Elena GualtieriVirginia Woolfs Essays [608981]

Elena GualtieriVirginia Woolf’s Essays
Sketching the Past

Virginia Woolf’s Essays
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Virginia Woolf’s Essays
Sketching the Past
Elena Gualtieri
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First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 0–333–74931–6
First published in the United States of America 2000 by
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC. ,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y . 10010
ISBN 0–312–22791–4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gualtieri, Elena, 1966–
Virginia Woolf’s essays : sketching the past / Elena Gualtieri.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0–312–22791–4 (cloth)
1. Woolf, Virginia, 1882–1941—Prose. 2. Literature and history–
–Great Britain—History—20th century. 3. Feminism and literature–
–England—History—20th century. 4. Women and literature—England–
–History—20th century. 5. English essays—20th century—History
and criticism. 6. Criticism—England—History—20th century.
7. Autobiography. 8. Essay. I. Title.
PR6045.O72Z67 1999
824'.912—dc21 99–43172
CIP
© Elena Gualtieri 2000
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP.
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The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Per Tula e Franco
Voor CorneÂ
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Contents
Acknowledgements viii
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction: Virginia Woolf, European Essayist 1
1 Eccentric Histories 23
Virginia Woolf Practising 23
Eccentrics, Obscure and Anon 36
2 The Essay as Form 49
The Essay as Autobiography 49
Common Readers and Modern Audiences 57
3 Professing Literature 69
Working Women and Women Writers 69
Art and Feminist Propaganda: Three Guineas 82
4 Sketching the Past, or the Fictions of Autobiography 93
Literature and the Scene of Memory 93
Orlando: Literary History as Family Romance 104
5 Images of History 116
Feminist Histories 116
The Imagination as a Golden Cage 128
Postscript: Angels and Harpies 146
Notes 151
Bibliography 167
Index 173
vii
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Acknowledgements
This book was originally written as a doctoral thesis at the University of
Sussex. My first debt of gratitude goes to Rachel Bowlby, who supervised
my work on the thesis with an unfailing critical eye and with clear
respect for my own critical positions. Peter Nicholls examined the thesis
and has ever since given generously of his advice, support and encyclo-
pedic knowledge of modernism. Hermione Lee's suggestions on shaping
the thesis into a book have also been very valuable. Thanks are also due
to Mrs Elizabeth Inglis of the University of Sussex Library for the con-
tinuous help throughout the years in which this project was developed.
Among friends and family, thanks go to Davide Pero and Elisabetta
Zontini for helping, listening and laughing at my obsessions; to my
parents for sustaining and loving me despite the distance; and to
Corne Kros, who gave unstintingly of everything he had, and then
some more.
A shorter version of Chapter 2 appeared in Textual Practice, 12:1 (1998):
49±67, # Routledge. Acknowledgements are due to Textual Practice and
to the publisher for permission to reprint.
Acknowledgements for permission to reprint from The Essays of Virgi-
nia Woolf, ed. Andrew McNeillie, vols i±iv (London: Hogarth, 1986± ),
are due to the executors of the Virginia Woolf estate, the title, the editor
and the publishers; for permission to reprint from The Crowded Dance of
Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), to the
Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia
Woolf.
The jacket shows a sketch of Hogarth House by Richard Kennedy,
which is taken from his brochure for the exhibition that accompanied
the publication of his A Boy at the Hogarth Press (London: Whittington,
1972). Kind permission to reprint the sketch was generously given by
Mrs Olive M. Kennedy, for which I warmly thank her.
viii
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List of Abbreviations
CD The Crowded Dance of Modern Life
CE 1, 2, 3, 4 Collected Essays
CR 2 The Common Reader: Second Series
D 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 The Diary of Virginia Woolf
E 1, 2, 3, 4 The Essays of Virginia Woolf
L 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 The Letters of Virginia Woolf
MB Moments of Being
O Orlando
PA A Passionate Apprentice
RO A Room of One's Own
SF The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf
TG Three Guineas
WE A Woman's Essays
ix
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Introduction: Virginia Woolf,
European Essayist
In 1923 Virginia Woolf was forty-one years old, living in Richmond, and
had already published three novels: The Voyage Out (1915), Night and
Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). She was also a regular reviewer for
the Times Literary Supplement and other major literary journals, includ-
ing the Nation & Athenaeum , where on 1 December 1923 she published
`Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', one of the best-known of her essays and
usually considered to be her literary manifesto. `Mr Bennett and Mrs
Brown' was written in response to Arnold Bennett's criticism of Jacob's
Room, which Bennett claimed showed Woolf's incapacity to create
characters that could `survive in the mind'.1 Rattled, as usual, by hostile
reviews, Woolf returned to Bennett's comments in a diary entry of June
1923, where she set out to `say something about my writing' (D 2, 248)
following her reading of extracts from Katherine Mansfield's journals in
the introduction to The Doves' Nest and Other Stories (1923).
