Anna Selvey on Woolf and Childhood Live Online Course

Anna Selvey writes about the 2024 live online summer course

July in Cornwall: I’m confined, both by Atlantic gales and a hefty end-of-term dose of Covid. I imagine Virginia Woolf’s bright young summers in St Ives were also muffled by clouds and ill health sometimes. Would child Virginia have embraced as eagerly as my own children the enchanted transporting powers of the internet? I certainly appreciate its power to plunge me into the colourful world of this year’s Literature Cambridge Online Summer School. A week of lectures, readings and seminars on Woolf and Childhood, with a wonderfully vibrant community of readers and thinkers from all over the world, the rich mix of texts, ideas and personalities seems very much the antidote to bad weather, both meteorological and metaphorical.

And it’s impressions of light and water which stay with me after this fascinating week: five Virginia Woolf works in five days is a wild ride – especially with a fever! Through A Sketch of the Past, Jacob’s Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves and The Years images swim and sink in tidal repetitions, assertions of Woolf’s knowledge that ‘nothing was simply one thing’ – even that solid Lighthouse I can see from my window. Much of our discussion is on the very Cornish natural world that underpins even the most urban of her novels, casting its fluid, green light on all the complexity of life between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters.

Judith Bridgland, Godrevy Lighthouse

Woolf visits and revisits St Ives in her writing: ‘I could fill pages remembering one thing after another that made the summer at St Ives the best beginning to a life conceivable’ she writes in A Sketch of the Past (1939). This sea-site of childhood sensory engagement conveys a complex and exciting blend of fear and delight: child Jacob is not on but inthe beach, stretching to climb a rock ‘rough with limpet shells and sparsely strewn with locks of dry seaweed … which pops when it is pressed’. We note how often, for Woolf, a celebration of life is not tempered but illuminated by an awareness of death. In part, this is a treasured haunting by her own mother who died when Woolf was 13, perhaps at its most devastating in the Time Passes section of To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf, in brutal parentheses, kills both Mrs Ramsay and her daughter Prue, briskly deleting outdated models of a femininity against the backdrop of a natural world which simultaneously regenerates and blows itself up: ‘a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave in a world full of wind and destruction’ as the Great War rages far from this island of remembrance.

Discussion of how Woolf kept her sister Vanessa going after her son Julian’s death in the Spanish Civil War, seeing in her grief that ‘the death of a child was childbirth again’ was very moving. This nephew who ‘laughed so hard that he broke chairs’, is another loved one resurrected, in a perpetual light which, in Jacob’s Room (1922), is often elegiac. The sunset in the chapel of King’s College ‘comes accurately through each window, purple and yellow’, illuminating boys who will soon be the ghosts of WW1, ‘white-robed figures [whose] great boots march under the gowns’. The lantern of Jacob’s boyhood that ‘burns steady and gravely illumines the tree trunks’, draws moths and toads which love the light until disturbed by the proleptic ‘terrifying volley of pistol-shots’ of a fallen tree. Numinous summer light falls on him, naked and laughing with his friend, sailing to Scilly and looking back at the Cornwall of his childhood,

with its violet scents, and mourning emblems… the Scilly Isles now appeared as if pointed at by a golden finger issuing from a cloud; and everyone knows how portentous that sight is, and how those broad rays, whether they light upon the Scillly Isles or the tombs of crusaders in cathedrals, always shake the very foundations of scepticism and lead to jokes about God.

In the midst of early twentieth-century life, we are, says Woolf, in death, and there is political heft in her war poetry.

I am made to concede, by my charming seminar group – despite an initial grumpiness at its form which I can only attribute to Covid – that this green light reaches its most affecting in The Waves (1931), where it connects, supports, energises and saddens all six voices. First, young Louis, ‘unseen … green as a yew tree in the shade of the hedge’. The soliloquy is his and he thinks himself into the green: ‘my hair is made of leaves. I am rooted to the middle of the earth’. It later finds Susan, tending her baby, singing by firelight ‘like an old shell murmuring on the beach’. Steam from the kettle obscures her vision of the natural world she delighted in as a child, but ‘the lamp kindles a fire in the dark pane. A fire burns in the heart of the ivy’. And it is there at the end, when elderly Bernard contemplates ‘shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves’ and especially the sensualist that civilised life has taught him to suppress:  

that man, the hairy the ape-like, has contributed his part to my life. He has given a greener glow to green things, has held its torch with its red flames, its thick and smarting smoke, behind every leaf. He has lit up the cool garden even…Oh he has tossed his torch high! He has led me wild dances!

Anna Selvey

This wonderful week has been a timely reminder to listen to emotional responses as much as to analyse the formal qualities of the text: to remember why we love Woolf rather than simply admiring her. I had the enormous luck to be in a seminar group with such wide, deep and various knowledge and backgrounds to bring to our reading. Supervisor Ellie Mitchell’s richly informed guidance gently drew out these perspectives, including, happily, those of the two child psychologists among us who led a great discussion on being, not-being and Moments of Being. Finding new biographical, philosophical and psychological frameworks for reading Woolf is very liberating to a long-time teacher of Eng Lit. – Heidegger and Winnicott are now at the top of my reading list. Our speakers too, made it clear that the considering the non-linguistic forces of affectivity – the power of a work in its emotional impact, beyond its words and ideas – is profoundly enriching.

The day after reading Jacob’s Room, I ventured out, following a negative Covid test, to Penzance. Drifting, as I always do, into the bookshop, I found a 1929 Hogarth Press edition of Jacob’s Room, with old press cuttings tucked into the binding. In one, from 1931, Gerald Bullett gives a century-echo to our discussions, writing of The Waves: ‘I know of no piece of literature from which one gets a richer or more intimate sense of life, its colour and music, its sadness and strange beauty’. Although the sun had now emerged, the gale was still flapping, and the precious newspaper clippings flew away when I showed them to my son: he leapt over the harbour wall to catch them just before they were whipped into the Cornish waves. He’s off to study English Literature at Edinburgh University this autumn, and I can’t wish more for him than the joy and illumination this week studying Woolf with Literature Cambridge has brought us all.

Anna Selvey
St Ives, Cornwall, July 2024