With a new feature, The Yale Review has become an even more wonderful place to go. Here, the announcement by Meghan O’Rourke of a weekly column called Annotating the Archives; archives that really are a treasure trove of 20th century literature and ideas, and which deserve to be brought to the fore and presented with perhaps a differentiated slant or emphasis – and by fine contemporary writers.
Of lists & threads – of the information they impart & the tale they weave
From my recent post and having been inspired by the newly (by me) discovered Gertrude Trevelyan and, therefore, as ever, by musings on Woolf, as one who had (probably) inspired her (and in more ways than the room and 500 quid), I had thought to write some more on the Pargiters. But, as I am only right now going about, and rather ponderously at that, re-reading and writing up Woolf’s diary that covers that period immediately following her speech to the National Society for Women’s Service on 21 January 1931 from which The Years (as lived by the Pargiter family) would evolve (and not in the way Woolf had at that time envisaged), I realize now this to be a more complex exercise than I thought; it seems there is a lot to be said on literary method and creative choices, and deserving, therefore, of greater attention. Simply said: this, whilst not exactly relegated to the bucket list, a task to be held in abeyance until I have pulled the very many threads together to do it justice.
…as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time […] so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal …
On which, then, this thread must find an end … but just before finishing up on Trevelyan’s book (and the Trevelyans), it has occurred to me that I didn’t previously emphasize one particular characteristic enough. From the very first page, the novel’s narrative is interspersed by the listing of factual events – some short, some long; from close to home and from far shores; some of historical significance such that they are still familiar but very many now lost in the passing years; and which David Trotter in his essay variously refers to as a “database”, “news crawl”, or as “threads” with their own “tale to tell” – hanging there like stitches in Time. But they are so cleverly entwined that they become inherent to the composition; implemented to establish the focus, shift the perspective – visual or temporal, often reflecting out of or into Katherine’s classroom, or Robert’s lab or bed-sit.
An unusual stylistic choice, and one that could easily date a book; and one that may have contributed to Trevelyan’s novel disappearing into obscurity for so long – others perhaps making the (superficially based) decision that later and contemporary readers would be put off by (or ignorant of) the real world goings on during those between the wars years.
Finally, I end with the admission that I can not think of a book quite like Two Thousand Million Man-Power. (Writing about the same time but on a grander scale, Dos Passos – sorry a gap in my education! – is mentioned as one employing a similar methodology.) Coming to my mind is only a song – albeit, a list song – that tracks the post-war years in the second half of the century, and that has special significance to me (another story!). Radically different, yet with something in common, these two listings of the people and events of different generations – strewn realities to be made palpable, and therefore relatable, only with the sensory overload stimulated by the natural phenomena of noise and fire respectively. Take it away … Mr. Billy Joel!
As a sort of prelude: How small England is (or was) it often seems to me. And, I am not talking geography, rather the closeness amongst many of a certain class. Perhaps that holds for all social and economic classes, and I suppose it could hardly surprise given our compulsion to acquiesce to the norms we are encouraged to think of as predetermined, but one cannot deny the bleedin’ obviousness of it when it comes to that socioeconomic group that includes the ‘great and good’ – or at least the broadly defined English (and British) literati. The entanglements of people and paths crossed every which way can make one quite giddy at times.
From where comes this musing? In the last days I have mentioned David Runciman and his new podcast. Now I know a bit about Runciman (who seriously has a hereditary dingsbums!), mostly from the LRB, and I knew he was married to the writer, Bee Wilson, and I also actually knew that to be past tense (not a pun on his podcast!), because Wilson wrote about it here. (She also writes a lot of good stuff for the LRB and elsewhere – mostly about food in a wide ranging, cultural sense, but not only.)
I could of course not help but be delighted by the enthusiasm David Runciman exhibits for Virginia Woolf in his podcast. Whether he has always been so enamored I have no way of telling, but his marriage to Bee Wilson did indeed bring him within a few degrees of Woolf, and certainly less than the six of.
To get to the point then: Bee Wilson and her sister Emily are the daughters of the Elizabethan scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones who died last year (which I posted on here, at that time also having been moved by familial relationships), and her mother was Elsie Duncan-Jones. Now, it was as the young Cambridge student, Elsie Elizabeth Phare, that she was there in the room at Newnham College on the evening of 20th October 1928 when Virginia Woolf delivered to the Arts Society the first of the two lectures (the other was a week later at Girton College) that were to form the backbone of “A Room of One’s Own” published the next year.
