[Vwoolf] First Encounters with Virginia on Blogging Woolf

[Joanne Frye]

It looks like Roberta and I were relatively unusual as students in the 1960s who first encountered Virginia Woolf in a college classroom; there I, too, met Mrs. Dalloway and wrote my first paper on Woolf.  I can't quite say it was love at first sight, as it apparently was for so many among us, but I was decidedly intrigued by the complexity of structure, the rendering of intersecting consciousnesses, the beautiful language.  Knowing that I wanted to continue to study modernist fiction, I went on to graduate school, took a seminar focused on Woolf, and wrote my dissertation on her novels, trying to rise to the difficult task of "analyzing" the ineffable.  By then it was love, and Woolf has continued to haunt my consciousness for the 39 years since I completed that dissertation.

The classroom I most yearn to return to since retirement is the Woolf course that I taught every two or three years throughout my 33 years of teaching.  No matter how often I read, reread, and taught Woolf's amazing novels, I felt a new excitement each time I entered that classroom. Students tell me that they hear her words in my voice (which both pleases and horrifies me) but I could never resist reading those beautiful flowing passages aloud, especially the endlessly resonant To the Lighthouse. And I loved seeing the novels in their ever-new complexities as students read them through their own lives and experiences, through loves of their own. I also took real pleasure in teaching Three Guineas in an upper level interdisciplinary seminar in Women's Studies--probing the complex insights into the intersections of masculine power structures and a culture of war, hoping that students would join me in resisting the power structures in which we are all immersed.

Most recently, when I wrote and published my memoir of those years (Biting the Moon: A Memoir of Feminism and Motherhood), I continued to hear Woolf's voice, echo her words, celebrate her luminous prose as best I could in my own struggles to find words for difficult meanings.  And I returned to the ongoing insight: throughout my life as student and as teacher, I have learned to see the world and to hear language in ever-new ways through my reading of Woolf. I join the chorus: thank you, Virginia. And thanks to the Woolf list for prompting so many wonderful reflections.

Joanne Frye


________________________________
From: vwoolf-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu [vwoolf-bounces at lists.service.ohio-state.edu] on behalf of Roberta Rubenstein [rubenst at verizon.net]
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2013 3:48 PM
To: LAURIE REICHE; Joanne Frye
Cc: vwoolf at lists.service.ohio-state.edu; Paula Maggio
Subject: Re: [Vwoolf] First Encounters with Virginia on Blogging Woolf


           As an English major at the University of Colorado during the 1960s, I knew I wanted to attend graduate school but hadn’t been able to decide on which period to focus. The first novel  I read by Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, assigned in a course on modern fiction, not only galvanized me but immediately answered my question about literary concentration: it had to be modernism, with an emphasis on Woolf. Mrs. Dalloway was by far the most illuminating and stylistically unique novel I had ever read.  As a twenty-year-old with limited worldly as well as literary experience, I couldn’t yet understand Septimus Warren Smith’s self-judged inability to feel as a painful manifestation of his feeling too much, but I knew that I wanted to better understand him, and Clarissa, and Peter, and that day in June, and Woolf’s method of expressing consciousness and time. I too (like several others who have offered memories of their encounters) was puzzled to discover that most people outside of my literature courses (and inside some of them as well) had only heard of Virginia Woolf in connection with Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.” No one, including me, seemed to be able to explain the obscure connection between the two writers.

           Subsequently, I was fortunate enough to study Virginia Woolf and her response to the Russian writers at Birkbeck College, University of London.  It was truly thrilling to read all of her fiction while living in Bloomsbury. I’ll never forget my first experience of The Waves, which struck me to my depths in a way no other novel had ever done. Yet the novel to which I continue to return is To the Lighthouse, which I now know like the back of my hand. While pursuing my doctoral degree on Woolf, I also had the good fortune (as some of you know) to discuss her life and fiction with Leonard Woolf, who was 87 when I met him at the age of 23, and who was exceptionally generous to me and to other scholars with an interest in his wife’s work.

           I’ve remained enthralled with Virginia Woolf for my entire academic career.  Re-reading, teaching, and writing about her novels and essays over the course of more than four decades have helped me to know myself.  I echo what others have expressed: thank you, Virginia Woolf, for what you have meant for my inner life as well as my scholarly life.

        Roberta Rubenstein




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