Novel Readings

How I hate the word “relatable,” which is so often a shorthand for “like me and thus likeable,” which in turn is both a shallow standard for merit and a lazy way to react to a character. And yet sometimes it’s irresistible as a way to capture the surprise of finding out that someone who otherwise seems so different, elusive, iconic, really can be in some small way just like me—a writer of genius, for example, who reacts to invitations by worrying that she has nothing nice to wear and doesn’t look very good in what she does have. Yes, the period of Woolf’s diary I am reading is one of great intellectual and artistic flourishing, and this makes it all the more touching as well as oddly endearing that she frets so much about “powder & paint, shoes & stockings.” “My own lack of beauty depresses me today,” she writes on March 3, 1926;

But how far does the old convention about ‘beauty’ bear looking into? I think of the people I have known. Are they beautiful? This problem I leave unsolved.

On March 20 she remarks “a slight melancholia,”

which comes upon me sometimes now, & makes me think I am old: I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

She loves socializing, thrives on conversation, but dreads dressing up for it: “When I am asked out,” she notes in May, “my first thought is, but I have no clothes to go in.” She undertakes to go to “a dressmaker recommended by Todd [the editor of Vogue]”: “I tremble & shiver all over at the appalling magnitude of the task I have undertaken.” Happily, it goes well:

I went to my dressmaker, Miss Brooke, & found it the most quiet & friendly and even enjoyable of proceedings. I have a great lust for lovely stuffs, & shapes . . . A bold move, this, but now I’m free of the fret of clothes, which is worth paying for, & need not parade Oxford Street.

No sooner is she feeling more at ease, even easy, about how she looks, then stupid Clive Bell has to go and ruin everything:

This is the last day of June [1926] & finds me in black despair because Clive laughed at my new hat, Vita pitied me, & I sank to the depths of gloom. This happened at Clive’s last night after going to the Sitwell’s with Vita. Oh dear I was wearing the hat without thinking whether it was good or bad; & it was all very flashing and easy . . . Come on all of us to Clive’s, I said; & they agreed. Well, it was after they had come & we were all sitting round talking that Clive suddenly said, or bawled rather, what an astonishing hat you’re wearing! Then he asked where I got it. I pretended a mystery, tried to change the talk, was not allowed, & they pulled me down between them like a hare; I never felt more humiliated. Clive said did Mary choose it? No. Todd said Vita. And the dress?  Todd of course. After that I was forced to go on as if nothing terrible had happened; but it was very forced & queer & humiliating. So I talked & laughed too much, Duncan prim & acid as ever told me it was utterly impossible to do anything with a hat like that. And I joked about the Squires’ party & Leonard got silent, & I came away deeply chagrined, as unhappy as I have been these ten years; & revolved it in sleep & dreams all night; & today has been ruined.

Thanks a lot, Clive! And you too, Duncan: I bet your hats were all plenty stupid-looking! But seriously, although at the time Woolf really was not “old” (and it is hard for me to think of her as anything but strikingly beautiful), isn’t it hard enough going out in public in this sexist and judgmental world as an aging woman who knows her strengths lie somewhere other than in her looks, without our dearest friends making us wish we’d stayed home?

(I don’t think either of the hats in the photos here is the hat! They are both great hats, but neither of them, surely, is astonishing.)