An Artist Vanishes

One morning last month British Novelist Virginia Woolf sat down at her desk as usual, but instead of revising her new novel, she wrote a note to her sister saying: "Farewell to the world." She also wrote a note to her husband, Leonard Woolf, editor of London's Political Quarterly. Then she took a walking stick and went for her favorite walk across the rolling Sussex Downs to the River Ouse. What Virginia Woolf did, what passed in her stream of consciousness beside the water no one else knew. But when her husband, following her footprints across the fields, rushed up in panic, only her stick was lying on the bank. While searchers dragged the Ouse, but found no body (the river is tidal at that point), Leonard Woolf told the press: "Mrs. Woolf is presumed to be dead." He did not tell what was in her last note to him.

All her family was inclined to think that Virginia Woolf was a suicide. They did not agree that her suicide had been brought on by the war. The Woolfs have spent most of World War II in an isolated cottage, Monk's House, near the village of Rodmell, Sussex. There was plenty of action, with airplanes frequently roaring overhead, dropping incendiaries. Virginia helped to give first aid. When a bomb demolished her London home, destroying valuable murals by Duncan Grant and her sister, Vanessa Bell (wife of Art Critic Clive Bell), she observed: "Every beautiful thing will soon be destroyed."

More unsettling than the war, her family thought, had been her literary worries. Three weeks ago Virginia Woolf finished a short novel, Between The Acts, written while she was working on her biography of Roger Fry. Husband Woolf was enthusiastic about the new book. His partner in the Hogarth Press, John Lehmann, called Between The Acts "a work of remarkable poetic power, in which her sensibility is even more naked and delicate." But Virginia felt that the end of her book was not good, the whole work was not up to the exacting Woolf standard.

She had always been morbidly self-critical, agonized over almost every book, sometimes suffered a complete nervous collapse. Yet she came of a professional writing clan. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She was related to Thackeray and such scholarly dynasties as the Darwins, Maitlands, Symondses, Stracheys. James Russell Lowell was her godfather. She married into the Bloomsbury group, which included Critic Bell, Novelist E. M. Forster, Biographer Lytton Strachey, Economist John Maynard Keynes.

In 1922 she published Jacob's Room; in 1925 Mrs. Dalloway; in 1927 To The Lighthouse. All three were stream-of-consciousness novels. To some readers they didn't always make sense, but they made her name and parts of them almost made music. Like a musician, she liked to strike the mood of her books with a borrowed lyric on which she improvised infinite variations.

In Mrs. Dalloway it was Shakespeare's Fear no more the heat o' the sun, Or the furious winter's rages. . . .

Perhaps, as she stood beside the Ouse, Virginia Woolf repeated those lines to herself as Clarissa Dalloway had done. Perhaps, in the midst of World War II, she had come to feel as Clarissa Dalloway did after World War I: "This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears." Perhaps, as World War II and the war's changes closed over her, Virginia Woolf came to feel at last like war-shocked Septimus Smith, whose suicide she had described in Mrs. Dalloway: "Human nature, in short, was on him--the repulsive brute with the blood-red nostrils. . . . The whole world was clamouring: Kill yourself, kill yourself. . . ."

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