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.
“Tom Stoppard – A Life” by Hermione Lee, pub. Knopf, 2021
I would not necessarily seek out a biography of Tom Stoppard, renowned as he may be and as interesting as his life has been and is (and tragically more so than even he realised for a long time); but when the biographer is Hermione Lee one’s curiosity must be piqued, and for reasons as noted in this very good piece in The New York Times in anticipation of the forthcoming release of Tom Stoppard – A Life in the United States. Firstly, while she has previously brought her craft only to women and secondly, only to the dead; Stoppard doesn’t fit the bill on either of those counts. It should also be said Stoppard pointedly sought out Lee, and not just because she is the best, but because he wanted it to be read – which sort of suggests he may have been thinking of a reader like me.
The NYT piece is about the Stoppard work to be sure, but more generally it is also very enlightening about Hermione Lee’s way of telling a life – ways (pl.) really, because for each she works at adopting a voice particular to that of her subject. The book has actually been out for some time in the UK, and this review in The Guardian is well worth a read.
Celebrating the 138th anniversary of the birth of Virginia Woolf (born 25th January, 1882)! Would she be flattered or embarrassed at the attention posterity has granted her? Who knows, but …
Woolf has been an interesting part of my reading life for some years now, but in recent times I have been thinking about her more than ever. And re-thinking her contribution to literature and her legacy, and discovering aspects to her life and her writing that were previously unbeknownst to me. The following 2014 video featuring her biographer Hermione Lee, is therefore a find and a treat on this day.
Lee focuses in her lecture on how Woolf’s shifting, slanting representation of fragmented time in her fiction, encapsulated as it is in memory, is often framed with some temporal precision – dates and seasons are important. An obvious example is Mrs. Dalloway; set on a Wednesday in mid-June 1923, and perhaps less obvious; the time span suggested in Night and Day where a Sunday evening in October must be 1911, and winter turns to spring. And actual historical events are indicative; Lee refers for instance to the mention of a general election and suffrage bill in The Voyage Out, dating the narrative to 1910.
Given my familiarity with her diaries, and the continued scrutiny I apply to them, I recognised well Woolf’s preoccupation with questions of mortality, her own and that of others, her predilection to relate her present with specific dates in days gone (often the deaths of the near and dear, family and friends), and how these memories found their way into her literary works. And I was always amused by her simple arithmetical doodlings, which I interpreted as resulting from a weakness in mental arithmetic but may well have been Woolf’s idiosyncratic way of measuring time gone (and remaining); of balancing her book of life.
Virginia Woolf Birthday Lecture, Hermione Lee, University of London, 2014
This video has inspired even more thought – I swear every time I am about to move on to other things, something else relating to the Woolf comes my way! Virginia Woolf may not have thought much of H.G. Wells, but she was as interested in the vagaries and possibilities of time travel as he – just in another, less mechanical, more mysterious manner. When I think about how, in much of Woolf’s writing, time ebbs and flows and overlaps and turns back on itself, I wonder whether it is not Woolf’s non-mechanical approach that better captures the essence of relative time, and that in some ways is more compatible to the precepts of modern science. [I remind myself here to look into a certain French philosopher called Henri Bergson – mentioned in response to a question in the last minutes of the video.]
