Re: What did Virginia Woolf mean by this?

Research, reviews, reflections, and reactions

Good morning!

I was searching the internet for a Virginia Woolf quote (for this Sunday’s essay) when I came across this question on a reddit thread. I thought I might try a different format for this week’s Re: and actually respond to it in this newsletter.

Virginia Woolf was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century and is best known for her use of “stream of consciousness” as a narrative and literary device. She wrote Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One's Own (1929).

I was reintroduced to Woolf’s writing through a different lens—one that highlights its tidal imagery through a feminist reading—while developing my research and shaping my concept of “fluvial feminisms.”

“There are tides in the body,” is a well-known quote from Woolf’s book Mrs Dalloway which resonates deeply with theories like hydrofeminism, a concept developed by the cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis and emphasizes water as a shared materiality across bodies. In her text “Bodies of Water,” Neimanis writes:

Water as body; water as communicator between bodies; water as facilitating bodies into being. Entity, medium, transformative and gestational milieu. All of this enfolded in, seeping from, sustaining and saturating, our bodies of water. “There are tides in the body,” writes Virginia Woolf. We ebb and flow across time and space—body, to body, to body, to body.

This background I think is important in setting the context to dissect the quote from the reddit question. This passage, which I paste below in full, is from a letter written by Woolf to Vita Sackville-West on 16 March, 1926: