I have missed writing the past few days. I have been teaching, and preparing to teach, and thinking about teaching, and I have also been reading applications for the search committee on which I am serving.
But today is Virginia Woolf’s birthday. Today, I must write.
I love Woolf’s writing: its elegance and verve and humor. When I spent a semester in England three years ago, I went on what I considered a Virginia Woolf pilgrimage. Included in my visits were Monk’s House (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/monks-house/) and Sissinghurst (http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/sissinghurst-castle/). Below, I include photos I took there of Virginia Woolf’s and Vita Sackville-West’s desks. May they inspire us all.
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| Woolf's desk in the shed at Monk's House, Sussex |
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| Woolf's photo on Vita Sackville-West's desk at Sissinghurst, Kent |
Since it’s her birthday, we must hear Woolf’s own voice. It somehow comforts me to know, that like most of us, Woolf also worried whether her writing was good enough. And she loved being at home with her books. She wrote this in a letter to Violet Dickinson in early January 1905. She was nearing her twenty-third birthday. (I am leaving her quirky punctuation intact): “I shall be rather—in fact very—glad to be home, in my own room, with my books, and I want to work like a steam engine, though editors wont take what I write. I must show you what I have done, when it is typed, and please be very kind…and please don’t say you want to alter heaps of things or I shall give up writing altogether and take up drink or society.”
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