Violet and Virginia

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A resurrection has occurred. 

In a stroke of archival serendipity most researchers don’t dare to dream of, literary scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered an edited edition of a Virginia Woolf work previously thought to exist only in early draft form. The work – now The Life of Violet (Princeton University Press 2025) — constitutes three farcical sketches written by Virginia Woolf in honor of her friend, Mary Violet Dickinson, in 1907. The stories had been seen in early stages, and Woolf herself reflected, “I know it will have to be re-written in six months; and I shan’t do it”, so no one had reason to suspect that she had indeed done the dirty work (editing). Until 2022, when Seshagiri discovered a version of the manuscript, apparently edited by Woolf in 1908, buried in the archives at Longleat House, a manor just outside of Bath. Thus an opening of an oeuvre whose lid we had thought to be firmly shut.

Before we pry our greedy fingers into the tomb, it’s worth considering that Woolf herself is not an author in need of a resurrection. Her writing is – in many ways – very alive. Last week, I listened to Zadie Smith recount a many-month immersion into Woolf’s complete diaries; last year, much fanfare accompanied the celebration of Mrs. Dalloway’s centennial; and in the past two years I saw both a major dance adaptation of her texts by ABT at the Met Opera House and a tiny, experimental adaptation of Orlando in a basement in the East Village. Woolf’s legacy is rich, multifarious, and coursing through our culture – whether explicitly re-imagined, or implicitly in the veins of the writers whom she has influenced. So – before inspecting Life of Violet, it might be worth asking: what has kept her so alive all this time? 

The answer for Zadie Smith, and many others, is the way that she understood the systemic limitations that prevented women to from engaging in the literary pursuits afforded to men, as enumerated in A Room of One’s Own and explored in innumerable characters – the maternal Mrs. Ramsay, balancing the needs of her children and husband, or the gender-bending Orlando, whose reception in the world is much altered when he transforms into a she. 

I have always been less compelled by her feminism than by the way her writing traverses the boundaries between the individual and the group. When I first read Woolf, I was in college, living and taking classes with my six closest friends, and had this intense sense of cross-consciousness pollination – that we were continuously weaving in and out of each others’ intellectual lives, personal obsessions, and interpersonal vicissitudes; I felt I had a bank of memories and knowledge that were not my own, but actually Sebastián’s, or Julia’s – that we were were woven together. Then some boundary of experience, opinion, or memory would reassert itself and remind us of our particular location as discrete beings in time and space. Woolf was the first writer I experienced who articulated these fluid exchanges of self and other, and the forceful thud of returning to one’s own boundaries. She does this through her trademark free indirect discourse, a narrative style in which the third person narrator dips gently in and out her character’s minds, like a beautiful bird, plunging and resurfacing, beak filled with prejudices, memories, and old buried treasures alike. This style, which I first experienced in To the Lighthouse but that weaves its way throughout all of Woolf’s work, mirrored my intense feeling of social expansion and contraction: She creates the radical sense that – for a moment – we might be able to enter into contact with another person’s consciousness through language itself. Life of Violet, though somewhat anticlimactic in its contents, prefigures this lifelong obsession with that line between self and other, and in the process gives a rare glimpse into the mind of Woolf, young and unfettered – in the best and worst sense of the word. 

Written eight years before her first novel, when Woolf was only 25, Life of Violet shows early tendrils of her interest in collective consciousness. The stories combine fantastical allegory, fairy tale, and biography. They are short, even for short stories, maybe 10 pages each; the bulk of the already slim volume is supplied by Seshagiri’s afterword in which we learn of Real Mary Violet Dickinson, Woolf’s single, tall, and eccentric companion (not to mention 17 years her elder), who ushered her into the company of other such magnificent and unconventional society women. This contextualizes the first story, concerning a very tall girl named Violet, who grows up (and grows up!) in Victorian England under the tutelage of various matrons, entering into a world filled with characters whose names are struck out, owing presumably to their resemblances with real figures in the Woolf -Dickinson orbit. 

