No 'Ordinary Day*: The Hours, Virginia Woolf andEveryday life

Women artists have always played a leading role in integrating art andlife ... To recognise this as a superior rather than an inferior aestheticchanges everything.'

There have been a number of recent biopics about twentieth-centurywomen writers which focus upon their daily domestic lives; forexample, Iris (2001), The Hours (2002) and Sylvia (2003). Severalcritics have argued that these films over-emphasise the domesticmelodramas and events that punctuated these women's lives and failto pay sufficient attention to their creative practices and intellectualachievements.^ Indeed, illness and domestic melodrama are thedominant themes in these three biopics. These texts also oversimplifythe woman artist's often complex relationship to the 'ordinary day',3the everyday. Here I consider ihe representation of the women writer'srelationship to everyday life in The Hours, particularly VirginiaWoolf S4 attitude to the domestic quotidian and home in the film.Cultural critics have long observed that film has tended to set famous

people apart from the everyday. In 'The Everyday and Everydayness'Henri Lefebvre writes that:

Images, the cinema and television divert the everyday by at timesoffering up to it its own spectacle, or sometimes the spectacle of thedistinctly noneveryday; violence, death, catastrophe, the lives of kingsand stars - those who we are led to believe defy everydayness.s

However, as Rita Felski argues in 'The Invention of Everyday life', theeveryday is a democratic concept; '[ejveiyone', she writes, 'from themost famous to the most humble' is 'ultimately anchored in themundane' material world.^ Biopics about famous artists favour the'spectacle' of the noneveryday and imply that the artist seeks to, inLefebvre's terms, 'defy it. In her discussion of biopics about visualartists, including Pollock and Frida, Rebecca Lancashire suggests thatsuch films seek to 'reinforce the romantic notion of creative genius'and observes that one of the problems with Hollywood'smythologising or demonising of artists is that 'it only serves to fuelpublic misconceptions about their lives and their role in society.^ TheHours is a suggestive text in discussions about biopics, artists and theeveryday, as the film formally privileges the concept of the everyday byrepresenting one day in the life of Virginia Woolf. The film, I suggest,embodies a contradictory and troubled approach to the relationshipbetween the woman writer and the theme of everyday life. While TheHours presents Woolf as an artist who is committed to capturing andcelebrating the quotidian in her fiction, she is portrayed as desiring totranscend it. Furthermore, while the film formally suggests a kind ofhomage to the texture of Woolf s daily life by focusing upon one60 HECATE

ordinary day in her life in 1923, it privileges melodrama andnoneveryday spectacles. Woolfs 1923 diary illuminates how TheHours offers a somewhat misleading and ideologically loadedrepresentation of her daily life and her attitude towards it.The screenplay for The Hours, written by David Hare, is an

adaptation of Michael Cunningham's novel by the same title, whichwas published in 1998. Both texts are, in tum, a reworking of Woolfsfourth novel Mrs Dalloway, which was published in 1925 and titledThe Hours in an earlier draft. Like James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), MrsDalloway traces one day in the life of a person - a society wife namedClarissa Dalloway who is preparing for a party she is giving thatevening. The Hours represents a day in the life of three women wholive in different decades of the twentieth century; Virginia Woolf,Laura Brown and Clarissa Vaughan. Virginia Woolf is living with herhusband, Leonard, at Hogarth House in Richmond, Surrey in 1923;Laura Brown is a pregnant housewife who lives with her husband andson in a suburb of Los Angeles in 1949 (1951 in the film); ClarissaVaughan is a literary editor who lives with her partner, Sally, anddaughter, Julia, in Greenwich Village, New York, in the 199OS.9 Byconstructing parallels between their lives which are, nevertheless,distinguished by class, time, space, domestic roles and occupation, thetext claims a common ground of female experience at the level of theeveryday, one that centres upon the notion of woman's universalsuffering under the constraints of the domestic quotidian. The Hoursexplores the efforts of these three women to negotiate their everyday,domestic roles as mother, wife, hostess and/or carer, with theirpersonal aspirations and sense of self.The film is modelled on Cunningham's book, and he was conscious of

