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‘Who knows what precipices aren’t concealed in words’. Scraps of Talk in Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories and Diaries

Anna-Maria Piglionica

Résumé

Conversation has an essential function in Woolf’s works. It can be considered as a sort of key word because it focuses on the fact that words, by building up architectonic forms within language, reveal and conceal, define and deceive, describe and suggest, imply and comment. The intersections between monologues and dialogues, impression and expression, partly emerge through Woolf’s original use of punctuation marks which emphasizes a continuity between uttered words and the silent ones inhabiting the mysterious circuits of the mind. Examples are taken from some short stories and some entries of the Diary.
Woolf’s identity emerges as a continuum in which her ego is intermingled with other egos because the interchange of words does not belong only to her fictitious characters, but often takes place between them and her voice, the narrator’s voice, which describes the possible worlds created by the flights of her mind which have the extraordinary capacity of absorbing what lives around and inside her.

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  • 1 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. N. Nicolson, vol.5 (London: The Hogarth Press,19 (...)

I like the London suburbs in autumn and their immense poetry. And I like Hyde Park fading into night, only the flowers burning in a few pale façades. I love overhearing scraps of talk by the Serpentine in the dusk; and thinking of my own youth, and wondering how far we live in other peoples and then buying half a pound of tea, and so on and so on. (You see how sleepy I am.)1

1It was 12 October 1934, Virginia Woolf was back from Bromley and wrote to Ethel Smyth who was at Torquay ‘rousing sparks in the orchestra’ (Letters V, 339). It is a very simple letter but gives an idea of the importance she attributed to conversation. Conversation is a love object as charming to her as some places in her dear London, as suggestive as some natural phenomena, as unforgettable as some magic moments of the day. If ‘the London suburbs in autumn’ are endowed with infinite poetry and by night the flowers in Hyde Park are similar to fires burning as if sudden, fantastic apparitions, some scraps of conversation heard near the Serpentine are gathered by her with as much loving tenderness as if they were flowers. And flowers, streets, voices form a unity which resurrects the past and unites the observer with what is observed, the writer with the reader through mute, secret words. An exterior reality coexists with an interior reality—the writer’s youth—, the present opens into the past and the future emerges in a questioning: ‘I love [. . .] wondering how far we live in other peoples’.

  • 2 See Jeanne Schulkind’s introduction to Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (San (...)
  • 3 Merleau-Ponty’s thought is essential to an understanding of the connections between perception and (...)

2Of course she hoped that Ethel Smyth would give her an answer, in a letter, or during one of her frequent visits. Yet the sudden turning of her attention to the simple but necessary everyday occupations (‘then buying half a pound of tea’) and the disappearance of the only ‘we’ into which the ‘I’ had flown, repeated three times in the first part of the letter, focus on the difficulty of putting definite boundaries2 around identities: the identity of the individual, the identity of space with its natural phenomena, the identity of the interlaced levels of chronological time.3

3If the term conversation has an essential function in Virginia Woolf’s life and fiction, it can also be considered a sort of keyword during Modernism whose essential valency is that of focusing on the fact that words, by building up architectonic forms within language, reveal and conceal, define and deceive, describe and suggest, imply and comment, and these functions take place simultaneously.

4During a radio talk included in the series Words Fail Me (29 April 1937) Virginia Woolf observed:

  • 4 The title of the radio talk broadcast by Woolf on 29 April 1937 and published in the Listener on 5 (...)

We must suppose that the talker is meant to discuss the craft of words—the craftsmanship of the writer. But there is something incongruous, unfitting, about the term ‘craftsmanship’ when applied to words. The English dictionary to which we always turn in moments of dilemma confirms us in our doubts. It says that the word ‘craft’ has two meanings: it means in the first place making useful objects out of solid matter—for example, a pot, a chair, a table. In the second place, the word ‘craft’ means ‘cajolery, cunning, deceit’.4

5Soon after, to make her thought clearer, she gave examples and spoke of the presence of already said words within new ones:

Take an example. Written up opposite us in the railway carriage are the words ‘do not lean out of the window’. At the first reading the useful meaning, the surface meaning is conveyed; but soon, as we sit looking at the words, they shuffle, they change; and we begin saying, ‘Windows, yes, windows—casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.’ And before we know what we are doing, we have leant out of the window; we are looking for Ruth in tears amid the alien corn. The penalty for that is twenty pounds or a broken neck. (‘Craftsmanship’ 138)

  • 5 See J. Dusinberre, Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1997) 192–205.