Violet’s personality is as outsized as her body, and the first story introduces her subversive sense of humor and magnetic personality, which defy the gender conventions of her time. Life of Violet honors its title by following Violet’s life into the second story, “The Magic Garden,” which finds our eponymous giantess constructing a majestic cottage, in which she cultivates a rich (nay-magic!) garden that she tends to herself, again dispensing with the expectations of the time that she marry and oversee her domain from the healthy distance of her parlor window. The cottage is populated with a diverse cast — “Coptic scholars, spital nurses, distinguished authoresses, ladies with troubles and tempers” and is an expression of Violet’s magical power of bringing people together. This magic comes from her adherence to her own impulses and her repudiation of convention. Woolf mirrors this in her genre-bending final story, “A Story to Make You Sleep”, which takes place in an imagined (and orientalized) Japan, and tells of a religious feud between the worshippers of the Sacred Monster, and the Mistress of the Magic Garden, a Princess who – you guessed it – can’t stop growing. 

From whence do these fantastical flourishes and forays into the far east emerge? Seshagiri hands us every answer: Real Life Violet Dickinson, a woman over six foot tall, inhabited her own Cottage, Burnham Wood at which Woolf convalescenced after her suicide attempt in 1904. Violet traveled to Japan in 1905, her letters to Woolf from that time serving as the inspiration for “A Story to Put You To Sleep”. What’s more, Sheshigiru tells us, Dickinson harbored her own literary aspirations, and her intimacies with Woolf have been overshadowed in the critical landscape by the overt lesbianism of Woolf’s affair with Vita Sackville West. 

So, we know something about Woolf’s literary foundations: they are predicated on the desire to express the deep and maybe even unspeakable connection between women, between friends whose lived experience transcends the term friendship and that asks for new expression; on the youthful adoration, no less, of a 25 year old for her 42 year-old shepherdess into adult life; the desire to turn intense ardor into an artifact in its honor.

And yet – tempting as it is to render the text less opaque with historical facts, Woolf herself might rebuke the aims of Sheshigiri’s afterward. Biography, she suggests, is never a place to seek truth. In Orlando, she describes “the first duty of the biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump in the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads.” This jab at the biographer’s duty is paralleled in the opening lines of Life of Violet:  “Forty years ago … a child was born in a Somersetshire Manor house. Whether she was born laughing or crying, or both at once, or whether she merely accepted the situation and made the best of it, a sincere historian, anxious to use only those words that cannot be avoided, has no means of telling.” These quotes cast a denigrating glance at the work of the traditional biographer and proclaim it madness to presume that the “facts” of someone’s life are the fabric from which they are made. Both Orlando and Life of Violet reflect to us the life-negating pursuit of chronology, of “events”, and – through absences, or the inability to say – bring to our attention to the elements of life that are mystical, aesthetic, and fleeting: the flowers, the shadows, the mixture of joy and sadness, the specificity of the mundane. Thus Woolf levies a critique against the bulk of the text in which she is contained (the plodding afterward). This criticism also introduces us to the question that dominates the rest of her writing life: How can I know someone without reducing them to their facts? 

This question is best articulated by another Woolfian heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, some 18 years after Life of Violet, as recounted in the head of her former lover, Peter Walsh:  

“Clarissa had a theory in those days – they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoke to, some women in the street, some man behind a counter – even trees, or barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps – perhaps.”

I have always thought of this “transcendental theory” from Mrs. Dalloway as a statement of Woolf’s project.  It’s a beautiful reflection on the kind of immortality afforded by living in proximity to others – that pieces of us live on in each other. At the same time, it suggests that to really know anyone you must know every person they’ve met, every place they’ve ever been, you must inhabit them fully. That task is arduous and likely impossible – which is why it could drive a life’s work.  Indeed it did. Think of the attempt to follow Orlando’s fantastical life throughout countless centuries and countries, or the title of Mrs. Dalloway, which betrays Woolf’s desire to wholly contain one woman in her book (notice that the Clarissa’s “transcendental theory” is quoted in the mind of Peter, as if her notion about living on in another is itself one of the parts of her that lives on in another person), or The Waves, which takes this theory to almost a literal level — each character crashing into another until they become nearly indistinguishable. To some extent, she does it in every single fictional endeavor – attempts to say someone else.

Violet is her first stab at this Sisyphean task. 

And how does she reveal her dear Violet to us? Firstly, by bursting through the doors of her friend’s most primary and private moments. Bold, you might say, to turn your friend into a Giantess! Bold to describe her at her first ball: “her ladyship [waving] her fan as an elephant its trunk.” Bolder yet to expose her deepest shames! To imagine her breaking down: “No one will ever care for me!” and then to enter her mind as she dares to dream of her future: “If she could but copy [the other women]!” But shared consciousness – to dip into others’ minds and take their thoughts for your own words – is a bold endeavor; a radical philosophical proposal. 