Woolf's relationship to Mansfield was notoriously and, by her own
admission, extremely competitive, with Woolf often measuring the
value and achievement of her own writing against the standards laid
out by Mansfield either in conversation with Woolf or in her published
work. In this particular diary entry, Woolf takes up Mansfield's notion
that writing should be `deeply felt' to question the integrity of her own
creations. It is an act of self-scrutiny that leads her back to the issue of
character raised by Bennett's review, as she admits:
It is true that I dont have that `reality' gift. I insubstantise, wilfully to
some extent, distrusting reality ± its cheapness. But to go further,
have I the power of conveying the true reality? Or do I write essays
about myself?
(D 2, 248)
1
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2 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
In the way in which it links together essay-writing, autobiography and
Woolf's experiments with the form of the modern novel, this diary entry
is central to the conception of this book. It shows Woolf entertaining
the kind of self-doubt which is banned from the pages of her public
reply to Bennett's criticism, where she confidently announces the com-
ing of `one of the most important, the most illustrious, the most epoch-
making' eras of literary history (E 3, 388). And yet, the very availability
of this private commentary calls up hordes of questions about literary
and historical documents and the ways in which their respective
domains are to be defined. In Woolf's case perhaps more than for any
other woman writer of this century, the respective roles of private and
public documents have been clearly scrambled as the most personal and
intimate circumstances of her life have become the subject of a sizeable
publishing industry that appeals to a wide spectrum of readers, both
specialised and non.
If the context of reading of this diary entry shows a clear disturbance
of lines of division between different kinds of writings, so its content
charts a clear crossing over of boundaries between apparently `natural'
definitions of different literary styles and periods. It moves away from a
simplistic Bennett vs. Woolf, Edwardian vs. Georgian, realist vs. modern-
ist opposition to concede a certain element of common understanding
between terms of which we are used of thinking as in stark contrast to
each other and to all intents and purposes irreconcilable. Woolf admits
that Bennett's charge is to some extent justified, that she does not have
`that „reality'' gift', but at the same time also points out that her defi-
ciency is in fact the product of a choice, of a sense of discrimination
between the given of experience (reality in inverted commas) and that
which has to be sought after (the artistic representation of another kind
of reality). Classifying the first as `cheap' and the second, by implication,
as precious, Woolf's remarks about the true nature of reality are also
made to prefigure, albeit unwittingly, some of the charges of snobbism
and limited social range that were to be brought against both her
personally and her work from the 1930s onwards.
It is interesting in this context that the question of literary form and,
specifically, of the essay surfaces here both as an element in the opposi-
tion between different kinds of reality and as a step further in the line of
reasoning followed by Woolf's reflections. On the one hand, `writing
essays about oneself' is seen as a de-valued kind of activity by compar-
ison with the pursuit of the true type of reality that figures here as the
most valuable of the two occupations. While the comparison might
suggest a certain similarity of positions between `cheap' reality and
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Introduction 3
essay-writing, it is also nevertheless quite clear that for Woolf the ques-
tion of the essay exceeds the terms of her opposition to Bennett's
materialism and of the simple historical paradigm that would cast mod-
ernism as the antithesis of realism. As Woolf warns, the ultimate risk lies
for her not in an improbable fall into base materialism but rather in the
final dissolution of what remains of objective reality into boundless
autobiography.
In the space of a few lines, then, this entry encompasses both the
scope of Woolf's artistic and intellectual ambitions and her sense of the
risks and the problems associated with her projects. The movement
described by her line of reasoning here mimics quite closely that of
the Hegelian dialectic, whereby an initial splitting into two of `reality'
opens the way for the subsequent transcendence of those splits into a
new synthesis or art form. As always with Woolf, however, the third
movement of the dialectic appears here only as a question and a
problem, but never as a solution.2 From this point of view, the essay
then figures in Woolf's own conception as the symbol of a failed synth-
esis, as the recycling of the given of experience into its own transcend –
ence.
The understanding of the essay that emerges from this quotation
reveals Woolf as being suspended between two different conceptions of
the genre. On the one hand there is the tendency to see the essay as a
second-order literary phenomenon that is concerned with autobiogra –
phical questions rather than more philosophical issues such as the true
representation of `reality'. In this sense, Woolf's observations occupy the
same space as Mr Ramsay's agonising analysis of his own achievements
in To the Lighthouse , which his son Andrew reflects by comparing his
father's pursuit of `the nature of reality' to `think[ing] of a kitchen
table . . . when you're not there'.3 The homely character of Andrew's
example might be read as yet another version of Woolf's assertion of
the `cheapness' of reality and her preference for more insubstantial forms
of inquiry. In this case, Woolf's association of the essay with the kind of
reality pursued by Mr Ramsay finds its place within a specifically English
tradition of thinking about the genre as a `minor', marginalised form of
literature which is the purview of amateurs and leisured gentlemen.4
This conception of the essay as belles lettres, as a form of writing
exclusively interested in the pursuit of style and good form has also
guided the reception of Woolf's critical writings in the postwar years.
