says Woolf’s biographer (amongst other things!), Hermione Lee, in her fine review in The Guardian to coincide with a new publication by Granta of The Diary of Virginia Woolf. In their original five volumes as edited by Anne Olivier Bell they each have a new introduction, the first by her daughter, Virginia Nicholson (others include Olivia Laing and Siri Hustvedt). They look very lovely indeed but are pricey at £30 a pop. I am content enough with my now a couple of decades old, not-so-well bound, much read, US trade copies – I think!
To quote Hermione Lee:
[…]The diary is an unmatchable record of her times, a gallery of vividly observed individuals, an intimate and courageous self-examination, a revelation of a writer’s creative processes, a tender, watchful nature journal, and a meditation on life, love, marriage, friendship, solitude, society, time and mortality. It’s one of the greatest diaries ever written […]
The Diary of Virginia Woolf review – The Guardian – Thu 22 Jun 2023
What Lee says are extraordinarily (a superlative suggestive of my very much not false modesty) ideas that I, too, have had, and said, and even written about. A “memory book” she calls Woolf’s diary – I love that.
One should need not say, but I will: With A Room Of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf laid the foundation to a way of thinking, not just about women’s writing, but what it is to be a woman in a man’s world and what it means to be represented in a man’s version of history, that has influenced generations through to the present. Here, in conversation with three who may very well count themselves as beneficiaries of Woolf’s legacy, is Melvyn Bragg’s contribution to the continuing exploration of how a couple of lectures to a roomful of young women in Cambridge almost a century ago evolved into a defining document for the ambitious modern woman – Woolf’s unique contribution to the greater quest for emancipation and equality. (Embedded below from Spotify.)
Melvyn Bragg & guests discuss the influence of Virginia Woolf’s famous essay.
Tár has been on my mind. A Todd Field film released at the end of last year; much talked about, though receipts suggest not seen nearly as much – albeit more so of late (award season!) and much more so since its wider release outside of the US. And looked upon mostly favorably and sometimes not. For now I can only add that it says much about these fractious times that a film about an absolutely not-nice but lauded female conductor – that all agree is brilliantly portrayed be Cate Blanchett – could be hauled from the creative space of the movie theater and plunged into the vitriolic and intransigent arena of the culture-war theater. I will see it and then have my say. (Though be warned my impartiality is not assured: most anything with Blanchett – with the exception of Armani ads! – is okay by me. I like to think we sound alike.) And have been encouraged to do so by a just read piece by Nicholas Spice in the LRB (Vol. 45 No. 6 · 16 March 2023) that broadly considers the art of conducting through Field’s film, a recent translation and commentary of Richard Wagner’s essays “On Conducting” (amazingly open access at JSTOR) and an experiential memoir by Alice Farnham.
There is probably no reason Spice should mention Ethel Smyth in his essay, but I would not have minded her spirited and stubborn presence; for she, too, has been fluttering around in my head. In the midst of my continuing Virginia Woolf stuff, I have been occupied with that period at the beginning of the 1930s during which Woolf found herself the object of the affections of the celebrated composer, conductor and suffragette; the attentions of whom aroused and irritated at the same time.
At the beginning of 1931 Woolf attended rehearsals of Smyth’s opera The Prison, adapted from a poem by her friend Henry B. Brewster, and then its London premiere performance on February 24. All did not go well. Accordingly, a very belated first recording in 2020 and its warm reception is of interest, and to be complemented by this essay, also from The Guardian, by Leah Broad.
Mysterious is this friend of hers, Henry Bennet Brewster, about whom information (in the internet anyway) seems scarce* but, when unearthed, is often in respect to his relationship with Smyth; his own work, seemingly, to have fallen into obscurity. Of any substance I can only find this 1962 essay by Martin Halpern in American Quarterly (pub. The John Hopkins University Press) held at JSTOR. (*Halpern’s essay suggests more could be learned by way of others, like another even more famous friend – Henry James. A task for another time.But the rediscovery of Brewster that Halpern hoped for sixty odd years ago seems not to have eventuated – unlike that of Smyth. Unless of course she has coattails to match her tailcoats!)
In a diary entry made following the 1931 rehearsal of The Prison, Woolf writes a colorful -and comical – portrait of Ethel Smyth, which concludes with her being struck that Smyth, so practical and so strident in common discourse, could spin such music – so coherent, so harmonious – and asks the question: “What if she should be a great composer?” Well, that I cannot answer. But, what can be said, is that Dame Ethel Smyth has been granted that rare gift of an afterlife; enough qualified others over the years having concluded her music had merit and warranted reappraisal – and, this, long after her once radical presence in this mortal world had seemingly been confined to feminist folklore, footnotes – or even the diary and letters of Virginia Woolf.
My Copy of Vol. III of The Diary of Virginia Woolf
Extraordinarily it has taken me two years to write up this Volume Three of Virginia Woolf’s diary. Absurd, really. But here it is!
It is left to be said, as I have vowed before I do so again; with Volume Four encompassing the years 1931- 1935 (and to be started upon post haste!) I shall endeavor to be stringent and selective. But, believe me, with Woolf that is easier said than done. And, whilst ambition is a worthy trait, and a very Woolf-ish one at that, I dare not predict a time frame for the completion of this volume either!
