The essays of virginia w.., p.76
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 76
The background to the symposium was the suppression in 1928 of The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943). The novel was published on 27 July, and LW reviewed it in his ‘World of Books’ column in the N&A on 4 August 1928: ‘As a study of a psychology which is neither as uncommon nor as abnormal as many people imagine, the book is extremely interesting … And yet the book fails completely as a work of art.’ On 24 August the book was withdrawn by its publisher, Jonathan Cape, on the advice of the Home Secretary. In the N&A on 1 September the situation was outlined in an unsigned editorial (by E. M. Forster), entitled ‘The New Censorship’: ‘The point is that the book has never been put on its trial, it has never had a chance of justice … as the British Courts provide’. In the same issue a letter from J. R. A. Bradley asked: ‘What is the test of indecency and obscenity? Surely it is not the theme of the book but the treatment of the theme?’ VW wrote on 8 September 1928 to Vita Sackville-West who felt ‘very violently about The Well of Loneliness’: ‘As for Radclyffe Hall, I agree: but what is one to do? She drew up a letter of her own, protesting her innocence and decency, which she asked us to sign, and would have no other sent out. So nothing could be done, except indeed one rather comic little letter written by Morgan Forster, which he asked me to sign: and now it appears that I, the mouthpiece of Sapphism, write letters from the Reform Club! Nothing else can be done’ (III VW Letters, no. 1922). On the same day, that letter, entitled ‘The New Censorship’, (Kp4 C302), appeared in the N&A:
‘May we endorse Mr J. R. A. Bradley’s letter from the point of view of novelists? We agree with him that “The Well of Loneliness” is restrained and perfectly decent, and that the treatment of its theme is unexceptionable. It has obviously been suppressed because of the theme itself. May we add a few words on this point? ¶ The subject-matter of the book exists as a fact among the many other facts of life. It is recognized by science and recognizable in history. It forms, of course, an extremely small fraction of the sum-total of human emotions, it enters personally into very few lives, and is uninteresting or repellent to the majority; nevertheless it exists, and novelists in England have now been forbidden to mention it by Sir W. Joynson-Hicks. May they mention it incidentally? Although it is forbidden as a main theme, may it be alluded to, or ascribed to subsidiary characters? Perhaps the Home Secretary will issue further orders on this point. And is it the only taboo, or are there others? What of the other subjects known to be more or less unpopular in Whitehall, such as birth-control, suicide, and pacifism? May we mention these? We await our instructions! ¶ The troubles of writers are, naturally enough, of little interest to the general public, and their protests are apt to raise a smile. Still, such as they are, writers produce literature, and they cannot produce great literature until they have free minds. The free mind has access to all the knowledge and speculation of its age, and nothing cramps it like a taboo. A novelist may not wish to treat any of the subjects above mentioned, but the sense that they are prohibited or prohibitable, that there is a taboo-list, will work on him and will make him alert and cautious instead of surrendering himself to his creative impulses. And he will tend to cling to subjects that are officially acceptable, such as murder and adultery, and to shun anything original lest it lead him into forbidden areas. ¶ That is why we feel that Miss Hall’s fellow writers ought to protest vigorously against the action of the Home Office, an action which is apparently illegal and is in any case detrimental to the interests of literature. Not only has a wrong been done to a seriously minded book, a blow has been struck at literature generally, and, as your editorial article points out, the blow will certainly be repeated unless public opinion can be aroused.’
In the N&A of 15 September, T. S. Eliot added ‘a line in support of the admirable protest made by Mr. Forster and Mrs. Woolf’.
On 6 September Cape sent the moulds of the book to Paris, where it was published by the Pegasus Press and in due course copies were imported into the UK. (Meanwhile, the trade edition of O was published by the Hogarth Press on 11 October.) On 19 October two consignments of the book were seized under the search and seizure provisions of the Obscene Publications Act, 1857, and the two parties concerned, Leopold Hill (bookseller) and Jonathan Cape, ‘were commanded to appear’ at Bow Street Magistrates Court on 9 November to ‘show cause why the said obscene books so found and seized as aforesaid should not be destroyed’ (quoted in Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall [Virago, 1999], p. 193). Harold Rubinstein, Hall’s solicitor, ‘compiled a mass of expert testimony to its virtues and gathered a glittering array of witnesses to give “good cause” why the book should freely circulate’ (ibid., p. 194). VW agreed to testify and her deposition states: ‘In my opinion “The Well of Loneliness” treats a delicate subject with great decency and discretion.’ In the event, the magistrate, Sir Chartres Biron, refused to admit expert testimony, and ruled that the book was obscene and that the copies be destroyed.
