Hermione Lee on Woolf and childhood

Summer course

Aug 4

Summer course in Cambridge, August 2024

Hermione Lee on Woolf and Childhood

She makes up a language for children's perceptions, as at the beginning of The Waves; she gets inside the vulnerability, the fears and the sensory perceptions of children (Jacob lost on the beach, Rose running down the dark street in The Years, Cam Ramsay absorbed in watching a rock pool). She can write with a kind of brilliant innocence, as if seeing the world for the first time.
She returns over and over to memories of her own childhood, and her masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, reinvents her family past as modernist fiction, vivid comic satire, and elegiac meditation on time, loss, and grief.
- Hermione Lee, preface to Hyde Park Gate News, ed. Gill Lowe (Hesperus Press, 2005), p. vii

Virginia Woolf built her political analysis of her culture on her experience of her childhood. The father's dominant needs and demands, the sacrifices of the mother and unmarried daughters to the tyranny of the family, the prejudicial economy which spent money on sending boys to school and university and kept the daughters at home, […] the disciplinarian attitudes of family doctors, the hypocrisy and censorship which kept the daughters ignorant of sex call on these would be the items, for life, on her political agenda.
Emerging from the ‘the shadow of the private house’ (as she put it in Three Guineas) to view the world ‘from the bridge which connects the private house with the world of public life’, she would make her own post-Victorian, post-war [FWW] analysis of her childhood. But the paradox of her writing is that he family life would also give rise to her most passionate, profound, and humane art.
- Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (Chatto and Windus, 1996), p. 128)