Virginia Woolf
Becoming a Writer
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- US$25.99
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- US$25.99
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By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as “sledge-hammer blows,” beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as she was (“skinless” was her word) she began, through these years, to practice her art—and to discover how it could serve her. Ultimately, she came to feel that it was her “shock-receiving capacity” that had made her a writer.
Astonishingly gifted from the start, Woolf learned to be attentive to the movements of her own mind. Through self-reflection she found a language for the ebb and flow of thought, fantasy, feeling, and memory, for the shifts of light and dark. And in her writing she preserved, recreated, and altered the dead, altering in the process her internal relationship with their “invisible presences.” “I will go backwards & forwards” she remarked in her diary, a comment on both her imaginative and writerly practice.
Following Woolf’s lead, psychologist Katherine Dalsimer moves backward and forward between the work of Woolf’s maturity and her early journals, letters, and unpublished juvenilia to illuminate the process by which Woolf became a writer. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory as well as on Woolf’s life and work, and trusting Woolf’s own self-observations, Dalsimer offers a compelling account of a young artist’s voyage out—a voyage that Virginia Woolf began by looking inward and completed by looking back.
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As the daughter of archetypal Victorian parents and Freud's first English publisher, Woolf has often been a posthumous analysand; but among her chroniclers, Dalsimer, a clinical psychologist and faculty member of two Ivy League universities, may have the best credentials for putting her on the couch. "This is not a biography," Dalsimer warns; it is, instead, an exploration of "the ways that writing served Virginia Woolf" throughout her difficult life, and particularly in her "adolescence and young womanhood." Approaching Woolf through her juvenilia, diaries, letters, criticism and novels, Dalsimer (Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature) traces both her artistic apprenticeship and her psychological narrative, placing Woolf's introspective observations alongside her early work from Jacob's Roomto A Room of One's Own and amid plenty of analytical commentary. While Woolf claimed that in her autobiographicalTo the Lighthouse she had "done what psychoanalysts do for their patients," Dalsimer draws out the book's psychology and Woolf's relationship to her deceased parents, and shows the matter to be much more complicated. Dalsimer also demonstrates, through Woolf's later letters and essays, that her affectionate, influential and overbearing father and her self-sacrificing, distant and tragic mother were instrumental in forming her creative character. Woolf's mental illness (which ultimately led to suicide) also receives understated, careful consideration. Dalsimer's clinical objectivity may be more notable than her line-by-line literary criticism, but she elegantly explains how Woolf's imagination, often subsumed in tragedy, could still find pleasure in life's daily rhythms, and how writing "consoled and sustained her as much as it was possible for her to be consoled or sustained."