On 22 November, a letter drafted by George Bernard Shaw with 45 signatures, including those of VW and LW, (Kp4 E17.2), appeared in at least four daily newspapers:
‘The Magistrate at Bow Street has ordered the destruction as obscene of a book by a reputable author, published by a reputable publishing firm, and reviewed without protest in the leading critical journals. His definition of obscenity, quoted from Chief Justice Cockburn, was as follows: “I think the test of obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences and into whose hands a publication of the sort may fall”. ¶ The most serious part of the sentence is the outlawry of anything that can deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences. It was impossible to defend “The Well of Loneliness” against that charge. But it would have been equally impossible to defend many of the masterpieces of English literature, from Shakespeare’s sonnets to “Tess of the D’Urbervilles”. If such a test is to stand, then any magistrate can order the destruction of many of the most famous books or of photographs of some of the most famous pictures in our public galleries. ¶ We are not unmindful of the value to the police and the magistracy of a test which enables them to deal summarily with obscene photographs and the rest of the trash sold by dealers in vulgar pornography. As long as the authorities play the game scrupulously by not attacking literature and art with this bludgeon they need fear no protest from any reputable quarter. We do not claim impunity for literature; authors are and should be subject to the law like other people. But neither authors nor others should be subject to judicial defamation under cover, not of laws, but of ancient dicta which are too absurd to be discussed without a suspension of common sense.’
The appeal on 14 December was turned down. See also III VW Diary, pp. 201, 204, 206–7; III VW Letters, pp. 520, 525–6, 555–6, 559, 563; IV VW Letters, pp. 14–15, 29; VI VW Letters, 16 October [1928], no. 1942a; Desmond MacCarthy, Experience (Putnam, 1935), ‘Obscenity and the Law’, pp. 140–8.
fn2 – Hatchard’s is still at 187 Piccadilly. John and Edward Bumpus’s shop was at 350 Oxford St; there is an advertisement for it in L&L, October 1928, in which VW’s ‘The Niece of an Earl’ appeared; and see VWB, no. 16 (May 2004), pp. 5–8.
Phases of Fiction
fn1 – A signed essay published in three instalments in the Bookman (NY), April, May and June 1929, (Kp4 C312). It was originally intended to appear in the Hogarth Lectures on Literature series, (Kp4 E15), devised by George (‘Dadie’) Rylands and LW. It was announced as ‘In Preparation’ in the first volume, A Lecture on Lectures by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, published by the Hogarth Press in February 1928 (but dated 1927); however, it was called No. 7 Phases in the Novel on the dust-jacket. This note remained in subsequent vols until vol. xiv, Some Religious Elements in English Literature by Rose Macaulay, published in May 1931, when the list of volumes in preparation was omitted.
VW started to think about producing a critical book for the Hogarth Press when she wrote in her diary on 27 November 1925: ‘I want to write “a book” by which I mean a book of criticism for the H.P. But on what? Letters? Psychology?’; and then on 7 December: ‘This book for the H.P.: I think I will find some theory about fiction. I shall read six novels, & start some hares. The one I have in view, is about perspective. But I do not know. My brain may not last me out. I cannot think closely enough. But I can – if the C.R. is a test – beat up ideas, & express them now without too much confusion … I don’t think it is a matter of “development” but something to do with prose & poetry, in novels. For instance Defoe at one end: E. Brontë at the other. Reality something they put at different distances. One would have to go into conventions; real life; & so on. It might last me – this theory – but I should have to support it with other things’ (III VW Diary). However, she may have had a different book in mind, for Poetry, Fiction & the Future was announced on the dust-jacket of I Speak of Africa by William Plomer, published by the Hogarth Press in September 1927, as having already appeared in the Hogarth Essays series. For this Hogarth ‘ghost’, (Kp4 E14), see ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, IV VW Essays.
