Virginia Woolf – Page 2 – My Own RE:public

Bon voyage

On hearing last week that a digitized version of Virginia Woolf’s personal copy of her first novel The Voyage Out is now freely available, I read around the many reports including at the BBC (a Radio 4 news report had been my first source), and linked to a timely article by Mark Byron from the University of Sydney (where the original resides) in The Conversation. This article I have now republished here.

Here now is the link to the University of Sydney library – with a well formatted web version of Woolf’s book; also available for download as pdf. The accompanying description alerts one to Woolf’s revisions in Chapter 16 (pp.249-267 [web-tool/pdf 262-284] with typed paste-ins on pages 254 and 256) and Chapter 25 (pp.398-432 [411-445] with a number of deletions) in preparation for the book’s US publication in 1920.

Original copy published by Duckworth & Co., London, 1915.

A glance to her diary is informative in this regard. Virginia Woolf writes on 28th November 1919, that two parties are interested in both The Voyage Out and Night and Day and their publication appears likely, and a footnote confirms that to be the case – with George H. Doran of New York becoming Woolf’s first American publisher [see The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume 1]. Then, the on 4th February 1920 she writes:

The morning from 12 to 1 I spend reading the Voyage Out. I’ve not read it since July 1913. And if you ask me what I think I must reply that I don’t know – such a harlequinade as it it is – such an assortment of patches – here simple & severe – here frivolous & shallow – here like God’s truth – here strong & free flowing as I could wish. What to make of it, Heaven knows. The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn – & then a turn of the sentence, a direct look ahead of me, makes them burn in a different way. On the whole i like the womans mind considerably. How gallantly she takes her fences – & my word, what a gift for pen & ink! I can do little to amend; & must go down to posterity the author of cheap witticisms, smart satires & even, I find, vulgarisms – crudities rather – that will never cease to rankle in the grave. Yet I see how people prefer it to N. & D. – I don’t say admire it more, but find it a more gallant & inspiriting spectacle.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Two (1920-1924)

Woolf’s tone in the private space of her diary suggests, irrespective of the blush, some pride in her younger self. Remember, as “Melymbrosia”, her book first started taking form as early as 1907, and remember, too, as Virginia surely would have, her severe mental illness during many of those preceding years. That Virginia must be respected.

At the Internet Archive is a copy of the Doran first edition, and it appears to me those corrections suggested by Woolf’s annotations in this newly ‘found’ treasure were adopted only in part – the paragraphs she suggests in Chapter 16 were indeed included (quite how, and what if anything was omitted only a more thorough look on my part will reveal) but those in Chapter 25 that she (?) suggested be deleted seem to remain in full in the US publication. This latter is particularly interesting; I could imagine Woolf mulling over whether Rachel’s feverish state may be interpreted as something close to her own mental agonies over the years. Leaving aside the veracity of my hypothesis and Woolf’s intentions, I have always found Rachel’s torment through those days and nights extraordinarily vivid. It must have been lived. Virginia lived through it. Rachel did not.

Virginia’s book has made quite a ‘voyage’ of its own. Presumably beginning in a room of her own (though the writing and editing of her first novel predates her actually having a room of her own – that did not come her way until 1919) in London and/or Sussex, onwards to her literary estate and its executors, somehow turning up in a bookshop in Lewes from whence it was sold in 1976 – were they mad, or was this simply a failure to predict the market potential? – to an Antipodean university, whereupon it was promptly (?) lost into the cavernous depths of the science section – were THEY mad? An ABC report explains the chain of events up until the book’s reemergence in 2021. To which we can only say: god bless literate, curious and alert Metadata Service Officers!

Virginia Woolf’s copy of her first novel was found in a University of Sydney library…

What do her newly digitised notes reveal?

A Sydney librarian recently discovered a misfiled lost gem in the stacks: Virginia Woolf’s own copy of her first novel, with handwritten notes for revision. An expert explores what they tell us.
— Read on theconversation.com/virginia-woolfs-copy-of-her-first-novel-was-found-in-a-university-of-sydney-library-what-do-her-newly-digitised-notes-reveal-210135

What a find! Herewith only a place holder – I will return with more to say.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf – a book for the ages …

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.

In her own words

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.

With baton in hand: On Tár & Ethel Smyth

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.

Ethel Smyth’s The Prison: A Work To Be Reckoned With

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!)

The Prison can be sampled below on Spotify; other interpretations of her work can also be heard there (with an account) including Mass in D from the BBC Symphony Orchestra; also resurrected and recorded for the first time in 2019.

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.

The Diary of Virginia Woolf (3)

VOLUME Three: 1925-1930

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!

The Beebs at 100

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.

Whether the Coronation Map of 1953, David Attenborough’s rejected job application (an ‘oversight’ that was thankfully quickly reversed!) or the Monty Python animations of Terry Gilliam, especially the objects category offers surprises and something familiar for almost everyone.

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 Times were 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.

The Bennett of Bennett & Brown

Following from my previous post, if you get another shot at The Spectator, A.N. Wilson also had something to say earlier in the year on Arnold Bennett and a new biography by Patrick Donovan called Arnold Bennett: Lost Icon (Unicorn) which couldn’t help but interest me.

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.