The essays of virginia w.., p.92
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5, page 92
fn15 – Ibid., p. 35.
fn16 – See ibid.
fn17 – Ibid., p. 131.
fn18 – Ibid., p. 30, which has: ‘It was that “largeness of heart, even as is the sand that is on the sea shore,” which Solomon possessed [1 Kings 4: 29], but unaccompanied by his means as well as his wisdom, which ruined Mr. Mytton; added to a lofty pride which disdained the littleness of prudence, and a sort of destroying spirit that appeared to run amuck at fortune.’
fn19 – Ibid., p. 92, which has: ‘round-shouldered, decrepid, tottering old-young man … bloated by drink’.
fn20 – Ibid., p. 106. See The Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles [c. 496–406 BC], trans. J. T. Sheppard (Cambridge University Press, 1922), pp. 46–8.
fn21 – Memoirs, p. 110.
fn22 – Quoted ibid., p. 87.
fn23 – Cf. ‘The Man who Loved his Kind’, CSF. The short story was probably drafted no earlier than 22 May 1925.
De Quincey’s Autobiography
fn1 – This essay was written specifically for CR2, for which VW primarily used the first volume of Thomas De Quincey’s Works (James Hogg & Sons, 1853). In December 1927 VW had been thinking about De Quincey (1785–1859): ‘I am trying to write about Lord Chesterfield and de Quincey. But the moment I start writing, I think I should like to write a story. Then I begin a story: then I think about de Quincey’ (III VW Letters, no. 1843). However, it seems that it was only in 1932 that she drafted this essay. On 25 March she wrote: ‘I think I’ll go into the house & fetch my de Quincey who comes next’; then on 11 April: ‘This perpetual criticism tires my brain. I’ve almost done de Quincey though, & am well on with the book’; and finally on 28 June: ‘Just “finished De Quincey”. Thus am I trying to keep pace with the days & deliver the 2nd C.R. done on the last of June – which I see with dismay is Thursday’ (IV VW Diary). See also ‘The English Mail Coach’, I VW Essays, Appendix I; ‘“Impassioned Prose”’, IV VW Essays. Reading notes (MHP, B 2p) (VWRN XLVIII). Draft (MHP, B 2e). Reprinted: CE.
fn2 – ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, ch. i, opening paragraph, in Autobiographic Sketches; Works, vol. i, p. 1.
fn3 – Ibid., pp. 16–17.
fn4 – Preface, Autobiographic Sketches; Works, vol. i, p. xi, which does not have: ‘of’.
fn5 – John Milton (1608–74); Jeremy Taylor (1613–67); Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82).
fn6 – Preface, Autobiographic Sketches; Works, vol. i, p. xii, which has: ‘able really’.
fn7 – Ibid., p. xi, which has: ‘motives to self-restraint’.
fn8 – Ibid., p. xii.
fn9 – Cf. O, ch. v, p. 207: in the nineteenth century ‘sentences swelled, adjectives multiplied, lyrics became epics, and little trifles that had been essays a column long were now encyclopaedias in ten or twenty volumes. But Eusebius Chubb shall be our witness to the effect this all had upon the mind of a sensitive man who could do nothing to stop it. There is a passage towards the end of his memoirs where he describes how, after writing thirty-five folio pages one morning “all about nothing” he screwed the lid on his inkpot and went for a turn in his garden.’
fn10 – ‘Introduction to the World of Strife’, ch. ii, Autobiographic Sketches; Works, vol. i, p. 60.
fn11 – Ibid., p. 61, which has: ‘in almost everybody’s words,’.
fn12 – De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. Richard Garnett (1821; Kegan Paul, Trench, 1885), pt ii, ‘The Pleasures of Opium’, p. 92, which begins: ‘I, whose disease it was …’
fn13 – Ibid., pt i, ‘Preliminary Confessions’, p. 40.
fn14 – Peter Howe Brown (1788–1845), Lord Westport, son of the Earl of Altamont.
fn15 – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78).
fn16 – Confessions, ‘To the Reader’, p. 3.
fn17 – Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832); Jane Austen (1775–1817); George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824).
fn18 – ‘The Affliction of Childhood’, ch. i, Autobiographic Sketches; Works, vol. i, pp. 13, 18–19.
fn19 – Cf. the last paragraph of ‘The New Biography’, IV VW Essays.
