Books: How Time Passes

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Two years before the War, Virginia Stephen married Leonard Sidney Woolf, a liberal journalist and literary critic. Their tall house in Bloomsbury soon became the nucleus of a literary set, the "Bloomsbury Group." The Woolfs housed their Hogarth Press under the same roof. There, in "an immense half-subterranean room, piled with books, parcels, packets of unbound volumes, manuscripts from the press," Virginia Woolf wrote. Many of her friends have been politically active feminists, and from her study Virginia Woolf has done her bit for woman's cause. Her essay on the position of women stated the now-classic requisite of modern women who want independence: "500 [pounds] a year and a room of one's own."

Virginia Woolf sympathizes with "Mrs. Jones in the alley." She would even like Mrs. Jones to be able to read her books, but thinks on the whole "it is better to be a lady." Lady or not, feminist or not, woman or not, she believes that to be a good writer demands something more still. "If one is a man, still the woman part of the brain must have effect; and a woman must also have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. It is when this fusion takes place that the mind is fully fertilized and uses all its faculties. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot create, any more than a mind that is purely feminine. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly." Tall, gaunt, haunted-looking Virginia Woolf lives quietly with her husband, divides her time between long weekends in a low-lying Sussex cottage (where she does most of her work) and a tall house in London. She rarely makes a public appearance. She has no children. Careless of her clothes, her face, her greying hair, at 55 she is the picture of a sensitive, cloistered literary woman. Jealous juniors derisively style her "The Queen of Bloomsbury." Her physical existence is as sheltered now as it always has been. But in the 12-ft. square workroom, whose old-fashioned uncurtained windows overlook a half-acre of English garden, she has made a world of her own. It is not a cork-lined invalid's retreat like Marcel Proust's, with the shades drawn; nor a chamber of nightmares like James Joyce's, where after dark all the familiar objects break up into strange & sinister shapes. Visitors who feel at home in Virginia Woolfs world say it is a room with a view.