Atwood on Woolf

These passages from Margaret Atwood’s essay on Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse struck a chord in me. The essay is in Writing with Intent:

I first read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse when I was nineteen. I had to. It was on a course—”The Twentieth Century Novel,” or some such. I got on all right with the nineteenth century novel…Nor did I do too badly with certain twentieth-century novels. Hemingway I could more or less fathom—I’d played war as a child, I’d gone fishing a lot… Camus was depressing enough for the late-adolescent me… Faulkner was my idea of what could be possible for—well, for myself as a writer… That Faulkner could also be outrageously funny went—at the age I was then—right past me.

But Virginia Woolf was off on a siding as far as my nineteen-year-old self was concerned. Why go to the lighthouse at all, and why make such a fuss about going or not going? What was the book about? Why was everyone so stuck on Mrs. Ramsay, who went around in floppy old hats and fooled around in her garden, and indulged her husband with spoonfuls of tactful acquiesence… In Woolfland, things were so tenuous. They were so elusive. They were so inconclusive. They were so deeply unfathomable…

At nineteen, I’d never known anyone who had died, with the exception of my grandfather, who’d been old and far away. I’d never been to a funeral. I understood nothing of that kind of loss—of the crumbling of the physical texture of lives lived, the way the meaning of a place could change because those who used to be in it were no longer there. I knew nothing about the hopelessness and the necessity of trying to capture such lives—to rescue them, to keep them from vanishing altogether.

This essay originally appeared as “The Indelible Woman” in The Guardian for September 7, 2002.