the way in which his text sought to negotiate between fact and fiction.In his 'A Note on Sources' at the end of the novel, he states that whileWoolf, her family and servants are presented as 'fictional characters',he claims to have 'tried to render as accurately as possible the outwardparticulars of their lives as they would have been on a day [he]invented for them in 1923'. ° Fact and historical detail are therefore ofimport to the biographical dimension of Cunningham's project. Heconsulted Woolfs many volumes of diaries, letters and some criticalworks for his research." If Cunningham's aim is to render an accuratepicture of the 'outward particulars' of Woolfs daily life in 1923, hisbook is somewhat compromised by a bias towards a notoriousrepresentation of her as a sick, eccentric woman writer whocommitted suicide. The film version further dramatises thisproblematic representation and implies that Woolfs feminist agendawas centrally concerned with escaping her everyday life.

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Escaping the quotidianVirginia Woolfs relationship to the everyday in the film iscontradictory in the sense that while it presents her as an author whois committed to the artistic representation of daily life and accentuatesthe importance of ordinary, domestic events, she is portrayed as beingdisengaged from them.In the film, Virginia Woolf describes her concept of The Hours as a

book that traces 'a woman's life in a single day, and in that day a wholelife'.i In Cunningham's novel she wonders; 'can a single day in the lifeof an ordinary woman be made into enough for a novel?''3 In thenovel, her strategy for making it 'enough' is to emphasise theimportance of domestic failures and successes to a woman's life andreveal their nobility; 'The trick will be to render intact the magnitudeof Clarissa's miniature but very real desperation; to fully convince thereader that, for her, domestic defeats are every bit as devastating asare lost battles to a general'. ^ This echoes Woolfs claim in her essay'Modem Fiction' (1925), that we must 'not take it for granted that lifeexists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what iscommonly thought small'. In that essay she also argues that modemnovelists should aim to illuminate the richness and complexity of 'anordinary mind on an ordinary day' in their prose. s The film'semphasis on the domestic quotidian pays tribute to Woolfs renderingof what is 'commonly thought small' and insignificant in such novelsas Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and shortstories such as 'The Mark on the Wall' (1917).! For example, baking aperfect birthday cake, ordering dinner and throwing a pady, are someof the common, domestic tasks that preoccupy the three femaleprotagonists in the film. However, it confiises Woolfs argument aboutthe experiential significance and aesthetic potential of 'an ordinarymind on an ordinary da/ with a desire to dramatise domestic life. Thisconflation becomes the grounds for introducing many scenes ofdomestic conflict and melodrama into the film that undermine, ratherthan celebrate the nobility of the domestic quotidian and reiterate thepatriarchal stereotype of woman as inherently melodramatic andhysterical.Woolfs novel, Mrs Dalloway, celebrates the 'miniature' and

quotidian events and perceptions that make up Clarissa Dallowa/sday, such as the various errands she completes in preparation for herparty, the sights and sounds that she observes whUst walking aroundLondon, and the incidental conversations she has with people alongthe way. 17 By contrast, in The Hours Virginia Woolf is presented asbeing disengaged from mundane routines and her everydaysurroundings, and resentful of her domestic responsibilities asmistress of the house. In several scenes, the everyday acts of eatingand making arrangements for dinner are portrayed as interruptions to

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her creative endeavours and this implies a fundamental oppositionbetween the everyday and creativity.Virginia Woolfs antipathy towards food in The Hours, and her

resistance to any dialogues relating to food, is linked to her status asan invalid, and her mental illness is the predominating theme in thefilm. Contrary to what The Hours suggests, in 1923 Woolf wasexperiencing a comparatively long period of good health. ^ She had notsince the summer of 1921 suffered from any of the psychologicaleffects symptomatic of her previous breakdowns, such as hearingvoices, and was not subjected to stringent rest cure practices that yearas she had been in previous years. s" Woolfs biographer, HermioneLee, observes that Woolf did not 'break down' at all during the twoyears that she wrote Mrs Dalloway, from October 1922 to October1924.20 As such, opening and closing images of Woolf s suicide in 1941,and arguments in the fihn between Leonard and Virginia Woolf aboutfood and regimes of health care, serve to dramatise her status asinvalid at the expense of her identity as artist, and perpetuate adisplacement of the everyday in favour of noneveryday drama and

