'As if some lovely rose had blossomed for her eyes only': Virginia Woolf, the Ballets Russes, and Le Spectre de la Rose (1911)

In a neglected fragment on the Ballets Russes in one of her Mrs Dalloway notebooks, Virginia Woolf draws an important distinction between ballet’s austere classicism and the popular appeal of the English variety stage. This tension informs her response to Diaghilev’s company as a modernist enterprise, both in its pre-war seasons at Covent Garden and its post-war migration to the music hall. Fokine’s ballet Le Spectre de la Rose (1911), made famous by Nijinsky’s nostalgically idealized jeté, operates as a model for Woolf’s balletic imaginary and her evocation of pre-war social rituals in Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway (1925), and The Years (1937). Woolf contrasts moments of self-enclosed aesthetic rapture, encoded in Mrs Dalloway’s movement aesthetics, with the narrowly conceived national character of the music hall, prescribed as a tranquilizing remedy that encourages states of collective sedation.