The London air (it does seem that the air is made in London) lurks  around Charing Cross station at lunchtime. It’s one of the first days of  the summer holidays. The colossal bronze lions lying by Nelson’s Column  seem to gasp for breath as gangs of children and selfie-takers clamber  to ride them. A word comes to me as I walk from station to gallery: tumult. Amidst the smell of sun lotion and the Cockney persuasion of the street performer, this word catches. Tumult.

It exists in my vocabulary thanks to Virginia Woolf. I recall its  prominence in her work, seeming to crop up more regularly than it ought –  once describing the thrust of an omnibus into traffic, again depicting  the circulation of Piccadilly Circus, in The Waves, Neville trying to calm himself inside his train car “before I emerge into that chaos, that tumult,” and again in A Room of One’s Own,  Virginia describing the spark of her intellectual curiosity as “such a  wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still.” More  often than not, the word seemed joyful. Tumult was the bright mixture  and energy of the city. This is what Virginia associated with London;  traveling into the heart of it, where she had grown up, was always a  necessary upheaval.

This upheaval, succumbing to the bustle and distraction of both the  city and her own creativity, was one of the most communal and productive  of the sensations that Virginia described; whether at a Newnham College  luncheon, or on an errand to buy a pencil, the joining of the self to  the collective experience had the effect of soothing and renewing her  and her fictional guises. It is also then a bridge between the real and  the fictional personas that Virginia Woolf wore, always so much more  fashionable and well-fitting than her dresses, which were, by all  accounts, awkward and old-looking.

It feels right then that an exhibition that celebrates Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision  should belong in that most tumultuous plaza of the city, Trafalgar  Square, and should invite us to circulate around the artifacts of her  life and work with a group of strangers. If anything gave Virginia the  impetus and energy for composing a new work in particular, it was the  bustle of central London and the observation of human life within it. As  I step into the gallery, I am looking for upheaval, for something  tumultuous, to produce a spark of truth about the woman. But the  Portrait Gallery, and especially the ticketed exhibition space, sitting  quietly like an inner chamber of the building, turns cacophony into  concert. It asks the visitor to look and reflect and look again. The  jerk and roar of the street is muted, and Virginia is enclosed away from  the mass experience.

The pressure on Virginia’s artifacts is to withstand the barriers to  entry that inevitably accompany any event related to literary fiction  and provide that link between the tumultuous outdoors and the reverent  inner chamber; to invite judgment, even over that gap lying dangerously  between present and history.

But if there’s anybody, among artists and writers of her era, whom it  seems possible to know intimately, it’s Virginia, whether because her  diaries are so extensive and available, because the Bloomsbury group [1]  was so sociable and recorded their lives so easily, or whether there’s  something about her persona that is open and invested in the tumult of  human experience including her own. If anybody can cross the border  between history and present, it should be Virginia. The full, almost  cramped, composition of the exhibition walls tells me there was more  than enough evidence of Virginia’s life to choose from. The exhibition  comprises photographs, paintings and documents, arranged chronologically  so that the monumental “eras” – childhood, troubled teenagehood,  Bloomsbury, bouts of intense creativity and near destruction – are  apparent. It is like viewing a scrapbook of her life, cluttered and  personal, page by page.

Coincidentally, I enter the exhibition and immediately turn the  “wrong” way, so that I experience the narrative backwards, starting with  the original, handwritten suicide letters that Virginia wrote to her  sister and husband, framed one beside the other. There is the dreadful,  scattered rhythm of these letters, and yet, by reading word for word,  one falls into Virginia’s written voice again; there is something  terrifyingly familiar about the document. The fictional pieces and first  edition novels, laid out along the course of the exhibition in glass  cases opened to relevant pages, subsequently refer back to these looming  suicide documents, as parts of the same collection. As I travel around  the rest of the narrative, past records of Virginia’s friendships and  intellectual encounters, towards the photographs of her childhood,  further and further away from the famous end point, her life story  becomes all fragments and reality again and the suicide an unshakeable  background.

“Who was I then?” Virginia writes in one of the featured letters,  marveling at how vastly she herself has changed with the vast changes of  her life. Virginia’s private and public personas are persistently  concerned with how identity changes, the differences between the  internal and external voice, between the self alone and in company, and  whether any part of one’s nature can be consistently relied upon. This  awareness is evident not only in each of the quotes that adorn the walls  of the gallery, but also in the photographs, the family ones where she  looks alternately suspicious and affectionate as she greets the  photographer’s eye, gesturing loosely with a cigarette beside her. She  is a writer as intently engaged with the idea of herself as she is with  the outside world.

And the visitor, charged with the investigation of this identity,  reviews the evidence before her. Despite Virginia’s doubt at the  reliability of her own self, when one examines her life from birth to  death (or death to birth in my case) as a whole, the Virginia voice and  that affectionate, suspicious gaze, remain constant, or at least, in a  constant wavering motion. There is something persistently youthful about  the energy of this person and her grey-eyed confrontation with the  outside world, and yet awareness that always seemed to undermine that  youthful side.

“The tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers,” she wrote in Jacob’s Room  in 1922. “And there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and  eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people  passing tragically to destruction.”

In a novel that would come to represent Virginia Woolf’s progression  from conventional structure to a more expressive form, this excerpt  shows how her observance of the self through time sparked creative  excitement, but sadness. In the gallery, as evidence of Virginia’s past  youth and past summers are taken up by the viewer, and added to the  tumult of the present, one empathises, naturally, almost subconsciously,  with these words, caught as one is between the tumult of the Square and  the quiet of the museum. We witness Virginia “passing tragically to  destruction” as the artifacts pass chronologically. Virginia was so open  and investigative of this phenomenon, of the self passing through time,  both in her personal writing and in her fiction, that she seems to be  actively engaging in this elegy.

“I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot,” Virginia wrote of her process while composing her many-voiced novel The Waves.  This is another of the handwritten statements featured in the  exhibition. Amidst the family portraits and illustrations of monumental  moments, like the deaths of her parents, her marriage to Leonard Woolf,  her first meeting with Vita Sackville-West, statements about her writing  stand out as the fragments that should be lasting ones, the connecting  force between her original life and the pursuit of fiction today.

The exhibition is all plot, but in the writing, even in the suicide  letter, whose handwriting scrawls frustratedly as if wanting to pinch  the paper (“you see I can’t even write this properly”), rhythm emerges.  The consistency of Virginia Woolf’s voice becomes clear. The fictional  rhythm of her personal letters and the way her fiction embraced the real  rhythm of the London scene has resulted in a body of work, but not in  the usual sense; this body is comprised of everything, interior and  exterior, from birth to death, all scenes inclusive, a tumult.

“The train slows and lengthens, as we approach London, the centre,  and my heart draws out too, in fear, in exultation. I am about to  meet–what? What extraordinary adventure waits me, among these mail vans,  these porters, these swarms of people calling taxis? I feel  insignificant, lost, but exultant. With a soft shock we stop. I will let  the others get out before me. I will sit still one moment before I  emerge into that chaos, that tumult. I will not anticipate what is to  come.” – Virginia Woolf, The Waves