Virginia and her Wolf

This first entry and the title of the blog are the product of my current reading and inner process on writing. Rather obviously I am reading a biography of Virginia Woolf by Hermoine Lee. This is not the first biography I have read on her life but this one has a more immediate quality which many literary biographies seem to lack.
For all her intelligence, forward thinking politics, brilliant, turgid use of language, Virginia Woolf is also exposed as caustic, snide, and (terminally) damaged. As a biography it goes a long way to undermine to undermine the fairly Victorian assumption that a damaged soul is a romantic soul. Whether or not damage makes us better writers will be dealt with on another day!
Much of what Virginia Woolf seems to struggle with, and this is something I can relate to, is the shadow side of the writing process - doubts, fear, self criticism, but more than that, a kind of madness that accompanies the process of writing. The feeling that the story is writing itself without you, a great monolithic beast that simply barrels forward without your consent. poems and words that plague your waking and sleeping mind until they are exorcised onto paper. This is what I refer to as the Wolf in this blogs title, in this case Virginia's wolf, but mine too. It is the Jungian animus.
I work a lot with animal totems, and living in the country spending hours every day walking means I feel very connected to animals as messengers and they inform much of what I write- in whatever form that may take: as archetypes, allegories etc and in this sense the predatory animal: the wolf, the fox etc are my animal embodiment if the shadow writer, the sub conscious part of oneself. It sits below the surface and collects experience, sniffs out words and phrases on the wind, turns an amplifying ear to a half heard conversation, stalks a marginal personality as literary quarry and then chews them over like an old rotting carcass to then finally, with all instincts primed, whiskers erect, nostrils wide, fur bristled and ridged on the ruff, spit them out onto the page.
So, that is Virginia, and that is her wolf. I hope this goes some way to explaining it.