So radical, that you can feel Woolf’s reluctance to fully delve into this project. Instead of trying to flesh out her character, she tiptoes around her, speculating mostly about what can not be said about Violet: 

“Now here again it would be possible to enter into one of those intricate labrynths of analysis which, as modern novelists expound them, turn human hearts and brains into so many honey-combs of coral. How did Violet love her friends, how did she know them? Tell me, for example, how she thought? Why did she drop her “g’s” and pout in her “h’s”? Was she a Christian? Describe the flight of her mind, rising like a cloud of bees, when a question was dropped into it. Did she reason or only instincticise?  Where does care for others become care for oneself…”.  

These are the questions she wants to ask, of course. And yet, as she pokes fun at the biographer, she mimics him too closely, not quite endeavoring to answer these questions fully. She seems to admit her failure in “Magic Garden”: “Often [Violet] has whisked behind a paragraph and it was only when I had done it and set it proudly in its place in the pile raised to her honor that I discovered that she was behind and not in front, that I had made a screen and no pane of glass.” 

What she produces is not just a screen obscuring Violet, but a mirror reflecting herself. In the negation of Violet, we get young Woolf. And the Woolf in the mirror is one who, at the beginning of her career, is taking very seriously the task of beginning. For a writer who could not have known the success she would achieve, the way she talks about Violet’s origins is oddly premonitory: 

“Now there should be here some more tremendous division than a blank space of white paper, and I suspect that my artistic skill would have been more consummate had I thrown these first pages into the waste paper basket or enclosed them within the arms of a parenthesis. For when you are writing the life of a woman you should surely begin with her first season and leave such details as birth, parentage, education, and the first seventeen years of her life, to be taken for granted. For it is the merit of the first season that, like some curiously furled flower, it folds many events and qualities and experiences into one mature blossom. Clearly no one could have a season who had not been born and who had not spent seventeen years in practising for it, but as the acquirements are completely exhibited in the ball room it is mere waste of time to say how she came by them or in what proportions they are mixed. But then this biography is no novel but a sober chronicle; and if life will begin seventeen years before it is needed it is our task to say so valiantly and make the best of it”

More than writing about Violet, Woolf is writing about writing. She spends most of the page reflecting on what it is and isn’t that she is doing; like a horse pawing at the gate, she is steadying herself for the task she does want to perform —tell us about someone — and which, at this point, she knows she does not want to perform — bludgeon someone’s story with that “sober chronicling”.  She wants to combine the effervescent shimmer of a novel with the task of the biographer and therein lies the trouble. 

She seems to have in mind that in novels, a single moment can contain a whole life, like a flower that contains the bud. That is the modernist project, one she’ll become famous for perfecting. Years later, Dalloway, for instance, will enfold a woman’s life into her day, a day that begins with, of course, buying flowers.  So here, the metaphor of the flower’s blooming stands in for Violet (whose name is floral), but also prefigures the primary image of Woolf’s own bloom. In this play-biography, she both dips her toe into the novelistic, and rejects it as too great a task… for now. 

It also is a harbinger of her gender politics – poking fun at what convention deems appropriate to write about a woman’s life, noting how early details could be relegated to parentheticals. Like an architect’s blueprint, she draws up the plans and prepares the toolkit that Future Woolf will employ to build a house: Parentheses, brackets, and dashes will contain large swaths of Woolf’s most famous writing. This is part of her feminist project: to make positive what others deem marginal or tangential – the domestic, feminine, or internal. Parentheticals also enclose one of the most moving deaths in literary history: Mrs. Ramsay, whose death is contained by a single sentence, enclosed by brackets, yet positioned at the center of the entire novel, is the absence around which To The Lighthouse swirls. The maternal, the domestic, the overlooked, the negated, become central. Woolf flirts with the writer she will one day become, as she tells us of an encounter between Violet and a gardener: “But as the most capricious of chroniclers I may select one seemingly irrelevant scene and let it stand for chapters of picturesque history”. This discussion between Violet and the man develops Violet’s aspirations in creating a “cottage of one’s own”, as the book jacket rightly insists. Here, again, Woolf valorizes moments that are incidental, tangential, insignificant to others, but that actually represent momentous emotional shifts for her characters. The minor, the small, the specific, she yells,  this is all life is! 

