Book review

Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf by Sina Queyras

Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf

by Sina Queyras

2022

The life of the mind. Let's pause for a moment and consider those last three words. Does a life happen in the mind of a person that is separate from the life, generally, of said person? The life of the body? The life of experiences, activities, the accumulation of events and things? Yes, surely. We are multiple, and our minds are mysterious to others, often because they are mysterious, too, from ourselves.

Sina Queyras uses the phrase, the life of the mind, throughout her excellent new book, Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf (Coach House Books, 2022), though the lives of bodies, experiences, activities, events and things are also given thorough consideration. The two primary minds, bodies, and sets of experiences under the analytical and narrative microscope here belong to the author and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).

As the back cover blurb puts it:

Thirty years ago, a professor threw a chair at Sina Queyras after they'd turned in an essay on Virginia Woolf. Poet and Lamba winner Queyras returns to that encounter to recover the body and thinking of that time. This book is both an homage to and provocation of the idea of a room of one's own at the centre of a literary life.

Literary life. There's a phrase to attach to the earlier one: the life of the mind. Are they the same thing? No, but they are deeply integrated—and Queyras shows how while recounting personal travails, some of the most harrowing kind. All of this, of course, is deeply "on theme" with this Art/Life Substack. Rooms is the kind of book I adore, combining as it does personal and intellectual history and lit crit directed, to borrow a phrase, at the common reader. There is no life, surely, without reading, and no reading (per Nabokov) without re-reading, and no re-reading without the communal sharing of "What I read and what it means to me. Let’s discuss."

Woolf means a lot to Queyras, so much that "a lot" is surely understatement. Woolf meant a lot to my late wife, too, so much her email handle was "dalloway@...". She also had a cat, newly deceased when we met in 2006, named Ginny. On the other hand, I made it through two English degrees at Canadian universities in the 1990s without reading a single Woolf novel and only an except from the text Queyras returns to again and again, A Room of One's Own (1929), shortened throughout Rooms to AROO, which is surely some kind of onomatopoeia signaling Woman Who Runs with Wolves. Or perhaps not.

In recent years, I've been catching up on my missing Woolf reading and relatively recently provided my university-bound step-daughter with her mother's copy of To The Lighthouse (1927), which she read and adored and we discussed. When I was half-way through Rooms, I went online and ordered a copy of this book, too, to be sent to her. "Oooo," she texted when it arrived. "Looks interesting!"

What will she make of it? I guess we'll see. What do I make of it? It's hard to summarize. I've already said I dig the attempt to articulate the art/life connections. I hesitate to reveal too much, so I will insert here SPOILER ALERT. I don't know how to summarize without spilling some of the beans.

Queyras is a creative writing professor at Concordia University, a post with privilege in the CanLit world. It's also a post hard won, as the details of Queyras's life-story reveal. They lived a disrupted childhood, marked by sexual abuse, domestic violence, the death of a sibling, poverty and other working class struggles. They failed high school English more than once, yet remained convinced that "being a writer" was their destiny. Years in the service industry followed before they returned to school and slowly uncovered a path to becoming "a writer." Woolf and AROO were instrumental companions as Queyras sought to have a life of the mind, an audacious objective in the social circles of their origins.

It's a hero's quest, yes. How to overcome obstacles to achieve the crown. The obstacles being, in large part, men, the patriarchy, crooked/misguided institutions, but also the indifference or even hostility of loved ones. There is no triumph in this quest. Queyras is too knowledgeable and plain-speaking about how the struggle continues. For her, yes, but more so for the younger generations, who continue to encounter the barriers and limitations that Woolf herself pushed against and did so much to articulate a century ago. (And here I'll add that Queyras repeatedly cites Woolf’s limitations, her classism, antisemitism, and other blind spots or just plain poor decision-making of her age, time and place. Woolf receives no hagiographic treatment here.)

But there is a tone of celebration:

Woolf's productivity relied on a great many things, from the 500 pounds a year to her class and relationship with her domestic help, to Leonard's evenness, the luck of real estate in both London and Rodmell, the depth of her familial roots in the English literary canon, her ongoing relationship with her father in her writing, her dedication to critical writing, her relationship with the TLS and the creation and tending of a public critical voice, and, most importantly to my mind, the fueling of a tendency toward always triangulating her perspective to keep a whirling, well-aired centre in her mind where the flames were always reaching up and her thinking was always full roar. And how she influenced us!

Bravo, Sina. Thank you.

*

ADDENDUM: Check out the @womenwoolfrooms Twitter feed—and the Women Writing Woolf website, which has groovy things like this interview between Queyras and Mark Hussey.

Also noting I reviewed Queyras’s Unleashed (2009) on my Underground Book Club blog, back in the day.

In 2009, Queyras interviewed me on reviewing for their blog, Lemon Hound.