Woolfe-ish Ramblings

I first encountered Virginia Woolf in the cafe at Barnes & Noble, where she was hanging out on the wall with Steinbeck and Mark Twain and Mary Shelly. [Click here if you're worried I've gone round the bend]. I was 15, and I’d accompanied my older sister and some of her friends to this new store, where books were displayed like art, splayed across tables like so much colorful confectionery, and where you could sit and read for hours. Or, if you were my sister and her friends, where you could talk earnestly and with compelling ignorance over chocolatey drinks. Then, as now, my sister’s friends bored me, and I found my attention wandering again and again to the mural on the wall, and to one woman in particular. She was angular, wistful, and looked less than pleased to be drinking with the suburban hoi polloi below. I eventually wandered off to browse the store again, and found myself looking for Woolf in the fiction section. I bought a copy of Mrs. Dalloway that day, because it was the least expensive title, and I took it home and read it curled up on my bed. I didn’t know anything about stream of consciousness, or about the Bloomsbury set, but I knew that I felt an instant affinity with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, and I loved them with the fierce intensity of a geeky adolescent bookworm. A few years later, I took a class in college on women and the law in literature, and I fell in love with Woolf all over again.

Which is a long-winded and self-indulgent way of saying that, if you are lucky enough to be in or around Cambridge, you should really take the opportunity to go view the new archive of letters by the Bloomsbury Group that’s now available for public viewing. And then tell me all about it!

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