Another alternative ending

[oursin]

I don't know if I've posted this theory before - I can't find it in old posts but the earliest ones aren't tagged. Feel that I may have mentioned it in commenting somewhere.

Anyway, it is my 'What-If' theory:

Supposing Virginia Woolf had actually faked her suicide?

I always think how very lowering it must have been with Leonard and Vanessa sitting

Comments

[nineveh_uk]

Sounds like you've found your novel!

[oursin]

I'd prefer to read it than write it myself!

[smellingbottle]

I actually once started a novel on this very topic (I think I'd been teaching D du M's Rebecca and was thinking about revenants and battered drowned corpses) - it didn't get very far. Although, come to think of it, I had her intending to commit suicide because she recognised the symptoms of breakdown yet again, not managing it, but deciding (after some unspecified period holed up in an old farmhouse with people who didn't identify her, being mad, and then realising everyone thinks she's dead) to remain 'dead'. Vanessa was my villain, Leonard was a drone, and the whole thing was horrifically badly written - pastiche Woolf meets pastiche du Maurier - and a friend who was reading it wanted me to send undead VW to Bletchley Park for some reason. I made her have a lot of sex in London and then gave up... I think she also had some bizarre confrontation with Angelica Bell on a street (?) Square-bashing sounds more fun, however unlikely.

[oursin]

Bletchley Park also crossed my mind.
I also felt something might be done with her recorded capabilities as a typesetter (though wasn't that pretty much a male closed shop, or would there have been wartime 'dilution'?) and as a bread-baker.

[carandol]

One of the lesser-known womens' jobs was crewing the barrage balloons. There are some good chapters in this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Balloons-War-Gasbags-Secrets-Revealing/dp/0752429957/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1204130227&sr=1-1
and the wartime artist Dame Laura Knight did a lovely painting of them at work, though I can't find a bigger version of it online than http://www.crdp-reims.fr/memoire/bac/2gm/dossiers/dirigeable.jpg

[oursin]

Also on anti-aircraft batteries, doing everything - spotting, aiming, etc - but the actual firing of the guns. But she would probably have been a bit on the old side for that! (young eyes and reflexes must have been a requirement)

I have expected to be fascinating book on women in the Home Guard in my tbr pile.

[mamculuna]

Fascinating thought, and also the makings of a neat novel.

[ironed_orchid]

That's a lovely thought.