Four Figures
I Cowper and Lady Austen
fna – NYHT: ‘had been in’.
fnb – NYHT: ‘youth something’.
fnc – NYHT: ‘action, which made any public … insupportable. Indeed, if goaded’.
fnd – N&A and NYHT: ‘appointment, he would drown himself; but there was a man sitting on’.
fne – N&A and NYHT: ‘But when that July … despair, not only into the haven … but into a settled state of mind, into a settled way’.
fnf – NYHT: ‘elder. She had brought him very wisely, like a mother, by letting him talk, and listening to his terrors and understanding them, to’.
fng – N&A and NYHT: ‘some profound unrest’.
fnh – N&A and NYHT: ‘outcast. He’.
fni – N&A and NYHT: ‘realised in what way he was unique; how it was that he’.
fnj – N&A and NYHT: ‘tables, for all’.
fnk – N&A and NYHT: ‘oneself.’
fnl – NYHT: ‘enchantingly friends’.
fnm – N&A: ‘moments, chiefly when’.
fnn – N&A and NYHT: ‘part idling his … pastimes, looking with’.
fno – N&A and NYHT: ‘Now it was Geary … teeth; now it was two’.
fnp – NYHT: ‘of Sir’.
fnq – N&A: ‘relations in England much’. NYHT: ‘relations in England who were much’.
fnr – NYHT: ‘lady was left unprotected. She was’.
fns – N&A and NYHT: ‘wanted to settle, to’.
fnt – NYHT: ‘share the pleasures of the country side. She’.
fnu – NYHT: ‘sprightliness William and Mary were’.
fnv – N&A and NYHT: ‘melancholy, one might paraphrase’.
fnw – NYHT: ‘this sense, this sidelong arch humor, embalmed in a beautiful’.
fnx – NYHT: ‘hares escaped … they were caught … Throckmorton asked’.
fny – N&A: ‘house; the greenhouse had been lined with mats – some little’. NYHT: ‘house; the greenhouse had been lined with mats. Some little’.
fnz – NYHT: ‘humors’.
fnaa – NYHT: ‘opinion on the wickedness of painting’.
fnbb – N&A and NYHT: ‘for he was in imagination a great traveller, though … than from Buckingham to Sussex.’
fncc – NYHT: ‘she loved’.
fndd – NYHT: ‘rising’.
fnee – N&A and NYHT: ‘break’.
fnff – N&A and NYHT: ‘that gave his … It was this that made passages’.
fngg – NYHT: ‘talk. It’.
fnhh – NYHT: ‘not for mortal beings; it’.
fnii – NYHT: ‘warned. Enthusiast as she was, she adored her friends and expressed her adoration openly. It’.
fnjj – N&A: ‘dreamt in the firelight watching … films playing upon’. NYHT: ‘dreamed in the firelight, watching the … films playing upon’.
fnkk – NYHT: ‘women. Mary one evening would notice that’.
fnll – NYHT: ‘For she was’.
fnmm – N&A and NYHT: ‘with the … Duchess; she’. See n. 23.
fnnn – N&A and NYHT: ‘and wind’.
fnoo – N&A: ‘abyss. He was haled by a terrible voice to perdition. Whispers mingled with the singing, voices hissed in his ear words of doom and damnation. And then … her! Then Ann’. NYHT: ‘abyss. He was haled by a terrible voice to perdition. Whispers mingled with the singing. Voices reminded him that he was damned. And then … to her! Ann’.
fnpp – NYHT: ‘friend gave’.
fnqq – N&A and NYHT: ‘wished to’.
fn1 – Originally published as a signed essay, based on The Correspondence of William Cowper [1731–1800] …, ed. Thomas Wright (4 vols, Hodder and Stoughton, 1904), in the N&A, 21 September, and (with variants) in the NYHT, 22 September 1929, (Kp4 C314); it was revised for CR2. It is clear that the NYHT version predates the N&A version. A version close to that in the N&A was translated into French by Jeanne Fournier-Pargoire and appeared in Le Figaro, 22–23 September 1929 (Kp4 D52). The N&A also contained: LW’s ‘World of Books’ column, ‘Born Writers’, on Alice Meynell, a Memoir by Viola Meynell and on A Book about Myself by Theodore Dreiser; and ‘The Oyster’ by V. Sackville-West, a review of The Glorious Oyster by Hector Bolitho.
