Books, Arts & Manners: Unafraid of Virginia Woolf

AS with Henry James, I never felt comfortable with Virginia Woolf. Her fiction, that is; her nonfiction I have always found of considerable interest. Now comes the film version of Mrs. Dalloway, and though the movie is perforce different from the wholly stream-of-consciousness novel, it presents separate but equal problems.

For starters, I have always mistrusted writings about men and women in love, sex, and marriage by authors lacking those experiences. (There are, to be sure, exceptions: Jane Austen and Tennessee Williams leap to mind.) But here we have Virginia Woolf in her long and totally asexual marriage to Leonard Woolf, whatever the exact nature of her lesbian mopings and gropings with Vita Sackville-West may have been. Something like this surfaces in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, where the young heroine chooses the safe Richard Dalloway over the passionate Peter Walsh, and has a quasi-sexual involvement with her best friend, Sally Seton.

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John Simon

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AS with Henry James, I never felt comfortable with Virginia Woolf. Her fiction, that is; her nonfiction I have always found of considerable interest. Now comes the film version of Mrs. Dalloway, and though the movie is perforce different from the wholly stream-of-consciousness novel, it presents separate but equal problems.

For starters, I have always mistrusted writings about men and women in love, sex, and marriage by authors lacking those experiences. (There are, to be sure, exceptions: Jane Austen and Tennessee Williams leap to mind.) But here we have Virginia Woolf in her long and totally asexual marriage to Leonard Woolf, whatever the exact nature of her lesbian mopings and gropings with Vita Sackville-West may have been. Something like this surfaces in the novel Mrs. Dalloway, where the young heroine chooses the safe Richard Dalloway over the passionate Peter Walsh, and has a quasi-sexual involvement with her best friend, Sally Seton.