On September 1, 1929, under the pen of the future Academician Louis Gillet, it could be read in the Revue des Deux Mondes : “Orlando is a lovely shelf trinket, and pretty things or pretty women are in their place in a living room. “Virginia Woolf had her ears whistling? In the same month of September 1929, a year after the publication ofOrlando (this amazing novel whose hero changes gender along the way to become a heroine), she takes out the essay A Room of One’s Ownwhich sells for 10,000 copies in England the first twelve months. For the record, this book which is now considered a classic has been relatively long to cross the Channel, the French publisher of Woolf, Stock, having not considered it useful to publish it with us. It was not until 1951 that Denoël editions appeared A Room of One’s Own under the title A room for oneselfin a translation by Clara Malraux. There have been other versions since, including A place to oneself By Marie Darrieussecq in 2016. Thank God, La Pléiade did not keep this one for the special virginia Woolf draw that she offers this month: under the title A piece to oneselfthe academic Laurent Bury offers an unprecedented translation, an ideal pretext for rereading this totem text.
We know that journalist Lauren Bastide, author of a preface to A Room of One’s Own In the pocket book, holds Virginia Woolf for her “favorite person in the whole history of feminism”. He is advised to look at the critical apparatus of this Pleiade, which risks desilting it if it does not disappoint it too much. Transgender researcher Paul B. Preciado, author in 2023 of the documentary Orlando, my political lifewhere he placed his sex change under the patronage of the character of Woolf, will also find grain to grind. Laurent Bury’s enlightening notice reminds us that in his novel Night and daypublished in 1919, Woolf laughs at the suffragettes that live “away from the normal world” and are busy “whispering their incantations, concoct their potions and launch their frail spider canvases above the torrent of life that swirls in the streets outside”. Incredible sarcasms when it is specified that the right to vote had been granted to English women (under certain conditions) in 1918. Woolf did not distinguish then by her sorority … She will be much more sensitive to the cause of women in the 1930s, in particular thanks to her friendship with the composer and suffragette Ethel Smyth (whose advances she will have to repel).
Between these two periods, A piece to oneself mark a turning point. We will still notice that, unlike Paul B. Preciado, Woolf does not believe in politics, of which she is waiting for nothing. For her, money is the nerve of war. Born in 1882 in a wealthy and literate environment (her father’s first wife was the daughter of the great William Thackeray, the author of The Vanity Fair), she has never experienced destitution. In 1904, on the death of her father, she inherited 22 years with a substantial sum, completed in 1909 by a second inheritance, that of her aunt Caroline Stephen, who gave her a comfortable annuity. It is not uninteresting to know that the two favorite French writers of Woolf were Flaubert and especially Proust, two rentiers remained without descendants – like her. In A piece to oneselfshe writes: “Of two things – voting and money – I admit that money seemed to me infinitely more important.” Interview later: “Intellectual freedom depends on material realities. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not only for two hundred years, but since dawn. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women have therefore had no chance of writing poetry.” We could see class contempt in these lucid words: it would be necessary to be rich and idle to indulge in literature, this hobby …
“I don’t need to hate any man”
Another capital point that we put less forward than the famous room or place or room to oneself: Woolf’s report to men. With amazing mercy (little one, she was the victim of repeated sexual touching on the part of her half-brother, George Duckworth), she writes this: “No force in the world can take me my money. I have forever feeding, staying and dressing. It is therefore not only the effort and the labeur that ceases, but also the hate and the bitterness. Man; I can’t harm me.
Many other incredible passages should be cited when one is used to the contemporary deformation ofA piece to oneself. Record just this one: “It would be infinitely a shame that women write like men, live like men, or look like men, because if two sexes are not enough at all, taking into account the immensity and diversity of the world, how would we come out with only one? Shouldn’t education put forward and strengthen the differences rather than similarities?” And this one, which requires being subtle: “It is fatal to be purely and simply a man or a woman; you must be femininely male or male female. For a woman, it is fatal to put the slightest accent on a grievance, to plead a cause, even with justice, to speak consciously as a woman.” If it clearly criticizes the claimed virilism of fascist Italy, then to its peak, it is not more comfortable in the face of militant feminism.
Basically, the current misunderstanding of Woolf’s elitist thought comes from the fact that we try to tackle it with demagoguery on social issues, while it is mainly linked to aesthetic reflections. When Woolf writes, quoting the poet Colerridge, that “a great spirit is androgynous”, she talks about the soul and not the genitals. The intermittents of the heart touched her more than the crowd movements. In this special Pleiade draw, in addition A piece to oneselfwe find MRS. Dalloway And Orlando. It is exciting to rediscover the two novels after reading or rereading the essay. It is humor and fantasy to the Sternence Sterne that strike in Orlandoin no case a pro-transgender speech before time. As of MRS. Dallowayone can only be touched by the way in which Woolf sublimates by art his own life. Its crossing of social appearances and its melancholy depression are tempered by the exhilarating beauty of “moments of being” (which James Joyce called “epiphanies”). There are poignant pages on the frigidity that Mrs. Dalloway (this “ice cube”) feels in front of men, and on this homosexuality that she dares not live in the open. As for Septimus, this man broken by the Great War who ends up committing suicide by throwing himself out of the window, how not to see a double of the novelist? The book Festival of the Book is worthy of Time found de Proust, the election brother of Woolf, who is definitely not the grandmother of the neofeminists of the 21st century.
MRS. Dalloway and other writings. By Virginia Woolf. La Pléiade/Gallimard, 800 p., € 62.
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