lUnlike the heroine in her new novel. The Hours portrays Virginia

Woolf as being absorbed in a private, asocial world of creative thoughtand thereby disengaged from the material, social world. This issuggested in the scene in which she talks to herself about the death ofClarissa Dalloway whilst sitting on a park bench in Richmond,apparently oblivious to her surrounding environment.^^ -fhe film alsoimplies that she was socially dysfunctional and detested mundaneconversations and social chit-chat. She avoids conversations about thelunchtime menu with her cook, Nelly, for fear that this might disrupther train of thought, and is later shown to be incapable of attending toa conversation with her sister, Vanessa, because she is too preoccupiedwith thoughts as to who will die in her new novel. It was the film'sportrayal of Woolf as antisocial and neurotic that her grand-niece,Virginia Nicolson, criticised in an interview reported in TheIndependent:

What worries me is that a generation of cinemagoers will see VirginiaWoolf as a neurotic, gloomy, suicide-obsessed femme fatale.... Toanyone v rho knew her, she was enormous fun, made everyone laugh....Her nieces and nephews didn't sit around mooning over dead birdswith her. They had a lot of fun and a lot of laughter.23

Such representations of Woolfs engagement with her everydaymaterial and social surroundings are not only contradicted by herfiction, which centres upon a character's responses to his or herexternal environment, but also her diaries. Lee observes that, forWoolf, diary writing served the purpose of recording what Woolfcalled the practice of 'seeing life' as she 'walk[ed] about the streets', in

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her 'concise historical style'.24 In contrast to the film, the 1923 diaryreflects Woolfs commitment to 'carefiiUy' recording observations ofthe weather and her surrounding landscape, daily happenings andconversations.25 She attempted to record several 'verbatim' in herdiary in July that year, conversations between herself and fiiends whovisited Richmond. ^ However, The Hours' depiction of a day in the lifeof Woolf makes the quotidian a residual feature of her life, andsomething she seeks to escape through her art. While it has beenobserved by Woolf critics that she often refiected on the distinctionbetween her interior life as a writer and her exterior, social life. TheHours is ultimately misleading in its suggestion that the two sphereswere always antithetical and in confiict.27 As Jeanette McVicker hasargued, Woolfs writing consistently reveals her sense that life 'existsalong a continuum that fundamentally links the interior or subjectivewith the physical or material worlds'. ^ Woolfs daily life in HogarthHouse, Richmond, illustrates the manner in which she successfiillynegotiated her public and private lives and sought to bring the twospheres into a symbiotic relationship.

Escaping HomeFelski suggests that many philosophers of everyday life 'focus on thehome as its privileged symbol', and it is the close ideologicalassociation between home and the everyday that further rendersVirginia Woolfs relationship to the everyday one of confiict in thefilm.29 The Hours subscribes to a dominant second-wave feministinterpretation of the home as a 'prison', 'trap' and 'straightjacket' andechoes the view expressed in Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique(1963) that the home must be, in Lesley Johnson's words, 'left behindin the formation of the feminist subject'.so While this feminist critiqueof a woman's everyday life in suburbia is most strongly articulated inthe film through the character of Laura Brown, who is deeplydespondent about her life as a suburban housewife and leaves herhusband and children for an independent, working life in Canada,Virginia Woolf and Clarissa Vaughan also express negative orambivalent attitudes to home. While The Hours can be viewed asproffering a feminist politic through its indictment of suburban lifefrom a woman's point of view, it presents, I suggest, a homogeneousaccount of women's experience of suburbia and home. The filmunderplays the unconventional nature of Woolfs suburban life inRichmond, which bore no resemblance to the isolated one of bearingand rearing children experienced by the 1950s housewife LauraBrown.The climactic, melodramatic scene in the Virginia Woolf narrative in

The Hours depicts an argument between her and Leonard atRichmond train station, in which she expresses her desire to return to

