The essays of virginia w.., p.78
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 78
fn15 – See ibid., ch. xxiii, p. 307.
fn16 – But see VW’s note appended to the CR2 version, p. 471 below.
fn17 – Richard Pepper Arden (1744–1804), Lord Chief Justice and 1st Baron Alvanley from 1801.
fn18 – Life, vol. ii, ch. i, p. 13.
fn19 – For VW on Lady Hester Stanhope (1776–1839), traveller, see ‘Lady Hester Stanhope’, I VW Essays.
fn20 – Life, vol. i, ch. x, pp. 137–8, which has: ‘from the society of the ordinary herd’.
fn21 – For ‘The Butterfly’s Funeral’, see ibid., ch. xvii, pp. 228–30.
fn22 – Ibid., vol. ii, ch. xxviii, p. 323, which has: ‘“in reply to my repeated entreaties that he would try and pray, he said, ‘I do try,’ but …”’; see also p. 324.
fn23 – Stendhal [i.e. Henri Beyle, 1783–1842], ‘Lord Byron en Italie’ (1830), trans. John Galt, in The Works of Lord Byron. Letters and Journals, ed. Rowland E. Prothero [later Lord Ernle], vol. iii (John Murray and Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), Appendix viii, p. 440, which has: ‘In his moments of dandyism, he always pronounced the name of Brummel …’
Dorothy Wordsworth
fn1 – A signed essay in the N&A, 12 October, and (with variations) in the NYHT, 27 October 1929, (Kp4 C317); it was later further revised for CR2. It is clear that the NYHT version predates the N&A version. The same issue of the NYHT contained a review by Mary Ross of Room, entitled ‘Sunlight of the Mind’, which began on the same page as VW’s essay. 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 N&A version (or similar) was translated into French by Jeanne Fournier-Pargoire and appeared in Le Figaro, 5–6 May 1930 (Kp4 D56). The same issue of the N&A also contained: LW’s ‘World of Books’ column on the Autumn’s new books; and ‘New Novels’, reviewed by Lyn Ll. Irvine. The reader is also referred to p. 477 below, where the revised version, together with the N&A variants in the form of endnotes, is printed in its place as part of CR2. Although VW was reading Dorothy Wordsworth in February 1921 and intending to write an article about her, this appears not to have eventuated (see II VW Diary, 16 February and 13 March; Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf [Hogarth Press, 1989], no. 1167a, 13 February to Katherine Mansfield). Brenda Silver deduces that VW was reading the Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth in May 1929 (VWRN, p. 111). VW wrote to Vita Sackville-West on 18 August 1929: ‘I am recovered, and have, more or less, finished my articles. The last was Dorothy Wordsworth, and if the written word could cure rheumatism, I think her’s might – like a dock leaf laid to a sting; yet rather astringent too. Have you ever read her diaries, the early ones, with the nightingale singing at Alfoxden, and Coleridge coming in swollen eyed – to eat a mutton chop? Wordsworth made his head ache, thinking of an epithet for cuckoo. I like them very much; but I cant say I enjoy writing about them, nine pages close pressed. How can one get it all in?’ (IV VW Letters, no. 2057). See also ‘Wordsworth Letters’, I VW Essays. Reading notes (Berg, RN 1.20) (VWRN XX).
fn2 – Dorothy (1771–1855) and William (1770–1850) Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834).
fn3 – Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (Cassell, 1889), Letter vii, p. 73, which begins: ‘Life, what art thou?’
fn4 – Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, ed. William Knight (2 vols, Macmillan, 1897), vol. i, ‘Journal of days spent in Hamburgh in September and October 1798’, entry headed ‘Sunday’, p. 24, which begins: ‘The walks …’
fn5 – Letters Written, Letter xiii, p. 120: ‘Here I saw the cloven foot of despotism. I boasted to you that they had no Viceroy in Norway, but these Grand Bailiffs, particularly the superior one, who resides at Christiana, are political monsters of the same species.’
