towering brother Adrian (6 ft. 5 in.), and some friends, she was a party to the famed hoax on a British admiral and the entire ship's company of H.M.S. Dreadnought. Disguised as the Emperor of Abyssinia & party (see cut. p. 93), they were brought aboard with due ceremony, barely restrained the captain from ordering a 21-gun salute, got safely away undiscovered.