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London; Leonard claims that this is 'an aspect of Dier] illness' ratherthan her ovra voice.3i This argument does not occur in Cunningham'snovel and there is no record of it in Woolfs 1923 diary, although theWoolfs did have divergent views on the matter at the time.s^ In thecourse of this argument, her attitude to suburban existence isunequivocally negative. She claims that her life has been 'stolen' fromher and refers to her life in Richmond as one of 'custody and'imprisonment'; 'I am living in a town I have no wish to live in. I amliving a life I have no wish to live'. She goes on to suggest that she is'dying in this town' and chooses 'the violent jolt of the capital' over the'suffocating anaesthetic of the suburb' which is tantamount to a living'death'.33 Similarly, in Cunningham's novel, Virginia Woolf 'despisesRichmond' and desires a return to the 'dangers of city life', a space thatis coded as noneveryday in the book through its association withexcess, the 'marvelous [sic]' and madness.a^ Like other themes andpreoccupations throughout the film. The Hours utilises VirginiaWoolfs purported experience of suburban life in Richmond as ameans to foreground her status as invalid and madwoman at theexpense of her identity as a successful artist and public intellectual.While the Woolfs' move to Richmond was initially prompted by herhealth, and she did become frustrated by its distance from London,the film obscures the fact that Richmond was not a prison entrappingVirginia Woolf the housewife; it was a place of independent, creativework for her as an author.The Woolfs left London and moved to Richmond in 1915 following

Woolfs breakdown in 1914-15, since the medical conventions of thetime viewed the busier pace of London life as prone to aggravate herillness.35 They lived in Hogarth House, Richmond for nine years and itwas there that they began the Hogarth Press. Feminist critics havechallenged the concept of the home as a refuge from paid labour andinterrogated essentializing images of women's lives in the suburbs.3^Daily life in suburban Richmond for Woolf in the 1920s was notequivalent to that of the 1950s suburban housewife who was solelyengaged in unpaid forms of domestic labour. While Woolf criticisedthe nineteenth-century ideology of the 'Angel in the House', one thatwas retained in the 1950s ideal of femininity, she was notfundamentally opposed to the domestic but, rather, concerned withthe ways in which women might negotiate their professional andpersonal/domestic desires and aspirations.37 Her own life was anexample of such a negotiation. Hogarth House was also a placeassociated with paid forms of work for her. She wrote her reviews,essays and novels at home and the Woolfs set up the Hogarth Press tofacilitate the publication of their own work and that of new, unknownauthors. The film again seeks to displace Woolfs status as professionalwriter and businesswoman with her popular status as madwoman by

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suggesting that the Press was set up as a 'ready source of absorptionand a remed/ for Virginia the invalid, one she compares to'needlework' in the film.as While Hermione Lee observes that thePress was viewed by some of Woolfs contemporaries as a form oftherapy for her, '[i]n practice', she writes, it 'was a time-consumingoccupation which immediately gripped them both, and which at oncegave a sense of [artistic] "possibilities opening up". By 1919 it was anestablished business.39Veronica Strong-Boag et al. have argued that '[i]nitially suburban

women appeared as victims of spatial constraints and cultural normsthat naturalized their domestic roles. More recently, women emerge asactive agents with diverse experiences of "suburban life".'4o Woolfsdaily life in Richmond, as presented in The Hours, fails to capture her'diverse' experiences of suburban life. Comments in her diaries revealthat her attitude to Richmond entailed positive and negative aspectsthat were related to her efforts to negotiate between her public andsocial commitments and interests and her love of work, solitude andprivacy. In some diary entries, Woolf expresses a liking for the privacythat Ilichmond provided, and an increased opportunity for readingand writing. For example, upon moving there in 1915 she writes; 'therewas a time when I went out to operas, evenings concerts &c, at least 3times a week - And I know we shall both feel, when its over, "really agood read would have been better".'4i At other times, she felt thatRichmond was too isolated from the sights and people she desired tosee in London. This feeling is expressed in her June 1923 diary, whenher desire to leave Richmond hit a peak:

