The essays of virginia w.., p.77
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 77
fn45 – Ibid., part ii, ch. i, ‘Night’, sec. vii, p. 237 (spoken by Shatov).
fn46 – Ibid., part i, ch. v, ‘The Subtle Serpent’, sec. v, p. 166.
fn47 – Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield (1849–50); Sarah Gamp in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–4).
fn48 – End of the May instalment in the Bookman. The June issue also contained: ‘The Tales Dead Men Tell’ by André Maurois, ‘The Stationary Journey’ by Edwin Muir (whose ‘latest book … is The Structure of the Novel’ [Hogarth Lectures on Literature, 1st Series, No. 6, Hogarth Press, 1928]) and ‘Joseph Hergesheimer’s Methods’ by Sara Haardt.
fn49 – Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778); Anatole France (Jacques Anatole François Thibault, 1844–1924).
fn50 – Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866), Crotchet Castle (1831), in ‘The Misfortunes of Elphin’ and ‘Crochet Castle’ (World’s Classics, OUP, 1924).
fn51 – Ibid., ch. x, ‘The Voyage, continued’, p. 219, which has: ‘In this manner they glided, over the face of the waters, discussing every thing and settling nothing’.
fn52 – Ibid., ch. ix, ‘The Voyage’, p. 212.
fn53 – Laurence Sterne (1713–68), The Works of Laurence Sterne (5 vols, s.p., 1769), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (9 vols, 1759–67), vol. i (1759), ch. xxii, p. 74.
fn54 – Ibid., vol. ii (i.e. vol. ix [1767]), ch. viii, p. 294.
fn55 – Emily Brontë (1818–48), Wuthering Heights (1847); Gabriel Oak in Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).
fn56 – George Meredith (1828–1909), The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859).
fn57 – Herman Melville (1819–91), Moby-Dick (1851).
fn58 – MHP, B 6e has: ‘parsonages’.
fn59 – In Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1848).
fn60 – Mrs Humphry (Mary Augusta) Ward (1851–1920), Robert Elsmere (1888); Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96), Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851).
fn61 – Austen, Emma (1816).
fn62 – Thomas Gray (1716–71), Elegy written in a Country Churchyard (1751); George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), Don Juan (1819–24).
fn63 – Robert Browning (1812–89); John Lydgate (1370?–1451?); Edmund Spenser (1552?–99).
Dr Burney’s Evening Party
fn1 – A signed essay in the NYHT, 21 (Part I) and 28 (Part II) July 1929, and (revised) in Desmond MacCarthy’s L&L, September 1929, (Kp4 C313); it was later further revised for CR2. The reader is referred here, where the CR2 version, together with the L&L variants in endnotes, is printed in its place as part of CR2. VW wrote on 31 May 1928: ‘Now I want to write … an essay of some sort … Dr Burney’s evening party I think for Desmond’ (III VW Diary). The recorded history of the writing of this essay is largely contained in the abortive negotiations for its publication in the Yale Review. On 29 June 1928 VW wrote to Helen McAfee, managing editor of the Yale Review: ‘I have just seen Desmond MacCarthy and have been arranging with him for a short story and an article called Dr Burneys Evening party – partly true, partly fictitious. This would appear in the December number. I could if you liked send you this for your Christmas number. ¶ But I wonder if you would think me very grasping if I asked what fee the Yale Review is able to pay for stories and articles? I ask because I have now made an arrangement with Curtis Brown for articles in various American papers. As I don’t write many, I want of course to place my work as profitably as I can – but I shall of course quite understand if the Yale Review is not able to offer more than the twenty pounds which I think it paid me before’ (III VW Letters, no. 1907). On 12 August she wrote to Saxon Sydney-Turner: ‘Leonard will drive me up to London, and I shall go to the London Library and ask for the Maxims and Characters of Fulke Greville – not the F.G. but his descendant who occurs in connection with Miss Burney’s father’s marriage and playing the harpsichord. Nothing pleases me more than to ferret out perfectly useless enquiries into the lives of completely valueless people; I see it might well usurp all other affections and employments, and is anyhow a refuge for old age, because employed at the British Museum one will scarcely notice deafness, blindness, the spring, the nightingale, or other infirmities or changes of season’ (ibid., no. 1913). She wrote to McAfee on 23 September: ‘I should have written before but I have not been sure if I could get the article on Dr Burneys party ready for Oct. 1st as you suggest. I have been so busy that unfortunately I find that this is impossible. I should be able to let you have it early in November and go without seeing a proof if that suits you. I may, on getting to work, find it better to change the subject; but it would be an article of the same kind that I suggested