6In difficult moments I resort not to one but to several dictionaries, and if conversation is the term in question, they confirm the complex, almost paradoxical meaning it attains in Woolf’s works by belonging simultaneously to a mute and a sonorous universe. If we look at its Latin origin, conversatio points to the act ‘of living together, of sharing the same space’. In 1511, according to the OED it also meant ‘sexual intimacy’; in 1580 ‘interchange of thought and words’ and since then such an interchange has become an implicit datum in ‘the act of consorting with others’. In Moments of Being Virginia Woolf underlines the positive function of the Bloomsbury Group as a universe in which an interchange of ideas could be achieved outside the paternal home. Free discussion united the members of the group and for Virginia and Vanessa it meant emancipation, independence from the melancholy and tyrannical, even if loved and admired, personality of Sir Leslie Stephen—an eminent Victorian—, freedom from the ambiguous attentions of their step-brother George Duckworth, freedom from the obsessive memory of their extraordinary dead mother who had become an unattainable model of perfection. Above all, the group gave Virginia the opportunity of enriching her personality through forms of conversation free from prejudice.5

  • 6 See B. Callieri, Percorsi di uno psichiatra (Roma: Edizioni Universitarie Romane, 1993) 138–40. See (...)

7Yet in Virginia Woolf’s works narrative sections are prevalent; the characters’ interior monologues and the detailed descriptions of faces, gestures, natural landscapes provided by the impersonal voice of a detached narrator, almost submerge dialogues. Of course, that prevalence does not mean that she was unable to build up dialogues, or that she was not interested in them. What she wanted to emphasise is that there is a simultaneity or continuity between uttered words and the silent ones inhabiting the mysterious circuits of the mind. The intersections between impression and expression, ‘in-sistentia’ and ‘ex-sistentia’,6 partly emerge through her original use of punctuation marks, which, according to codified rules, should define the boundaries between direct and reported speech, between dialogues and monologues. In one of her first short stories, A Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus (1906), she reflected on the difficulty of writing traditional forms of dialogue.

  • 7 The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985) 65.

They stretched themselves then in the shade and it was no fault of theirs or of the ancients if their discourse fell short in design at least of its noble model. But since dialogues are even more hard to write than to speak, and it is doubtful whether written dialogues have ever been spoken, we only rescue such fragments as concern our story. But this we will say, that the talk was the finest in the world. 7

8The central focus of the passage is the relation between the truth of art and the truth of life. It is inevitable to call into question the romantic idea of art conceived as a lie which still has the capability of producing, as Coleridge put it, ‘a suspension of disbelief’. Other concepts could be called into question, Manzoni’s ideas about what he called ‘verosimile’ (‘verisimilitude’), or George Eliot’s statements about her respect for ‘plain truth’ which, as she stressed, she narrated as she remembered it, so implying that there was only the reality of her words, since what was remembered had by then disappeared. Thus the reader was asked to believe in her good faith rather than in an absolute truth. In any case my aim is not to talk about problems involving realism, I only wish to say that the higher incidence of narrative sections with respect to dialogic ones is indicative of the strategies through which an external reality reaches the writer’s mind. In The Mark on the Wall (1917) there are fundamental reflections about the positive value of exterior reality:

Knowledge? What is knowledge? [. . .] Indeed that I have fixed my eyes upon it [the mark on the wall], I feel I have grasped a plank in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality [. . .]. Here is something definite, something real. Thus waking from a dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal world which is proof of some existence other than ours. (Complete Shorter Fiction 87)

  • 8 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin B (...)

9The association of the term ‘worshipping’ (appearing four times in one line) with material objects and concepts implying solidity is revealing. That Virginia Woolf was eager to absorb the physicality of an external reality, elaborate it and give it back in verbal form is a fact, and is proved by the large number of her friends and acquaintances, by her travels, frequent trips, journeys and moves from one house to another and by the great volume of her correspondence; even her Diary, which can be considered the private confidante of her secret thoughts, is written for others and not for herself only. In one entry dated 7 november 1928 she jotted down: ‘This [the Diary] shall be written for my own pleasure’, and soon added ‘but that phrase inhibits me: for if one writes only for one’s own pleasure,—I don’t know what it is that happens. I suppose the convention of writing is destroyed; therefore one does not write at all’.8

10Virginia Woolf’s identity is a continuum in which her ego is intermingled with other egos; thus the interchange of words does not belong only to her fictitious characters, but takes place between them and her voice, the narrator’s voice, which describes "the possible worlds" created by the flights of her mind, which have the extraordinary capacity of absorbing and elaborating what lives around and inside her. The fascination of Woolf’s writing is similar to The Fascination of the Pool, the title of a short story written in 1929.

