What about the aeroplanes?

Gillian Beer

  • The Essays of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 1 1904-1912 edited by Andrew McNeillie
    Hogarth, 411 pp, £20.00, November 1986, ISBN 0 7012 0666 7
  • The Interrupted Moment: A View of Virginia Woolf’s Novels by Lucio Ruotolo
    Stanford, 262 pp, $29.50, November 1986, ISBN 0 8047 1342 1
  • Virginia Woolf and the Real World by Alex Zwerdling
    University of California Press, 370 pp, £24.95, October 1986, ISBN 0 520 05684 1

‘If one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?’ queries a character in Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts. Both Alex Zwerdling in Virginia Woolf and the Real World and Lucio Ruotolo in The Interrupted Moment engage with the implications of this question – though neither has much to say about aeroplanes. Zwerdling concentrates on Woolf’s ‘intense interest in the life of society and its effect on the individual’; Ruotolo emphasises ‘the rhythm of broken sequence’. Zwerdling and Ruotolo recognise the urgency with which Woolf responds to the current moment in her final work. Ruotolo discovers a hoped-for continuity: what is interrupted is resumed, though changed in form by interruption. Zwerdling emphasises the diaspora of the self and of English society that is chillingly written into the book’s gossip: ‘Negation regularly has the last word.’ Ruotolo, in his book’s only surprising move, proceeds from his analysis of Between the Acts to claim Woolf for anarchism, though the anarchism for which he claims her proves to be generalised (‘All great art is anarchy’—Gertrude Stein) and muted, a matter of ‘the liberating space of unguarded moments’.

You are not Logged In

  • If you have already registered login here
  • If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
  • If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
  • If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
  • If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions