Perhaps the most balletic and unexpected of these is the essay’s final leap from the best of literature (which we are able to enjoy in the solitude necessitated by illness) to the guilty pleasures of the worst, whose characters and names “ray out as beams of benignant lustre” to those suffering a “slight rise of temperature.” In this case the worst is represented by “The Story of Two Noble Lives” by Augustus Hare, a biography of sisters Charlotte and Louisa Stuart. I believe we are to think this is nobility-obsessed drivel and perhaps not well-written, but to Woolf’s credit the summary she gives of the book, or rather the summary of their lives, is enticing and far superior to the books I’ve read under cover of darkness (or umbrella, or fever).
In fact, the sisters’ loneliness is sketched out with comedic, yet poignant detail—from their father who builds the family home “upon the borders of a crumbling cliff, too, so that the housemaids saw their brooms swimming down the Solent” to a certain fate to “grow very old and remain very upright, and sit in hooded chairs cutting flowers it seems out of coloured paper.” While her sister moves to India, Louisa goes with her husband to Ireland where she “must fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup[…]. Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox and she would wave to him and think each time, what if this should be the last?” And indeed, the entire essay ends beautifully and strangely with the image of “the curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps,…all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.”
Hermione Lee’s introduction to the essay provides great insight into the role of Hare’s book within Woolf’s essay and in particular what we might make of the last movement; brilliantly, the “crushing” of the curtain harkens back to the linguistic “crushing together” required to adequately speak of illness. I would also add that in Louisa’s seemingly healthy life we see the invalid’s reflected. She is solitary, though awaiting care and companionship. Her husband is “stately as a crusader” and Louisa, the opposite. If we use Woolf’s previous military metaphor, she is a deserter—thinking, waiting, wondering.
***
Coincidentally, at the end of writing these posts I caught dinky cold. There was only one day when I felt truly awful, but I made a concerted effort to write during it. Though the result was single paragraph, a tendency emerged; I was drawn to synesthesia. It was inaccurate to say my glands were swollen and hurting, or that I was stiff. No, my neck felt like the sound of a wet stick being snapped. I suppose synesthesia allows the magnitude of a particular experience or feeling to be amplified, spread out across the body. It expresses how interconnected and communicative each part of the body is, despite being so often ignored.