The Wise Virgins: A Story of Words, Opinions and a Few Emotions

The Wise Virgins (1913) is a semi-autobiographical novel about a dilemma: whether Harry, the hero, should go into the family business and marry the suitable but dull girl next door or move in artistic circles and marry one of the entrancing ‘Lawrence’ girls. For, as Lyndall Gordon writes in her Persephone Preface: ‘It is a truth widely acknowledged that Camilla Lawrence is a portrait of the author’s wife - Virginia Woolf.’ This is one reason why the novel is so intriguing. But it is also a Forsterian social comedy, funny, perceptive, highly intelligent, full of clever dialogue and at times bitterly satirical; while the dramatic and emotional denouement still retains a great deal of its power to shock. It was on his honeymoon in 1912 that Leonard Woolf began writing his second (and final) novel. He was 31, newly returned from seven years as a colonial administrator, and asking himself much the same questions as his hero. Helen Dunmore wrote in The Sunday Times : ‘It’s a passionate, cuttingly truthful story of a love affair between two people struggling against the prejudices of their time and place. Woolf’s writing is almost unbearably honest.