The charm of the pool was that thoughts had been left there by people who had gone away and without their bodies their thoughts wandered in and out freely, friendly and communicative, in the common pool. One drew closer to the pool and parted the reeds so that one could see deeper, through the reflections, through the faces, through the voices to the bottom. [. . .] Yet there was always something else. There was always another face, another voice. One thought came and covered another. (Complete Shorter Fiction 227)

  • 9 In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf had written that she was convinced that behind the fragmentary form (...)

11There is always something else to communicate or explain., there are always new words to be found. Woolf’s short stories stimulate the reader’s collaboration to fill up the voids of a discourse made of elliptic expressions, scraps of conversation, uncompleted sentences. And it is the restless coexistence of fragments that gives the idea of movement and becoming and suggests the idea of a lost totality.9

12In Kew Gardens (1919) the fragmented interchange of words and thoughts of the four couples in the story interrupts the cohesion of the compact, detailed description of the place. The words uttered appear as the offspring of silent worlds unknown to those involved in the dialogue. In the first conversation, whose characters are a young man and his wife, the thoughts and words expressing them show their ancient roots even if the visions belonging to the past are aroused by heterogeneous elements living in the present of that same place:—an oval flower bed, the breeze stirring leaves and flowers, the sunlight shining over them, the small insects flying over the multicoloured petals, the white and blue butterflies crossing the space in zigzag flights.

‘Fifteen years ago I came here with Lyly’ he thought. ‘We sat over there by a lake, and I begged her to marry me all through the hot afternoon. How the dragon fly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragon fly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe.’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 90)

13The young man’s discourse goes on, moving over memories and emotions he had considered lost for ever, but then, pursuing his thoughts, he asks his wife, who is there, near him:

‘I’ve been thinking of Lyly, the woman I might have married. . .Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?’
‘Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren’t they one’s past, [. . .] one’s happiness, one’s reality?’
‘For me, a square silver shoe-buckle and a dragon-fly’ ‘For me, a kiss. [. . .] the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all my kisses in all my life. Come Caroline, come Hubert’. (
Complete Shorter Fiction 91)

14What is not clear is whether she is answering her husband or speaking to herself, and whether she is happy to be with him, or not. Anyhow the last sentence—isolated between two full stops—marks a sudden emotional interruption; it is a segment which belongs to the present and is placed next to a longer one which belongs to the past. The fragmented conversation inhabits a continuous tract of time, and fragments of a fading vision, of a disappearing recent past are embodied in the silhouettes of the couple and their children moving away.

They walked on past the flower-bed, now walking four abreast, and soon diminished in size among the trees and looked half transparent as the sunlight and shade swam over their backs in large trembling irregular patches. (Complete Shorter Fiction 91)

15The words spoken by the aged man and addressed to his young friend walking near him have no cohesion, no relation to the people and things around him. What he says emphasises his complete mental isolation, a total loss of the capacity to share ideas through words. Language reveals its paradoxical nature in this situation; the two women, who belong to the lower middle class and, as the narrating voice ironically comments, are ‘frankly fascinated by any signs of eccentricity betokening a disordered brain, especially in the well-to-do’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 93); they speak in a way which isolates them much more than the man they consider mad and wish to observe. They try to piece together their complicated dialogue, but no meaning emerges from it:

‘Nell, Bert, Lot, Cess, Phil, Pa, he says, I says, she says, I says, I says, I says—’
‘My Bert, Sis, Bill, Grandad, the old man, sugar,
Sugar, flour, kippers, greens
Sugar, sugar, sugar.’ (
Complete Shorter Fiction 93)

16The other conversation, made up of short, very banal sentences between a young man and a young woman (perhaps his sweetheart), shows that few words, even stupid ones, allow communication when feelings live in unison, and when words fail or when no linguistic architecture can be thought up to express newborn feelings, there is a gesture, a sigh, a pause or a silence, which may have an extraordinary eloquence.