This may be life; hut I douht that I shall ever convert L. & now sitdown b ^ e d & depressed to face a life spent, mute & mitigated, in thesuburbs ... the old rigid obstacle - my health ... is surely now a deadhand, which one should no longer let dominate our short years of life- oh to dwindle them out here, with all these gaps, & abbreviations!Always to catch trains, always to waste time, to sit here & wait forLeonard to come in... when, alternatively, I might go & hear a tune, orhave a look at a picture, or find out something at the British Museum... But now I'm tied, imprisoned, inhibited ... This is the pith of mycomplaint. For ever to he suburban.42

With reference to this diary entry, Hermione Lee observes thatThis was one mood, and a very insistent one. But at other times shefelt with equal passion that she wanted to withdraw from the'thousands of people' they saw (even in suburban Richmond). Andthen, at other times (these 'other times' could coexist within the samehour, on the same page in the diary) she appreciated that they were inthe swim of things, that they had "bitten off a large piece of life'.43

In January 1924, upon purchasing a ten-year lease on her new housein Tavistock Square, London, Woolf celebrates London life in her66 HECATE

diary, but also reflects upon the necessity of living in Richmond for thetime she did and the ways in which it benefited her both personallyand professionally. She writes that 'save for one fit of the glooms' inthe summer of 1923 she had 'never complained of Richmond'.'*4Woolfs lifestyle in Richmond, and her attitude towards it, was morevariable than The Hours implies and was not one of despair, boredom,or confinement. What her diaries reveal, and what the film denies, arethe complexities, tensions and contradictions that were integral to her,and many people's experience of everyday life, and the ways in whichwomen negotiated cultural expectations and normativities with theirown aspirations and desires.

Art and Everyday lifeFeminist critics have discussed some of the ways in which womenhave utilised their experience of home to facilitate new or existingcreative practices. In her essay 'The Subversive Hearth: TheInstallation of the Domiciled Artist', Margaret Baguley discusses howmany less affluent housewives in the 1950s and 1960s transformedtheir "'assigned' domestic spaces into unique expressions of theirindividuality through interior design and home decoration.ts Shesuggests that creativity in the home became a means for many womento express their individuality in a social climate that was otherwiseprescriptive in terms of the roles and opportunities it offered women.As the home became a 'site of aesthetic statement' for housewivesduring the 1950s, women authors such as Woolf similarly sought toutilise their domestic everyday environments as spaces of creativepossibility and inspiration. Furthermore, as Gillian Beer has argued,Woolf sought to dispel the assumption that ordinary, domestic life isantithetical to thought.'*^ Thus, in short stories such as 'The Mark onthe Wall' (1917), Woolf uses her own everyday, domestic encounters,such as observing a mark on the living room wall, as a quotidianphenomena which becomes the catalyst for a diverse range of social,political and philosophical meditations. To the Lighthouse similarlyexplores the manner in which domestic events and spaces initiate avast range of meditations and reflections in the mother, Mrs Ramsay.As Mark Hussey has observed, Woolfs 'moments of being', asexperiences of sudden revelation or insight, are typically reserved forWoolfs female characters and frequently occur in domestic spaces.'Moments of being', he suggests, give rise to 'the psychic perception of[a] pattern' to life, and such moments are frequentiy linked todomestic routines and patterns, such as Clarissa Dallowa/s sewing inMrs Dalloway, and Mrs Ramsay's knitting in To the Lighthouse.'*'^ ForWoolf, the everyday lives and spaces of women are not opposed to artor thought, but can be their origin.

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The Hours misconstrues Woolfs daily life in 1923 and her attitude tothe everyday by privileging noneveryday dramatic moments thatcentre on her status as invalid and creative genius, and through thesuggestion that she was disempowered by a repressive, domesticexistence in suburban Richmond. In the tradition of novels includingMrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, The Hours focuses upon theexperiences of women and seeks to foreground the significance oftheir daily lives. However, is it not possible to celebrate the nobilityand validity of the lives of ordinary women like Laura Brown, andfamous women such as Virginia Woolf, without diminishing theirstories into tales of domestic melodrama and hysteria? The Hours, itseems, is compromised by not having in Rita Felski's terms, made'peace' with the concepts of the ordinary that it superficially claims tocelebrate.48While Woolfs self-proclaimed aim in 'Modem Fiction' is to render

