[Vwoolf] Discovering Woolf

[Marcia Childress]

Like many of you, I never encountered Woolf's writings in a college English literature course; she simply wasn't widely taught. Rather, midway through my senior year in college, in 1969-1970, two housemates--one a psychology major, the other studying philosophy--were suddenly raving about a novel they'd just read for a philosophy course (I don't recall which philosophy course). Since I was the English major in the house, they insisted I drop everything and read this novel too. It was To the Lighthouse. So, like many of you, I read it all in one day, in pretty much a single sitting, swept up and along by the powerful rhythms of Woolf's prose. What I recall about finishing the book is a shiver, then tears, then a strong impression of a blur of green and blue, like moving water. I'm not sure I could have said then and there what the book was about; I only knew that I had had an extraordinary life-experience through written words.

I next read Woolf the following year as a graduate student in literature, but she was assigned only in a course on comparative fiction, as an English writer whose stylistic experiments influenced twentieth-century Continental novelists. I recall the professor almost apologizing for making us read Mrs. Dalloway, as, in his view, Woolf was "a second-rate novelist." Compared to giants like Joyce and Tolstoy and Balzac, he maintained, Woolf was rather a poor hand at representing "the stuff of real life," like war and its aftermath, politics, urban life, and human relationships. (Oh.)

How good that we now see it otherwise. Thanks, Virginia!


Marcia Day Childress, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Medical Education
Director, Programs in Humanities
Center for Biomedical Ethics and Humanities
University of Virginia School of Medicine
PO Box 800761
Charlottesville VA 22908-0761
Voice:  434.924.9581
Fax: 434.982.3971
Email: woolf at virginia.edu OR mdf4e at virginia.edu






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