The essays of virginia w.., p.1
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
About the Editor
The Essays of Virginia Woolf
Title Page
Introduction
Editorial Note
Abbreviations
THE ESSAYS
1929
On Not Knowing French
Geraldine and Jane
Women and Fiction
The ‘Censorship’ of Books
Phases of Fiction
Dr Burney’s Evening Party
Cowper and Lady Austen (headnote)
Beau Brummell
Mary Wollstonecraft (headnote)
Dorothy Wordsworth
Women and Leisure
An Excerpt from A Room of One’s Own
1930
Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell
Augustine Birrell
Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister
Wm. Hazlitt, the Man
Memories of a Working Women’s Guild
On Being Ill
I am Christina Rossetti
1931
All About Books
Introductory Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies
Lockhart’s Criticism
George Eliot, 1819–1880
Edmund Gosse
Aurora Leigh
The Love of Reading
The Docks of London
1932
Oxford Street Tide
The Rev. William Cole: A Letter
Great Men’s Houses
Abbeys and Cathedrals
A Letter to a Young Poet
‘This is the House of Commons’
The Common Reader: Second Series
The Strange Elizabethans
Donne After Three Centuries
‘The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’
‘Robinson Crusoe’
Dorothy Osborne’s ‘Letters’
Swift’s ‘Journal to Stella’
The ‘Sentimental Journey’
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son
Two Parsons
I James Woodforde
II The Rev. John Skinner
Dr Burney’s Evening Party
Jack Mytton
De Quincey’s Autobiography
Four Figures
I Cowper and Lady Austen
II Beau Brummell
III Mary Wollstonecraft
IV Dorothy Wordsworth
William Hazlitt
Geraldine and Jane
‘Aurora Leigh’
The Niece of an Earl
George Gissing
The Novels of George Meredith
‘I am Christina Rossetti’
The Novels of Thomas Hardy
How Should One Read a Book?
Leslie Stephen, the Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories
Portrait of a Londoner
Acknowledgements
APPENDICES
I George Gissing
II Notes of a Day’s Walk
III The Essays of Augustine Birrell
IV The Women’s Co-operative Guild
V Speech to the London and National Society for Women’s Service
VI As a Light to Letters
VII The Text of The Common Reader: Second Series
VIII Notes on the Journals
Bibliography
Index
Copyright
About the Book
Fiction was the core of Virginia Woolf’s work. But she took her essay writing very seriously, spending a great deal of time on each essay and finding them a refreshing diversion from fiction. Her essays informed her fiction, and vice versa; this volume shows her thinking about the possibility of poeticising the novel (The Waves was the result) and in some of these pieces (‘Women and Fiction’, ‘Women and Leisure’) she considers the relationship between women, writing and society – the preoccupation that would become such a large part of her legacy.
The Common Reader: Second Series comprises a significant part of this volume – it was first published in 1932 to excellent reviews. (‘They are wholly delightful. They are sensitive, acute, picturesque, humorous, and yet severe.’ Vita Sackville-West; ‘Is there anybody writing anywhere in the world at this moment who could surpass the essay … so beautifully moulded into a form appropriate to its content that what is an authentic critical masterpiece seems as light on the mind as a song?’ Rebecca West.) This collection shows Woolf’s genius as a critic and essayist: as well as displaying her perceptive understanding of writers and their work, it also offers us an important insight into her creative mind.
Continuing the work of former editor Andrew McNeillie, Stuart N. Clarke brings fresh light to Woolf’s essays and enriches them with variations which appeared in different versions of her work.
About the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. After her father’s death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
About the Editor
Stuart N. Clarke has transcribed and edited Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993), was co-compiler with B. J. Kirkpatrick of the 4th edition of A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (1997), and edited Translations from the Russian (2006) by Virginia Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky. He is a founding member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and has edited its journal, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, since its inception in 1999.