Since 1922 (it just had to be 1922!) the BBC has informed and entertained at home and abroad; during times of empire – its waning and its demise; in war and peace; through political turmoil and social upheaval. In these days of instantaneous communication and the new media that has evolved out of it, she navigates gingerly through troubled waters but, hopefully and with good will and chance, is in no real danger of sinking anytime soon – with or without the license fee, meddling politicians, the next app, or the next big thing.
With a timeline to be explored either by year or thematically, and thoughtful collections of 100 objects, 100 faces and 100 voices that have been accumulating over the year, the BBC proudly displays the first century of their being.
And from the beginning, women were there; in many roles, mostly unheralded, underpaid and pawns to the patriarchal structures of … Auntie Beeb! For me the name Hilda Matheson jumps out; she who shared with Virginia Woolf (who wrote of her disparagingly – that, enough to make one curious) the affections of Vita Sackville-West. Specific to her work with the BBC, this blog entry is very interesting, and illustrative of what the ‘girls’ were up against.
During my exploration of the celebratory website, links to the Radio Timeswere prevalent and it turns out that the Programme Index includes amongst its (searchable) historical listings also digitized copies of the Radio Times. One way (should the time allow) of appraising the societal history of the United Kingdom over the last century – thinking about how far it has come and imagining how far it could go.
Now for me, Bennett is only the Bennett of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown; that essay from a certain Mrs. Woolf that is the wryly imagined culmination of the legendary dispute between herself and the aforesaid, and is a proxy – so to speak – for that greater reckoning between proponents of realism and modernism in the early 2oth century novel.
More than a little snarky when it comes to Mrs. Woolf, in my opinion, is the Mr. Wilson. Nor quite accurate either. Bennett and Woolf were contemporaries only up to a point, more precisely their careers briefly overlapped; most of Bennett’s works (including the “Clayhanger” series) were published in the first two decades of the century, and Mr. Bennett’s criticism of Mrs. Woolf’s third novel Jacob’s Room came in 1922 and before her real rise to literary fame with Mrs. Dalloway. And Wilson’s claim that she (and others) had it in for Bennett because he was too “middle-brow” is rather specious. On the contrary, one could contend; it was Mrs. Woolf’s “Mrs Brown” who displayed various degrees of the too easily maligned “middle-brow” – Mrs. Woolf is rooting for the “middle-brow” with all their peculiarities and inconsistencies and against easy assumptions made of them. Her point is: if it were to be a “Mr. Bennett” who was to imagine and describe his “Mrs Brown”, he would have her been imbued in his own image, reflecting the world as he saw it.
I do understand Mr. Wilson’s loyalties towards Mr. Bennett – the links between the two men: Stoke-on-Trent, potteries, Wedgwood are clear. And Clayhanger and The Potter’s Hand stand only a century apart in the setting and a (different) century in the writing of; neither of which I have read, but am inclined to.
…or maybe not – of course not; not this day! For this one gifted to us nearly a century ago, and more recently to have become a quiet but special celebration of literary reflection.
This year the weather plays its part as written (by Virginia Woolf, and today – in Germany anyway) and though bad tidings continue to whirl (wars and pandemics; in the here and now as once they haunted the streets of 1922 London), there is always some time to give to a Dalloway Day. At the Royal Society of Literature there are some links for this year and previous years, but the embedded clip below is something lighter and bit different.
This Lit Hub video is a good-humored discussion; presenting some transatlantic perspective through the person of Elif Batuman in conversation with the young, Black and British writer Yomi Adegoki. Though they divert quickly from talking specifically about Virginia Woolf, it was not before Batuman set the tone of the discussion by relating the peculiar atmosphere of unresolved grief, personal and societal, that pervades Mrs. Dalloway to her own method of working in these uncertain times. Specifically, the hazards of moving between writing as a journalist, concerned often with matters of the real world, and those of the novelist which can’t help but reach into an interior life for inspiration. Such so-called ‘life writing’ brings with it responsibilities – to one’s own self and to others. These were, of course, concerns that Virginia Woolf was aware of and attended to in her own way; this to be discerned in an informed reading of Mrs. Dalloway.
To be remembered: Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970). Born 15o years ago today; renowned mathematician and logician, a founder of analytic philosophy, a prolific (and accessible) writer and commentator of the 20th century, a Nobel Prize for Literature laureate, an influential public intellectual and a voice for peace – and as such one with particular resonance at this time.
Because birthdays, one’s own or that of another, always seem to inspire reflection on the passing years, Russell’s short essay contemplating (and so titled) “How to Grow Old” (from his 1956 collection Portraits from Memory and Other Essays at the Internet Archive) is a fitting read. It’s simple and entertaining and it’s message is timeless, and begins by restating its purpose as actually being concerned with how not to grow old. In a nutshell: genetic disposition is one thing, health issues another, but the greatest dangers lay in nostalgia and regret, and clinging to the past and to a world of youth that is no longer yours. Rather, one should look to the future and pursue a broad range of interests, the more impersonal the better. His essay nears its end with the difficult contemplation of death that faces us all, and described with the metaphorical river of life.
[…]Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.[…]
from the essay “How to Grow Old” by Bertrand Russell.
Sometimes referred to as Mr. Russell, with sly, good-humored respect one may presume, but for Virginia Woolf (and for our photographer above, Ottoline Morrell), more often than not, he was just plain Bertie – another of the brilliant, mercurial, imperfect figures that entered her sphere through family and acquaintance. So, as Woolf may well have proclaimed should she have encountered him on any 18th May: Happy Birthday, Bertie!
