The Magazine No. 020 Vol. III, Juli, 2026

The more I re-read her, the more the Woolf I wanted to inhabit my pages danced and laughed. Like her diaries, my Virginia is full of life, ideas, jokes, sensuality. She is much more joyous than melancholy. She is, in fact, exactly what I take Woolf to have been: a person with a great capacity for pleasure who at times became dangerously ill with depression. Unless you think it right to let an illness define a person, it’s just as possible to interpret Woolf via her coexisting gift for happiness. Novelist Elizabeth Bowen remembered her on the floor mending a curtain, “and she sat back on her heels and put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun, and laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful, hooting way.”