mrs. dalloway.

Here is something brave to admit: Up until a week ago, I hated Virginia Woolf. As a girl with feminist tendencies and as an English student this attitude seemed sacrilegious and shameful. I avoided her and her books and this is why:

As it goes with younger siblings, I appropriated clothes, ideas, stories, catch-phrases, music, books, films etc. from my two very cool older sisters. This has lessened somewhat over the years as we've all grown older, but appropriation still happens. One of the things that trickled into my sixteen-year-old consciousness was the intriguing name 'Virginia Woolf' and her subsequent greatness. I remember surreptitiously stealing my sister's copy of To The Lighthouse (which I actually still have. Sorry, Shani, let me know if you want it back...) and settling down to read it. I got about halfway before my brain exploded leaving bits of wrinkled confusion splattered against the window. I put it aside and decided to wait a year or two, feeling terribly insecure about my stupidness and convincing myself that I would be much smarter next year this time.

And a year or two later I attempted In Between the Acts. And once more, I got about halfway and realised that the sentences were so slippery and frustrating that I had been reading the same page again and again. Woolf was nonsensical, utterly annoying, repetitive, vague, cloudy, long-winded and I was simply too stupid to see the supposed genius in all of the above. And this made me cross. What enraged me further was that my friends all seemed to be delightedly flying through Virginia Woolf, reader her as casually as one would pick up Archie Comics. They loved her and I couldn't see it. All I could see was some wolf-like shape of a woman throwing strange words at my face which I didn't understand.

So when I saw A Room of One's Own and Mrs. Dalloway appear on our course outline this year for English, I became all sulky. Damn Modernists.

Needless to say, all I needed was someone to iron out all the wrinkles, give me a bit of context, a bit of biographical information and tell me what to look out for when reading her books. (On a more personal note, I had to remind myself just to read Woolf slower than I read any other author). And I was converted. I no longer hated her... quite the opposite, it just shows that English lecturers can make or break a book. In my case, our lecturer salvaged an entire author.

A Room of One's Own is sad, hilarious and inspiring. And I have falling completely in love with every character in Mrs. Dalloway, jaw just about dropping at the patterns, connections and descriptive genius that constantly occurs throughout the book. I finished reading Mrs. Dalloway about an hour ago, sprawled on Rose's bed. (Rose's room is a magical room, the envy of everyone in the house because the sun insists on gracing her double bed almost all day. Tess and I sometimes sneak in when she's out to indulge in an afternoon of sunlit reading.) I read the last page and sighed happily because I am not a boy, because the sun is incredibly lovely and because Virginia Woolf and I are friends.

And so, I no longer have to avoid Virginia Woolf in conversation and in bookstores. I can now embarrassingly but comfortably join the ranks of other upper-middle-class feministy girls who read and adore suicidal females authors with gusto and enthusiasm.