fn6 – Ibid., Letter viii, p. 78.
fn7 – Journals, vol. i, ‘Journal written at Alfoxden [sic]’, 9 April 1798, p. 16, which has: ‘hawthorns’. VW and LW stayed near Alfoxton, at Holford in Somerset, on their honeymoon in August 1912: see Sheila M. Wilkinson, ‘“Who Lived at Alfoxton?”’, VWB, no. 2 (July 1999), pp. 48–50.
fn8 – Journals, vol. i, p. 16; correctly dated by VW, but there are, however, brief entries for 10–13 April.
fn9 – Ibid., 15 April 1798, p. 17.
fn10 – Ibid.
fn11 – Ibid., ‘Journal written at Grasmere’, 14 March 1802, p. 100; the poem was ‘To a Butterfly’, which begins ‘Stay near me – do not take thy flight!’, and in stanza 2:
Oh! pleasant, pleasant were the days,
The time, when, in our childish plays,
My sister Emmeline and I
Together chased the butterfly!
fn12 – Ibid., 2 October 1800, p. 50.
fn13 – Ibid., 13 April 1802, p. 105. Cf. ‘the sea running into the bays’ in Greece (V VW Letters, no. 2575, 24 April [1932], to V. Sackville-West).
fn14 – Journals, vol. i, 29 April 1802, p. 114.
fn15 – Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859), Works (James Hogg & Sons, 1853), vol. ii, ‘William Wordsworth’ (originally published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, January, February and April 1839), p. 238, which has: ‘startling’.
fn16 – Journals, vol. i, ‘Journal written at Grasmere’, 16 May 1800, p. 32; the ellipsis is in the original.
fn17 – Ibid., 23 March 1802, pp. 103–4, which has: ‘nothing save the breathing …’ (The one-vol. reprint of 1924 has: ‘The fire flutters, …’, p. 103.)
fn18 – Ibid., 29 April 1802, p. 114.
fn19 – ‘Resolution and Independence’ (or ‘The Leech Gatherer’), written May–July 1802 at Grasmere.
fn20 – VW and LW visited Dove Cottage on 1 July 1938: see Sheila M. Wilkinson, ‘Virginia in Westmoreland [sic]’, VWB, no. 18 (January 2005), pp. 67–8.
fn21 – Journals, vol. i, ‘Journal written at Grasmere’, 22 December 1801, p. 72, which does not have ‘with’.
fn22 – Ibid., 30 June 1802, p. 135. These descriptions refer to two old men, not one.
fn23 – Ibid., vol. ii, ‘Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland’, Fifth Week, 11 September 1803, p. 105; the line was to be the donnée for Wordsworth’s poem ‘Stepping Westward’ which Dorothy quotes (pp. 105–6): ‘William wrote the following poem long after, in remembrance of his feelings and mine: –
“What! you are stepping westward? Yea,
’Twould be a wildish destiny …”’
fn24 – Quoted ibid., 13 September 1803, p. 121.
fn25 – Quoted ibid., vol. i, ‘Journal written at Grasmere’, 3 June 1802, p. 127.
fn26 – In 1795, with the help of a legacy, the Wordsworths set up house together at Racedown Lodge, Dorset, and then moved to Alfoxden House two years later. Coleridge, ‘Christabel’ (1816).
fn27 – Journals, vol. i, ‘Journal written at Grasmere’, 23 January 1802, p. 81, which has: ‘We talked about the Lake of Como, read the description, looked about us, and felt …’ (The one-vol. reprint of 1924 has: ‘… read the Descriptive Sketches, …’, p. 81.)
