Meteorites

A HAUNTED HOUSE--Virginia Woolf --Harcourt, Brace ($2).

In her best novels Virginia Woolf achieved the miracle that writers pray for. No other novelist possessed quite the same gift. Her readers were suddenly and magically transported into the heart of the life of her characters. It was a slightly disconcerting experience, like stepping into a large, friendly, glowing party, where you knew no one, and being made to feel at home -- understanding their intimate talk, enjoying what they enjoyed, and, when they suffered, bearing with them as with people you loved.

This quality made all of Virginia Woolf 's writing unique, and her best novels as un forgettable as intimate personal experiences.

Unfinished Work. Her short stories, like her experimental novels, were an other matter. They were like fragments of meteorites over which geologists might puzzle: containing traces of unquestionably valuable metal, with delicate markings and crystal patterns of great beauty and rarity, but of as little appreciable utility as most meteorites. Virginia Woolf wrote short stories all her life, sketching them out in very rough form and putting them away in a drawer to mellow. Or she wrote them to rest her mind while she was writing her novels. Published last week was a posthumous collection of 18, selected by her husband, Leonard Woolf. The book will please collectors.

The stories are simple, sometimes only a few paragraphs of cadenced prose. Their taste is bitterer than that of her novels. An Unwritten Novel, with its anguished account of a nervous, twitching, staring woman visiting her plump, patronizing sister-in-law, whose children stop eating to watch her tremors, is a harsh story for anyone to have written, incredibly harsh for Virginia Woolf. More characteristic is the mood of The Lady in the Looking-Glass, with its picture of a house in mid summer: "The room that afternoon was full of such shy creatures, lights and shadows, curtains blowing, petals falling -- things that never happen, so it seems, if someone is looking. . . . Since all the doors and windows were open in the heat, there was a perpetual sighing and ceasing sound, the voice of the transient and the perishing, it seemed, coming and going like human breath, while in the looking-glass things had ceased to breathe and lay still in the trance of immortality."

Unfinished Writer. The total effect of A Haunted House is saddening. It adds a postscript to the story of Virginia Woolf. That story's end was more melodramatic, more Elizabethan, than anything that she or her contemporaries wrote. The daughter of the editor of the Cornhill Magazine, with James Russell Lowell for her godfather (she received no religious instruction), with Hardy, Ruskin and Gosse for family visitors and her sister Vanessa for companionship, she was educated at home, too delicate a child to stand normal schooling. Her mother died when she was 13, her father when she was 22. She wrote her first book, The Voyage Out, in 1906 when she was 25, but did not publish it until 1915. In 1912 she married brisk Editor Leonard Woolf, with whom she published books that the London Times described as "having a political trend to the Left." Several times in her life she had had intimations of insanity. During the blitz she was twice bombed out of her house, and moved to Monks House, a long, low, green frame dwelling surrounded by gardens, in Sussex. On March 28, 1941, she wrote a note to Vanessa and one to her husband, took her stick and walked across the Downs to the River Ouse. Later her hat and stick were found on the river bank. On April 2, her husband said: "Mrs. Woolf is presumed to be dead. . . ." At the inquest the coroner read a note by this mistress of English prose: "I have the feeling that I shall go mad and cannot go on any longer in these terrible times. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness in life to you ... I cannot go on and spoil your life."

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