My friend gave me an annotated copy of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. This week I took it off the top of the stack by my bed and started looking at all the photos and illustrations first, then began the novel I hadn't read since the 80s.
That very night, I discovered Vita and Virginia on Netflix, the story of Virginia Woolf's friendship and love affair with Vita Sackville-West--a lavishly produced period piece that recreated Bloomsbury, London home to Leonard Woolf's publishing company and writers and artists of the early 20th century.
Vita was a best-selling author of the time; Virginia's novels were less popular, but far more well known and studied after her death for her experimental style. (Nothing much happens in the plots of her novels, they focus more on the interior lives of the main characters.)
Virginia was temperamental, brilliant, intense--a genius. Vita was flamboyant, intent on seducing both women and men who fascinated her. While Vita and her diplomat husband had two sons, the boys were more or less footnotes in the movie, presumably in her life as well. Vita did not live at Bloomsbury but her wealthy mother--who supported her family--was extremely disapproving of her daughter's refusal to live by the norms of high society.
Mrs. Dalloway was written in 1925; Virginia died by suicide in 1941. Her final novel, Orlando, was her artistic endeavor to "get inside" the mind and psyche of Vita (who by then was no longer her lover but still a friend).
The first time I heard a line by Virginia Woolf I was a college student at St. Mary's. It was the line everybody knows even if they've never read her work: "Every woman should have money and a room of her own."
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