to you. Unless I hear from you to the contrary, I will send you an article about the second week in November. It will appear here in December’ (ibid., no. 1925). Then on 7 October: ‘I am so sorry you had the trouble of cabling. I am still more sorry to say that I dont see how I can possibly post the manuscript by October 25th. I have come back to find all sorts of things waiting to be done before I can start my Burney article. I think therefore I must hope that you will let me send it later and give up the idea of publishing it here in December. I will aim at sending it you early in December and if you will let me know when you will publish it, I will arrange about publication here. I am sorry to have been so changeable’ (ibid., no. 1937). And then on 15 October: ‘I am so sorry that you had again the trouble of cabling to me. I hope by this time you have had my letter. I am afraid that I cannot commit myself to write the article for any definite date. I have had to postpone it here too. I cannot at present get the time that I need for reading the books I want to read for it; nor do I feel sure when I shall be more at leisure. ¶ Thus I fear I must leave it that I will let you know as soon as I can be certain. But I am extremely sorry that my half promise led you in any way to alter your plans. I am afraid that I must have been more optimistic than I had a right to be’ (ibid., no. 1940). VW wrote in her diary on 27 October 1928: ‘When I have written here, I am going to open Fanny Burney’s diaries, & work solidly at that article which poor Miss McKay [McAfee] cables about’ (III VW Diary). A letter in reply (‘we needn’t press you for the manuscript immediately’) from McAfee, dated 23 October 1928, is printed in WSA, vol. xii (2006), p. 52. By about 9 January 1929 VW was writing to Vita Sackville-West: ‘I do nothing but try, vainly, to finish off a year’s journalism in a week. If I can earn £400, by flights into the lives of Miss Burney and Miss Jewsbury, then I can pitch every book away, and sink back in my chair and give myself to the wings of the Moths [The Waves]. But I doubt it. There are dates to look up. One can’t simply invent the whole of Chelsea and King George the 3rd and Johnson, and Mrs Thrale I suppose. Yet after all, thats the way to write; and if I had time to prove it, the truth of one’s sensations is not in the fact, but in the reverberation. When I have read three lines, I re-make them entirely, if they’re prose, and not poetry; and it is this which is the truth’ (IV VW Letters, no. 1981). On 15 January she wrote to McAfee: ‘I am afraid that there is no chance of my being able to send you the article on Dr Burney by the tenth of February. I am only now beginning to work at it, and as I have other work to do at the same time I shall certainly not have finished it by then. Also I think it will be a good deal longer than I supposed. Would it not be as well to give up the idea, and I will find a home for it elsewhere?’ (ibid., no. 1985). VW fell ill on her return from visiting the Nicolsons in Berlin, and wrote to Vita on 19 February: ‘I wrote two pages yesterday; dull ones, but pages, with sentences and paragraphs; only about the Burneys, who attract me less than The Moths, though’ (ibid., no. 2005). LW wrote to McAfee on 25 February: ‘My wife has been ill’, and so she cannot complete the Burney article (letter summarised in Berg M 43, no. 90). The issue of L&L also contained: Desmond MacCarthy’s short story, ‘The Mark on the Shutter’. This version was translated into French by Jeanne Fournier-Pargoire and appeared in Le Figaro, (Kp4 D51) 19, 20, 22 and 24 August 1929; and it was included (with omissions) in Prose Masterpieces of English and American Literature, ed. Robert Silliman Hillyer et al. (Harcourt, Brace, 1931), for which VW was paid £4 (see Introduction, p. xvi). See also ‘Fanny Burney’s Half-Sister’ below, and ‘Mrs Thrale’, VI VW Essays. Reading notes (Berg, RN 1.13) and (MHP, B 2n) (VWRN XIII and XLVI).
fn2 – Fanny Burney, later D’Arblay (13 June 1752–6 January 1840).
fn3 – For Miss Young’s advice, see The Early Diary of Frances Burney 1768–1778 …, ed. Annie Raine Ellis (2 vols, George Bell, 1889), vol. i, pp. 18–20.
fn4 – Ibid., p. 13.
fn5 – Samuel Crisp (1707–83), sometime dramatist and recluse, author of the play Virginia (1754) for which Garrick wrote prologue and epilogue. The appellation ‘Daddy’ had been given him by Dr Burney in his own youth.
fn6 – For Fanny’s reaction to The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), by Samuel Johnson (1709–84), see Early Diary, vol. i, pp. 14–15 and 76, fn.: ‘Perhaps (as she loved euphony) she did not care to write … Tomkin.’
fn7 – See Memoirs of Doctor Burney …, by his daughter Madame d’Arblay (3 vols, Edward Moxon, 1832), vol. ii, p. 168.
fn8 – In Burney family parlance: ‘it can’t be helped’; see Early Diary, vol. ii, p. 252 and fn. 2, and also Memoirs, vol. ii, pp. 170–1.
