More Must-Read Virginia Woolf Books!

Because seven books by Virginia Woolf wasn’t already enough, I’m here to suggest two more. My first article in the ROAR covered some of her most important novels, and seeing as this will be my last article, it felt only right to make it about her. When I graduate, you will have hopefully read 9 Virginia Woolf books (7 + 2 = 9, in case anyone was confused).

Night and Day 

Photo via Penguin Random House

As the title suggests, Night and Day focuses on the contrasts between individuals. The novel follows the lives of Katherine Hilbery, Mary Datchet, Ralph Denham, and William Rodney, and their ever changing relationships with one another, while addressing women’s feelings toward marriage in the Edwardian era. Night and Day almost reads like a rom-com. There is a real and detailed plot as well as frequent dialogue—unusual for Woolf—and it beautifully intertwines the romantic lives of several characters.

Katherine Hilbery clashes the most with societal expectations. She is solitary and accused of being unemotional, with a dislike for marriage and an ardent desire to learn about astronomy and mathematics. One of my favorite quotes from the novel comes from her: “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?” This comment encapsulates her character: far-removed from people’s passions and instead finding solace on her own. Mary Datchet, meanwhile, is more sensitive and thus more conventional in terms of her personality, yet she focuses on work and advancing the women’s suffrage movement above all else. Ralph Denham and William Rodney, moreover, seem to parallel each other as a way for Woolf to critique the bourgeoisie; Rodney is more upper class than Denham but, next to Denham, is depicted as ridiculous and insecure with his mediocre talent and old-fashioned ideals. The novel, however, is not just a romance; it covers the endless different kinds of love. Woolf depicts the friendship between women which transcends romance through Katherine and Mary ignoring the men in their lives and potential jealousy in order to support each other, the way love can drive a person crazy, the simultaneous desire for love and distaste for marriage, the love one can have for a person without necessarily being in love with them (yet, it’s so strong that it may very well feel that way), and, in short, conveys the subtleties of love, ultimately affirming that it does not always have to be romantic. 

Although I was initially disappointed that Night and Day was written like a traditional novel in which you concretely understand what is happening, I loved it nonetheless. There is still strong emphasis on the characters’ thoughts and emotions, and her familiar flowery writing remains present, despite the fact that she does not delve into her renowned stream of consciousness technique nearly as much as in her other novels (likely because this was still her second book). Hence, as fantastic as it is, if you want a typically Woolf-esque book, I wouldn’t recommend starting with Night and Day. 

Street Haunting: A London Adventure (Collection of Essays)

Photo via Amazon

“Street Haunting: A London Adventure” is an absolutely magnificent depiction of Woolf’s walks in London and truly a glimpse into her mind, reminding me of all the reasons I love her. So, if you read anything at all by Virginia Woolf, it might as well be the ~20 pages that is Street Haunting. This collection included several other essays separated in three sections. 

1. Nothing but this: we have loved reading

The first section has a more formal tone. It discusses how one should read a book, exploring the common feeling that there are so many books out there (and so little time!) as well as how to best appreciate them. She advises her audience to read by trying to understand the writer first, illustrating this with Daniel Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy, but concludes with the fact that it is impossible to establish a true way to read, and that one should instead be as passionate as possible. All that is certain is that the reason we are human is “nothing but this: we have loved reading.” 

The section also contains “Women and Fiction,” which comes from A Room of One’s Own, in which the title is intentionally ambiguous regarding whether or not it concerns women and the fiction they write or women and the fiction written about them. She discusses the way women are constrained by their situation and by experience (lacking, for instance, Tolstoy’s view of war), the idea that women—by nature of their situation—are novelists because writing a novel can survive with long pauses whereas a poem or play cannot (hence why Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily Brontë are primarily novelists) but that she hopes this will change, and the external influence of their situation on their writing as it becomes tainted with anger—turning into an emotional dumping ground—and thus distracting the writer from her artistic vision. 

Another essay, “Craftsmanship,” focuses solely on the immortality and power of words, stating that words “live in the mind, not the dictionary.” They are what we make of them, defined by the emotions we attach to them, and exist based on our perception; when we can’t find the words for something, it’s precisely because we are looking for them from within rather than as things existing isolated from ourselves. 

2.  To look, for example, at the sky

The second section is far more abstract. “The Sun and the Fish” is centered on the duality between the sublimity of nature and the mundanity of life, or on the sun and the fish. I personally loved the line, “The eye shuts now. It has shown us a dead world and an immortal fish.” The other essay, “Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car,” considers the past and future of Sussex and her sense of self as belonging to a far vaster world. 

3. How beautiful a London street is  

In “Great Men’s Houses,” Woolf analyzes great men based on their houses. Indeed, she distances herself from their greatness to look at their mundanity, reflecting on the people she sees walking the streets of London, the same streets Keats and Coleridge and even Shakespeare may have walked. I also appreciated the essay, “Oxford Street Tide,” which depicted Oxford Street, as one of my favorite passages in The Waves is also a truly breathtaking description of Oxford Street, almost personifying the street, representing it as some constant being which we can hardly understand. This section, and the collection, ultimately ends with “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.”

Bonus: The Hours by Michael Cunningham

Photo via Amazon

This novel captures the intensity of an ordinary existence, which is also what Woolf often aims to accomplish in her writing. Focusing on the way life can feel hopelessly trivial and the weight of mundanity, Cunnigham traces the lives of three different women who each dream of something extraordinary but must resign to a seemingly inescapable and bland reality. New Yorker Clarissa Vaughan is a modern parallel to Mrs. Dalloway’s story, the author herself Virginia Woolf is in the process of writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1920s London suburbs, and Laura Brown is finding solace in Mrs. Dalloway as a 1950s housewife in Los Angeles. 

Cunningham was clearly inspired by the way Woolf sometimes depicts women who are not particularly spectacular (ex. Clarissa Dalloway); this emphasizes the inner mind and its tension with the outer self, which, in turn, develops the feminist side of the novel. In The Hours, Mrs. Brown especially represents this as she feels confined in her marriage and suffocatingly traditional lifestyle. I’ve found that this emphasis renders many of Woolf’s works reminiscent of the opening line in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus on why we stay alive, which is a question The Hours explores extensively. Moreover, for me, the most beautiful parts of the book were when Woolf was imagining Mrs. Dalloway’s story. In fact, as she writes what she believes will happen in her book, Clarissa Vaughan’s life subtly reflects it, and, in a more distant way, Mrs. Brown is surrounded by a similar atmosphere until her story becomes more clearly intertwined with the others’. The three stories initially intertwine in prose, with recurring phrases in different chapters (such as the phrase “Life, London, this moment in June”), until surprisingly becoming intertwined in the plot. 

The Hours is set in a world in which everybody seems to love Virginia Woolf, which sounds pretty ideal to me, but on a more serious note, it truly immerses the readers into Woolf’s universe: the enduring role of women, the creative process, some existentialism, a critique of the bourgeoisie, the passage of time, the idea of a failed life, and the longing to know yourself.

I was originally going to include her long essay, Three Guineas, but I hadn’t read it yet and there are only so many hours in a day and article deadlines to respect. Besides, I wouldn’t want to rush through Woolf’s works. I’ll be very happy to spontaneously find another one of her books in a couple of years and once again be able to dive into her stream of consciousness, discover other essays, or find her letters or diary—I mean, really, there is simply no such thing as too much Virginia Woolf.