Smashing the Teapots

Jacqueline Rose

• Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee
  Chatto, 722 pp, £20.00, September 1996, ISBN 0 7011 6507 3

One of the strangest things Virginia Woolf ever did was to travel with Leonard to Germany for part of their annual holiday in April 1935. The vigour of German anti-semitism was by this point clear and Hitler’s power and at least some of his worst intentions towards Britain were recorded by Woolf in her diaries (‘There is some reason I suppose to expect that Oxford Street will be flooded with poison gas one of these days’). But it wasn’t uncharacteristic of her to make light of danger. Although in many ways her life seems closeted, guarding its safety till the last, Virginia Woolf took risks with herself. Five years later, caught in an air-raid with Ben Nicolson, who sagely threw himself to the ground, she stood still and lifted her arms to the sky. More sinisterly, caught in the middle of a flag-waving crowd of Nazi supporters shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ in the course of the trip to Germany, she had raised her arm in salute.