Finally – the reflexivity of this passage, and the entire novel – I should have thrown them away – acknowledges the inevitability of having started, and the impossibility of going back. To say you will throw away what you have written, means you will never start for the first time, again. She takes it playfully, as if to say – here I am, beginning. How long can I draw it out?

It’s that feeling – that we are greeting Woolf at the beginning of her journey, when we have the vantage of a century of acclaim – that is overwhelming and strange. Like seeing a video of a friend when they are a child, getting a rare glimpse into a familiar person before she had become herself. We see her as she sees child-Violet; indeed when she wrote this she was Virginia Stephens, not Woolf at all. And I think it is partially because she is so young that she is unable to render youth in a compelling manner. For all the excitement of a long lost glimpse of inchoate genius, Life of Violet misses a lot of the marks. The sentences luxuriate and indulge themselves far beyond the universal loveliness of Dalloway or To the Lighthouse; the inside jokes exhaust even an eager reader; the blade of its social critique is dull and the plot not precise. “A Story To Make You Sleep” literally put my friend to sleep on the AmTrak home from Christmas Break, and the three stories took me about a month to read – short as they are. Even then, I often had to reread sentences to make sense of them, not in the enriching retracings of sacred territory I feel with other texts, but with the plodding eye of the person who is required to make sense of another person’s private lexicon. Life of Violet is a very young attempt, a mere bud of the great gardens she would grow in her later works. 

We can forgive the indulgences, and the lengthy asides, however, if instead of reading it as a text about Violet, we read it as a text about the author — if we see these as pictures of Woolf’s youth from the vantage of youth itself. And what is youth but enamored of its own playful turns of phrase? What is it, but absolutely silly, and self-referential, obsessed with its own world, rendering the characters therein Giantesses, the Most Giant among them the Best Friend, the singular figure of adoration, the superlative, the single-most, toward whom all your stories are but glamorized notes passed under the table. Here is Woolf at her most unvarnished, obsessed, her most playful and silly and unpolished and free. It’s refreshing, in a way, to see the woman who had perfected a craft, loose, imperfect, ardent. 

The final tale, “A Story to Make You Sleep”, is a fairy tale of sorts, and it combines the animating question of Woolf’s oeuvre — what does it mean to know someone? — with the question of her incipient writing life: what does it mean to begin? To know someone is to go to Herculean lengths of discovering their beginnings, – as Clarissa Dalloway puts it – to “seek out the people who completed them; even the places”. And yet, the further we press back, the more it dissolves in our fingers, like mist. She finishes the epic tale of battling Japanese deities, which she frames as a story told to a sleeping child: “Indeed the child had been asleep these two hours–that was part of the virtue of the story, and the mother also had put the last stitch in her embroidery, and was ready to sleep too”. She suggests that even if we knew another person fully – that is to say, we knew where they came from and everywhere they went — we still would have to ask, where did their world come from? Their beliefs? And so the tale serves less as an explanation, and more as a lighthearted chide to all this seeking — for we will fall asleep before we can reach it; that even if we are children, we aren’t at our beginnings, because they start far before and far away from where we are, and are far more mystical than the nationalities of our parents, or the zip code of the hospital in which we were born. Part of what Woolf might be getting at here is that it is not so fantastical at all for a woman to be a Giantess; it’s not crazy for her to have a magical cottage or for sea monsters to be worshipped; that what is the really fantastical and wild thing is to know someone wholly, to know them at all. These questions also become relevant to us, as readers of young Woolf – they animate us in our quest to understand a great mind, and humble us in the face of the mystical unknown of the other. 

She comes to this conclusion more richly in Dalloway, which ends with the devastating four words about Clarissa: “For there she was.” As if to say, all these hundreds of pages, all these phrases that attempt to capture this woman, is somehow folly, has failed us; at the end of the day, all we have is being, to see the people we love as the mystery they are; as the unsayable.

With Life of Violet, we may feel closer to Woolf than ever, having this privileged window onto her youth like parents peeking in at their children on the playground. And yet, the stories themselves remind us that as much as it is a thrill to uncover new facets of someone, it is impossible to see them fully; impossible to say another person, to say anything at all; that – because we love them, and because they are in some ineffable, powerful way a part of us –  it’s still worth the attempt.

And so too with Woolf.