Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) begins,
Three years is a long time to leave a letter unanswered, and your letter has been lying without an answer even longer than that. I had hoped that it would answer itself, or that other people would answer it for me. But there it is with its question—
This is an intimate beginning; we feel the anxiety of the author’s time, which has already passed, and which passes as she writes. Especially, shamefully, as she has delayed; put off the answering.
But there it is with its question—How in your opinion are we to prevent war?—still unanswered.
And now, less intimate, more abstract—the beginning of Three Guineas as an Essay About Politics. But before that—for its first three sentences—it sounds more like an epistolary novel; or a note which I might have written, or held in my hand.
Woolf begins with this letter, which sits without being forgotten—and she creates it as a problem of time. The letter, as a real thing, which exists, which is unchanging, reminds her that time has passed, and that she is beholden to both—beholden to time, beholden to the letter. These two things create Her, whose delayed beginning brings self-consciousness: there are reasons why it is particularly difficult to avoid misunderstanding. A whole page could be filled with excuses and apologies; declarations of unfitness, incompetence, lack of knowledge, and experience: and they would be true.
But one does not like to leave so remarkable a letter as yours, she says, unanswered. Therefore let us make the attempt; even if it is doomed to failure.
In the attempt, she makes her unknown questioner flesh. She imagines him as a married barrister; he perhaps went to one of the English Public Schools, then Oxford or Cambridge. He is, like her, a member of what she calls the educated class.
Moreover, we both earn our livings. But. . .those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut that for three years and more I have been sitting on my side of it wondering whether it is any use to try to speak across it.
And in this, the first difficulty of communication between us appears.
Woolf describes the ellipsis with all the earnest distance of a lovers’ correspondence, at odds with this otherwise curt, detailed rejoinder. This feeling of the romantic comes from, I think, the relation of the ellipsis to solitude; to a sense of one’s seemingly isolable relation to time and meaning. I say something, I don’t say something, I feel the weight of consciousness pressing, my heart wakes me up, beating hot gasping fast.
The disjunct between the essay and its first intimacy comes, in part, from the trace of the work Three Guineas was meant to be; The Years (1937). Woolf intended for the two to be fused—her novel-essay—but writing it made her sick, and thus the split.
The Years is a family’s history in the raw, fifty years in single days and their seasons. From the first sentence, first season, 1880—It was an uncertain spring—the book is plagued by ellipses, while its characters play off each other in the repetition, quotation, of old correspondence.
"Coward; hypocrite, with your switch in your hand; and your cap on your head—" He seemed to quote from a letter that she had written him. He paused. She smiled at him. "But what was the word—the word I used?" she asked, as if she were trying to remember.
Of course she remembers, without the gulf or the gap, as the two cross back into real intimacy, into overlapping speech and teasing. For a moment, not-elliptical.
In contrast, one character observes the end of an evening—
Time was passing; if they stayed much longer she would miss her train. Surreptitiously she noted that the hands of the clock were close on eleven. The party was bound to break up soon; it was only the prelude to another party. Yet they were all talking, and talking, as if they would never go.
Talking. . . talking . . . The letter, as soon as it is written and read, makes time clear. And in doing so, it reveals hesitant or torpid speech as another kind of ellipsis, the one which circles the gulf, without looking down. And there we are, re-produced between the two. Between us, we make time. That’s why there are around five hundred ellipses in The Years, and only one in Three Guineas. Hesitancy being the stuff of life, and the first thing to be answered.
And, as Three Guineas ends in the present-tense,
Now, since you are pressed for time, let me make an end; apologising three times over. . .first for the length of this letter, second for the smallness of the contribution, and thirdly for writing at all. The blame for that however rests upon you, for this letter would never have been written had you not asked for an answer to your own.
After Woolf suicides, her husband, Leonard, edits her diaries for publication. The most sensitive information, on their sexual lives, on her most anguished, cruel periods, is replaced with ellipses. Many have despised him for this decision—but I think I understand. Another, desperate way of continuing the communication, with a kind of bitter fidelity to what the ellipsis meant for his wife—most of all, that which I want to say, that which I can say, but not quite, not yet. For most people, this effort doesn’t continue past death. For Woolf, it will last for as long as she is read.