The Essays of Virginia Woolf
Volume I: 1904–1912
Volume II: 1912–1918
Volume III: 1919–1924
Volume IV: 1925–1928
Introduction
Looking at this substantial volume, casual readers might think that it represents much of Virginia Woolf’s writing during the four-year period, 1929–32. They would be wrong, however. Certainly Woolf took her essays and reviews seriously: ‘these articles, all architecture, a kind of cabinet work, fitting parts together, making one paragraph balance another; are such hard labour in the doing that one cant read them without remembering the drudgery. One starts full tilt; one sees a scene in a flash; but the working out is almost (with me) unbelievably laborious.’fn1 Then one has only to look at Woolf’s reading notes and drafts to realise the amount of work that lies behind these very readable essays. Finally, ‘Phases of Fiction’, originally devised as a book in the Hogarth Lectures on Literature series, took an unbelievable amount of time over a number of years; a transcription of its drafts would fill a book.fn2
For Woolf, of course, the core of her working life was writing fiction, and during this period she wrote The Waves from July 1929 until she finished correcting the proofs on 18 August 1931. By 21 July 1931 at the latest she had begun writing Flush: A Biography as a relief from ‘the last screw of The Waves’.fn3 Writing Flush – ‘that abominable dog’fn4 – continued into 1933. The essays fertilised the fiction, and vice versa, and occasional echoes and parallels have been footnoted in the essays. In 1931 William Empson wrote that in ‘Time Passes’ in To the Lighthouse (1927) ‘it seems as if Mrs Woolf herself was not so much remembering [Mrs Ramsay’s shawl from ‘The Window’] as finding her way about the book as if by habit; it is this sort of small correspondence, used so often, that makes up a full and as it were poetical attitude to language such as would gain by an annotated edition’.fn5 Although Empson was writing shortly before The Waves was published, his comments about Woolf’s ‘poetical attitude to language’ apply even more to that novel written in the most poetic prose. On 10 January 1931 Woolf was stirred by rereading her essay ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’,fn6 and on 16 August she concluded: ‘It is a good idea I think to write biographies; to make them use my powers of representation reality accuracy; & to use my novels simply to express the general, the poetic. Flush is serving this purpose.’fn7 During these years Woolf was often thinking about poetry and prose and the relationship between them. In the Arcadia Sidney ‘bethinks himself, one must not use the common words of daily speech’; and ‘it is not to be denied that two of the novelists who are most frequently poetical – Meredith and Hardy – are as novelists imperfect’. It is not by chance that the last section of ‘Phases of Fiction’ deals with ‘The Poets’. If ‘time to come lies far beyond our province’, nevertheless the ‘poet is always our contemporary’.fn8 No wonder, when Woolf read Aurora Leigh ‘with great interest for the first time the other day’,fn9 she wanted to write about it. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s attempt to put daily life into poetry was not so different from Woolf’s attempt to poeticise the novel. In her essay on Aurora Leigh she throws down the gauntlet for her own experiment. The Waves takes it up and confutes her own conclusion at the end of that essay: ‘We have no novel-poem of
In this volume we also see evidence of Woolf’s feminist preoccupations. ‘Women and Fiction’ leading to A Room of One’s Own and ‘Women and Leisure’ all appeared in 1929. Even if the women were not from her own class, writing ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (and its revisions) reminded her in 1930 of the discrimination against and the subjection of women. Then on 29 January 1931: ‘I have this moment, while having my bath, conceived an entire new book – a sequel to a Room of Ones Own – about the sexual life of women: to be called Professions for Women perhaps – Lord how exciting! This sprang out of my paper to be read on Wednesday to Pippa’s society … I’m very much excited.’fn10 This would occupy her for a number of years and develop into The Years (1937) and Three Guineas (1938).
Virginia Woolf wrote essays primarily as a relief from fiction and as a means of making money:
Writing articles is like tying one’s brain up in neat brown paper parcels. O to fly free in fiction once more! – and then I shall cry, O to tie parcels once more! – Such is life – a see-saw – a switch back.fn11
This last half year I made over £1800; almost at the rate of £4000 a year; the salary almost of a Cabinet minister; & time was, two years ago, when I toiled to make £200. Now I am overpaid I think for my little articles … Well, after tomorrow I shall close down article writing, & give way to fiction for six or seven months – till next March perhaps.fn12
Above all, Woolf had to keep writing: ‘The only way I keep afloat is by working. A note for the summer I must take more work than I can possibly get done. – no, I dont know what it comes from. Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.’ Referring to taking on too much work, she added in the margin of her diary two months later: ‘This vow I kept’.fn13
