The essays of virginia w.., p.66
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 66
Had the Editor of the Nation sent it to me, I should have been compelled by that different sense of values to write in a very different strain.
O you old humbugs, I should have begun. O you who have enjoyed for all these centuries comfort and prosperity – O you who profess devotion to the lady of Clare and love for the Sentiment of colleges, would it not be better to spend your six thousand pounds not upon a book, clothed in the finest dress of paper and buckram, but upon a girl, whose dress allowance is very meagre, and who tries to do her work, as you will read if you turn the very next page in the Nation, in one cold gloomy ground floor bedroom which faces due north and is overrun with mice.fn9 A college I entirely agree with Mr Keynes is a gracious sight; worthy but difficult of imitation. If the members of Clare college handed over the six thousand pounds that they have spent upon a book to Girton, some of the difficulties of imitation would be removed, and what is more I am sure that the lady of Clare would rise from her grave and say Gentlemen you have done my will honour.
That is more or less how I should be forced to write that review, if the editor had sent me the book; but I doubt that that review would be printed; for I am a woman. My sense of values would differ too much I am afraid from that of a very celebrated economist. Now that difference is bound to show itself in all kinds of ways. And you are bound to find when you come to practise your innumerable professions that your difference of outlook is bringing you to loggerheads with some respected chiefs of your professio[ns.] But one of your most amusing and exciting experiences will be precisely on this account – that you will have to make your profession adapt itself to your needs, your sense of values, your common sense, your moral sense, your sense of what is due to humanity and reason. As a member of the general public, who sometimes has to employ lawyers, then architects, then builders, then doctors, stock brokers and so on – I can assure you that I think it is high time that these ancient and privileged professions came more in touch with human needs.
Well now, to go on with the tame story of my professional career. I suppose that the Persian cat which I bought out of the proceeds of my first review did not satisfy me. I grew ambitious. I desired not merely a cat but a motor car. You cannot afford a car on five hundred a year; but it is a strange fact that people will provide you with a motor car if you will tell them a story. That is one reason for writing novels. And then to imagine and to create would seem to be an easier, a simpler occupation than to reason and to criticise. Ignorance does not so much matter. I could let my heroes and heroines be born when they liked in a novel; but if I said in the Times or elsewhere that Shakespeare was born in May when he was born in April it roused a storm of indignation in every capital in Europe. Hence, along these natural avenues of greed and laziness I reached the next stage in my professional career – that is to say novel writing. Now your secretary asks me to tell you what experiences of a professional nature did I have as a novelist?
That is an extremely difficult question to answer. A novelist is not nearly so conscious; or so reasonable a person as a critic. Fiction is not nearly so conscious, or so reasonable an art as criticism. I do not wish you to infer from this that a novelist is in a perpetual state of inspiration. I mean rather that the novelist is in a perpetual state of lethargy. It is his desire to be as unconscious as possible. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day and month after month so that nothing may break the illusion; that nothing may disturb the flow, that nothing may interrupt the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts and dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive fish the imagination.
Therefore I find it very difficult to describe to you what happens to a novelist, what are the incidents of her professional career. Outwardly I can perhaps sketch her for you. That ignorant girl who used to sit scribbling reviews and now and again getting up to shy an inkpot at an angel, now spent her time mooning. She mooned and mooned. I figure her really in an attitude of contemplation, like a fisherwoman, sitting on the bank of a lake with her fishing rod held over its water. She was not thinking; she was not reasoning; she was not constructing a plot; she was letting her imagination down into the depths of her consciousness while she sat above holding on by a thin but quite necessary thread of reason. She was letting her imagination feed unfettered upon every crumb of her experience; she was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in our unconscious being.
Then suddenly this fisherwoman gave a cry of dismay. What had happened? The line had suddenly slackened; her imagination had floated limply and dully and lifelessly upon the surface. The reason hauled the imagination on shore and said What on earth is the matter with you? And the imagination began pulling on its stockings and replied, rather tartly and disagreeably; its all your fault. You should have given me more experience to go on. I cant do the whole work for myself.
And I – the reason – had to reply: Many forms of experience are lacking to me because I am a woman.
Well, that is one experience – quite a common one if you are a woman – of the novelist’s profession.
But there is another. The novelist is sitting on the shores of the lake, holding the little line of reason in her hands when suddenly there is a violent jerk; she feels the line race through her fingers. The imagination has rushed away; it has taken to the depths; it has sunk – heaven knows where – into what dark pool of extraordinary experience. The reason has to cry ‘Stop!’ The novelist has to pull on the line and haul the imagination to the surface. The imagination comes to the top in a state of fury.
