Vestiges of all Woolf’s concerns over this difficult year thread through the novel: how far it’s possible to know others, when a knowledge of the past can help equip us for the future, how a society can remain intact amid the threat of invasion from external forces, whether art can heal a fractured community and bring people together across significant divides. The village is gathered to watch a historical pageant performed by local villagers and directed by Miss La Trobe, a woman whose mysterious background, foreign name and possible homosexuality have caused consternation among town gossips. She is an anxious leader, and the play is not a success; she stands behind a tree, cringing as her actors halt and stumble, fretting as her audience disperses during the interval, and despairing as a rainstorm engulfs the second act. But though her execution is flawed, Miss La Trobe’s aims are implicitly connected with the prevailing threat of war: she is driven by an urgent need to impress on the audience their duty to take up their own parts in ensuring a peaceful future. Her vision is of a community which examines itself, and is bound together by a sense of social responsibility.
Woolf’s portrayal of a village united, if only fleetingly, by a communal performance, reveals the significant, continuing influence on her thought of Jane Harrison. For Christmas 1923, Harrison had given Woolf a signed copy of her book Ancient Art and Ritual, in which she argued that the origins of Greek drama lie in ancient community rituals, their power derived from ‘the common or collective emotion’ the worshippers express towards a shared symbol of devotion. The chorus of actors who form the centre of a Greek play, argued Harrison, is an evolution of the ancient band of tillers who would break from sowing and ploughing and dance around a sacred object – a maypole, an image of the goddess or the pile of reaped corn – to ensure fertility for the new season, wearing masks and disguises and dancing to a single rhythm so that, ‘by the common excitement, they become emotionally one, a true congregation, not a collection of individuals’. Over the centuries, Harrison suggested, this community ritual faded in favour of more self-conscious dramas – still performed at religious festivals, in the presence of priests, but where the action was an end in itself, divorced from its original meaning. Writing in the aftermath of the First World War – when H. D. was also focusing, in her inventive translations, on choruses and women’s communities as an antidote to individual heroism – Harrison drew a poignant contrast between the old ritual dance in which ‘the individual was nothing, the choral band, the group, everything’, and the leader-orientated tales of tragic drama and epic poetry, where warriors fight in single combat, seeking personal distinction or to avenge a personal grievance. She ended by urging a return to a communal style of art and living; only through rediscovering community values, Harrison suggested, could further wars be avoided.
Harrison’s portrait of a time when art played a genuine social role in community cohesion – was political in the most literal way – was suggestive to Woolf: the idea that an instinct to create has always been connected with survival felt relevant to her, as a writer questioning her role in a world now succumbing to violence. Already, she sensed that people were disengaging from books and culture, and was unsure how her work would be received in the post-war future she could barely imagine; she became increasingly preoccupied with the part played by the public, the audience, not only in the formation of future policy, but also in the creation of works of art. From her renewed thinking about community grew another idea, which she developed over subsequent months. In 1932 she had wondered if she could count on another twenty years of writing, and had hatched a tentative plan ‘to go through English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence’. During 1940, while waiting for invasion and working on Between the Acts, Woolf was already thinking ahead to new projects: she considered an essay on women and peace, and contemplated a biography of her servant Mabel (‘how profoundly succulent it wd be … her subterranean London life’). But while she was out blackberrying in September 1940, the idea of ‘a Common History book’ resurfaced. The aim, she wrote in a fresh notebook, would be to explore ‘the effect of country upon writers’: to begin in earliest England, and ‘to find the end of a ball of string & wind out. Let one book suggest another. Keep to time sequence. Pass from criticism to biography. Lives of people. Always follow the genuine scent – the idea of the moment. No “periods”: No text book. Read very widely. Write rather from memory.’
Over the final months of her life, Woolf was consumed by research for this hybrid project of creative history, absorbed so fully that she could ignore the noise of air-raid sirens. She wanted to explore the development of the creative impulse from prehistory to the present: to pick up Harrison’s suggestion that art used to be a community practice, and place ‘the universality of the creative instinct’ at the centre of her literary history. Provisionally titled Reading at Random or Turning the Page, this would be a democratic story of popular culture, its roots placed firmly in a shared oral tradition. She would show how the story of literature begins with an anonymous singer, ‘lifting a song or a story from other people’s lips, and letting the audience join in the chorus’. Woolf would look back to a time when there was no distinction between singer and audience, when culture was shared, not labelled as high or low, and literature was ‘no man’s territory’ but rather a common ground – but she would take Harrison’s theory even further, using this vision of the past as a blueprint for the future ‘classless society’ she had imagined in ‘The Leaning Tower’.
