“Prose is so humble that it can go anywhere,” wrote the great novelist, essayist, diarist, letter writer and radical thinker Virginia Woolf. Appraisals of Woolf, however, tend to wind up at the same place: the river Ouse in Sussex, where on 28 March 1941, the writer of some of the greatest English modernist novels in history filled her overcoat with stones, walked into the water and drowned herself. Great Lives: Sara Pascoe on Virginia Woolf (BBC Radio 4) attempted to redress the balance by focusing less on Woolf’s lifelong depression and more on her intellectual prowess. More life and less death.
“I think she’s a comedian,” argued stand-up, writer and actor Pascoe, though we never heard the reasons behind this intriguing interpretation. “She was egotistical, over-sensitive, manic, and so funny socially. She gave everyone pet names and called herself ‘old goat’.” If she were alive today, Pascoe reckoned, “she would be the host of QI”: a thought at once mildly amusing and deeply awful. I like to think Woolf would have been immune to the pull of a prime-time panel quiz.
No new ground was broken here, but it was a pleasure to hear clever, passionate people discuss her extraordinary way of seeing the world, and seizing it too. Joining Pascoe and presenter Matthew Parris – who confessed to never being able to finish a single book by Woolf – was expert Alexandra Harris, professor of English at the University of Liverpool, who only agreed to come on the programme if it wasn’t “all about madness and death”. “There was nothing inevitable about it,” said Harris of Woolf’s death. “She was planning her next novel and series of essays.”
Pascoe spoke about studying Woolf at university and the “sensible feminism” of A Room of One’s Own which “blew my mind off”. We were treated to a 1937 BBC recording of Woolf speaking about the English language. “Words are full of echoes,” she said. “They’ve been out and about on people’s lips for so many centuries.”
