Claire Messud: Revisiting Virginia Woolf's Essays in The Yale Review

ou can hear in the delaying rhythms of the opening sentence the influence of Marcel Proust and the digressive, paid-by-the-word style of Thomas De Quincey, whose essays Woolf had lately looked into for the first time

The essay ends in a kind of dream—with the image of a plush red curtain clasped and crushed in grief. And we’re happy to follow Woolf there, in part, because of that dash in her opening sentence, which denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing.

Woolf’s letters and diaries, in which she laments that she may have overwritten. Returning to the text in light of Eliot’s note, she “saw wordiness, feebleness, and all the vices in it.” She had composed the essay from her sickbed, and it seemed that one of the main arguments of the piece—that the hiatus and the solitude of illness encourage a febr

‘Arrange whatever pieces come your way’ wrote Virginia Woolf in her diary, and it’s good advice, even when the pieces – a half-remembered conversation, the subtext of a smile – seem at first not to lead anywhere. They can go in a notebook or diary until the meaning becomes clear, perhaps not until months or years later.

The other great lesson to take from Virginia Woolf is her attitude to failure, which was extremely open. She recognized that it was necessary to go through a lot of self-doubt and self-examination before you could say anything that really mattered.

“As an experience,” Virginia Woolf once declared, “madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.” To top it off, the allure of Woolf’s “madness” is not limited to this heady state of inspiration but also offers a kind of rare and perfect productivity. “It shoots out of

It may well be the sentence that for diverse reasons—because thinking about Woolf, or sickness, or essays, because trying to emulate a certain rhythm in my own writing—I’ve copied out by hand more than any other.