fn9 – Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson …, by Hester Lynch Piozzi (T. Cadell, 1786), p. 141, which has: ‘of manners’. Hester Lynch Thrale, née Salusbury, later Piozzi (1741–1821).
fn10 – See Memoirs, vol. i, pp. 230–2.
fn11 – NYHT has: ‘least’.
fn12 – Charles Burney (7 April 1726–12 April 1814).
fn13 – Early Diary, vol. ii, p. 70.
fn14 – Isaac Newton (1642–1727); St Martin’s Street south of Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square).
fn15 – Ibid., vol. i, p. 304.
fn16 – See ibid., vol. ii, p. 28. David Garrick (1717–79).
fn17 – Cf. ibid., vol. i, p. 59: ‘He played with his usual successful velocity and his usual applause.’
fn18 – For Signora Lucrezia Agujari (known also as ‘La Bastardini’ or ‘La Bastadella’), see ibid., vol. ii, p. 2, and also Memoirs, vol. ii, pp. 31–2.
fn19 – James Bruce (1730–94) of Kinnaird, traveller and explorer who sought unsuccessfully the source of the Nile in Abyssinia. This account, by Joseph Cradock (1742–86), the friend of Dyer and of Garrick, from Early Diary, vol. ii, p. 14, fn. 3, which has (p. 15): ‘… complaint which could not well be accounted for; when …’ For VW on George Dyer (1755–1841), see an uncollected letter of 28 January 1924, to Edmund Blunden, VWB, no. 26 (September 2007), p. 5, and IV VW Essays, p. 121.
fn20 – Early Diary, vol. i, p. 261, Mr Crisp in a letter to Fanny Burney, which has: ‘I sadly want to know about Mr Greville and his motions [sic]; … have you seen him lately?’
fn21 – Sir Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628), was a lifelong friend of Sir Philip Sidney (1554–86); his biography of Sidney was published in 1652.
fn22 – For this account of the absurd Richard Fulke Greville (c. 1717–c. 1806), see Memoirs, vol. i, pp. 25–6.
fn23 – Ibid., p. 30.
fn24 – Ibid., p. 46: ‘fogrum; a term which he [Greville] adopted for whatever speech, action, or mode of conduct, he disdainfully believed to be beneath the high ton to which he considered himself to be born and bred’.
fn25 – The ‘oldest and grandest of London’s gentlemen’s clubs, White’s is situated at 37–8 St James’s Street. It was rebuilt in its present form in 1787–8, and its celebrated bow window was created in the middle of its façade in 1811’: Mrs Dalloway, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford World’s Classics, OUP, 2000), p. 170.
fn26 – See Memoirs, vol. i, pp. 25 and 40.
fn27 – Frances Greville, née Macartney (1727?–89). ‘A Prayer for Indifference’, first published in the Edinburgh Chronicle, 19 April 1759, begins: ‘Oft I’ve implor’d the Gods in vain, / And pray’d till I’ve been weary;’ and continues for 16 stanzas: see The Oxford Book of Eighteenth-Century Verse, chosen by David Nichol Smith (Clarendon Press, 1926), pp. 426–8, no. 276; OBEV, pp. 550–1, no. 475, prints stanzas 5–7. For the passage upon which this account is based, see Memoirs, vol. ii, p. 103. In a letter of 24 February 1933, Donald C. Brace informed VW: ‘A woman writes us from Los Angeles, California, to complain that … the correct title of Mrs. Greville’s poem is “A Prayer for Indifference.” She says it is not an “Ode” at all’ (LWP Ad. 18). The ODNB’s title is ‘Ode to Indifference’.
fn28 – Memoirs, vol. i, p. 112, which has: “‘Maxims, Characters, and Reflections, Moral, Serious, and Entertaining;” a title that seemed to announce that England, in its turn, was now to produce, in a man of family and fashion, a La Bruyere, or a La Rochefoucault. And Mr. Greville, in fact, waited for a similar fame with dignity …’ It was published in 1756 by J. and R. Tonson; Greville also published Reflection, a poem in four cantos (1790).
fn29 – Memoirs, vol. ii, p. 75, which has: ‘Mrs. Thrale, Dr. Burney had beheld as a star of the first magnitude in the constellation of female wits; surpassing …’
fn30 – Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, p. 63.
fn31 – Ibid., which has: ‘a first cousin’, and continues: ‘… supper? Presto was the dog that lay under the table while we talked.’
fn32 – James Boswell (1740–95).
fn33 – Memoirs, vol. ii, p. 74.
fn34 – See Early Diary, vol. i, p. 169, fn. 1.
fn35 – Memoirs, vol. ii, pp. 183–4, which has: ‘sudden flashes of wit, which, carelessly, she left …’
fn36 – Ibid., p. 89, letter from Fanny Burney to Samuel Crisp.