the life of 'an ordinary mind on an ordinary da/ in her fiction. TheHours does not illuminate her rich engagement, both personally andartistically, with her everyday surroundings and the manner in whichshe approached domestic environments as spaces of creativepossibility, not constraint.49 While Michael Cunningham's novelacknowledges, and seeks to celebrate Woolfs engagement withordinary life in her writing, the biographical representation we areoffered in the film version of The Hours ultimately undermines theeveryday in Woolfs life in favour of stereotypical narratives about madwomen writers and their domestic melodramas. While, as HenriLefebvre argues, images in cinema often work to entice us withnoneveryday spectacles, biopics have the opportunity to developalternative ways of representing the lives of famous people, ways thatmight pay homage to the ordinary nature of their lives and theimportant role that the ordinary often assumes in their creativepractices. This is particularly necessary in films portraying the lives offamous women artists as many negative stereotypes are alreadyattached to them, stereotypes that a biopic like The Hours had theopportunity to redress.

Lorraine SimNotes

^ Joan Kerr, 'Art in Life', quoted in Margaret Baguley, 'The Subversive Hearth: TheInstallation of the Domiciled Artist', Hecate, vol. 29, no. 2, 2003, p. 173.= A. O. Scott, 'A Poet's Death, A Death's Poetry', The New York Times, 17 October2003, p. E 1:1; Andrea Toal, Review Article on Sylvia, Sight and Sound, vol. 14,issue 9, September 2004, p. 98.3 Virginia Woolf, 'Modem Fiction', Collected Essays, vol. 2, London: Hogarth,1966-7, p. 106.•• In my discussion 'Virginia Woolf refers to the character in The Hours, while'Woolf refers to the 'real' or historical woman/writer, a distinction I have drawn

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from Brenda Silver's study, Virginia Woolf Icon, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1999, p. 3.5 Henri Lefebvre, 'The Everyday and EverydasTiess', Yale French Studies, vol. 73,1987, p. 11.* Rita Felski, Doing Time. Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, New York:New York University Press, 2000, p. 79.7 Rebecca Lancashire, 'Artists Framed by Hollywood', The Age, reprinted in TheWest Australian, April 24, 2004, 'Weekend Extra', p. 10.8 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Anne Olivier Bell and AndrewMcNeillie (eds), vol. 2, London: Hogarth, 1979, p. 249.9 In the novel, the Laura Brovra narrative is set in 1949, while in the film it is set in1951. Cunningham's date corresponds to Betty Friedan's argument in TheFeminine Mystique, that the ideology of the American housewife-mother tookeffect from 1949: 'Fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for Americanwomen after 1949 - the housewife-mother ... Her solo fiight to find her ownidentity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitlessworld shrunk to the cozy walls of home'. The Feminine Mystique, New York: W. W.Norton & Company, 1983, p. 44.'" Michael Cunningham, The Hours, London: Fourth Estate, 2003, p. 229." Cunningham, pp. 229-30.' Stephen Daldry, The Hours, Paramount Pictures and Mirimax Films, 2002.Video recording.'3 Cunningham, p. 69.'4 Cunningham, p. 84.'5 Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, pp. 107,106. Similarly, the narrator of Woolfsthird novel, Jacob's Room (1922), suggests that our emotional experience isconstituted by everyday, rather than catastrophic, events; 'It's not catastrophes,murders, deaths...that kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up thesteps of omnibuses', Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room, Sue Roe (ed), London:Penguin, 1992, p. 69.16 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1996; VirginiaWoolf, To the Lighthouse, Margaret Drabble (ed), London: Oxford UniversityPress, i992;Virginia Woolf, 'The Mark on the Wall', The Complete Shorter Fictionof Virginia Woolf, Susan Dick (ed), London: Hogarth, 1985, pp. 77-83.'7 Cunningham, p. 84; Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, pp. 1-10.'* Cunningham's novel also acknowledges diat, in 1923, Woolf was experiencing aperiod of stable health, p. 71.'9 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, New York: Vintage, 1999, p. 448. The filmsuggests that, in 1923, Woolf was only permitted to vmte for certain periods oftime, required permission to engage in any physical exercise and was forbiddenfrom attending parties at her sister, Vanessa Bell's, house in London. However,such a rest cure regime was not as vigorously enforced during the period in whichshe was writing Mrs Dalloway as it had been following her breakdowns inprevious years. In 1923, Woolf was productive creatively, entertained many guestsat Richmond, visited London and Sussex on several occasions, and travelled vnthLeonard to Spain in April. In 1923 she continued to work on The Hours and herfirst volume of critical essays. The Common Reader (1925), and published fouressays and seven reviews, Andrew McNeilhe (ed). The Essays of Virginia Woolf,vol. 3, London: Hogarth, 1988, pp. 353-394. For Woolfs social activities duringthat year see her Diary, volume 2, and Edward Bishop, A Virginia WoolfChronology, Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1989, pp. 73-9.=" Lee, p. 451.21 I do not seek to diminish the major role that physical and mental illnessassumed in Woolfs life or the fact that the regimes of healthcare to which she was