‘Of course I’m “patriotic”,’ Woolf had told Smyth in 1938, ‘that is English, the language, farms, dogs, people: only we must enlarge the imaginative, and take stock of the emotion.’ This book was to be about England, but not the martial, self-sufficient Blighty of wartime propaganda. Over the time she was writing Between the Acts, London’s landscape changed almost daily, as preparations for air raids intensified: windows were shrouded in heavy blinds, pillar boxes were painted yellow on top with a liquid that changed colour to warn of gas, and vulnerable landmarks were boarded up or removed for preservation. Woolf wrote movingly in her diary of the surreal quality of the blacked-out city, which seemed ‘a reversion to the middle ages with all the space & the silence of the country set in this forest of black houses’: ‘Nature prevails. I suppose badgers & foxes wd come back if this went on, & owls & nightingales … A torch blinks. An old gentleman revealed. He vanishes. That red light may be a taxi or a lamppost. People grope their way to each others lairs.’ The end of Between the Acts lingers on an image of thick forests swarming with birds, recalling the prehistoric, prehuman landscape depicted at the start of G. M. Trevelyan’s 1926 History of England. In the novel, a woman of ‘rather shabby but gallant old age’ named Mrs Swithin is reading a book that merges Trevelyan’s text with H. G. Wells’s Outline of History. While others peruse the newspapers and discuss the impending invasion, Mrs Swithin is lost in an ‘imaginative reconstruction of the past’: she spends the day ‘thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one’. While Woolf was writing the book, the whole Ouse Valley flooded, and a lake stretched from the Woolfs’ garden to Lewes in the north and Newhaven in the south, appearing to cast the landscape back to a time before the banks were built up. This haunting echo of Europe’s communal past was a powerful image for Woolf, the unfractured, peaceful landscape a strong metaphor for the ‘whole’ Miss La Trobe is seeking in her play, and a symbol of hope for a peaceful future.
Now, Woolf decided to open her new book with a passage from Trevelyan, describing early Britain as an untamed forest where hunters would listen in awe to the singing birds, and start to sing to one another as they worked. From there, her book was to form an alternative history of England focused not on ‘great men’, battles and politics, but on culture, women and communities – very much in the spirit of Eileen Power’s and Jane Harrison’s wor
k. It would be a critical equivalent to Miss La Trobe’s pageant, in which vignettes from English history illustrate literary culture from Chaucer to the present, interspersed with two romantic farces which revolve around peacetime occupations: gossip, weddings, picnics. One guest, Colonel Mayhew, is furious at the unconventional choice of scenes. ‘Why leave out the British Army? What’s history without the Army, eh?’ he harrumphs. But Miss La Trobe’s is a version of history, like Eileen Power’s, which deliberately emphasises peace and community over authority and power. Among the books Woolf read or reread that autumn (listing them in her reading notebook) was Power’s Medieval English Nunneries; she bought a copy of Medieval People for 6d in December, and regretted not picking up a new cigarette holder at the same time. Not only was Woolf conjuring for readers a different sort of past, founded on the values of peace and cooperation so sorely needed in the present, but she was also placing herself in a tradition of Mecklenburgh Square women resetting the boundaries of history.