‘Lucky it isn’t Friday,’ he observed. ‘Why? D’you believe in luck?’ ‘They make you pay sixpence on Friday.’ ‘What’s sixpence anyway? Isn’t it worth sixpence?’ ‘What’s ‘it’—what do you mean by ‘it’?’ ‘O anything—I mean—you know what I mean.’ (Complete Shorter Fiction 94)

17If the interchange of words between the young man and the girl breaks off, the narrator’s voice goes on, with explanations and comments that create a contact with the reader, probably to provoke a response from him, since the last part of her long meditation breaks into a series of unanswered questions:

The couple stood still on the edge of the flower-bed, and together pressed the end of her parasol deep down into the soft earth. The action of the fact that his hand rested on the top of hers expressed their feelings in a strange way, as these short insignificant words also expressed something, words with short wings for their heavy body of meaning, inadequate to carry them far and thus alighting awkwardly upon the very common objects that surrounded them and were to their inexperienced touch so massive: but who knows what precipices aren’t concealed in them, or what slopes of ice don’t shine in the sun on the other side? Who knows? Who has ever seen this before? (Complete Shorter Fiction 94)

18Certainly Virginia knew, she knew much more than common readers or common people, yet she sought their collaboration because they were her source of inspiration, and she addressed her stories to them. In this connection the conclusion of An Unwritten Novel (1920) is emblematic:

Wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you, turning the corner, mothers and sons; you, you, you. I hasten, I follow. This, I fancy, must be the sea. Grey is the landscape; dim as ashes; the water murmurs and moves. If I fall on my knees, if I go through the ritual, the ancient antics, it’s you, unknown figures, you I adore; if I open my arms, it’s you I embrace, you I draw to me—adorable world! (Complete Shorter Fiction 121)

  • 10 See the comments by Susan Dick, the editor of The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 304–0 (...)

19Many other examples could be taken from other short stories, but my choice is Together and Apart because the original title was The Conversation (the precise date of composition is uncertain but it was written between 1922 and 1925).10 Virginia Woolf reflects on the danger of feelings drying up; when this happens—it can happen in an instant and for unknown reasons—the interchange of words does not lead to any form of gratifying communication; the copia verborum then separates people instead of uniting them, showing the deceiving power of words, their ‘craft’, as Virginia Woolf had stressed in the radio talk quoted above.

So things came to an end. And over them both came instantly that paralysing blankness of feeling, when nothing bursts from the mind, when its walls appear like slate; when vacancy almost hurts, and the eyes petrified and fixed see the same spot—a pattern, a coal scuttle—with an exactness which is terrifying, since no emotion, no idea, no impression of any kind comes to change it, to modify it, to embellish it, since the fountains of feeling seem sealed and as the mind turns rigid, so does the body. (Complete Shorter Fiction 193)

20This is the sad conclusion after a conversation which could have allowed a true emotional contact (at least it had seemed so at the beginning) between a handsome man—Mr Serle—and an elegant woman—Miss Anning. What is underlined at the very incipit of the story is that a conversation begins before words have been uttered, that is, when an intense desire for a contact exists (189). But what is stated later is that emotional contacts cannot be planned because feelings have a life of their own. As the conversation goes on, the abyss between silent thoughts and uttered words becomes deeper and deeper. Each character speaks to his/her new friend, but his or her thoughts are elsewhere and follow memories which neither of them wants to share with the other. ‘Of all things, nothing is so strange as human intercourse’, thought Miss Anning and then reflected that the ‘mind was truly obscure’ and that words were ‘very few’ to express ‘astonishing human perceptions’. Thus her final words have the function of burying this discovery under the veil of a formal politeness which, instead of concealing, emphasises the extreme difficulty of establishing sincere human relations, even when circumstances are favourable.

That is what she felt now, the withdrawal of human affection, Serle’s disappearance, and the instant need they were both under to cover up what was so desolating and degrading to human nature that everyone tried to bury it decently from sight—this withdrawal, this violation of trust, and seeking some decently acknowledged and burial form, she said:
‘Of course, whatever they may do, they can’t spoil Canterbury.’
He smiled; he accepted it; he crossed his knees the other way about. She did her part; he his. So things came to an end. (193)
Words create a sort of armour within which people hope or presume to hide the secrets of their minds, but what lives in the mind or in the heart controls speech. When Miss Anning and Mr Serle discover ‘the paralysing blankness of their feelings’, they only hope that something will happen in order that they can separate. They felt as if an enchanter had freed them, and spring flushed every vein with streams of life, when Mira Cartwright, tapping Mr Serle archly on the shoulder, said:
‘I saw you at the Meistersinger, and you cut me. Villain,’ said Miss Cartwright, ‘you don’t deserve that I should ever speak to you again.’
And they could separate. (Complete Shorter Fiction 194)

  • 11 Judith Simons, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women (London: Macmillan, 1990) 18.

