An Artist Vanishes

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Perhaps, as she stood beside the Ouse, Virginia Woolf repeated those lines to herself as Clarissa Dalloway had done. Perhaps, in the midst of World War II, she had come to feel as Clarissa Dalloway did after World War I: "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." Perhaps, as World War II and the war's changes closed over her, Virginia Woolf came to feel at last like war-shocked Septimus Smith, whose suicide she had described in Mrs. Dalloway: "Human nature, in short, was on him—the repulsive brute with the blood-red nostrils. . . . The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself. . . ."