Essays virginia woolf vo.., p.1
Essays Virginia Woolf, Volume 6, page 1
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
About the Editor
Also by Virginia Woolf
Title Page
Introduction
Editorial Note
Abbreviations
THE ESSAYS
1933
London Squares
‘Twelfth Night’ at the Old Vic
The Novels of Turgenev
1934
Oliver Goldsmith
Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell
Why?
Walter Sickert: A Conversation
Royalty
1935
The Roger Fry Memorial Exhibition
The Captain’s Death Bed
1936
Why Art To-Day Follows Politics
1937
The Historian and ‘The Gibbon’
Craftsmanship
Reflections at Sheffield Place
Miss Janet Case: Classical Scholar and Teacher
Congreve’s Comedies: Speed, Stillness and Meaning
1938
Lady Ottoline Morrell
America, which I Have Never Seen …
Women Must Weep
1939
Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole
The Art of Biography
White’s Selborne
Reviewing
Lewis Carroll
1940
Gas at Abbotsford
The Dream
The Humane Art
‘Hary-o: The Letters of Lady Harriet Cavendish’
The Man at the Gate
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
Sara Coleridge
Georgiana and Florence
The Leaning Tower
1941
Ellen Terry
Mrs Thrale
ADDITIONAL ESSAYS 1906–1924
‘Chippinge’
‘Occasion’s Forelock’
‘Abbots Verney’
‘The Lonely Lady of Grosvenor Square’
‘Memoirs of a Person of Quality’
‘Disciples’
‘Carlyle and the London Library’
‘Old Hampshire Vignettes’
Mary Christie
‘The Wingless Victory’
Lady Huntingdon
‘In Playtime’
Some Poetic Plays
The Call of the East
‘The Longest Journey’
Mrs Sellar’s Recollections
‘Letters of a Betrothed’
Venice
‘A Mirror of Shalott’
‘The Feast of Bacchus’
‘The Red Sphinx’
‘Love the Judge’
‘Tales of Two People’
‘Mam Linda’
‘The Weavers’
‘The Square Peg’
‘Outrageous Fortune’
‘The Desert Venture’
‘The Forest Playfellow’
‘The Northern Iron’
Some Poetical Plays
Rachel Gurney of the Grove
‘Father Alphonsus’
‘Colonel Kate’
‘The Ways of Rebellion’
‘The Wolf’
‘The Sword Decides’
‘The Red Neighbour’
‘Destinies’
‘Marotz’
‘Between the Twilights’
‘Masques and Phases’
Lysistrata
A Friend of the Great Duke
‘Women of the Country’
Butterflies and Moths: Insects in September
The Rough Road
‘The Old Madhouse’
‘Vision and Design’
A Letter to a Lady in Paraguay
‘Maud-Evelyn, &c.’ [and] ‘The Sacred Fount’
‘The Art of Thomas Hardy’
What is a Good Novel?
Strangely enough, that engaging acrobat …
‘The Faithful Shepherdess’ …
Acknowledgements
APPENDICES
I Variant Essays
The Novels of Turgenev
A Conversation about Art
II Essays Posthumously Published by Leonard Woolf
On Re-reading Novels
‘The Antiquary’
Personalities
The Death of the Moth
Flying over London
Gas
Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
Modern Letters
Ruskin
Notes on D. H. Lawrence
Old Mrs Grey
Middlebrow
Professions for Women
Crabbe
‘The Faery Queen’
Fishing
Madame de Sévigné
Royalty
The Moment: Summer’s Night
III Draft Essays
Friendships Gallery
Tchekhov on Pope
Some French Books
Three Characters
The ‘Dreadnought’ Hoax
Anon [and] The Reader
IV Wireless Broadcasts
Are Too Many Books Written and Published?
Beau Brummell
Craftsmanship
V Additions and Corrections to Volumes I–V
Miss Ormerod
VI The Text of The Common Reader
VII Notes on the Journals
Bibliography
Index to Essays in Volumes I–VI
Index to Volume VI
Copyright
About the Book
With this sixth volume The Hogarth Press completes a major literary undertaking — the publication of the complete essays of Virginia Woolf. In this, the last decade of her life, Woolf wrote distinguished literary essays on Turgenev, Goldsmith, Congreve, Gibbon and Horace Walpole. In addition, there are a number of more political essays, such as ‘Why Art To-Day Follows Politics’, ‘Women Must Weep’ (a cut-down version of Three Guineas and never before reprinted), ‘Royalty’ (rejected by Picture Post in 1939 as ‘an attack on the Royal family, and on the institution of kingship in this country’), ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, and even ‘America, which I Have Never Seen …’ (‘[Americans are] the most interesting people in the world - they face the future, not the past’). In ‘The Leaning Tower’ (1940), Virginia Woolf faced the future and looked forward to a more democratic post-war age: ‘will there be no more towers and no more classes and shall we stand, without hedges between us, on the common ground?’ Woolf stimulates her readers to think for themselves, so she ‘never forges manifestos, issues guidelines, or gives instructions that must be followed to the letter’ (Maria DiBattista).