21The importance attributed to conversation also emerges in the Diary. ‘Throughout her five published volumes of diaries Woolf continues to refer to herself as the reader of her own text; [. . .] they offer a demonstration of the diary as art’, observes Judy Simons.11 Thus the conversation is first of all with herself, and we might add that the struggle is with the language through which she can give a new and lasting life to the most various thoughts and events of her life. Thus the fluctuations of her own self intermingle with the slippery nature of the people she meets and does not want to forget. Her probings into the truth of art and the truth of life, into the presence of mute thoughts within uttered words, into the fundamental role of emotions and the ambiguous meanings of words, are central topics of the Diary and are set out in a way that is instinctive, but are not the less suggestive or important for that.

22In an entry in the Diary dated 3 May 1934 Virginia Woolf reflected on conversation:

To copy down conversation is not very interesting. People say the same thing over and over again. I wd like to describe the perfection of Irish conversation, which was Mrs FitzGerald’s last night.
[. . .] After dinner she came in, ostensibly to lend us a paper & offer advice, in fact to indulge her genius for talk. She talked till 11, & wd. willingly be talking now: about hotel keeping, about frigidaries, about her grandmother sitting on a chair in the kitchen saying Thats done that wants another 2 minutes & so on, never stirring herself but somehow getting it done. We have the name of being good house keepers. Then on about bogs, she has bought several fragments because now there may be money in it. However I can give no notion of the flowing, yet formed sentences, the richness and ease of the language; the lay out, dexterity & adroitness of the arrangement.
(Diary IV, 212–13)

  • 12 See M. Pagnini, ‘Il continuo mentale nella sua rappresentazione narratologica’, Letteratura e ermen (...)

23Obviously Virginia Woolf is not copying down Mrs FitzGerald’s conversation, she is remembering it and reflecting on it and wondering about it. Is she speaking to herself? Is she speaking to the reader? Does she belong to Mrs Fitzgerald’s universe considering that she is trying to reproduce her way of speaking, or is she outside it, given that she is cutting what she considers useless repetitions? Whatever the answer, she is building up a verbal cosmos to grasp the flux and multiplicity of the events to which she liked to be exposed, and which she has created by her presence. In the passage three forms of discourse are interlaced: there is an egodialogic discourse (the Diary is first of all written for herself), a heterodialogic discourse (Mrs FitzGerald is speaking to her guests) and an endophasic discourse (the writer’s silent comments).12 Thus the writer’s identity appears as a process, an energy which creates itself while it is describing and absorbing the unrepeatable uniqueness of others. But what is still more interesting is that Virginia Woolf discovers the true nature of the character in question through her way of speaking: thus Mrs FitzGerald’s conversation appears as an explosion of egoism because her flood of words leaves the others speechless.

Mrs F. is one of those bluntnosed parted haired Irish women with luminous brown eyes & something sardonic & secretive in her expression. Talk is to her an intoxicant, but there is as Mr Rowlands said, something heartless about the I[rish]: quite cold, indifferent, sarcastic, for all their melody, their fluency, their adorable ease & forthcomingness. (Complete Shorter Fiction 19)

24All this the writer is able to communicate through the magmatic structure of her language; the frenetic rhythm of the sentences is heightened by the elimination of punctuation marks and apostrophes, by the use of abbreviations and the welding together of heterogeneous linguistic elements.

25Another entry in the Diary written on 13 May 1933 focuses again on the fluidity of discourse which has eliminated the borderline between direct and reported speech and registers the emotional involvement of the narrator in the description of a beautiful Italian landscape she has seen for the first time.

26Siena.

