A society for asking questions

Virginia Woolf. Source: AP/Getty Images

Ninety-five years ago Virginia Woolf published a collection of short stories entitled Monday or Tuesday. I read the opening two stories earlier today. The first - a short, short story - is called 'A Haunted House'. It clearly draws directly on Mrs. Woolf's life and the deaths of her parents. One can see in it the core elements concerned with families and loss as well as time and place (especially the house in 'Time Passes') presented with such accomplishment and power in the novel To The Lighthouse, published six years later.

The second piece in the 1921 short-story collection goes by the title, 'A Society'. It's a comic tale, a satire I suppose, extolling feminist Utopian ideas which, almost one hundred years after publication, remains insightful and compelling. Like everything of Virginia Woolf's I have read it also shows her powerful intellect and perceptive skill. It is witty, self-deprecating at times and sharp throughout. It's impossible not to think that a Century later we still haven't reached the point Mrs. Woolf looked forward to in her short story.

by Aubrey Beardsley, 1895

I subsequently stumbled over (yet again and not for the last time) just how much I do not know and have yet to learn when I found an academic paper on Mrs. Woolf's short story online: 'A Society': An Aristophanic Comedy by Virginia Woolf' by Lucía P. Romero-Mariscal. I vaguely recall studying one of Aristophanes' plays forty years ago at Stirling University. It may have been Lysistrata but might have been The Birds. I still possess the book of the great dead Greek's plays I bought in 1975 or 1976; one of several paperbacks to see me through the semester on drama. 

Now ... I'm not entirely thick. With character names such as Cassandra and Castalia, and references to Sappho in her story I understood Virginia Woolf was making Classical allusions as well as many other observations. But I had no idea at all of the direct reference to and influence of Aristophanes' Lysistrata in 'A Society' until I read Ms. Romero-Mariscal's short, insightful and persuasively argued paper. So I came away from this evening's set of readings with clear impressions and observations, which include:

• Every new encounter with Virginia Woolf's writing leaves me in awe of her talent and accomplishments;
• I truly do know much less than I think I know;
• I have a lot to learn;
• Writing has as much to do with reading as it does with writing.

When I was reading Steal Like An Artist by Austin Kleon I was struck by a suggestion of his that one should "climb your own family tree". He described that idea in these terms,

"... chew on one thinker - writer, artist, activist, role model - you really love. Study everything there is to know about that thinker. Then find three people that thinker loved, and find out everything about them. Repeat this as many times as you can."

I surprised myself at the time by sticking an IKEA-equivalent of a post-it note to the page in Mr. Kleon's book (page 15, as it happens). I scribbled on my note, "who would that be?" I was stumped not because I don't have heroes and role models. I have many. Instead, I struggled with selecting my number one, my person of choice with whom to begin. Since reading Steal Like an Artist, however, the question has been answering itself because time after time after time I'm drawn back to Virginia Woolf. Who would have thought so? Well, me actually; now that I think about her place in the panoply of influences and talents from which I might choose. 

It seems, then, I've found the first of my next three 'thinkers' to explore (as I continue to mine the works of Virginia Woolf). So ... Aristophanes, here I come. I shall start by digging out the creased and worn paperback volume of Greek plays I've carried with me across two continents for more than forty years. Back to the future indeed.