Her scheme also allowed Woolf to return to the question – which had preoccupied both Harrison and Power – of how history is constructed, and what voices it excludes. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf describes looking up ‘position of women’ in Trevelyan’s index and finding only a smattering of references, mostly to customs of arranged marriage, wife-beating and the fictional heroines of Shakespeare; she wonders ironically whether a reader is to suppose women have been utterly subservient throughout time, or that they have been consistently held supreme on a pedestal. Reading his chapter headings, focused on wars and kings, she wryly questions why so little room is left for women’s real activities in the events which ‘constitute this historian’s view of the past’. It was clear to Woolf, as it had been to Power and Harrison, that new historians were needed to offer a different view. ‘I like outsiders better,’ she wrote. ‘Insiders write a colourless English … They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps.’ Now, just as Eileen Power had done in Medieval People and her sketches of medieval women’s lives, Woolf sought to fill in these gaps, to follow those ‘unmarked tracks’ which the male historians ignored, and to write, especially, of what was ‘left out in textbooks’. ‘Keep a running commentary upon the External,’ she wrote in her notebook. Woolf sketched out a convincing trajectory in which she would follow ‘the progress of Anon from the hedge side to the Bankside’, exploring how communal music-making ceased as class structures developed, before the invention of the printing press created an irrevocable division between poet and audience, meaning art could be consumed in the privacy of one’s home. Now, poets could no longer be anonymous, but were conscious of their position in literary tradition, their work shaped by the pressures of the marketplace, the whims of patrons and all the other economic, political and social forces that come to bear on an individual within society. And as Woolf had already outlined so powerfully, these ‘outside influences’ tended to disrupt the work of women and silence their voices. In A Room of One’s Own, she had imagined that Shakespeare had had a gifted sister, who was thwarted in her artistic ambitions by dismissive relatives and an untimely pregnancy, while her brother was given every possible help and encouragement to allow his talents, no greater than hers, to flourish. Now, thinking back to her Judith Shakespeare, Woolf resolved that her history would not only examine ‘the germ of creation’ but also ‘its thwarting: our society: interruption: conditions’.
Women’s work, she had argued, has always been conducted under ‘conditions that have nothing whatever to do with art’: practical questions of whether or not they had children, money, a private space, a supportive husband, servants to help with the childcare and housework. Pondering the fragmented nature of the female tradition – the fact that ‘the history of England is the history of the male line, not of the female’ – Woolf insisted that we cannot account for a woman’s success or failure as a writer without first assessing the extent of her handicap. These were the same ‘invisible presences’ she had written of in relation to herself in ‘A Sketch of the Past’; she now named them Nin, Crot and Pully, and described them as ‘always at their work, tugging, obscuring, distorting’. Woolf immersed herself in reading about witches, nuns, poets, actresses, servants, governesses, eager to draw these ‘lives of the obscure’ together in an alternative portrait of society, which – like her memoir – would take into account ‘the immense effect of environment and suggestion upon the mind’, and allow women to take centre stage ‘without impropriety’.
‘Skip present day. A Chapter on the future,’ she wrote in her notes. Woolf told Ethel Smyth she felt like ‘a voracious cheese mite which has gnawed its way into a vast Stilton and is intoxicated with eating’, invoking an image of her floor scattered with ‘mouldy dramatists’ as she worked her way through English literature. ‘By the time I’ve reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. So I’ve arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade far away, and quite forget.’ Her book – sure to have been artful, esoteric and radical – was never finished, and survives only in two draft chapters and reams of notes. Yet in its conception, Woolf planned to fulfil what Miss La Trobe’s pageant urged others to do: to ‘look back through our mothers’, through the work of women historians and writers she admired, to a time when art drew communities together, in the hope that it might provide consolation and inspiration in the present crisis. ‘Surely it was time someone invented a new plot,’ one member of the audience in Between the Acts suggests. For Woolf, as for Harrison and Power, this ‘new plot’ might be a world regenerated and brought together by art, which foregrounds cooperation, embraces change, follows the lead of women, and learns the lessons of the past.
*
The Phoney War had dragged on into the first months of 1940; the continued lack of an invasion gave Woolf the sensation of ‘standing about in a dentist’s waiting room’. The smallest thrills, such as the grocer dispensing extra tea, became significant amid the ‘endless boredom’ of waiting for attack. Rumours abounded in Rodmell that Germans were parachuting into Britain disguised as monks and nuns. In February, IRA protesters had placed bombs in phone boxes, mailbags and dustbins, setting panic to the capital, but Hitler made no move. ‘The war is like desperate illness,’ Woolf wrote. ‘For a day it entirely obsesses; then the feeling faculty gives out; next day one is disembodied, in the air.’ That spring, the anxious limbo finally began to morph into immediate peril as Hitler began a Western European offensive, invading Norway and Denmark in April, and France, Belgium and Holland in May. Woolf saw, to her horror, that Britain was being ‘led up garlanded to the altar’.