Today we saw the most beautiful of views & the melancholy man. The view was like a line of poetry that makes itself; the shaped hill, all flushed with reds & greens; the elongated lines, cultivated every inch; old, wild, perfectly said, once & for all: & I walked up to a group & said What is that village? It called itself [blank in ms]; & the woman with the blue eyes said wont you come to my house & drink? She was famished for talk. Four or five of them buzzed round us, & I made a Ciceronian speech about the beauty of the country. (Diary IV, 156)

27The spontaneity and friendliness of the woman with blue eyes and the hard sincerity of the melancholy man attract the writer in the same way as the landscape that she likens to a line of perfect poetry; the interchange of words between them conveys a real form of communication, while the reader grasps significant moments of Italian social history and the ethical facet of Woolf’s sincere participation in others’ wishes, in the country-people’s hard life and dignity.

  • 13 ‘How Should One Read a Book?’: first published in the Yale Review, October 1926, then considerably (...)

28‘Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither’, we read in this same passage from the Diary. Thus she selects words, arranging them in a form to suggest what she has felt, to reveal the osmosis between impression and expression and realise a lasting interchange of thoughts and emotions with her readers. ‘Words are more impalpable than bricks’, she wrote in the Yale Review in 1926, adding: ‘Reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulty of words’.13

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Notes

1 Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. N. Nicolson, vol.5 (London: The Hogarth Press,1979) 338.

2 See Jeanne Schulkind’s introduction to Virginia Woolf, Moments of Being, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (San Diego- New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985) 12.

3 Merleau-Ponty’s thought is essential to an understanding of the connections between perception and time: ‘Il est bien vrai que je ne saurais percevoir de position temporelle sans un avant et un après, que, pour apercevoir la relation des trois termes, il faut que je ne me confonde avec aucun d’eux, et que le temps enfin a besoin d’une synthèse. Mais il est également vrai que cette synthèse est toujours à recommencer’. Phénoménologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945) 475.

4 The title of the radio talk broadcast by Woolf on 29 April 1937 and published in the Listener on 5 May 1937 was ‘Craftsmanship’, now in The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1993) 137–38.

5 See J. Dusinberre, Virginia Woolf’s Renaissance (London: Macmillan, 1997) 192–205.

6 See B. Callieri, Percorsi di uno psichiatra (Roma: Edizioni Universitarie Romane, 1993) 138–40. See also G.C. Argan, ‘L’estetica dell’espressionismo’ in Da Hogarth a Picasso. L’arte moderna in Europa (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1983) 408–09.

7 The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, ed. Susan Dick (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1985) 65.

8 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol.3, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982) 201.

9 In ‘A Sketch of the Past’ Woolf had written that she was convinced that behind the fragmentary forms of every day life—‘the cotton wool of daily life’—there was a pattern and that all human beings were connected with it (Moments of Being 72). The idea of a lost totality was of fundamental importance during Romanticism as Anthony Johnson points out in ‘A Study in Romantic Form: Shelley’s Ozymandias’, Textus VII, Tilgher, Genova (1994): 157–158. With reference to the continuity between Romanticism and Modernism see K. Wheeler, Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) 1–72. See also A.M. Piglionica, ‘La frammentazione dell’Io nel Diario di Virginia Woolf’, Le infinite negoziazioni dell’Io, ed. V. Zaccaro and F. Troisi (Bari: Adriatica, 2002) 84–89.

10 See the comments by Susan Dick, the editor of The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, 304–05.

11 Judith Simons, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women (London: Macmillan, 1990) 18.

12 See M. Pagnini, ‘Il continuo mentale nella sua rappresentazione narratologica’, Letteratura e ermeneutica (Firenze: Olschki, 2002) 169.

13 ‘How Should One Read a Book?’: first published in the Yale Review, October 1926, then considerably revised, in The Common Reader. Second Series, 1937; now in The Crowded Dance 60.

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Anna-Maria Piglionica, « ‘Who knows what precipices aren’t concealed in words’. Scraps of Talk in Virginia Woolf’s Short Stories and Diaries »Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], Hors série | 2005, mis en ligne le 25 juillet 2024, consulté le 07 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/15104 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12cwp

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Auteur

Anna-Maria Piglionica

Anna Maria Piglionica is Extraordinary Professor of English Literature at the University of Lecce, Italy. She has published a volume on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Olschki, Firenze 1985) and various papers on The Tempest, Cymbeline, and Ben Jonson’s Sejanus His Fall; short essays on De Quincey, Keats, Dickens, Joyce’s Dubliners and Telemachia in Ulysses. She has studied Virginia Woolf with particular reference to the Diary. She translated R. William’s The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1991) and is now completing the translation of Ben Jonson’s Sejanus. She has also written on John Fowles, Angela Carter and Marina Warner.

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