This series, called ‘Four Figures’ in CR2, was conceived as a group of articles about eighteenth-century figures for the NYHT (see Appendix VIII below), and VW’s reading notebook containing notes on Cowper and Mary Wollstonecraft has a heading ‘Possible articles for Herald’. VW wrote to Vita Sackville-West on 15 August 1929: ‘I am quite well again, and spent the morning writing. It wasn’t you; as you were only the tailend – I had been badgered by people in London, and then this writing of four articles, all pressed as tight as hay in a stack (an image that comes you see from [Vita’s] The Land) – that was what did it – not that it [a headache] was bad … But what about next week – towards the end, say Friday, when I shall have written the last word of these excruciating little biographies’ (IV VW Letters, no. 2056). But then on 27 August: ‘I have now no excuse for not correcting my articles – I shall do that tomorrow instead of coming to you’ (ibid., no. 2064). The articles were published in the N&A on consecutive weeks. VW wrote to Desmond MacCarthy, as editor of L&L, on 19 September 1929: ‘Thanks for the cheque [for ‘Dr Burney’s Evening Party’]. I will write you a better article one day. I have had to send the American articles to the Nation as they all hang together – four figures living at the same time – but I have others in my mind’ (IV VW Letters, no. 2070).
Although VW was reading Cowper in February and March 1927, and had him on her mind in 1928 – ‘The Singer [car] I know for a fact to be hermaphrodite, like the poet Cowper’ (III VW Letters, no. 1864, to Vanessa Bell); ‘Cowper, whom I suspect of hidden divinities unnumbered’ (ibid., no. 1976) – she ‘wrote a little article on Cowper’ at Cassis in the first half of June 1929, ‘but lifting the words with difficulty in the heat, surrounded by black & white butterflies’ (III VW Diary, 15 June 1929). Years later she protested that she had read Cowper when she was 15 (see IV VW Diary, 7 September 1935). See also ‘Swinburne Letters’, II VW Essays, esp. p. 232, n. 2. Reading notes (Berg, RN 1.9) (VWRN IX). Reprinted: CE.
fn2 – Theadora Jane Cowper (1734?–1824) was the youngest daughter of Ashley Cowper (1701–88) who forbade the match that seemed imminent between his daughter and nephew. She died unmarried; the poems Cowper had addressed to her were published in 1825.
fn3 – From 1765 Cowper lodged with Mary Unwin, née Cawthorne (1723–96), and her husband Morley and continued to reside with her after she was widowed in 1767.
fn4 – John Cowper (1737–70), Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
fn5 – Rev. John Newton (1725–1806), evangelical divine, curate and Cowper’s neighbour and close friend at Olney. He published the sixty-six Olney Hymns in 1779, most of which were written by Cowper.
fn6 – Correspondence, vol. ii, Letter to the Rev. John Newton, 20 April 1783, p. 60; 13 January 1784, p. 147.
fn7 – See ibid., 19 February 1785, p. 299: ‘He [Ball] is now languishing in a dropsy … So long as he was able to crawl into the street, his journey was to the Royal Oak and home again; and so punctual were we both, I in cleaning my teeth at my window, and he in drinking his dram at the same time, that I seldom failed to observe him.’
fn8 – See ibid., vol. i, p. 325. Lady Austen (d. 1802), née Ann Richardson, was the widow of Sir Robert Austen and the sister of Mrs Jones, the wife of the Rev. Thomas Jones, the curate of Clifton Reynes.
fn9 – Ibid., Letter to the Rev. John Newton, 7 July 1781, p. 326.
fn10 – Ibid.
fn11 – The Task (1785), of which the first part (bk i) is entitled ‘The Sofa’, is in a volume also containing The Diverting History of John Gilpin (1782).
fn12 – Correspondence, vol. i, Letter to the Rev. William Unwin, 9 February 1782, p. 443.
fn13 – Ibid., vol. ii, Letter to the Rev. John Newton, 21 March 1784, p. 181.
fn14 – Ibid., vol. i, Letter to Mrs Maria Frances Cowper, 20 July 1780, p. 217: ‘My days steal away silently, and march on (as poor mad King Lear would have made his soldiers march) as if they were shod with felt; not so silently but that I hear them …’
fn15 – Homer, legendary Greek poet, author of the Iliad and the Odyssey; Virgil (70–19 BC), classical Roman poet.
fn16 – James Cook (1728–79), explorer; George Anson (1697–1762), naval officer and politician.
fn17 – Correspondence, vol. ii, Letter to the Rev. John Newton, 27 July 1783, pp. 85–6.
fn18 – Ibid., Letter to the Rev. William Unwin, 10 November 1783, p. 121.
fn19 – Ibid., vol. i, 9 February 1782, p. 443; slightly adapted by VW.
fn20 – Ibid., vol. ii, 19 February 1783, p. 36.
fn21 – For Hercules, see Thomas Bulfinch, The Golden Age of Myth & Legend (George G. Harrap, 1905), pp. 181–2: ‘Hercules in a fit of madness killed his friend Iphitus, and was condemned for this offence to become the slave of Queen Omphale for three years. While in this service the hero’s nature seemed changed. He lived effeminately, wearing at times the dress of a woman, and spinning wool with the handmaidens of Omphale, while the queen wore his lion’s skin.’ For the binding of Samson, see Judges 16: 6–14.
