Secrets of 22 Hyde Park Gate: November 17, 2015

Drains: 22 Hyde Park Gate

They want a plot, do they? They want a reason?  It is not enough for them, this ordinary scene.  It is not enough to wait for the thing to be said as if it were written; to see the sentence lay its dab of clay precisely on the right place, making character; to perceive, suddenly, some group in outline against the sky.  Yet if they want violence, I have seen death and murder and suicide all in one room.  One comes in, one goes out.  There are sobs on the staircase.  I have heard threads broken and knots tied and the quiet stitching of white cambric going on and on on the knees of a woman.  Why ask, like Louis, for a reason, or fly like Rhoda to some far grove and part the leaves of the laurels and look for statues?  They say that one must beat one's wings against the storm in the belief that beyond this welter the sun shines; the sun falls sheer into pools that are fledged with willows.  (Here it is November; the poor hold out matchboxes in wind-bitten fingers.)

The Waves 

Olivier Bell suggests that Woolf read the essay "22 Hyde Park Gate," which reveals her sexual abuse by George Duckworth, aloud to the Memoir Club on November 17, 1920. (MOB 162)