Women and Leisure
fn1 – A signed letter to the editor in the N&A, 16 November 1929, (Kp4 C319), in response to a review of Room, by Lyn Ll. Irvine, on 9 November 1929. Irvine (1901–73), who graduated from Girton in 1927, joked in her review: ‘Loyalty prompts me to observe here that Fernham cannot be Girton, for at Girton the staple sweet is dried apricots – the Students call them Dead Men’s Ears.’ A letter of introduction to LW had led to her reviewing in the N&A, and the Woolfs met her on a number of occasions: see especially III VW Diary, 2 September 1929. Irvine and VW corresponded 1929–37: see VWB, no. 25 (May 2007), pp. 4–13. The Hogarth Press published her Ten Letter-Writers in 1932. A rather whimsical letter from Frances M. Orr appeared in the N&A, 28 December 1929, ostensibly praising VW and criticising Irvine’s review. This drew a response from Irvine in the N&A on 4 January 1930, in which she wrote: ‘I was grateful to Mrs. Woolf for having written as she did. But I disagreed with her in her estimate of the extent to which improved conditions would affect the production of works of genius by women … Any general efforts that are made to encourage genius bring in a harvest of inferior and derivative work, and modern civilization on the whole is apparently unfavourable to the development of the supreme artist.’ The 16 November 1929 issue also contained: LW’s ‘World of Books’ column, ‘The German Tribes’; and Ray Strachey’s review of Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell. See also ‘Women and Fiction’ above, and ‘An Excerpt from A Room of One’s Own’ below. Reprinted: W&W.
fn2 – Travel agents; Thomas Cook (1808–92).
fn3 – Charlotte Brontë (1816–55), Jane Eyre (1847); Emily Brontë (1818–48), Wuthering Heights (1847).
fn4 – Florence Nightingale (1820–1910), ‘Cassandra’ (1859), in Ray Strachey’s The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (G. Bell & Sons, 1928), p. 402, which has: ‘an half-hour’. VW quotes part of this in Room, ch. iv, p. 100: ‘women never have an half hour … that they can call their own’ (VW’s ellipsis).
An Excerpt from A Room of One’s Own
fna – Room: ‘back to mind,’.
fnb – Room: ‘foundation’.
fnc – Room: ‘very far distant’.
fnd – Room: ‘avenue’.
fne – Room: ‘my’.
fnf – Room: ‘a’.
fn1 – An excerpt from Room, published in Time and Tide, 22 and 29 November 1929 (Kp4 C320). The Hogarth Press trade edition of Room had been published on 24 October, (Kp4 A12b), and the instalments are taken from ch. i, pp. 14–21 and 25–37. The first was introduced: ‘Time and Tide has secured from the Hogarth Press the right to publish two excerpts, of which this is the first, from Mrs. Woolf’s book, “A Room of One’s Own”.’ Theodora Bosanquet had reviewed Room in Time and Tide on 15 November and called it an ‘enchanting essay’. The 22 November issue of Time and Tide also contained: ‘Autumn Near Tokio’, a poem by William Plomer; reviews of ‘New Fiction’ by Vera Brittain; ‘Nothing Over Much’, a story by Naomi Mitchison; and, next to the opening of VW’s excerpt, a paragraph in St John Ervine’s column, ‘Notes on the Way: Men, Women and Events’, employed a favourite image of VW’s: ‘I wonder if women are really hardier than men. The other day a lady entered a railway carriage on a bitterly cold day and, without a “by your leave” to anybody, threw down all the windows. The men visibly shivered, but none of us had the courage to defy the female and shut the windows again. Why are women so passionately addicted to draughts?’ See also ‘Women and Fiction’ and ‘Women and Leisure’ above.
fn2 – VW is probably remembering ‘a singular old cousin, who trots if you whistle, and gallops if you sing’, Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922), Vinerian Professor of English Law at Oxford, 1882–1909: see I VW Letters (nos 635 and 637).
fn3 – Seemingly referring to King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, which was built between 1446 and 1547.