This volume and its predecessor contain the two pillars of Virginia Woolf’s essays: her two Common Reader volumes of 1925 and 1932. Because of the duplication and revision of essays previously published, Volumes IV and V are misleading if looked at superficially. ‘Phases of Fiction’ and the postcard on George Eliot in this volume, for example, can hardly be equated. Suffice it to say that Volumes IV and V, each covering a four-year period in Woolf’s working life, comprise a significant amount of work. And neither can the amount of work involved in the revisions be underestimated: ‘Why did I ever say I would produce another volume of Common Reader? It will take me week after week, month after month. However a year spent … in reading through English literature will no doubt do good to my fictitious brain. Rest it anyhow. One day, all of a rush, fiction will burst in.’fn14 Yet only four of the essays in The Common Reader: Second Series were written especially for that volume, while the remaining twenty-two were revised to a greater or lesser extent. Woolf was trying to bring imagination and cohesion to a disparate collection, unified only by her approach and personality. We can see from her revisions increasing cross-references between the essays, and this is most significant in the much-revised final essay, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’: ‘the CR I confess is not yet quite done. But then – well I had to rewrite the last article, which I had thought so good, entirely. Not for many years shall I collect another bunch of articles’.fn15 Georgia Johnston remarks about The Common Reader that when ‘we read the volume as a whole, circularly, the last essay, “How It Strikes a Contemporary,” informs the first, “The Common Reader,” as if Woolf had conceived of the volume as a loop’.fn16 Beth Rigel Daugherty develops this insight: ‘When Woolf adds The Second Common Reader to her first, she enlarges the loop, seeing the two volumes as a whole.’fn17 Nevertheless, Woolf remained dissatisfied:
I am working very hard – in my way, to furbish up 2 long Elizabethan articles to front a new Common Reader: then I must go through the whole long list of those articles. I feel too, at the back of my brain, that I can devise a new critical method; something far less stiff & formal than these Times articles. But I must keep to the old style in this volume. And how, I wonder, could I do it? There must be some simpler, subtler, closer means of writing about books, as about people, could I hit upon it.fn18
The Common Reader: Second Series was published by the Hogarth Press on 13 October 1932 and as The Second Common Reader by Harcourt, Brace on 27 October 1932. Reviews were almost universally favourable.fn19
The Times Literary Supplement, as with a number of the reviews, considered Winifred Holtby’s Virginia Woolf together with The Common Reader: Second Series, and this offered an opportunity to look back at Woolf’s achievements in fiction as well as at her essays. Naturally, those ‘who enjoyed Mrs Woolf’s first series, or the other essays which have appeared in these columns and are reprinted here, will renew their enjoyment’. Or, as the editor, Bruce Richmond put it: ‘I was constantly purring and saying “Ha ha! This first appeared in the Supplement”.’ The TLS chose ‘Dr Burney’s Evening Party’ as the ‘gem’ of the collection.fn20
The Times itself saw Woolf as ‘a novelist deliberately using her creative imagination’ and praised her for ‘conduct[ing] us not into the classroom but out of it’,fn21 with particular reference to ‘The Strange Elizabethans’. E. J. Scovell in the New Statesman and Nation stated that ‘most readers … will be enchanted by [the essays], whether or not they have read what she is writing about’ and perceptively noted that Woolf regretted ‘the limiting nature of fact, the impossibility of knowing the truth about it’.fn22 Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times found ‘in these essays an extraordinary insight into the creative mind; and … a series of brilliant pictures of the characters’.fn23 Gerald Bullett in the Week-end Review considered Woolf’s potted biographies to be ‘her best and most characteristic’ essays. He noted that she did not confuse biography with criticism: ‘She does not ask us to read the novels of Geraldine Jewsbury: Geraldine is worth attention for her own sake.’fn24
Vita Sackville-West in the Listener strongly recommended the book, comforting her readers (and those who listened in to her talk on the BBC) that, ‘although you may have found difficulty in following some of Mrs. Woolf’s novels, I assure you that you will find no difficulty at all in following her critical essays. They are wholly delightful. They are sensitive, acute, picturesque, humorous, and yet severe.’fn25 Basil de Selincourt in the Observer took a similar view but expressed it more wittily, while taking a swipe at ‘a disposition at the back of our minds to believe that criticism must be scientific’.fn26
Stephen Spender in the Criterion thought that ‘what interests her chiefly is the artist’s development, rather than the actual word’ and that she ‘feels her dead historic characters protest that they are alive’. He concluded: ‘it is not often in this book that we are aware of an effect that is too deliberate, and even when we are so aware, it is an effect of which we do not tire’.fn27
John Sparrow in the Spectator wondered what was Woolf’s secret of success, and answered himself: ‘she writes vividly because she reads vividly’. He was one of the few reviewers to single out for praise ‘How Should One Read a Book?’,fn28 although Theodora Bosanquet in Time and Tide, noting that it was ‘a paper read at a school’, commented ‘fortunate school’.fn29 Roger Pippett in the Daily Herald chose ‘George Gissing’: ‘A miraculous achievement! And an everyday occurrence with Mrs. Woolf! You ignore such an exciting writer at your peril.’fn30 And Rebecca West in the Daily Telegraph alighted on ‘Robinson Crusoe’: ‘Is there anybody writing anywhere in the world at this moment who could surpass the essay … so beautifully moulded into a form appropriate to its content that what is an authentic critical masterpiece seems as light on the mind as a song?’fn31
Yvonne ffrench gushed in the London Mercury: ‘the apotheosis of Mrs. Woolf as an essayist has begun’ with these ‘flawless’ essays. She considered that, unlike the first series, this time Woolf had ‘followed a definite plan’.fn32 By contrast, Denys Thompson in Scrutiny thought that ‘The Common Reader: First Series was a contribution to criticism and the Second Series is not’, because ‘an interest in amiable eccentrics has become almost exclusive’.fn33 Perversely, Geoffrey Grigson in the London Bookman linked Woolf to Felicia Hemans. Surprisingly, he also connected her with Sir Henry Newbolt: ‘you find unending curiosity, continual liveliness, but the same absence of thought (to be inquisitive is not to be thoughtful), the same urbanity, the same good taste’.fn34
