The Voyage Out [antikvár]

Introduction Was my aunt Virginia Woolf indeed a great writer? When I was still a teenager, it seemed as though a few people thought so, although not so many as now, but their voices were thinly spread, neither quite convinced nor convincing. But then the world was infinitely smaller, and the word "great" meant something different. It was allied to something formidable, gigantic and granitic, and in spite of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and George EUot, it was doubtful whether a woman could aspire to such a condition. Sometimes I would be asked what I thought, and I did not know what to answer: the question seemed to me misplaced, out of alignment to the fact that Virginia was my aunt. If this says a lot about my own narcissism, it also says a lot about the seriousness with which Virginia took her role as aunt. Like Rachel Vinrace in The Voyage Out, however, I not only suspected the questioner of a wish to exaggerate, to inflate the subject for their own purposes, but I was silenced by my own incapacity to answer truthfully. It was partly because I not only knew Virginia as a member of the family—one of the "grown-ups"—but, privileged to listen behind the scenes, I knew her too as someone far from perfect, who could be teased and laughed at, sometimes to her face, but mostly behind her back. Virginia the egotist, Virginia the mischief-maker, Virginia the absent-minded, Virginia the exag-gerator, the snob, the gossip. My family seldom praised its own members: virtue was taken for granted because ordinary