fn22 – The Task (John Sharpe, 1817), bk iv, ‘The Winter Evening’, p. 102:
In such a world, so thorny, and where none
Finds happiness unblighted, or, if found,
Without some thistly sorrow at its side;
fn23 – Cf. Correspondence, vol. i, Letter to Joseph Hill, 25 October 1765, p. 53, about Mrs Unwin who ‘has a very uncommon understanding, has read much to excellent purpose, and is more polite than a duchess.’
fn24 – ibid., vol. i, Letter to the Rev. William Unwin, 24 February 1782, p. 448: ‘Retirement is our passion and our delight; it is in still life alone that we look for that measure of happiness we can rationally expect below.’
fn25 – See ibid., vol. ii, p. 198, editor’s note: ‘Subsequently Lady Austen married a French gentleman named Tardiff, with whom she lived happily. She died in Paris in 1802.’
II Beau Brummell
fna – N&A and BB (Beau Brummell [Rimington & Hooper, 1930]): ‘was’.
fnb – BB: ‘himself.’
fnc – N&A and BB: ‘dirty beside’.
fnd – N&A and BB: ‘a turn to them’.
fne – BB: ‘lady of title.’
fnf – N&A and BB: ‘Brummell would never … he would have’.
fng – N&A: ‘dress, stamped his manner, his whole’. BB: ‘dress, stamped his manner, permeated his whole’.
fnh – N&A: ‘health admirable;’. BB: ‘health was admirable;’.
fni – N&A and BB: ‘come. And it’.
fnj – BB: ‘these’.
fnk – BB: ‘won; he vowed’.
fnl – N&A and BB: ‘out his hairs … issued out at’.
fnm – BB: ‘These indeed might’.
fnn – N&A: ‘and empty,’.
fno – BB: ‘cupids, cut out and fitted’.
fnp – N&A and BB: ‘now they soon gave out.’
fnq – N&A and BB: ‘further,’.
fnr – BB: ‘a sentimental friendship’.
fns – N&A and BB: ‘dog if there’.
fnt – BB: ‘he got up and left’.
fnu – N&A and BB: ‘It was the signal of the end. After’.
fnv – N&A: ‘till the’.
fnw – N&A and BB: ‘débris – an’.
fnx – N&A and BB: ‘try; for he had always … duchesses and to religion itself. But … longer; indeed there was nothing to try for. He’.
fny – N&A and BB do not have the Note.
fn1 – For periodical publication and composition, see ‘Beau Brummell’ above; only material not in that version is annotated here. The essay was further revised for CR2. On this series in CR2, see ‘Cowper and Lady Austen’ above. The essay is based on Captain Jesse’s The Life of George Brummell, Esq., commonly called Beau Brummell (1844; revised ed., 2 vols, John C. Nimmo, 1886). Reprinted: CE.
fn2 – Life of … Beau Brummell, vol. i, ch. xix, p. 258.
fn3 – Cf. ibid., 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 – This note derives from a letter to the BBC, printed in the Listener, 27 November 1929, in response to VW’s broadcast: see VI VW Essays, Appendix.
III Mary Wollstonecraft
fna – NYHT: ‘hair on their’.
fnb – NYHT: ‘dawn; without doubt they saw –’.
fnc – N&A and NYHT: ‘was’.
fnd – N&A and NYHT: ‘And these glaring’.
fne – N&A and NYHT: ‘a’.
fnf – NYHT: ‘brothers’.
fng – N&A and NYHT: ‘she had’.
fnh – N&A and NYHT: ‘of human’.
fni – N&A: ‘mind.” Independence … grace and charm … her essential qualities.’ NYHT: ‘mind.” Grace and charm were not what a young woman needed, but energy and courage and the power to put her will into effect.’
fnj – N&A: ‘truth. When she was little more than thirty’. NYHT: ‘truth. Even at the age of thirty’.
fnk – NYHT: ‘forced’.
fnl – N&A and NYHT: ‘she had declared’.
fnm – N&A and NYHT: ‘merely a thing that’.
fnn – N&A and NYHT: ‘her blood.’
fno – NYHT: ‘reformer’s complex love’.
fnp – N&A and NYHT: ‘as of love,’.
fnq – N&A: ‘“Vindication of the Right of Women”,’. NYHT: ‘“Vindication of the Rights of Women” –’.
fnr – NYHT: ‘not even understand her’.
fns – N&A and NYHT: ‘something more, something different.’
fnt – NYHT: ‘the’.
fnu – N&A and NYHT: ‘time, for all her love of experiment, she’.
