![]() ![]() ![]() No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. ![]() I couldn’t screw a word from me and at last I dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink and, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. As she promptly wrote to her friend Vita Sackville-West: Yesterday morning I was in despair. At her lowest ebb, bored and demoralised by literary criticism, inspiration suddenly and unexpectedly struck. ![]() ‘For the truth is,’ she noted in her diary, ‘I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books whose form is always so closely considered.’ Instead, ‘I want to kick up my heels & be off.’ Then 45, with five increasingly complex and beautiful novels behind her, a couple of dozen short stories and two collections of essays, she was working on a book on ‘Fiction, or some such title to that effect’ and it was not going well. Not that this meant a holiday from writing rather it was a break from the intensity of her ongoing Modernist experiment. Towards the end of 1927 – following the publication of To the Lighthouse in May – Virginia Woolf took what she described as a ‘writer’s holiday’. ![]()
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