E.E. Phare later reviewed the evening for the student magazine, Thersities; the following passage from the Newnham College website celebrating their 150th anniversary last year offers some further insight.
When Woolf addressed Newnham students at the Arts Society, she discussed the consequences to the lack of spaces for women to learn, write and their lack of access to knowledge, or write. Poet and Newnham undergraduate E.E. Phare wrote a review of Woolf’s talk in the Newnham student magazine Thersities. Phare highlighted that for Woolf ‘the reasons why women novelists were for so long so few were largely a question of domestic architecture; it was not, and is not so easy to compose in a parlour,’ where women could very easily be interrupted. Woolf also ‘exhorted her audience to write novels and send them to be considered by the Hogarth Press, which she had founded with her husband Leonard Woolf in 1917. If Newnham students were to submit work, they should not try to adapt themselves to the prevailing literary standards which are likely to be masculine, but… should remake the language so it becomes a more fluid thing and capable of delicate use.’ [2]
[2] E.E. Duncan-Jones (Phare) 1926, ‘Mrs Woolf Comes to Dine’ in Ann Phillips (ed) A Newnham Anthology (Cambridge University Press, 1979) p. 12 [originally in Thersities].
Newnham College, University of Cambridge, 150 Years Website
Unfortunately, neither the above foot-noted anthology nor another academic tome in which Phare’s review is included can be got to by me – the first, because of (in)accessibility; the second, cost factor(!). Given the influential reach of Woolf’s talk to a room full of young women all those years ago in Cambridge, surely this would be an interesting addition to the public domain.
This tweet from Emily Wilson a few days ago led to some new information (for me anyway): that not only was her grandmother present on that evening but that it was, in fact, she who invited Virginia Woolf to Newnham. I had always presumed that Woolf was there at the invitation of Pernell Strachey. (Certainly she and Leonard stayed the night with Strachey.)
A great essay about my (and @kitchenbee 's) grandmother, which includes the detail that she invited Virginia Woolf to give the talk that became "A room of one's own" — and that she found Woolf "haughty". https://t.co/egOF4iouuK
And, as I have, you now too have read the piece, and know that “Elsie’s confidence in inviting Virginia Woolf to Newnham was characteristic of the determination she would demonstrate throughout her life. She was born in Devon in 1908 into a working-class home, in which neither parent had received education beyond elementary level…”.
Whereupon my ‘class’ argument comes tumbling down like a house of cards; mitigated only by the fact that Elsie Duncan-Jones was the recipient of some good fortune and was able through her intelligence and strength of character benefit from the opportunities presented to her and rise above the hurdles put in her way; establishing the foundation from which her descendants have been able to cement their place amongst the cultural elite.
I was a big fan of David Runciman’s previous podcast Talking Politics that wound down last year (here still on Spotify), and was delighted to discover that he was making a new start. Past Present Future is a weekly podcast (in conjunction with the LRB) discussing the triangulation of those three spaces of time – in culture, society, politics, philosophy, science.
Already a diverse range of subjects and guests has been offered; with episodes as varied as Ian McEwan talking about Italo Calvino’s “The Watchman”, on “Dallas” (the TV soap, that is) and the economics of oil, about the history and threats of space and that of population trajectories – and all the accompanying noise and propaganda. And gladly a return to his History of Ideas series that was previously embedded in Talking Politics. For this latter, it is only David Runciman who speaks to us – an audio essay if you will, and about a significant essay and it’s author.
Fittingly, the first episode can not help but be about Montaigne – he who all but invented the essay form. And then there was one on Hume and on Thoreau, and next week George Orwell (“The Lion and the Unicorn” – this I know!). And just now: Virginia Woolf’s 1929 legendary work “A Room of One’s Own”!
5 March 2024 ….Oh! The from Spotify embedded pod has disappeared. Here it is at LRB.
This episode an excellent companion to the Melvyn Bragg offering I mentioned not long ago. Oh! And Runciman says: the greatest essay of the 20th century. Neither imagined, nor exaggerated by me. He says that. I can say no more. But then there is always more to be said …
So, much more than rules of grammar or the world according to Disney, Past Present Future a welcome addition to my podcast library.
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.My own 1991 Penguin paperback
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!
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.
