Tag: Virginia Woolf

Housekeeping at the Dalloways

With the end of year two of the pandemic, I note with pleasure – whereby, in these complicated days, that a relative state of being – where it was that one of our literary flights of fancy led. And, that was back to the London of a century ago, and all that could happen on just one day traversing the topography between Westminster and Bond Street – on the ground, in the heart and in the head.

Penguin ed. 2021

A particular literary journey inspired, at least to some extent it seems, by the publication of two new editions of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway – one from Penguin Random House (with a forward by Jenny Offill and introduction and notes by Elaine Showalter) and an annotated edition from Merve Emre published by Liveright (w.w. norton). Or was it the other way round, and these publications came with an awareness of renewed interest and the potential of a new readership amongst younger generations?

Whichever, as a matter of ‘housekeeping’, and before they go astray amongst my chaotic collection of bookmarks and the like, following are links to just three of the articles that I have collected during the year. (Some other good pieces, unfortunately, require subscriptions.)

Angels grounded

Mrs. Woolf & the Servants by Alison Light, pub. Penguin 2007

Alison Light’s 2007 book Mrs. Woolf and the Servants – referred to by me here – is indeed a wonderful read, and for many reasons. Significantly, it goes some way in satisfying my curiosity about the complicated relationship of the said Mrs. Woolf with her servants, and, more generally, in offering through this particular example an engrossing and informative account of the domestic power structures of the middle and upper class households (in Britain), and as a microcosm of the hierarchical distribution of power in greater society, from the end of the Victorian era through to the post-war twentieth century. The gap in my own knowledge was quickly apparent – and gaping! – and Light’s book has gone some considerable way towards remedying my ignorance.

Even from the prologue, I was heartened to read that Alison Light’s motivation for writing the book came from her reading of Virginia Woolf’s diaries and her discomfort, on one hand, and fascination on the other, with Woolf’s language concerning her domestic help over the years, and like me especially with respect to Nellie Boxall. (And I must add: it was just as heartening to hear a British scholar of such standing – and to the Left! – admit to her previous ignorance of the historical importance of domestic service in Britain, and especially for women.)

Broadly chronological, the book traces the history of domestic servitude parallel to that of Virginia Woolf’s life. But ‘parallel’ is a misplaced word here (when thinking about time it may always be!); more precisely, these lives and histories are intertwined in ways obvious and not so; imbued with a public presence that abides by social norms, and a behind closed doors intimacy that is mutually dependent (and, as Light says, unequal); in both spheres easily sentimentalized – then and now.

Woolf is not necessarily the star of this narrative, but rather the accompaniment for the lives of others: of Sophie Farrell, the treasure of the Stephan household in late-Victorian Hyde Park Gate, of Nellie and Lottie Hope, inseparable, in service and out, almost a life long, and of the Batholomews and Annie Thompsett and the Haskins and Louie Everest all who made Monks House the “home” Woolf had needed for her emotional well-being and creative and professional development as a writer. Would she have been generous in accepting this supporting role? I think so, I hope so.

And, as employers, the Woolfs are hardly set decorations – it is important what Light has to say about their role as representative of an intellectual class in the first half of the twentieth century: the disparity that existed between the political and societal agenda that was being propagated and the actuality of a way of life that contributed to the cementing of rigid class structures. I think it is fair to say that it was the highly political Leonard who spoke and wrote loudest on the rights of the working class, but maintained an imperious attitude to those employed in his own home.

Continue reading …

Janet Malcolm

There are names in journalism that everyone knows – Janet Malcolm, who died on June 16 in New York City at 86 years of age, is one such. During her almost sixty years at The New Yorker, she wrote a multitude of pieces over an extraordinary range; some I have read but most I of course I have not – being (funnily enough!) once too young, and later, before the digital revolution, while the said esteemed publication came my way only sporadically.

Interesting, are the controversies commented on in The New York Times obituary – serving to remind of just how radically the print media and journalism has changed in the last decades – how trite Malcolm’s transgressions now appear and how prescient her ideas about what good journalism is and what it could and could not do.