fn4 – Susan Gubar (ed.), Room (Harvest Book, Harcourt, 2005): ‘An imaginative rendering of a lunch at King’s College, in George Rylands’s rooms on October 21, 1928, the day after the first lecture version of A Room was delivered’ (p. 118). ‘Dadie’ Rylands (1902–99) said in an interview: ‘partridges various? I don’t think there could be more than one kind of partridge. And I don’t very much like the idea, except that it was very much like college cooking, of a counterpane of sauce with some brown flecks on it. Never mind. And I hope there were two wines. I think it unlikely and there was probably only one’ (Recollections of Virginia Woolf, ed. Jean Russell Noble [Peter Owen, 1972], p. 144). See also ‘Portrait of Virginia Woolf’ in Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments, ed. Eleanor McNees (4 vols, Helm Information, 1994), vol. i, p. 95.
fn5 – The reputed last words of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88), painter of portraits and landscapes. The words refer to the Antwerp-born Sir Anthony Van Dyck (1599–1641), who painted portraits of the English Royal family.
fn6 – In Aldous Huxley’s Limbo (1920), Mrs Cravister, who is based on Molly MacCarthy’s mother, Blanche Warre-Cornish, comments on Manx cats: ‘No tails, no tails. Like men. How symbolical everything is!’ See ‘Cleverness and Youth’, III VW Essays, where VW quotes this remark. In W&F the narrator leaves this ‘to Freud … to explain’ (p. 14).
fn7 – ‘Maud’ (1855) by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–92), OBEV, no. 708, p. 847. Tennyson reads ‘Maud’ throughout VW’s play, Freshwater (Hogarth Press, 1976).
fn8 – ‘A Birthday’ by Christina Rossetti (1830–94), OBEV, no. 780, p. 948.
fn9 – Cambridge colleges for women, established in the late nineteenth century, are outside the much older university area. VW has conflated Girton and Newnham.
fn10 – This is the end of the first instalment. The second was introduced: ‘Time and Tide has secured from the Hogarth Press the right to publish two excerpts from Mrs. Woolf’s book, “A Room of One’s Own”. The first appeared last week and should be read before that which follows.’ A poem, ‘The Absence’ by Sylvia Townsend Warner, followed the second extract. In the same issue, C. H. B. Kitchin’s Death of My Aunt (Hogarth Press) was briefly reviewed; and there was a quarter-page Hogarth Press advertisement for the first four vols of VW’s Uniform Edition ‘just published’, quoting most of the last paragraph of the review of Jacob’s Room in the Spectator, 11 November 1922, p. 662.
fn11 – Jane Harrison (1850–1928), classical scholar and anthropologist. Her Reminiscences of a Student’s Life had been published by the Hogarth Press in 1925. For VW’s visit to Harrison on her deathbed, see III VW Diary, 18 February 1928 (and see ibid., 17 and 21 April 1928).
fn12 – Trinity, Girton and Newnham are Cambridge colleges; Somerville and Christchurch are Oxford colleges.
fn13 – A reference to the ‘Ballad of the Four Marys’: Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael and Mary Hamilton, all supposed to be companions to Mary Queen of Scots. The singer, Mary Hamilton, is to be executed as punishment for her relationship with the king and the murder of the child she bore him. The ballad is alluded to throughout Room. For further information, see Room (Harvest ed.), pp. 114–17, and see ‘The Queen’s Marie’, The Oxford Book of Ballads, ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (Clarendon Press, 1920), no. 83, pp. 369–73.
fn14 – See Room (Harvest ed.), pp. 120–1, editor’s note: ‘In 1813, as a consequence of excavations in St George’s Chapel of Windsor, the vault containing King Charles I was found by workmen. When the coffin was opened and the cloth around the body unwrapped, according to an eyewitness, “‘the left eye in the first moment of exposure was full and open, but vanished almost immediately’” (Charles Wheeler Coit, The Royal Martyr [London: Selwyn and Blount, 1924])’.
fn15 – John Stuart Mill (1806–73), philosopher, author of The Subjection of Women (1869).
