Tag: Virginia Woolf

Goblin Market

Reading recently by chance Christina Rossetti’s narrative poem “Goblin Market”, I could not help but think about Virginia Woolf; the reasons for which I explain in some detail here.

Christina Rossetti is deserving of more attention, and will be returned to (soon, I hope!). Amongst other things, given Rossetti’s intense religiosity, I would be interested in exploring the leap of faith necessary for Woolf to embrace her.

Also, whilst looking for a copy of the poem, I came across this very nicely put together page at The Victorian Web, with the full text and a lot of interesting contextual information about the poem and of course about Rossetti herself. More generally, The Victorian Web is one of the better and more accessible resources out there in the big, wide whatever …!

“Virginia Woolf? – Snob!

Richard Wright? – Sexist! Dostoyevsky? – Anti-Semite! ” So, Brian Morton asks in The New York Times, just how should we read great writers from the past whose moral blind spots offend us?

I read the above piece while underway yesterday – a really good contribution I think to the fiercely debated topic of how to approach literary works written in the historical past. I particularly liked Morton’s time machine analogy! And I was of course immediately alert to the “snob” accusation against Virginia Woolf – one which I happened to use of her a couple of days ago. It seems as a reader I instinctively cope with the “snob” Woolf under the guise of a time-traveler as Morton suggests. Though “snob” is a rather mild description, one could just as well attach the “anti-semite” tag to her also – the stereotypical language she uses of Leonard Woolf and his family, amongst others, would be untenable today. Nor would it be hard to find, from she an icon of women’s literature, some ideas that may today be considered sexist; for even she was not immune to the patriarchal conditioning rooted in the class structures of the society in which she lived. And her ideas on race and intelligence were very much colored by contemporary thinking on social-Darwinism and eugenics popular in her social milieu.