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In 1933, one of Virginia Woolf s common readers — a schoolteacher in Omaha, Nebraska — devised an elaborate colour graph diagramming the rhythmic pattern formed by twenty recurrent motifs in A Room of One's Own. Although it might seem ironic for Woolf's protest against patriarchal logic to be mirrored in a mathematical chart, its creator, Jessie Towne, was neither a distanced nor an insensitive reader. In a letter to Woolf explaining the graph, Miss Towne described class="EmphasisTypeItalic ">A Room as "a complete and perfect statement for all of us — women who have neither the money nor the rooms of our own", and she praised The Waves for its embodiment of "the inner absolute truth about that strange proceeding, human living". Furthermore, with narratological acuity, Miss Towne perceived the underlying narrative structure of Woolf's non-fictional essay: the way its a-logical power accumulates through an interwoven "pattern" of repetition and recurrence that seems "purposed" although perhaps not "what we commonly call conscious". The graph was a tool for expressing her intuitive grasp of the way Woolf's text makes sense. ¹

DOI: 10.1057/9780230206045_2

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