fn16 – ‘“We are told that we ought to ask for £30,000 at least…. It is not a large sum, considering that there is to be but one college of this sort for Great Britain, Ireland and the Colonies, and considering how easy it is to raise immense sums for boys’ schools. But considering how few people really wish women to be educated, it is a good deal.” – Lady Stephen, Life of Miss Emily Davies.’ (VW’s fn. in Room.) The book title was corrected to Emily Davies and Girton College, from the fourth impression (December 1929) onwards of Room; see Emily Davies and Girton College (Constable, 1927), Miss Davies to Madame Bodichon, 29 January 1867, pp. 150–1; VW had reviewed it: see ‘Two Women’, IV VW Essays.
fn17 – ‘Every penny which could be scraped together was set aside for building, and the amenities had to be postponed. – R. Strachey, The Cause.’ (VW’s fn. in Room.) See The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (G. Bell & Sons, 1928), p. 250.
fn18 – The Married Women’s Property Act, allowing married women to keep £200 of their own earnings, was passed in 1870, and then amended by the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, giving married women the same property rights as unmarried women, and allowing both to carry on trades or businesses using their own property.
fn19 – Balliol College, Oxford.
fn20 – The Cambridge BA academic hood is fringed with white rabbit fur.
fn21 – A name coined by William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–63) in Pendennis (1849) for a fictional university, especially one regarded as a composite of Oxford and Cambridge. VW revived the expression in Room, but it did not gain popular currency until the 1950s.
Foreword to Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell
fn1 – A signed foreword, 4 February 1930, (Kp4 B10), to a catalogue of twenty-seven paintings, priced between 18 and 50 guineas, by VW’s sister Vanessa Bell (1879–1961), exhibited through the London Artists’ Association at the Cooling Galleries, 92 New Bond St, from 4 February to 8 March 1930. John Maynard Keynes was instrumental in founding the Association in 1925, together with Samuel Courtauld, L. H. Myers and F. Hindley Smith. Angus Davidson was the Secretary from 1929. VW had been wanting to discuss Vanessa’s paintings for some time. On 12 May [1928] she wrote to Vanessa: ‘O and then I went to your show and spent an hour making some extremely interesting theories: which I will condense into one paean of admiration for your Three Women … I had forgotten the extreme brilliancy and flow and wit and ardour of these works – I am greatly tempted to write “Variations on a Picture by Vanessa Bell” for Desmonds paper [L&L] – I should run the three women and the pot of flowers on a chair into one phantasmagoria. I think you are a most remarkable painter. But I maintain you are into the bargain, a satirist, a conveyer of impressions about human life: a short story writer of great wit and able to bring off a situation in a way that rouses my envy. I wonder if I could write the Three Women in prose’ (III VW Letters, no. 1894). On 31 January 1930 Vanessa wrote to Clive Bell: ‘I have been fearfully busy getting things finally ready for my show. Virginia suddenly offered to write a preface for it. I don’t know what people will think but I daresay its a very good advertisement[.] Eddy [Sackville-West] came in to see a portrait of himself I am showing [no. 14] and nearly died of his proximity to a fat female nude’ (Charleston Papers, University of Sussex). The day after the exhibition opened VW noted: ‘Nessa sold 5 pictures I think the first day’ (IV VW Letters, no. 2133); see also Bell’s letter of 7 February [1930] to Duncan Grant in Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, ed. Regina Marler (Bloomsbury, 1993), pp. 350–3. VW told her nephews (Vanessa’s sons, Julian and Quentin) that the show was ‘a great success and members of the aristocracy rend their gloves asunder competing for her pictures. My foreword has roused Mr Rory Mahoney [O’Mullen] as his name suggests to fury. He says I am indecent, and must be suppressed’ (ibid., no. 2145, 17 February 1930; and see no. 2144). The Times, however, called the foreword ‘enchanting’ (7 February 1930, p. 12, col. b), and John Piper quoted from it approvingly in his review of the exhibition (‘Vanessa Bell’, N&A, 15 February 1930, p. 672). See also ‘Foreword to Catalogue of Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell’ and ‘Walter Sickert’, VI VW Essays. Draft (Berg, M 1.3). Reprinted: CDML.
