“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." - Virginia Woolf from Mrs. Dalloway
I started another blog entry this exact way.
In the entry I simply displayed different bouquets of beautiful flowers for Valentine's Day. There are flowers featured in this picture, but flowers are not my subject now. The subject is the writer, herself, and not this specific book the quote was from. But the quote about flowers might make you wonder what is so special about these flowers I've shown in my picture. Well, first of all some of them are made from pages of books, which I'm sure any bibliophile would appreciate. Those pages are from a book by Virginia Woolf.
I had a book themed wedding, and we found a florist that could fold book pages into flowers. For the wedding we had the paper flowers intermixed with real flowers. These mixes were in bouquets, and in flower arrangements on the tables sitting on stacks of classic books combined with book boxes. My wedding was important to me, so I choose a book that was special to me. That book was “A Room of One’s Own”. Even though Woolf was known more for her fiction, and I have read her fiction like Mrs. Dalloway, which is probably her most well-known book, it was this non-fiction book that spoke to me enough for me to choose it as the book I wanted my wedding flowers made of.
‘A room of One’s own’ is a slip of a book, with simple easy to understand sentences. I think Woolf was a feminist, because I see that in the bits of her other works I’ve read, but I think that side of her comes out clearer and directly in this book. The book is an extended essay based on two of Woolf’s speeches she did at the University of Cambridge. This book speaks to me as a woman, feminist, and writer. It is both literal and figurative for women writers in a literary tradition dominated by men. The title is based on the concept that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". Some of the quotes from the book I like are:
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally this is so. Yet is it the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are "important"; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes "trivial." And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”
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.
pic from askmehelpdesk.com
Perhaps a writing room.
I find Woolf’s fiction to be good but challenging. The other day my sister tried to correct my writing, saying I had written a run-on sentence. I checked to see if my comas and semi-colons were in the right places, and they were. They often are not. She said people like to read short sentences. She may be correct, but I tend to write longer sentences naturally, because that’s what I read, and probably how I talk. I mention this because Woolf is one of those writers who is queen of the semi-colon. I may have a semi-colon tattoo but using them too much makes it hard to read things sometimes. While reading her fiction, I say to myself, I will stop reading when the sentence ends, but it takes a long time for them to end. I still do find her worth reading and wish to read more of her fiction in future.
Woolf was born in South Kensington, London and lived from 1882-1941. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912. They ran a small publishing press called Hogarth Press. Woolf was part of a bohemian group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers, and artists called the Bloomsbury Group, in which several famous writers and artists were part of. I read a biography about her that talked a lot about her depression. Having depression, I started to relate to her even more. She would have terrible bouts of depression. I have noticed that many writers and artists suffer from depression. I wonder if there is a specific correlation. Woolf died of her disease, putting rocks in her pockets and drowning herself in a river.
pic from the artstory.org
The Bloomsbury Group
While I relate to the concepts in the text, I do understand the criticism of the concept because not every woman has this access to money or a room of their own. I don’t think its mentioned, but having young children or other responsibilities can also get in the way of this. but it’s something I want for women writers, and dream of for myself. I have a little time to write and am very fortunate for this.
And wanted the energy of literature, art, and feminism in paper roses, and the juxtaposition with other flowers made it perfect!
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