On 25 May, she recorded ‘so far the worst week in the war’, during which the BBC announced the taking of Amiens and Arras. ‘The feeling is we’re outwitted. Theyre agile & fearless & up to any new dodge. The French forgot to blow up Bridges. The Gs seem youthful, fresh, inventive. We plod behind.’ Nonetheless, she and Leonard continued their games of bowls while, as if in defiance, buttercups and sorrel sprang up in the Monk’s House garden – ‘the very flush of the first summer’. But on 26 May, the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk as the German army advanced to the French coast. Trains arrived in London packed full of injured soldiers, in hasty and chaotic retreat. Young men returned to Rodmell with stories of swimming out into the Channel, hoping desperately for a lifeboat, then of walking along the English coast for hours, believing the war to be lost. Wooden stakes were hammered into the fields to prevent German planes from using them as landing grounds. The country lanes were clogged with lorries bearing sandbags and cement. ‘So,’ wrote Woolf, ‘the Germans are nibbling at my afternoon walks.’
On 10 June 1940, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France, sparking riots among Soho’s Italian community. Four days earlier, Leonard and Virginia had held a despondent dinner party in Mecklenburgh Square, where Kingsley Martin predicted the invasion of Britain within five weeks. ‘Up till 1.30 th
is morning,’ recorded Virginia the next day, ‘Kingsley diffusing his soft charcoal gloom. Question of suicide seriously debated among the 4 of us – R. Macaulay the other – in the gradually darkening room. At last no light at all. This was symbolic.’ By 14 June, Paris was occupied and Britain isolated. On 22 July, the British foreign secretary, Edward Wood, rejected an offer of peace from Germany, and the prime minister, Winston Churchill (who had taken over from Chamberlain in May), announced his resolve, now that invasion was inevitable, to ‘fight for every inch of London, down to the last street and suburb’. The first bombs fell on London on 22 August; Churchill immediately ordered a retaliatory attack on Berlin, from which point London became the Luftwaffe’s primary target. Vita phoned in horror to tell Virginia that bombs were falling all around Sissinghurst, in Kent: ‘I’m too jaded,’ wrote Woolf in her diary that evening, ‘to give the feeling – of talking to someone who might be killed at any moment.’ The war had infected her subconscious in a disconcerting and pernicious way, forcing her to think communally rather than as an individual: ‘We think of weather now as it affects invasions, as it affects raids, not as weather that we like or dislike privately.’
On 7 September 1940, the Blitz began, with bombs exploding overnight at London’s docks and around Woolwich, West Ham, Bermondsey, Whitechapel and Limehouse. That night, the dome of St Paul’s could be seen from a distance to be surrounded in flames; five days later a delayed-action bomb buried itself twenty-seven feet deep under the cathedral, taking three days to dig out before being carried away in state. The city’s hospitals were besieged, and the roads so pocked with craters that ambulances could hardly make their way through. Underground stations became illegal air-raid shelters; the fire brigade battled night after night, and rescue squads – composed of barely trained volunteers – attempted to restore electricity cables, gas mains and sewage pipes while providing makeshift first aid to people being dug out from submerged buildings. London was raided on all but three nights to the end of the year, by an average of two hundred bombers each night. Five thousand seven hundred and thirty people were killed in the first month of the Blitz, and by the end of the year the toll had exceeded thirteen thousand. At night, the city was deafened by the noise of anti-aircraft guns, the skies bisected by white streaks, ghostly vestiges of distant battles. Londoners grew accustomed to the drone of aeroplanes, the smell of cordite after an explosion, the sight of pilots gliding down from the sky in parachutes. Restaurants created improvised dormitories for stranded diners; John Lehmann and his friends went pub-crawling in the blackout, floundering through the dark streets high on adrenaline. A dustman reported finding twelve dead cats in Bloomsbury in a week, three in Mecklenburgh Square, and residents speculated that they were being run over in the dark, or that thieves were killing them for their fur. The Woolfs were asleep in Mecklenburgh Square during one of the earliest night raids, but decided not to go out to the shelter in the square’s garden: Leonard later recalled that they ‘thought it better to die, if that were to be our fate, in our beds’.
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