The Uncompromised Self

lessons from Virginia Woolf

“My Way,” Beth Kephart, Multimedia, Multi-method Collage

Virginia Woolf was often hilarious and she liked to bake bread. She would strap on a pair of skates and, over a frozen river, soar. She was self-doubting and self-promoting, self-consciously vain and prone to wearing questionable fashion, competitive and intense and sometimes plain silly.

She was a good friend; she was a gossip.

She was married to a man; she loved women.

She was the wit at the party; she needed a room of her own.

She wanted to be read; she feared her audience.

But here’s what fascinates me: Virginia Woolf was chief typesetter and bookbinder, solicitor of submissions and editorial gatekeeper, package bundler and sometimes sales rep for the Hogarth Press that she’d built with her husband, Leonard. As such she published some of the most important writers of her time. More importantly, she published herself, which left her free, following her first two novels, to produce her work in precise accordance with her ambitions and desires. No intemperate editorial influence or interference. No noise of the publishing bureaucrats chugging in her head. No expectations to meet or breach but her own. Through her radically modern, sometimes mystical, always fiercely intelligent Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, A Room of One’s Own, Common Reader, Modern Fiction, Between the Acts, and other books of both fiction and non-fiction, Woolf changed the way we think not just about what stories might be but about how we might pay better attention to the world in its infinite detail.

She also changed the way I think (we all might think) about fragments and continuity, the space between lines, the curl of a sentence, the thwack of an exclamation mark, the border of nothing at the bottom of a page, the eternal power of the handmade thing, and our continuing dominion, even now—especially now as we navigate the world by way of techno intermediaries, AI devices, glass screens—over it.

To read Woolf is to hold very still within a single moment or to drift from consciousness to consciousness, chasing multiplying points of view. To teach her is to apologize for all the biographical intrigue that must be hurried through. To write of her is to tempt a deluge. “Periodic attacks of archive-faintness overcame me, as I contemplated the transatlantically scattered hoards of manuscripts and letters, diaries and notebooks…the editions of her works and the hundreds of books and articles, reviews and conference papers on Virginia Woolf,” wrote the author’s most famous biographer, Hermoine Lee, in 1998.

To sit with the pages that Virginia herself set, letter by letter, comma by comma (as I have, in the Kislak library at the University of Pennsylvania), is to undertake a reckoning: Then. Now. Hers. Ours.

I find Woolf, when I imagine her, with the ink of her letterpress letters on her hands. I take hold of her commas, her dashes, her intuitive negotiation of typography and sense and sound. I sit with her in the converted too lshed at Rodmell, listening to Leonard’s apples roll annoyingly above her head. I walk with her into a London night in search of sentences. I watch the dough of her cottage loaf rise and her mind wander. I am, as she is, abraded, conspicuous, fascinated, alive, sometimes suspicious, swept into memory by points of light. Over the course of fragments, interludes, biography, memoir, I lean toward her generosities and pucker, her illnesses and days of spectacular good feeling, her wrestling with letters and words, silence and creation.

Woolf is prompt, springboard, purpose. She is prism. She is mosaic and footnote, typography and white space. She is gorgeous in some photographs and arresting in others, and I can hear her—do you hear her?—inviting you to be precisely who you wish to be, on the page and off of it.

Do not compromise, she says.

Write your own heart, she says.

Be the person you are searching for.

(Happy New Year.)