fn37 – Ibid., pp. 106–7; adapted by VW.
fn38 – Ibid., p. 109: ‘When, however, she [Mrs Thrale] observed the sardonic disposition of Mr. Greville to stare around him at the whole company in curious silence, she felt a defiance against his aristocracy beat in every pulse; for, however grandly he might look back to the long ancestry of the Brookes and the Grevilles, she had a glowing consciousness that her own blood, rapid and fluent, flowed in her veins from Adam of Saltsberg …’
fn39 – The Salusbury family, ‘gentry, were one of the most prominent families in north Wales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The origins of the family are obscure (they claimed descent from one Adam of Salzburg, who was alleged to have come to England in 1066)’ (ODNB).
fn40 – Memoirs, vol. ii, p. 111.
fn41 – Ibid., which has: ‘… this burlesque scene was but the first of a drama the most extraordinary of real life, of which these two persons were to be the hero and heroine …’
fn42 – Ibid., p. 112.
fn43 – Ibid.
fn44 – Ibid., p. 113.
fn45 – Ibid.
Beau Brummell
fn1 – A signed essay in the N&A, 28 September, and (with variations) in the NYHT, 29 September 1929, (Kp4 C315); it was later revised and published on 22 November 1930 in NY by Rimington & Hooper in a limited edition of 550 copies (Kp4 A15), distributed by the Department of Limited Editions, Doubleday, Doran and Company (see MHP, III, Box 78, for R. C. Rimington’s enthusiastic proposal of 8 October 1929 to VW), for which VW received £30 (WSU). It was further revised for CR2. It is clear that the NYHT version predates the N&A version. The NYHT version was translated into French by Jeanne Fournier-Pargoire and appeared in Le Figaro, 14 and 15 October 1929 (Kp4 D53). The series, called ‘Four Figures’ in CR2, was conceived as a set about eighteenth-century characters for the NYHT (see ‘Cowper and Lady Austen’ in CR2 and Appendix VIII below). The reader is referred here, where the revised version, together with the N&A and Rimington & Hooper variants in the form of endnotes, is printed in its place as part of CR2. The issue of the N&A also contained: LW’s ‘World of Books’ column, ‘Ad Astra?’, on The Ascent of Humanity by Gerald Heard; and ‘New Novels’, reviewed by Lyn Ll. Irvine. VW broadcast another version of the essay on 20 November 1929, which was published in the Listener, 27 November (Kp4 C321): see VI VW Essays, Appendix. In February 1929 VW was ‘reading Beau Brummell’s life’ (IV VW Letters, no. 1997; and see no. 2002). The essay is based on Captain [William] Jesse’s The Life of George Brummell, Esq., commonly called Beau Brummell [1778–1840] (1844; revised ed., 2 vols, John C. Nimmo, 1886). Reading notes (Berg, RN 1.9, 1.20) (VWRN IX, XX).
fn2 – The Correspondence of William Cowper [1731–1800], ed. Thomas Wright (4 vols, Hodder & Stoughton, 1904), vol. ii, letter to the Rev. John Newton, 31 May 1783, p. 71. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757–1806), of the famous Gainsborough portrait, author of the poem ‘The Passage of the Mountain of St Gothard’.
fn3 – Life, vol. ii, ch. xxv, p. 293: ‘… at eight o’clock this man, to whom he had already given his instructions, opened wide the door of his sitting-room, and announced the “Duchess of Devonshire.”’
fn4 – Ibid., vol. i, ch. iii, p. 29.
fn5 – Ibid., ch. iii, p. 40, which has: ‘a very large, blue nose’.
fn6 – Ibid., p. 45.
fn7 – Ibid., ch. vii, p. 95.
fn8 – Ibid., ch. ix, p. 119.
fn9 – Ibid., ch. viii, p. 111.
fn10 – Ibid.
fn11 – Ibid., ch. xix, p. 254.
fn12 – Ibid., ch. v, p. 70: ‘Mr Leigh Hunt, in a note in which he kindly referred me to some anecdotes of Brummell, says: “I remember that Lord Byron once described him to me, as having nothing remarkable in his style of dress, except a “certain exquisite propriety”’. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824).
fn13 – See Harriet Wilson’s Memoirs of Herself and Others, ed. James Laver (Peter Davies, 1929), letter from Harriet’s sister Fanny, p. 547: ‘Brummell’s sun, they say, is setting …’ For VW on Harriette Wilson (1786–1845), courtesan, see ‘Harriette Wilson’, IV VW Essays, and p. 259, n. 1.
fn14 – Brummell quoted in Life, vol. i, ch. xxii, p. 305: ‘… no doubt that rascal Rothschild, or some of his set, got hold of it’.
