ABSTRACT
if we look over Virginia Woolf’s shoulder to discover her perspective as a novelist we see in the foreground nothing so prosaic as Defoe’s earthenware pot or so metaphysical as the Soul—Russian or otherwise. But a Globe, a recurrent image in both her Diary and her novels, might stand there as a symbol of her pursuit of “Mrs. Brown”—the spirit we live by, Life itself. Mrs. Woolf herself was wary of symbols. Completing the most “inner” and symbolic of her novels. The Waves, she noted in her Diary (Feb. 7, 1931): “What interests me in the last stage was the freedom and boldness with which my imagination picked up, used and tossed aside all the images, symbols which I had prepared. I am sure that this is the right way of using them—not in set pieces, as I had tried at first, coherently, but simply as images, never making them work out; only suggest.” The globe is life: “I ask myself sometimes whether one is not hypnotised, as a child by a silver globe, by life; and whether this is living…. I should like to take the globe in my hands and feel it quietly, round, smooth, heavy, and so hold it, day after day” (Diary, Nov. 28, 1928).