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subjected were often repressive, if typical of the period in which she lived. Rather,I am interested in the version of Woolfs daily life in 1923 that the film privilegesand how it reiterates cultural stereotypes of the woman writer as inherently sickand seeking to transcend the everyday through illness or madness , themes that arealso evident in the film Sylvia.^^ By contrast, in the novel, Virginia Woolf pays close attention to the details of hersurrounding environment, including other people, their conversations, thesurrounding landscape, light and colour, Cunningham, p . 166.=3 The Independent, July 7, 2004 . The extract from this interview was obtained onthe Woolf listserve <VWOOLF@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>, posted by S. Shulman, 7July, 2004.^t Lee, p . 375; Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp. 144,100.^5 Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp . 251-2.2 Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, pp. 252-7.27 Lee, p . 448. The most detailed discussion of the relationship between the publicand private realms in relation to Woolf is Anna Snaith's, Virginia Woolf: Publicand Private Negotiations, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2 0 0 0 .^ Jeanet te McVicker, 'Gaps and Absences in The Hours', Virginia WoolfMiscellany, vol. 62, spring 2003 , p . 8.29 Felski, pp. 85-6.3° Felski, p. 86; Lesley Johnson, "As Housewives We are Worms' : Women,Modernity and the Home Question', Cultural Studies, vol. 10, no. 3 ,1996, p . 450.3' Daldry, 2002.32 In Cunningham's novel, Virginia Woolf decides to make an evening trip toLondon, without telling Leonard, but meets him on the street near the station.Rather than entering into a violent argument about moving back to London, shestates that it is t ime to do so, and he suggests that they discuss it over dinner, p .172.33 Daldry, 2002.34 Cunningham, p . 83 .35 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Anne Olivier Bell and AndrewMcNeillie (eds), vol. 1, London: Hogarth , 1978, pp . xvii.36 Veronica Strong-Boag, Isaveck Dyck, Kun England, and Louise Johnson , 'WhatWomen ' s Spaces? W o m e n in Australian, British, Canadian and US Suburbs ' , PeterJ , Larkham and Richard Harr is (eds). Changing Suburbs: Foundation, Form andFunction. Spon Press: London, 1999, p . 168.37 Woolf critiques the Victorian ideal of the 'Angel in the House ' in her essay,'Professions for Women ' , The Death of the Moth, London: Hogarth , 1945, pp . 150-1.38 Daldry, 2002 .39 Lee, p . 357.40 Strong-Boag et al., p . 168.41 Woolf, Diary, vol. 1, p . 19.42 Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p . 250.43 Lee, pp. 453-4; the quotations are from Woolfs 1922 diary.44 Woolf, Diary, vol. 2, p . 2 8 3 .45 Baguley, p . 169.4* Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground, A n n Arbor : Univers i ty ofMichigan Press, 1996, pp. 2-4.47 Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World. The Philosophy of VirginiaWoolfs Fiction, Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 1986, p . 105.48 'It is t ime, perhaps , to make peace with the ordinar iness of daily life', Felski, p .95-49 Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 2, p . 106.

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