Truth Tellers: Virginia Woolf, ‘I always tell the truth’

Truth Tellers: Virginia Woolf, ‘I always tell the truth’
In her diaries, letters, and works, Virginia Woolf demonstrated her reverence for the truth. Marie C. Fields/ Shutterstock
Raymond Beegle
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Virginia Woolf asks us—we hear her own voice, by way of a BBC recording—“How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth?”

This was Woolf’s life question, her life quest, the catalyst of her genius. She struggled with it, like Jacob struggled with the angel, and she would not let go until the true and the beautiful, in one way or another, blessed her. “When I write, I always, always tell the truth,” she admonished a friend who suggested that she might do otherwise. In her letters, diaries, and fiction, the struggle never ends.

Raymond Beegle
Raymond Beegle
Author
Raymond Beegle has performed as a collaborative pianist in the major concert halls of the United States, Europe, and South America; has written for The Opera Quarterly, Classical Voice, Fanfare Magazine, Classic Record Collector (UK), and The New York Observer. Beegle has served on the faculty of the State University of New York–Stony Brook, the Music Academy of the West, and the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria. He taught in the chamber music division of the Manhattan School of Music for 31 years.
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