Description
She then put on her fur coat, took her walking stick, and left the house. It was
now about 11:40 a.m. When she reached the river, she left her walking stick on
the bank, put a large stone in her coat pocket, and walked down to the Ouse.
Three weeks later, some children found her body by the river. Identification
took place on April 18th in the New Haven Mortuary, and the inquest on the 19th.
On Monday, the twenty-first, Virginia was cremated in Brighton. Leonard was
alone at the cremation, and that night, alone, he played a recording of the
cavatina from the Beethoven Quartet in B Flat, op 130, as they had many years
earlier as they had agreed upon. He buried her ashes beneath one of the two
great elm trees they had christened “Leonard” and “Virginia” in the Monks
house garden.
Leaska, Mitchell. Granite and Rainbow:
The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf.
Cooper Square Press, 2000;
Page 439 and Postscript
The inner life has its soft
and gentile beauty;
an abstract formlessness
as well as a subtle charm.
I often consider myself
as a figure in a foggy painting:
faltering lines,
insecure distances,
and a merging of greys and blacks.
An emotion or a mood,
a mere wisp of color, is shaded off
and made to spread until it becomes
one with all that surrounds it.
Virginia Woolf
