Julia Stephen was holding her sixth daughter in her arms a few hours after giving birth. Leslie Stephen scribbled letters on her desk, oblivious to the crying baby. It was January 25, 1882. No one seemed to suspect that day that Virginia was born to drown. Much less did they suspect that with her we would all drown a little and save ourselves from drowning at the same time. Decades later, before her 60th birthday, Woolf smiled at those who saw her stroll through the trees that March morning. She was wearing a very long coat as she wrote two short notes (one for her sister Vanessa hers, one for her husband Leonard hers) in her little notebook.
On January 25, 1882, no one suspected that, before filling her pockets with stones and sinking into the River Ouse, Virginia would write some books that would change the course of literature forever (to the lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, a room of one’s own, Orlando, Waves), nor (even more importantly) that these books would transform their readers generation after generation. Virginia died leaving us as an inheritance a long ladder and a magnifying glass. Thanks to it we reach the necessary height to lose fear. Thanks to her we were able to see the tiny, almost invisible things that our feet bumped into at every step.
Virginia, the strange thing is not that you drowned. The strange thing is that so many women did not go, with their pockets full of stones, behind. The strange thing was not to give up, it was to continue, to be, to resist, to fight
As often happens with the great female writers whose biographies had something awry from very early on (I am thinking of Emily Dickinson’s atrocious fear of others, of Sylvia Plath’s recurring depressions or of the stays in the psychiatric hospital of Alejandra Pizarnik), when talking about it, the words depression, madness, disease are emphasized. But the reasons for this deep discomfort, this constant feeling of being out of joint, are never explained. And I’m not just talking about the fact that, after the loss of her mother at just 13 years of age, her father prohibited her name from being pronounced again. I’m not even talking about the sexual abuse she suffered from the age of seven by her stepbrothers, twenty years older than her, whose account no one (including her biographers) believed. I’m talking about something much more vague that reached everything. How not to feel like a foreigner when the place you occupy is never represented, when yours is systematically off the map? How not to stir when you inhabit a world that has never belonged to you? How to be a woman in a reality made by a few men who only thought of a few other men while they raised their batons of command or climbed the pulpits of their churches, without looking into the eyes of those who cooked in their kitchens? Furthermore, how could you not go crazy if you were able to crack open a door and stick your head out into forbidden places, if you were lucky enough to read the books that were reserved for them, to buy a handful of sheets of paper and some ink, to find the time and space to write? How not to fill your pockets with stones and sink into the River Ouse if every word of yours was systematically questioned, every slightest rebellion disapproved, when they spat on each of your little conquests and you could already guess that more than a hundred years after writing what that you wrote would things remain practically the same?
Virginia, the strange thing is not that you drowned. The strange thing is that so many women did not go, with their pockets full of stones, behind. The strange thing was not to give up, it was to continue, to be, to resist, to fight. And if we do it since you left, it is, in part, thanks to your legacy: the ladder, the magnifying glass, the word. To everything you left us. To everything that day did not drown.