Virginia Woolf's walking stick

Narrator: Virginia Woolf’s walking stick. Dates to before 1941. Wood. 3 feet 4 inches long by 1 inch in diameter.

This is a slender walking stick with a curved handle. It is displayed upright, at a slight angle, with the handle at the top. It is made of lightish-colored wood, with darker notches or joints at intervals along the length. 

There is a metal tip on the bottom of the stick. 

Interpretive commentary follows.

Anna Deavere Smith: This walking stick belonged to Virginia Woolf, one of the great modernist writers of the 20th century—known for such novels as Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and her influential feminist essay A Room of One’s Own. The New York Public Library holds the largest collection of Virginia Woolf manuscripts and letters in the world. Declan Kiely, Director of Special Collections and Exhibitions at the Library:

Declan Kiely: While we have this mass of manuscripts by Virginia Woolf, they’re in some ways more inert and less animate than a cane, this object that she used. It once had kinetic energy. And I think it brings us into a more intimate connection with her as a person.

Anna Deavere Smith: Woolf suffered from numerous ailments throughout her life, and she used this walking stick for support.

Declan Kiely: It’s something that, in a way, conveys her human frailty and, ultimately, her mortality. This object accompanies her right up to her last moments.

Anna Deavere Smith: If this cane is, in some ways, a symbol of Woolf’s life, it’s also inextricably tied to her death. On March 28th, 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse. That day, her husband, Leonard, wrote a letter to their friend Vita Sackville-West.

Declan Kiely: The letter reads in part, “[Virginia] has been really very ill these last weeks & was terrified that she was going mad again. It was, I suppose, the strain of the war & finishing her book [...] I think she has drowned herself, as I found her stick floating in the river, but we have not yet found the body.”