School & Virginia Woolf

I have started school again. It's with mixed feelings to be sure. Mostly negative ones, but I do look forward to the structured reading again. But it won't be like in Leeds. It won't be as in-depth and interesting and enlightening. The classes are just not on the same level - they're too slow, too basic (how horrible of me). I can't stand how much time is lost on explaining things like group works and assignments. All I want it melodious voices telling me everything they have discovered about a text and be so interesting and interested that students share their own thoughts.

I will study Virginia Woolf thoroughly this semester. I didn't want that to happen, either, but it did. I'm taking a One Author course on Virginia Woolf which will be so great (if we can ever get a conversation started). The other course is Literary Theory and Method and the only fiction in that course will be To the Ligthouse. And then, finally, I will write my BA essay on Virginia Woolf.

This means saying goodbye to Barbauld, Austen and Edgeworth (for now, at least). Give up the last of my Leeds studies. I wanted to do my essay on the 18th century and women's spaces and their interiority. But they did apparently not have a supervisor for it so I was given the Virginia Woolf one (it was my second choice). It's fine, I guess, only I had looked forward to immerse myself in the late 18th century again. And it will be so much Virginia Woolf.
(Mostly I can't bear to leave Leeds behind.)

But I will have other opportunities to write essays. And I love Virginia Woolf. I really like my supervisor too; she's wonderful and has studied at Leeds and knew about one of my teachers there.
I have come to terms with the Woolf essay. But not quite with returning to a school full of people and my inability to inhabit it. I find the social aspect of school absolutely horrible. I want to attend small seminars and meet with teachers and never see another human being. It would be fine, just pushing through it, but it's tainting the whole reading-learning-doing school thing as well. And it's so much worse at Stockholm with the crowded halls and large buildings and big class rooms and classes and none of the intimacy and privacy of the teacher's own studies.

To end with something else, another emotion, here is a part from To the Lighthouse:

'And it was then too, in that chill and windy way, as she began to paint, that there forced themselves upon her other things, her own inadequacy, her insignificance, keeping house for her father off the Brompton Road, and had much ado to control her impulse to fling herself (thank Heaven she had always resisted so far) at Mrs Ramsay's knee and say to her - but what could one say to her? "I'm in love with you?" No that was not true. "I'm in love with this all," waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children. It was absurd, it was impossible.'

And with this, it is not at all bad to be reading nothing but Virginia Woolf this autumn.