In providing an authoritative text, introduction and annotations to Virginia Woolf’s essays, Stuart N. Clarke has prepared a common ground — for students, common readers and scholars alike — so that all can come to Woolf without specialised knowledge.
About the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. After her father’s death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
About the Editor
Stuart N. Clarke has transcribed and edited Virginia Woolf's Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft (1993), was co-compiler with B.J. Kirkpatrick of the 4th edition of A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf (1997), and edited Translations from the Russian (2006) by Virginia Woolf and S.S. Koteliansky. He is a founding member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and has edited its journal, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, since its inception in 1999. Stuart also edited Volume 5 in this series.
THE ESSAYS OF VIRGINIA WOOLF
Volume I: 1904–1912
Volume II: 1912–1918
Volume III: 1919–1924
Volume IV: 1925–1928
Volume V: 1929–1932
Introduction
On 14 February 1934 Virginia Woolf recorded that she had gone ‘out to buy ink for my new Waterman, with which I am to take notes for a new Common Reader’, but by November she would tell her American publisher, Donald Brace: ‘I dont suppose that I shall have enough essays for a book for some time to come.’fn1 During the last eight years of her life, Woolf published fewer essays on an annual count compared with the previous sixteen years. We can, however, perceive a reduction from 1929 onwards, although this is partially obscured by the publication of The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932. If we accept that Woolf ‘wrote essays primarily as a relief from fiction and as a means of making money’,fn2 we may deduce that neither motive was as strong as formerly.
Taking the latter point first, we note that, while the Woolfs jointly spent just over £1000 annually (or £500 a year each – admittedly after tax) in the years 1927–39,
To some extent Virginia Woolf’s attitude changed with the advent of the Second World War. Three-quarters of an hour before war was declared on 3 September 1939, she noted her reactions: ‘Its the unreality of force that muffles every thing. Its now about 10.33. Not to attitudinise is one reflection. Nice to be entirely genuine & obscure. Then of course I shall have to work to make money. Thats a comfort. Write articles for America. I suppose take on some writing for some society. Keep the Press going.’fn4 American newspapers and periodicals generally paid better than British ones.fn5 In any case, Woolf’s stock in the United States had been particularly high since the publication of The Years: when Time magazine reviewed it on 12 April 1937, its front cover was adorned with a photograph of her by Man Ray; and the novel became a best-seller, with 38,900 copies printed between April and October.fn6
Although the only article that Woolf would write for America was ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, on 7 September 1939 she replied to Raymond Mortimer, the Literary Editor of the New Statesman and Nation who had asked her for contributions, that she had ‘an idea or two at the back of my mind for a possible article – perhaps Gilbert White into whom I’ve plunged by way of a respite, or … theres an account of a party at Abbotsford that might be made amusing. I’m horribly rusty and distracted, so you must be severe and reject.’fn7 On 11 September she noted: ‘I’ve offered to write for the NS. I dont know if wisely: but it’s best to have a job, & I dont think I can stand aloof with comfort at the moment. So my reasons are half in half.’fn8 She was also willing in theory to write for the Listener, but in practice the constraints of space were a problem in peacetime: ‘Joe [Ackerley, the Literary Editor] will only allow me 800 words of unsigned; 1500 of signed. An amusing illustration of the virtues of capitalism. Its the advertisement, not the article, they want. And its the advertisement I dont want.’fn9 In wartime the constraints were worse: ‘The Dream’ and ‘Georgiana and Florence’ were both signed and fewer than 1500 words each. Leonard recalled: ‘The war years were a publishing nightmare for The Hogarth Press, as indeed they were, I suppose, for all publishers. The blackest spot in the nightmare, perpetually preying on our minds, was the shortage and rationing of paper.’fn10
Following the completion of The Waves (1931), Woolf embarked on Flush: A Biography (1933), a fictionalised biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog. Critics tend to include it among her novels, but it does not fit neatly into any genre. It presents ‘that perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow’fn11 more completely than the fictional Orlando: A Biography (1928) and the factual Roger Fry: A Biography (1940). However, to the extent that Flush is based on fact, there was less need for Woolf to turn to writing essays ‘as a relief from fiction’. With The Years, the situation was similar although more complex. Initially conceived in 1932 as ‘an Essay-Novel, called the Pargiters – & its to take in everything, sex, education, life &c’,fn12 it soon became unmanageable. The essays were broken off and eventually redrafted in a very different form as Three Guineas (1938), while Woolf struggled with increasing desperation to complete the novel. Dorothy Wellesley reported to W. B. Yeats on 6 July 1936 that she had received a letter from Woolf: ‘She has been ill for months, and writes for the first time I have known a dispirited letter; she says she cannot write; but of course this will be only temporary.’fn13 When Three Guineas was published Woolf called it ‘the end of six years floundering, striving, much agony, some ecstasy: lumping the Years and 3Gs together as one book – as indeed they are’.fn14
Owing mainly to the indefatigable researches of the late Brownlee Kirkpatrick, over fifty additional essays dating from 1906 to 1924 have been discovered subsequent to the publication of the first three volumes of this edition.fn15 They are included in this volume and, incidentally, allow us here to compare Virginia Stephen’s early reviews with Virginia Woolf’s last essays. Virginia Stephen served a long apprenticeship, but even the most practised reviewer would be hard put to strike sparks of inspiration from the series of trashy novels that Bruce Richmond, the editor of the Times Literary Supplement, saw fit to set before his tyro reviewer.