‘Good heavens’ she cries – ‘how dare you interfere with me! How dare you pull me out with your wretched little fishing line?’ And I – that is the reason – have to reply, ‘My dear you were going altogether too far. Men would be shocked.’ Calm yourself, I say, as she sits panting on the bank – panting with rage and disappointment. We have only got to wait fifty years or so. In fifty years I shall be able to use all this very queer knowledge that you are ready to bring me. But not now. You see I go on, trying to calm her, I cannot make use of what you tell me – about women’s bodies for instance – their passions – and so on, because the conventions are still very strong. If I were to overcome the conventions I should need the courage of a hero, and I am not a hero. I doubt that a writer can be a hero. I doubt that a hero can be a writer. And then I point out to her that the moment I become heroic, I become shrill and hard and positive – in short I cease to be a writer [but] become a preacher; and that, I say, is extremely unpleasant for you, poor imagination. And I go on to tell her that even men, who can let their imaginations go much further than women can, because the convention allows men to be much more open in what they say than women – even men, I tell her, have to say Stop. Thackeray for instance.fn10 And in our time, though things are better, still there are conventions, even for men; and if a man like Lawrence,fn11 I tell her, runs against convention he injures his imagination terribly. She becomes shrivelled and distorted; and you would not like to become shrivelled and distorted, would you? I say. It is your nature to understand and to create.
Very well, says the imagination, dressing herself up again in her petticoat and skirts, we will wait. We will wait another fifty years. But it seems to me a pity.
This then is another incident, and quite a common incident in the career of a woman novelist. She has to say I will wait. I will wait until men have become so civilised that they are not shocked when a woman speaks the truth about her body. The future of fiction depends very much upon what extent men can be educated to stand free speech in women. But whether men can be civilised, what capacities lie dormant in them, how far their condition is the result of education or of nature, whether given a better environment the results might be such that women too can be artists lies on the lap of the Gods, no not upon the laps of the Gods, but upon your laps, upon the laps of professional women.
Here then I am really come to an end of my professional experiences – I have told you how I tried to murder the Angel in the House – I have recorded the little dialogue between the reason and the imagination, which sometimes breaks the peace of our solitary hours of contemplation. That these are very tame experiences I know. But as I explained to you, I have had two peculiarities which made it unnecessary for me to go through many of the experiences which fall to the lot of you who are pioneers – I had five hundred a year of my own, and my profession is the one profession which, owing to the cheapness of writing paper, and the fact that pens scarcely make any noise, women have practised for many years with some success. When people said to me ‘What is the use of your trying to write?’ I could say, truthfully, I write, not for use, but for pleasure. When they said, Women cannot write, I downed them with the sacred name of Sappho – a very difficult writer whom few people have read.
But for you it is very different. You who are now for the first time practising as barristers, architects, decorators, solicitors, – you have no Sappho, no Jane Austenfn12 to fall back upon. You must be the Sappho and the Jane Austen of your profession. Therefore you will meet with much more ridicule than ever fell to my lot. And then, you have, I imagine, to make your livings – which I never did. And therefore you will meet with an opposition much sterner than any I could [have] had to face, because you are trying to make men pay you for work which no woman has ever done before [and] they have hitherto done themselves. Now I cannot delude myself into thinking that you have an easy task before you. You are bound I am afraid to meet with a great deal of derision and opposition. You will want all your strength and courage. And for this reason it is of the highest importance that you should not add to your burdens a very heavy and unnecessary burden, the burden of bitterness. If you are always comparing your lot with the lot of men, if you are always thinking how much easier it is for them to earn a living than for you – you will have an enemy within who is always sapping your strength and poisoning your happiness. Here I would beg of you, speaking from the very comfortable easy armchair position of a woman who need not earn her living, but can spend her time imagining how other people earn theirs – speaking as a novelist, I would ask you to use a novelist’s prerogative – to use your imaginations and to try that [imagination?] as a specific against bitterness. Imagine what it is like to be a man. Put yourselves into his shoes for a moment. Now directly that you try to put your selves into the shoes of a man, I think you will find that those shoes change their size: they become very large. A delicious sense of weight and importance pervades you. You feel that you are a very respectable and responsible human on whose shoulders rests the burden of providing for that house and servants. This large and important and responsible person is being put by you into a very difficult position. Let us imagine how it appears to him. He has been out all day in the city earning his living, and he comes home at night, expecting repose and comfort, to find that his servants – the women servants – have taken possession of the house. He goes into the library – an august apartment which he is accustomed to have all to himself – and finds the kitchen maid curled up in the arm chair reading Plato.fn13 He goes into the kitchen and there is the cook engaged in writing a Mass in B flat. He goes into the billiard room and finds the parlourmaid knocking up a fine break at the table. He goes into the bed room and there is the housemaid working out a mathematical problem. What is he to do? He has been accustomed for centuries to have that sumptuous mansion all