Also, in the NYT obit, and as one forever on the watch for lurking wolves – hunting in pack for easy prey, with family in tow or home in the den – I note with delight the link to her great 1995 essay in The New Yorker; entitled “A House of One’s Own” and inspired by the Stephen/Woolf/Bell family house-hopping, correspondence and biographical works, including Quentin Bell’s famous Woolf biography, and culminating with conversations with Quentin and Anne Olivier Bell during a visit of her own to Vanessa’s Charleston home. Malcolm brilliantly explores the Stephen sisters’ coming of age and complicated relationship; with others and with each other and brings Vanessa out of the shadow of her more famous sister. She surprises with details of the familial animosities and inconsistencies that the protagonists left in their wake for the next generation to grapple with. But, in considering Angelica Bell’s bitter recriminations, what Malcolm also does in this essay is articulate her own personal theory of biography; one in which choices have to be made, circumstances rarely prevail and moral certitude anything but.

In what I have written, […]I have, like every other biographer, conveniently forgotten that I am not writing a novel, and that it really isn’t for me to say who is good and who is bad, who is noble and who is faintly ridiculous. Life is infinitely less orderly and more bafflingly ambiguous than any novel, […]and if we pause to remember that [they] were actual, multidimensional individuals, whose parents loved them and whose lives were of inestimable preciousness to themselves, we have to face the problem that every biographer faces and none can solve; namely, that he is standing in quicksand as he writes. There is no floor under his enterprise, no basis for moral certainty. Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image. The finding of a new cache of letters, the stepping forward of a new witness, the coming into fashion of a new ideology—all these events, and particularly the last one, can destabilize any biographical configuration, overturn any biographical consensus, transform any good character into a bad one, and vice versa. […] Another biographer might have made—as a subsequent biographer may well make—a different choice. The distinguished dead are clay in the hands of writers, and chance determines the shapes that their actions and characters assume in the books written about them.

Janet Malcolm in The New Yorker A Critic at Large – June 5, 1995 Issue

Finally, The New York Review of Books, to whom Janet Malcolm also often contributed over very many years, kindly provide a peep into their archives (probably for a limited time) to celebrate a great journalist’s life. From their mail of June 17, 2021:

Free from the Archives:

Janet Malcolm, a longtime contributor to The New York Review, died yesterday at the age of eighty-six. Between 1981 and 2020, Malcolm published thirty-eight pieces in our pages, including the essay below, part of her career-long meditation on the hazards of writing about other people. “Almost from the start,” she writes, “I was struck by the unhealthiness of the journalist-subject relationship, and every piece I wrote only deepened my consciousness of the canker that lies at the heart of the rose of journalism.”

The Morality of Journalism
There is no such thing as a work of pure factuality, any more than there is one of pure fictitiousness. As every work of fiction draws on life, so every work of nonfiction draws on art.

25 June 2021: There have been numerous tributes to Janet Malcolm in the last days, but I would just like to mention one last one; an antipodean perspective that unites her with another that I have long, long, admired. Should one have read any of Helen Garner’s non-fiction works, it would surely not surprise that she would have been influenced by Malcolm, in style, in sensibility and in methodology. (It also should be said, both writers shared a talent for attracting controversy, and not shying from it, and that Malcolm was not uncritical of Garner on a book and its repercussions that received intense scrutiny in the Australian literary scene and beyond, and that this appears not to have affected Garner’s admiration.) Here in a Guardian tribute adapted from her introduction to the Australian publication of an essay collection entitled “Forty-One False Starts“, Garner says:

To open any one of her books at random is to find myself drawn back into that unmistakable sensibility, that unique tissue of mind, and to grasp how deeply I am indebted to her. […]

[…]I saw manifest [in her Plath biography,The Silent Woman] what I was at the time painfully trying to learn: the fact that beneath the thick layers of a writer’s self-censorship, of her fear of being boring or wrong, lies a whole humming, seething world waiting to be released. I learned from watching Malcolm in full flight that I could go much further than timidly nibbling at the edges of people’s peculiar behaviour. I saw that I could get a grip on it and dare to interpret it, to coax meaning from it. The tools were already in my possession. […] that in journalism, as well as in fiction, I could call upon the imagery, the spontaneous associations and the emblematic objects that I had learned to trust when I myself was groaning on the therapist’s couch.

Helen Garner on Janet Malcolm: ‘Her writing turns us into better readers’, The Guardian, June 24th 2021.

The many lives of St. Ives

As the G7 gathers for the first time since the wretched Covid-19 pandemic took grip, and dignitaries and media descend upon Cornwall to do whatever it is they do, it seems an appropriate time to pay a visit too, albeit only in one’s head – and that of Virginia Woolf.

St. Ives, Cornwall, 2021.

