Virginia Woolf Is Not An Author

Virginia Woolf: even her name succinctly captures her spirit and makes clear her style; Virginia, the haughty upper-class lady, Woolf, the fiery temper which lays beneath. Someone who stumbles across Virginia Woolf and skims through her writings will be left with the impression that she is a flurry of meaningless words, telling an eventless story whose plot is more a loose collection of non-happenings. But to the more watchful eye, there is a colourful world beneath the initial drudgerous mist of boredom and melancholy.

There is a barely-lucid musicality to her words; her sentences ebb and flow in a vivacious mind-tide which overtakes you, traps you in its spinning whirlpool and leaves you in a daze of both confusion and enlightenment. Her works are not stories, they are brains on paper, long thoughts laid bare, inviting us to study them, yes, to examine their every nook and cranny, but never to comprehend their immensity, the sheer size of them, the depth at which she has explored her thoughts and meticulously noted them down for us to puzzle through.

And in among the endless sea of the mind, she conservatively rations out her plot, carefully edging it in between description in a way which perfectly mimics the drifting focuses of the human mind, darting from one attention to the next, abandoning one thought for another, and then returning to the first with an equal caprice. Virginia Woolf is not an author, she is a medium. She channels her mind to the reader with an intricate yet wild beauty which demands always to be looked at closer, to be seen deeper and deeper, and which can never be fully understood.