Virginia Woolf: Writer and Personality

Abstract

All human beings are extremely complicated. Virginia Woolf was one of the few people I have ever met who I think was a genius, and geniuses are slightly more complicated than ordinary people. I have myself met two people whom you have to call geniuses; one was G. E. Moore the philosopher, and the other was my wife. Her mind acted in a way in which ordinary people, who are not geniuses, never let their minds run. She had a perfectly ordinary way of thinking and talking and looking at things and living; but she also at moments had a sight of things which does not seem to me to be exactly the ordinary way in which ordinary people think and let their minds go. It was partly imagination, and it worked in ordinary life in exactly the same way every now and then as it worked in her books. She would be describing what she had seen in the street, for instance, or what someone had said to her, and then go on to weave a character of the person and everything connected with them, and it would be quite amusing. Then suddenly it would become something entirely different. I always called it leaving the ground. She would weave not the sort of scene or conversation which one felt was what anyone else would have seen and described, but something entirely different.

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Authors

1. Leonard Woolf

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© 1995 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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