Fictional Virginia Woolf is a distinct and separate entity, not necessarily related to the real Modernist author Virginia Woolf.

They are distinct not just in physical appearance, a fairly standard adaptation for anyone Not Beautiful fictionalized through movies, but also in their personality, life chronology, and work habits. They have one thing in common: Fictional Virginia Woolf and real Virginia Woolf are both Mentally Ill Geniuses Who Worked. The actresses portraying Fictional Virginia Woolf convey this fact in different ways but the result is always the same.

In The Hours Nicole Kidman paces, mutters various lines from Mrs Dalloway, and at one point shouts at a child “she’s going to die,” in reference to the fate of Clarissa Dalloway. The actress who portrays her in Vita/Virginia has a weird head tilt that does a good job of both portraying Mental Illness and what an Aquarius looks like when they’re about to intellectually eviscerate you.

Fictional Virginia Woolf is always Working. She does not stop to eat. She does not pay attention to anyone who knocks on her door. She especially ignores servants, because her class and gender anxieties about servants, always get dramatized, however tacked on it feels. The people who write Fictional Virginia Woolfs want you to know that they read To The Lighthouse, and they know why she wrote it, even though they don’t have time to explain who Mrs. Ramsay is.

They’re busy telling the story of their Fictional Virginia Woolf, so don’t have time to cover everything that ever happened to the real one. They, like Fictional Virginia Woolf, are Working.

​Deep Work 

Cal Newport describes what he calls “Deep Work,” as the pinnacle of the human experience, a flow state of mindful productivity. He theorizes, that as artificial intelligence makes more and more jobs obsolete, that developing creative ideas that come from you and you alone is the safest investment of time and energy in the 21st-century. These ideas are created through deep work, or work done with meditative levels of focus and an unactivated nervous system. 

There is a chalk X on the door whenever Fictional Virginia Woolf is Working that means no one, no one, not even one of the historically famous Bloomsbury Group characters that populate the film, is allowed to intrude. 

Cal Newport describes his time spent doing deep work, in a room with or without a chalk x on the door, as time where he paces back-and-forth. When he’s there, he mutters out loud to himself, not particularly concerned with anything.

Except, of course, his flow state. 

How To Deep Work

Fictional Virginia Woolf’s bouts of mental illness are indistinguishable from Deep Work.  Her Genius, her Working, is the same as Being Mentally Ill. This never needs to be said out loud, but it is always said anyway, often by Fictional Leonard Woolf.

Fictional Leonard Woolf is also the world’s most curmudgeonly printer in every iteration. “Virginia, LOOK at these impounded commas!” He fusses almost line for line in every version. “Virginia, you can’t go on that Sapphist trip. Yes, we have an open marriage, but you’re Mentally Ill, remember? What about Your Work?”

Fictional Virginia Woolf has not only a room of one’s own, but a deep bench of people who protect her physical mental and emotional well-being. Fictional Leonard Woolf, in spite of his occasional out of character medical comments that contextualize the state of 1920s mental health care, cares only if she eats or not. When the book she’s writing seems to be particularly good, he is even ambivalent about that. You get the feeling that if it weren’t anachronistic for Fictional Virginia Woolf to drink Soylent, she totally would. 

At What Cost is Deep Work?

Cal Newport describes a few elite professors with enough power and status that they can deactivate all of their social media, email, even their phone lines. These elite Deep Workers presumably only receive messages from people writing them large checks, who don’t mind only ever talking to their assistants.  Cal Newport is unabashed about the fact that Deep Work is easiest to cultivate for those who already have enough status and power to withstand being known as a flake professionally.

Fictional Virginia Woolf’s Mental Illness is rarely professionally embarrassing, except in very Tortured Artistic Genius Ways. However, everyone is very understanding about it when it is, especially the Modern Audience.

On Cal Newport’s podcast most of the advice he gives is about people’s inability to cut out all distractions, all relationships, all other people, from their life in order to pursue deep work. It’s a real struggle, he shrugs. But it’s worth it.

