The Life of Violet by Virginia Woolf (2025)
Three Early Stories
A reworked and redrafted version of the original The Life of Violet (1908), written by a young Virginia Woolf, was dormant in Longleat House, the estate of the Marquess of Bath, Wiltshire.
Many untold stories await discovery in attics, cellars, trunks, drawers, beneath boards, and other imaginative ramblings. Hidden treasures might be snuggily awaiting the passionate hand and mind that will bring them to light.
Virginia Woolf’s writings were part of my University years; I remember how fruitfully I wandered through the pages of her novels, how each word and thought was a palimpsest that would lead me through the alleys of the tridimensional coexistence of narrative layers, how one could access the inner recesses of the minds of characters through words, how words were not just words but the absence of words, the untold thoughts. Virginia Woolf means moments of being.
The Life of Violet strikes as a different kind of narrative.
Urmila Seshagiri’s magnificent preface to this edition of The Life of Violet heralds the unusual character of these short stories, in which a young Virginia experiments with narrative within the architecture of her bond with Violet . Seshagiri comments that this is a mock- biography, a triumph of laughter and a celebration of friendship. The stories also address many Woolfian topics: the necessity for women to have a place of their own in history, in writing as well as the necessity to record the evanescence of their domesticity. The blurry borderlines between fiction and history are also unspun (the narrator says that this is a chronicle or that a sincere historian would have rendered certain veracities).
These stories are also about laughter, especially about women’s laughter. Henry Bergson “In his 1900 book Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic (Le Rire), French philosopher Henri Bergson argues that laughter is a uniquely human, social, and corrective power rather than a mere intellectual exercise or emotional outlet.”
Violet’s extraordinary height becomes a butt for comedy but also a standpoint to defy the corsetted world of conventions to which women seem to be ascribed. This ironic fashion in which Violet is presented through her exaggerated height can be traced back to some 18th century biographical fictions written by men and populated by their heroes. “Tristram Shandy” by Lawrence Sterne ( 1759-67) starts ab ovo, even before Tristram is born. Some uneventful matters at birth mark his character: the doctor flattens his nose with his forceps.
The narrator’s constant metafictional disquisitions draw awareness to the process of writing and its construction. The unnamed narrator digresses, questions, and shapes as the story unfolds. The narrative unsettles established systems of meaning through humour and irony: the cross Violet receives from her aunt, initially presented as a solemn religious token, is gradually transformed into an object of mockery and laughter. In this way, Woolf playfully subverts the authority of religious and social conventions. Other social conventions that are challenged are debutante balls where women seem to be deemed eligible wives on the basis of their looks.
Violet, by contrast, is independent, unmarried, and thoroughly enjoying herself. In this portrait, the young Virginia Woolf captures the spirit of earlier literary heroines, from Austen’s Emma to Charlotte Brontë’s protagonists, whose intelligence constitutes a source of power and prevalesces over the outlayers of beauty. The domestic details—the atoms of existence, the minutiae of women’s everyday lives—are precisely what make history.
“Throughout her career, Woolf urged women to keep records of their lives, writing to the composer and suffragette Ethel Smith in 1934, “please I be of you, devote yourself to memoir writing for posterity...This I consider the most sacred duty.” Her own diaries demonstrate. desire to record the evanescent domestic details of every day life” (Dublin Review of Books)