to himself, to be master in his own house. Well of course his first instinct is to dismiss the whole crew. But he reflects that then he would have to do the work of the house himself, and he has not been trained to do it. – Nature has denied him certain quite essential gifts. He therefore says that these women servants may practise their silly little amusements in their spare time, but that if he finds them neglecting the sacred duties which nature has imposed upon them he will do something very dreadful indeed. But what can he do? It is difficult to say. It is extremely amusing to see. He can stand upon his dignity. He can appeal to precedent. He can say that nature intended servants to be servants, and that there is no getting over nature. He can make the most cutting and disagreeable remarks about housemaids playing the piano and scullerymaids reading Plato; he can turn them out of the library, lock the billiard room door, and put the key of the cellar in his pocket – because after all he pays the rent and the house is his property. But there is a spirit in the house not by any means an Angel – a very queer spirit – I don’t know how to define it – it is the sort of spirit that is in Dame Ethel Smyth – you have only got to look at her and you will feel it for yourselves – and this spirit of adventure and daring it is impossible to lock up – or to lock out. Hence the man came home one day to find that although the servants had managed to keep the house going all the time – and that is really one of the most [blank space] they had yet contrived, by practising their silly little accomplishments, to have saved enough money to hire rooms of their own. Therefore they need not go on living in his house any more. That did place the man in a very awkward predicament. His deepest instincts were outraged – and his most cherished traditions were flouted. He had thought that nature had meant women to be wives, mothers, housemaids, parlourmaids and cooks. Suddenly he discovers that nature – but he did not call it nature – he called it sin – had made them also, into the bargain, doctors, civil servants, meteorologists, dental surgeons, librarians, solicitors’ clerks, agricultural workers, analytical chemists, investigators of industrial psychology, barristers at law, makers of scientific models, accountants, hospital dieticians, political organisers, store keepers, artists, horticultural instructors, publicity managers, architects, insurance representatives, dealers in antiques, bankers, actuaries, managers of house property, court dress makers, aero engineers, history instructors, company directors, organisers of peace crusades, newspaper representatives, technical officers in the royal airships works, – and so on.
That is the sort of position that you have put this man into, and it is an extremely difficult one. Remember what a tremendous tradition of mastery man has behind him – consider what prestige and power he has enjoyed. And reflect, as I think in all honesty you can, that there are men who have triumphed over all the difficulties of their very lopsided education, of their very specialised and arduous careers, men of generous and wide humanity, [of] civilisation, not only of education, men with whom a woman can live in perfect freedom, without any fear. Men too can be emancipated. Do not therefore be angry; be patient; be amused. It is a situation of extraordinary interest and amazing possibilities both for the present and for the future. You have earned your room; you have paid the rent for it. It is a little bare at present I agree. I suspect that the sofa turns into a bed; and the wash stand is covered with a check cloth by day to look as much like a table as possible. You picked up the carpet at the Caledonian market for half a crown or so on condition that you carried it home under your arm. And I convict you of eating poached eggs instead of mutton chops – because poached eggs are cheaper. But these things are your own – you have bought them with your own money. There, in the privacy of your own room, you can sit and write or paint, or compose music, design houses or aeroplanes – or whatever it is. There you must work, because you have your livings to earn. That is perhaps enough at the moment. But, then as Dame Ethel asks, what will be the next step? There will have to be one. And I predict that the next step will be a step upon the stair. You will hear somebody coming. You will open the door. And then – this at least is my guess – there will take place between you and some one else the most interesting, exciting, and important conversation that has ever been heard. But do not be alarmed; I am not going to talk about that now. My time is up.
APPENDIX VI
As a Light to Letters
This review in the NYHT, 26 July 1931, (Kp4 C331), varies too considerably from the Fortnightly Review version printed above as ‘Edmund Gosse’ for its substantive difference to be sensibly accounted for other than producing it in its entirety. See Editorial Note, here. Max Beerbohm’s caricature of ‘Max Beerbohm and Austin Dobson at the Board of Trade’, taken from Evan Charteris’s The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (facing p. 150), was reproduced on the second page of VW’s article.
When famous writers die it is remarkable how frequently they are credited with one particular virtue – the virtue of kindness to the young. Every newspaper article contained that eulogy upon Arnold Bennett. And here is the same tribute paid to another writer who differed in every possible way from Arnold Bennett – Sir Edmund Gosse. He, too, it was said, was generous to the young. Of Bennett it was certainly, although on some occasions rather obliquely, true. He might, that is to say, have formed a very low opinion of a book; he might have expressed that opinion bluntly and emphatically in print; and yet if he met the writer he made it by his own candour and simplicity perfectly easy for that unfortunate person to feel that they both cared so much for the craft of letters that it was quite possible to say, ‘But Mr Bennett, you cannot possibly hate my books more than I hate yours’ – after which a frank discussion of fiction and its nature was possible; and a very obscure writer was left with the feeling that a very famous one was the most magnanimous of men. That certainly is one way of being generous and not the worst.
