"Then may I tell you that the very next words I read were these – 'Chloe liked Olivia…' Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women." (A Room of One's Own, 1929)
Mrs Dalloway was first published by Hogarth Press on this day in 1925.
"This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears. Tears and sorrows; courage and endurance; a perfectly upright and stoical bearing." --from Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway – a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance - infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and Life - Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.
Em 28 de Março de 1941, Virginia Woolf decidiu encerrar seus 59 anos de angústia e sofrimento ao vestir um belo casaco de pele, encher os bolsos de pedras e se atirar nas frias águas do rio Ouse.
Certa de que teria um terceiro colapso nervoso - nos outros dois, chegou a tentar o suicídio -, estava receosa de que jamais iria se recuperar de mais uma crise. Não conseguia mais escrever e estava receosa com os desdobramentos da Segunda Guerra Mundial, que já tinha bombardeado Londres e tinha destruído a residência do casal Woolf em 1940.
O suicídio foi, ao contrário do que muitos acreditam, foi o seu maior ato de coragem. A carta de despedida endereçada ao marido Leonard Woolf retrata com exatidão o sofrimento de Virginia:
Dearest,
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.
I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.
V.
Neste vídeo, a atriz Louise Brealey faz uma leitura dramatizada da carta de Virginia Woolf:
“But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken.”