In 2018, NYT had a very nice travelogue feature (the usual “subscriber access” proviso applies) entitled “In Search of Virginia Woolf’s Lost Eden in Cornwall”. I know, of course, from my own reading, how very much Woolf cherished the childhood Summers spent at “Talland House”; how those memories found their way into so much of her later writing – Jacobs Room, To the Lighthouse, The Waves. Mentioned in the above article; this letter written by Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, in the summer of 1884, describing the “pocket paradise” that the two year old “‘Ginia” was getting to know and explore.

St. Ives, Porthminster Bay, Cornwall, 1895

The above postcard image from 1895 is particularly poignant; although from the year after Virginia Woolf’s mother’s death, and the first Summer in Virginia’s young life that the Stephen family did not spend at “Talland House” (instead at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight), it still must be very illustrative of the St. Ives town and coastal landscape that so enriched her own memories of the time and later literary work.

Woolf and Music

Following on from a previous post, and beyond The Waves, some (probably many!) others have been thinking and writing about the role played by music in Virginia Woolf’s work. And creating their own musical response.

In 2015, one of the guests on the Radio 3 program celebrating The Waves, the pianist Lana Bode, founded a collaborative concert project, Virginia Woolf & Music, with Dr Emma Sutton  from the University of St Andrews. A project that happily appears to continue. Video clips and notes from previous concerts are available on the website; for instance, embedded below a 2016 concert at the Clothworkers’ Centenary Hall at the University of Leeds.

In this post at The Conversation, the aforesaid Emma Sutton gives an interesting, plainly written appraisal of classical music being an essential element in both Woolf’s creative thought processes and the literary form of her composition. Such a worthy read, and The Conversation being so fair, that I have republished Sutton’s piece to a page on my site.

Eighty years ago, and a last walk…

Virginia Woolf’s letter to Leonard written a few days previously.

On Friday 28th March, 1941, Virginia Woolf walked across the downs to the flooding River Ouse near her beloved home in Sussex, as she would have done so many, many times before; but on this day she filled her coat pockets with stones aplenty and just kept on walking into the watery depths.

On her desk she had left a note to Leonard, written a few days previously. Her body was not found until the 18th April. In the midst of war and tormented by mental illness and personal anguish, Virginia Woolf departed the mortal world.

Juliet Stevenson reading Virginia Woolf’s suicide note.

Not long ago I dug up this review at The New Yorker by W.H. Auden of the so-called “Writer’s Diary” published in 1954 – and admiring and generous it indeed is, of Woolf in particular but also of a neglected generation of women writers in general. I don’t think Auden lived long enough to read the whole kit and caboodle; which I suggest would have delighted him even more. He finished his piece thus:

I do not know how Virginia Woolf is thought of by the younger literary generation; I do know that by my own, even in the palmiest days of social consciousness, she was admired and loved much more than she realized. I do not know if she is going to exert an influence on the future development of the novel—I rather suspect that her style and her vision were so unique that influence would only result in tame imitation—but I cannot imagine a time, however bleak, or a writer, whatever his school, when and for whom her devotion to her art, her industry, her severity with herself—above all, her passionate love, not only or chiefly for the big moments of life but also for its daily humdrum “sausage-and-haddock” details—will not remain an example that is at once an inspiration and a judge. […]

“A Consciousness of Reality” by W. H. Auden in March 6, 1954 issue of “The New Yorker“.

In retrospect, Auden would perhaps have been surprised at just how profound and enduring Woolf’s influence has been on following generations of writers and readers alike, and that it is an influence that is intrinsically emotional and psychological rather than stylistic – for most know only too well, that to be so tempted would certainly end in, what Auden rightly predicted as, “tame imitation”.

Virginia & Vita

A pre-publication extract in The Guardian drawn from Alison Bechdel’s introduction, alerts me to Love Letters: Vita and Virginia by Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, published by Vintage (Penguin) on 4 February.

“Love Letters: Vita and Virginia”,
Vintage Classics, 2021

As things will have it, I am deep in Volume Three of Woolf’s diary, and therefore in the period when Virginia’s first tentative interest in Vita is beginning to evolve into something more. And though I have read some of these letters in the past in other collections, brought together and standing alone, this very affordable little tome is a must have!

Every day is a day to remember…

…but maybe some more than others, and at least provides for an opportunity to link to a really nice and informative site dedicated to today’s birthday girl. Though, she seemed not to enjoy her birthday very much (with the exception of funny little gifts from Leonard) – too much did it remind of the passing years – and may not appreciate this reminder from her distant future – or on the other hand, perhaps delighted at being remembered still!

Happy 139th birthday, Virginia Woolf!
Blogging Woolf.org