An egregious example was The Desert Venture (1907), which its (and E. M. Forster’s) publisher Edward Arnold described as:
a good stirring story, reminding one of the late H. Seton Merriman in its power of introducing a series of exciting adventures which, but for the author’s skill, might seem almost too extraordinary for the twentieth century. As we read these pages, however, we feel that there is no reason whatever why an enterprising European should not even to-day attempt to carve out for himself a new little empire in the heart of Africa, why he should not have to confront all sorts of intrigues culminating in most sanguinary fighting both with natives and European rivals; while the chain of circumstances which takes out Eva, the heroine, to follow the fortunes of ‘Uncle Dick’ and her cousin Arthur in the hinterland of Morocco seems the inevitable result of an ingeniously-contrived situation. An interesting and exciting book, which arrests attention and retains it.fn16
With its ‘English county family’,fn17 the novel is set clearly within ‘that school of Snobbery with Violence that runs like a thread of good-class tweed through twentieth-century literature’.fn18 Racism also runs through The Desert Venture as a matter of course, from the ‘fair-haired, blue-eyed, British’fn19 hero down to a hierarchy among slaves:
the chained wretches were not negroes, but men of aquiline countenance, blackened to negroid colouring by force of sun and sand.
‘Moors!’ he [Saint Serreze] ejaculated. ‘Full-blooded Moors in a slave-gang!’fn20
The novel’s crude scenes would pass before any modern-day reader like a series of oleographs faded with the years. Stephen is more generous than she would have been thirty years later, when she might well have dismissed it as ‘a very exciting yet infinitely childish book’.fn21
With the publication of The Years in March 1937, Woolf turned again to writing a few essays: ‘I don’t want to write more fiction. I want to explore a new criticism’.fn22 She was dissatisfied with the form of her Common Reader essays, but had difficulty in March 1939 finding an alternative: ‘I’m thinking of a critical book. Suppose I used the diary form? Would this make one free to go from book to book – or wd it be too personal?’fn23 On 22 June 1940 she wrote: ‘I wish I cd invent a new critical method – something swifter & lighter & more colloquial & yet intense: more to the point & less composed; more fluid & following the flight, than my C.R. essays. The old problem: how to keep the flight of the mind, yet be exact.’fn24 A month later she noted: ‘I can write entirely to please myself: first a C.R’;fn25 while on 22 October she appears to have accepted the old format: ‘I will write supports & additions for my old TLS articles’.fn26 On 1 March 1941 she told her friend, the composer Ethel Smyth: ‘I am at the moment trying, without the least success, to write an article or two for a new Common Reader. I am stuck in Elizabethan plays. I cant move back or forwards. I’ve read too much, but not enough.’fn27 According to Leonard: ‘At the time of her death she was already engaged in getting together essays for a further volume, which she proposed to publish in the autumn of 1941 or the spring of 1942.’fn28 While his first posthumous collection of her essays, The Death of the Moth (1942), is comparable in length with the two Common Readers, it is unlikely that she would have chosen the same essays, and of course ‘there is no doubt that she would have made large alterations and revisions in nearly all’fn29 of them. The Death of the Moth contains only eleven from 1933 to 1941, ten from 1917 to 1932, and seven which had never previously been published. Woolf herself would probably have included more of her published essays from 1933 to 1941, and would certainly have included ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’ (1934).fn30
Nevertheless, Woolf remained worried by the formal literary manner of her ‘old Literary Supplement articles’ with ‘their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong approach’.fn31 She continued to identify herself as a ‘common reader’.fn32 While she had tried in such books as ‘the Common Reader, A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas’ to ‘reach a far wider circle than a little private circle of cultivated people’, she still felt that she ‘ought to have been able to make not merely thousands of people interested in literature; but millions’.fn33
