Whenever our club years have fallen during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime, I’ve looked into her diaries to share something of her life from the period. And the 1930 Club is no different! Her first entry isn’t very inspiring, but I like this from 11 March. It’s part of the entry, and shows her observational skills and her power with words. And, more sadly, what she thought about her own potential old age – that would never come. Spelling and grammar her own!
Tuesday 11 March
all because I have to buy myself a dress this afternoon, & cant think what I want, I cannot read. I have written, fairly well – but it is a difficult book – at Waves; but cant keep on after 12; & now shall write here, for 20 minutes.
My impressions of Margaret & Lilian at Monks House were of great lumps of grey coat; straggling wisps of hair; hats floppy & home made; thick woollen stockings; black shoes; many wraps, shabby handbags, & shapelessness, & shabbiness & dreariness & drabness unspeakable. A tragedy in its way. Margaret at any rate deserved better of life than this dishevelled & undistinguished end. They are in lodgings – as usual. Have, as usual, a wonderful Xtian Scientist landlady; are somehow rejected by active life; sit knitting perhaps & smoking cigarettes, in the parlour where they have their meals, where there is always left a diet of oranges & bananas. I doubt if they have enough to eat. They seemed to be flabby & bloodless, spread into rather toneless chunks of flesh; having lost any commerce with looking glasses. So we showed them the garden, gave them tea (& I dont think an iced cake had come Lilian’s way this 6 weeks) & then – oh the dismal sense of people stranded, wanting to be energised; drifting – all woollen & hairy. […] Must old age be so shapeless? The only escape is to work the mind. I shall write a history of English literature, I think, in those days. And I shall walk. And I shall buy clothes, & keep my hair tidy, & make myself dine out.
What a passage. I’m now berating myself for having acquired her diaries a few years ago and decided to move them on without reading them. I wonder, however, to what extent she is confounding old age with agency. The older I get, the more I realise that the difference between the genteel poverty my parents were scared of, but settled into and sufficient fortune in the world to be able to live as one wants. Woolf at least assumes they are all able to live differently but that M&L don’t.
What a good idea, I should have looked in my Writer’s Diary. But I have “done” some VW myself and was glad I could take part in this Club.
Oh, how poignant… :( I loved reading her diaries and I wish I had the time to go back and read them all again….
Pretty bleak! But so beautifully evoked. She really is a stunning writer.
Thanks for that, Simon. I’m reading “Jacob’s Room” now since I don’t have any more 1930 books. It was hard to understand at first, but I’m slowing down, and that helps.
Ouch! She may have been a stunning writer, but she was SUCH a snob. That bit ‘oh the dismal sense of people stranded, wanting to be energised; drifting’ is so perceptive, yet at the same time she condemns Margaret and Lilian for their ‘unspeakable’ shapelessness, shabbiness, dreariness and drabness, and appears to be unable to understand that maybe they cannot afford to live any other way.
Lilian’s father was a wealthy banker. I wonder where the money went.
https://www.margaretllewelyndavies.com/margaret-and-lilian