It will be seen from her diary and letters that VW undertook an enormous amount of work on ‘Phases of Fiction’ over several years, and she continued to work on the ‘book’ intermittently for a further five years following the Bookman publication. The following dates have been discovered in other sources:
11 August 1928: starts MS draft of ‘The Character Mongers’ (MHP B 6c).
20 August 1928: starts MS draft of ‘The Psychologists’ (ibid.).
1 September 1928: starts MS draft of ‘Stylists Satirists’ (ibid.).
9 September 1928: starts MS draft of ‘The Poets. Conclusion’ (ibid.).
26 February 1929: the instalments were posted to the Bookman.
Reading notes (Berg, RN 1.13, 1.14, 1.25, 1.26) and (MHP, B 2n) (VWRN XIII, XIV, XXV, XXVI and XLVI). Smith College holds reading notes on Trollope, Tolstoy, Peacock, Balzac and Richardson, which may have been made in connection with this essay. Drafts (MHP, B 6a–e, 7a–e [see Appendix II]). The April issue of the Bookman introduced the essay thus: ‘Mrs. Woolf has been thinking about her craft of novelist, letting her eye and mind run over the great examples of the art in which, as the author of Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, etc., she has won such distinction. The result is a survey of fiction at once profound and charming.’ The issue also contained: three poems by Stephen Crane and one by Edmund Wilson, and ‘Thoreau: A Disparagement’ by Llewellyn Powys, as well as Rebecca West’s regular monthly contribution, ‘A Commentary’. Reprinted (with errors and omissions): G&R, CE.
fn2 – Anthony Trollope (1815–82); Jane Austen (1775–1817); Henry Fielding (1707–54); Samuel Richardson (1689–1761); William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63).
fn3 – Thomas Hardy (1840–1928).
fn4 – Daniel Defoe (1660?–1731); Jonathan Swift (1667–1745); George Henry Borrow (1803–81); W. E. (William Edward) Norris (1847–1925); Guy de Maupassant (1850–93).
fn5 – ‘A strong solution of sodium manganate or permanganate, used as a disinfectant’, named after ‘Henry Bollmann Condy, 19th-c. English manufacturer of chemicals’ (OED).
fn6 – Defoe, Moll Flanders (1722); for VW on The … Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), see CR2; Roxana (1724).
fn7 – Roxana, ed. R. Brimley Johnson (Abbey Classics series, Simpson, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1926), p. 76.
fn8 – VW reviewed six novels by W. E. Norris: see ‘Barham of Beltana’ and ‘Lone Marie’, I VW Essays; ‘The Obstinate Lady’, ‘Mr Norris’s Method’ (The Triumphs of Sara) and ‘Mr Norris’s Standard’ (Tony the Exceptional), III VW Essays; ‘The Square Peg’, VI VW Essays, Appendix. Here VW has in mind The Triumphs of Sara (Hutchinson, 1920), confirmed by her reading notes (Berg, RN 1.25); (VWRN XXV); cricket is mentioned on the first page and in VW’s review. Rotten Row (ch. v, p. 62) is a ‘road in Hyde Park, extending from Apsley Gate to Kensington Gardens, much used as a fashionable resort for horse or carriage exercise’ (OED).
fn9 – Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822).
fn10 – Guy de Maupassant, ‘Histoire d’une fille de ferme’, Boule de suif et autres contes normands, ed. M.-C. Bancquart (Éditions Garnier Frères, 1971), pp. 86 (which has ‘déchiqueté’) and 89. ‘Boule de suif’ (1880), the story that made his name, was first collected in Maupassant’s Oeuvres (Havard, 1884). ‘Histoire d’une fille de ferme’ (1881) was first collected in La Maison Tellier (Havard, 1881); one story gave its name to the volume. The Woolfs owned at least two books by Maupassant: Boule de suif, Éditions de luxe, Oeuvres complètes illustrées de Guy de Maupassant, vol. xi (Société d’éditions littéraires et artistiques; Librairie P. Ollendorff, 1907); La Maison Tellier (P. Ollendorff, 1905).
fn11 – Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726).
fn12 – Vignettes of Memory by Lady Violet Greville (VW’s fn.). (Hutchinson, n.d. [1927]), p. 100: the second quotation appears first; the third has not been discovered and, according to MHP, B 6e, is VW’s own description of Trollope.
fn13 – Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857; J. M. Dent, 1906), ch. iv, ‘The Bishop’s Chaplain’, p. 30; the second of the Chronicles of Barsetshire. For Mrs Proudie’s discomfiture, see ch. xi, ‘Mrs. Proudie’s Reception – Concluded’. There were a dozen gas burners: see ch. x. ‘Mrs. Proudie’s Reception – Commenced’, p. 76.
