Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf's Greece

Abstract

T HE GREEKS HAUNTED WOOLF. Her essay On Not Knowing stresses both their aloofness and unfamiliarity and our ignorance of their minds worked, of and why their literature was written; as a woman, she found them more primitive, puzzling, and alluring than their legitimate male heirs in Cambridge and Bloomsbury could imagine. When I think of the Greeks I think of them as naked black men, says Miss Allan in The Voyage Out (114), which is quite incorrect, I'm sure.' Yet Woolf's essay also conveys a profound sense of intimacy and recognition. Picked up through private study rather than beaten in at public school, Greek worked its way into her imagination, elusive but persistent: how Greek sticks, darts, eels in & out! (Diary 5: 236, 11 September 1939). solid grounding gave way to shifting and unbidden moments of insight: A strange thing-when you come to think of it-this love of Greek, flourishing in such obscurity, distorted, discouraged, yet leaping out, all of a sudden (Jacob s Room 126). Her first Greek essay (now lost) was to have been called Magic Greek; it explored the closeness yet unknowableness of the Greeks, the veil she still felt between her and the ancient texts. There