“There’s a particular sentence of Woolf’s that haunts me; I’ve written about it before, without managing to exorcise it. It appears in her novel Jacob’s Room: ‘It’s not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it’s the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses.’
…In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf writes with pain and some bewilderment about the way in which complete strangers would react to his wife: ‘ … to the crowd in the street there was something in her appearance which struck them as strange and laughable … people would stare or stop and stare at Virginia. And not only in foreign towns; they would stop and stare and nudge one another – “look at her” – even in England, in Piccadilly or Lewes …’
Leonard makes the observation that these incidents tended to happen at moments when Virginia was lost in thought – when she had, in a sense, forgotten herself. There was something in her expression or comportment in those moments, which, taken with her unusual mode of dress, made her appear anomalous to people. Like her clothes, her manner marked her out as a woman who went out into the world without apparently caring how she appeared in it. And, as I would find out when I walked back from Canons Park station without giving my appearance a conscious thought, that is a risky way for a woman to proceed. A woman should never forget that whatever else she is, she is also an object.”
—Joanne Limburg, “What was Virginia Woolf afraid of?”
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