dynamiteninja
Man for all seasons
- Joined
- May 30, 2008
- Messages
- 1,195
- MBTI Type
- INFJ
- Enneagram
- 4w5
iNFp
She was a mixture of shyness and liveliness. She 'was shy and awkward, often silent, or, if in the mood to talk, would leap into fantasy and folly and terrify the innocent and unprepared.' (Angelica Garnett). She was 'enormously generous.' 'Shop assistants made her feel shy and out of place.' ('ibid). Away from social life, she was a workaholic like her father. 'Leonard has said that of the sixteen hours of her waking life, Virginia was working fifteen hours in one way or another.' (John Lehmann).
Fellow writers elaborate on the extraverted side of her character. Elizabeth Bowen noted that 'her power in conveying enjoyment was extraordinary. And her laughter was entrancing. It was outrageous laughter, almost a child's laughter. Whoops of laughter, if anything amused her. ......She was awfully naughty. She was fiendish. She could say things about people, all in a flash, which remained with one. Fleetingly malicious, rather than outright cruel.'
Frances Marshall says 'Argument was not her forte, but wild generalisations based on the flimsiest premises and embroidered with elaborate fantasy...'
In a television interview in 1967 her husband said: '.....the way that her mind worked when she was perfectly sane. First of all, in her own conversation she would do what I called "leaving the ground". Suddenly she would begin telling one something quite ordinary, and incident she'd seen in the street or something like that; and when her mind seemed to get completely off the ground she would give the most fascinating and amusing description of something fantastic, quite unlike anything that anyone other than herself would have thought of, which would last for about five or ten minutes.' The young Stephen Spender often attended informal dinner parties given by the Woolfs. 'When entertaining she would, at the start of the evening, be nervous, preoccupied with serving the drinks. Her handshake and her smile of welcome would perhaps be a little distraught.' He was surprised, in the Thirties, that she often cooked and served the meal. She would often smoke a cheroot after dinner. The talk would be of literature, sometimes of politics, when she would fall silent and let the men talk. She loved to talk about social class divisions, and about the Royal Family, sometimes to the point of tedium, Spender thought. Despite her interest she did not approve of honours and refused the C.H. proffered in 1935.
Mystical experience was not part of her public persona, but she had strange feelings of unreality when she was a child in 1894, looking at a puddle in Hyde Park Gardens. She recalled this in her 1940 reminiscences: 'when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended, I could not step across a puddle: I tried to touch something.....the whole world became unreal' She quotes the puddle in The Waves, and writes in her diary of the 'semi-mystic very profound life of a woman.' There are no other 'normal' abnormal experiences in her life; all other psychological symptoms are related in time and character to her affective illnesses.
I'm guessing ENFP.
Orangey, that was a very interesting read.
Extravert?
^ "A Room of One's Own", was written by an extravert?
I can't see it myself.
Her personality was a mixture of shyness and ebullience. She was remembered by friends not as a gloomy depressed person but as a brilliant conversationalist, laughing, joking, gossiping, and often indulging in malicious flights of fantasy at the expense of her friends. She was loved by children, given to interrogating others in her search for material, and often rude and snobbish. She was awkward out of her social class, and had an odd eccentric appearance which made people stare at her in the street.
The picture that emerges from reminiscences is remarkably consistent. Socially she was a talkative, formidably intelligent, witty, and humorous woman. With friends she was talkative, given to flights of fancy, and fond of jokes and gossip. Even in private she talked. When her new housekeeper arrived in 1934, she was surprised: 'The floors in Monks House were very thin, the bathroom was directly above the kitchen and when Mrs Woolf was having her bath before breakfast I could hear her talking to herself. On and on she went, talk, talk, talk: asking questions and giving herself the answers. I thought there must be two or three people up there with her.....it startled me in the mornings for quite some time'.
Orangey said:I could see ENFP with social anxiety. Plus she obviously had problems that might fuel that sort of thing on, such as childhood sexual abuse and depression.
Why ever not?
Oh God, do I have to give you reasons too?
I'll dig it out tomorrow and get back to you with specifics.
HEY DD!!!!
Long time no see!
HEY DD!!!!
Long time no see!
I am not going to attempt to type the Woolf, but I will say this, there are plenty of people out there who can not imagine, shock-horror, that an extrovert can actually be a writer/intellectual/philosopher.
And this bugs me to no end.
:rolli:
ESTJ