fn14 – Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), Tales of My Landlord, Third Series … (4 vols, Archibald Constable, 1819), The Bride of Lammermoor, vol. i, ch. ii, p. 50. VW wrote on 12 September 1932 to Hugh Walpole: ‘I cant read the Bride, because I know it almost by heart; also the Antiquary (I think those two, as a whole, are my favourites) … One of the things I want to write about one day is the Shakespearean talk in Scott: the dialogues: surely that is the last appearance in England of the blank verse of Falstaff and so on! We have lost the art of the poetic speech –’ (V VW Letters, no. 2634; and see no. 2574 and fn. 3).
fn15 – The Bride of Lammermoor, vol. i, ch. iii, pp. 68–9.
fn16 – Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94).
fn17 – Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale (Cassell, 1889), ch. v, p. 137; and The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Tusitala Edition, 35 vols, W. Heinemann, 1924), vol. x, The Master of Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale, ch. v, pp. 95–6. Both have: ‘It was as he had said:’.
fn18 – Ibid., p. 132 (Cassell) and p. 92 (Tusitala), which have: ‘the folk’.
fn19 – The Bride of Lammermoor, vol. iii, ch. vii (ch. 34 in a 1-vol. ed.), pp. 105, 106.
fn20 – Ibid., vol. iii, ch. viii (last ch. in a 1-vol. ed.), p. 128.
fn21 – Ann Radcliffe (1764–1823), The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance … (1794; 3rd ed., 4 vols, G. G. & J. Robinson, 1795).
fn22 – Ibid., vol. ii, ch. vi, p. 289.
fn23 – End of the April instalment in the Bookman. The May issue also contained: ‘The Letters of Joseph Conrad to Stephen and Cora Crane’ (concluded in the June issue) and ‘A Letter to a Young Gentleman who Wishes to Enter Literature’ by William McFee.
fn24 – Charles Dickens (1812–70), Bleak House (1852–3; Chapman & Hall, 1914), Preface to the First Edition, last sentence.
fn25 – I.e. Miss Flite.
fn26 – Bleak House, ch. xvi, ‘Tom-all-Alone’s’, p. 185.
fn27 – Ibid., ch. xviii, ‘Lady Dedlock’, p. 217; ‘the maid wading through the long grass is a masterpiece that has always stuck in my mind’ (V VW Letters, no. 2502, [4 January 1932], to Ethel Smyth).
fn28 – Bleak House, ch. xxii, ‘Mr. Bucket’, p. 257.
fn29 – Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), War and Peace (1865–9).
fn30 – In the Bookman, a blank line precedes this paragraph. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (3 vols, 1813; J. M. Dent, n.d. [1906]).
fn31 – Pride and Prejudice, ch. x, p. 47.
fn32 – Ibid.
fn33 – See ibid., ch. ix, p. 41, and ch. x, p. 48.
fn34 – Ibid., p. 50, which has: ‘I do not know …’
fn35 – Ibid., ch. xxx, p. 172; VW’s italics.
fn36 – George Eliot (1819–80), Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–2); for VW on George Gissing (1857–1903), see CR2.
fn37 – Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861; The Works of George Eliot, William Blackwood, 1878).
fn38 – Ibid., ch. ii, p. 20, which begins: ‘Even people …’
fn39 – Ibid., ch. v., p. 64, which begins: ‘Yes, there was a sort …’
fn40 – Henry James (1843–1916), What Maisie Knew (1897; William Heinemann, 1898), p. 3.
fn41 – Marcel Proust (1871–1922).
fn42 – Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (À la recherche du temps perdu; 1913–27), part iv, Le Côté de Guermantes, as The Guermantes Way, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff (1920–1; Chatto & Windus, 1925), vol. ii, p. 34.
fn43 – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–81), The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, vol. iii, The Possessed: A Novel in Three Parts, trans. Constance Garnett (1871; Heinemann, 1913), part i, ch. ii, ‘Prince Harry. Matchmaking’, sec. i, p. 36.
fn44 – Ibid., ch. iv, ‘The Cripple’, sec. v, p. 133, which has ‘earthly tear’ (spoken by Marya Timofyevna).