Everyone Else Around Someone Doing Deep Work, Fictional Virginia Woolf and Otherwise

Fictional Virginia Woolf has servants, regardless of her gender and class anxieties about them, Fictional Leonard Woolf, and a host of other accurate or inaccurate versions of her other Modernist family members. Occasionally she will say something weird at a party, but it is usually overlooked. After all, mental illness is a byproduct of being a Genius, of doing uninterrupted deep work. 

Personally, I’ve never been good at marriage advice, Cal Newport says when a caller’s partner challenges their consuming schedule of undisturbed deep work. He adds, Making the time to pursue deep work is worth sometimes seeming a little crazy.A Classic Fictional Virginia Woolf Scene

Here is a classic Fictional Virginia Woolf scene. She is muttering to herself in public, drawing negative attention from others. The joke’s on them: she’s muttering the first lines of Mrs. Dalloway, which the Modern Audience knows is Genius. In fiction when you walk around muttering, you are usually a Genius in the midst of Deep Work. 

For Fictional Virginia Woolf, being Mentally Ill is indistinguishable from the power and status needed to protect her time spent in Deep Work. 

Who knows what real life Virginia Woolf would think of Cal Newport‘s theory. Ambivalence? Snobby rejection? Basic agreement but skepticism of his mechanical, businessy affect? 

Would she, like she did about James Joyce, write annoyed letters to her friends about how he wrote the same thing she did in a more pedestrian way? 

The real Virginia Woolf speculated in “a room of one’s own,” that we know nothing of Shakespeare’s sister not just because she lacked the material conditions to create fiction but because her gender made those material conditions impossible to achieve. This goes beyond, you know, the room of one’s own, to the social conditions required to acquire that room. Shakespeare’s sister (Judith Shakespeare, in the essay), runs away from home, is beaten, and eventually commits suicide after persistent societal rejection.  Deep Work: It’s Not for Everyone

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose, Alice Walker applies Woolf’s essay to women of color, particularly black women, who “own(ed) not even themselves.” She says throughout history, for so many talented black women — “the strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent drove them insane". 

Though Cal Newport contends that deep work could be pursued by anyone with or without a room of one’s own, that it must be pursued by anyone who wants to be stable in the 21st-century, his methods of creating space for that are much older than the phrase “deep work.” Assistants, secretaries, wives, hired help, AI. Ignoring everyone you’re not trying to gain power or status through. Resources.  

But in his extremely 2020 white dude Georgetown Professor way, you can kind of hear what Alice Walker is talking about, especially when particularly obstinate callers reject his advice. Why wouldn’t you prioritize deep work? he asks, incredulous. You’d have to be insane not to. You’ll probably go insane, if you don’t.

Who’s Afraid of Real Virginia Woolf**

The real Virginia Woolf‘s mental illness did not promote her deep work, it inhibited it. It led to her institutionalization at least four times, part of her life no fictional portrayal of Virginia Woolf has yet taken on. She struggled with mental illness her entire life (struggled as “suffered”, not struggled as a synonym for “had a”). 

I am not particularly interested in the obvious conclusion here, that mental illness and its cluster of symptoms, its causation and correlation with Genius aside, varies by material context. That would be too embarrassing of a conclusion for an essay on Virginia Woolf, even the fictional one, basically a restatement of the thesis of “a room of one’s own.”

But even with a room of her own, the money to keep it, a Leonard Woolf, Servants that made her Anxious, the real Virginia Woolf wasn’t Working very often. She didn’t often have the time and focus for Deep Work.  It was certainly more time and focus than say, Philis Wheatley had, Alice Walker’s Shakesphere’s Sister example. But even with significant resources, the implicit variable behind all of Cal Newport’s advice,

Fictional Virginia Woolf is Always Working a lot more than the real one ever was.

In that way, Fictional Virginia Woolf takes the fabric of A Room of Ones Own to heart while defying its actual conclusion. She doesn’t contend with a key theme in real Virginia Woolf’s life, which is this:If you mutter to yourself out loud in public, even if you’re a Genius? 

Deep Work is the least of your concerns.

- H

*She also, as my friend Zoe points out, usually looks 20 or 30 years younger than the actual age she was when she wrote whatever is being portrayed. ** Sorry.

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