Virginia Woolf

Lay me down, let the only sound be the overflow, pockets full of stones

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer, an author of many famous novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando. She has suffered from many nervous breakdowns. On 28 March 1941, she put on her coat, filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse near her home, and drowned herself.

Lay me down, let the only sound be the overflow, pockets full of stones

“What the Water Gave Me” is plainly inspired by Virginia Woolf’s suicide. On another track she sings rhapsodically about “the arms of the ocean, so sweet and so cold.” She tells me she’s always been sort of fascinated by water, and clips drowning stories out of newspapers. “It happens quite a lot with kids,” she says. “Kids will get swept out to sea and their parents will dive in after them. And because of the weight of children compared to the weight of adults, quite often the children will get swept back into shore but the adults will drown. It’s like the ocean wants its sacrifice. But would their parents have it any other way? They wouldn’t.”

‘For What the Water Gave Me, I was in his (Eg White’s) house and there was a kids’ book on how to read and a book on surrealism and I had a Virginia Wolfe book with me. There was a collage of imagery created just from the books in the room.’

‘It’s a song for the water, because in music and art what I’m really interested in are the things that are overwhelming,” Welch said. “The ocean seems to me to be nature’s great overwhelmer. When I was writing this song, I was thinking a lot about all those people who’ve lost their lives in vain attempts to save their loved ones from drowning.’

‘It’s about water in all forms and all bodies. It’s about a lot of things; Virginia Woolf creeps into it, and of course Frida Kahlo, whose painfully beautiful painting gave me the title.’ (You can read more about Frida in Must See->Florence’s Inspirations->Art)

According to Gloria Orenstein, professor at the University of Southern California, ‘Woolf’s relationship to childbirth is also very complex –and related to her doctors and her husband as well.’ Water was then the only escape for Woolf.

What is more, Flo has mentioned Virginia Woolf many times in her tweets:

Adrianna Polcyn