Although during her lifetime the essays enjoyed a wider and, in Leonard
Woolf's term, `more catholic' (CE Editorial Preface) appreciation than
Woolf's novels, in the years which followed her death and up to the late
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4 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
1960s this situation was reversed, as critics began to focus almost
exclusively on her activity as a novelist and relegated the essays to the
traditional role of `minor' genre, dutifully included in studies of her
work, but dismissed as more imperfect and less challenging than her
fiction.5
But this isolation of the essay to the margins of the canon of Woolf's
work also finds a point of resistance in the second line of thinking
outlined in the diary entry of 1923. As Woolf turns to examine the
status of her own work within the development of literary history, the
essay is offered as a possible source of disturbance of a historical para-
digm which would see the `old post-Dostoevsky argument' (D 2, 248)
about character in fiction superseded by a better representation of char-
acter in a sort of progressive move towards the best possible literature.
This is a remarkably un-English conception of the genre which associ-
ates it not so much with leisurely pursuits and the exercise of style for
style's sake, but rather with a different way of thinking about history and
modernity. In this sense, the essay becomes an interruption to progress
and, at the same time, signals the emergence of a type of literary history
that questions the identification of modernity with the culmination of
progress.
This other conception of the genre aligns Woolf's thinking in matters
of literary historiography with a Continental tradition of commentary
upon the essay that has found its most sophisticated exponents among
Continental Marxists such as LukaÂcs and Adorno. Both LukaÂcs and
Adorno saw in the genre one of the paradoxes and puzzles of modernity,
a form of writing that was at one and the same time the product of a
determinate time and place and yet approaching the conditions of pure
discourse. This conception of the essay as a type of discourse that
disturbs established boundaries between different kinds of writing was
first articulated by LukaÂcs in his introductory chapter to Soul and Form
(1911). LukaÂcs insisted that the essence of the essay lies precisely in its
ability to bring together modes of being and of thinking that are com-
monly thought of as being in opposition to each other. He admits that
the aesthetic and the epistemological domain relate to two different
forms of consciousness (the thing itself and the concept), produce two
different types of expression (the image and meaning), and two different
ontologies (that of giving form, or creation, and that of inquiry, or
intersubjective relationship). Yet he claims that as a modern genre still
in its prehistory the essay presents features from both sides of the dis-
tinction. It asks the fundamental ontological questions, `what is life,
what is man, what is destiny?', but provides them not with `the answers
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Introduction 5
of science or, at purer heights, those of philosophy' but with a form, a
`symbol'.
As the form given to the ontological questions, the essay partakes
then of both modes of being and therefore makes problematic any
clear-cut opposition between cognition and aesthetic experience. For
LukaÂcs, the essay articulates knowledge as the experiencing of whole-
ness that in Kant's terms only belongs to the aesthetic moment. As this
kind of cognitive experience seals together subject and object, the essay
cannot belong to science or philosophy, even though it shares with
them the ontology of inquiry. To articulate `intellectuality, conceptual –
ity as sensed experience, as immediate reality, as spontaneous principle
of existence' criticism must both be form and address itself to the forms
of art.6 In LukaÂcs's argument, then, the essay as criticism does not stand
in opposition to the essay as belles lettres but rather represents the
realisation of the essence of the genre. The definition of the essay as a
well-written piece of prose which is commonly associated with the
English tradition signals some kind of understanding of the essence
of the genre but fails to articulate its wider implications. As form,
the essay attempts to bridge the gulf between knowledge and experience
by giving knowledge the form of aesthetic experience. Rather than
producing knowledge the way that science does, the essay creates a
form where knowledge can be experienced as art.
LukaÂcs's analysis of the genre reflects then the blurring of boundaries
in the search for new forms of writing that is articulated by Woolf in the
diary entry of 1923. The parallel becomes even more striking when
LukaÂcs's argument is enlarged to take into consideration the type of
subjectivity inscribed in the essay and its relation to the form of the
novel. In The Observing Self (1988), Graham Good follows LukaÂcs in
arguing that the essay emerges from the cultural revolution of the
Renaissance in reaction to the scholasticism that had characterised
medieval knowledge. To the culture of commentary and authority
the essay prefers an appeal to personal experience that aligns it to the
empiricism of the `new' science. Unlike modern science, however, the
essay does not lead this experience back into the folds of systematic
knowledge, but attempts to make a faithful reproduction of singularity
and uniqueness. Close to other autobiographical genres in its drive
towards capturing the self on the page, the form of the essay is distin-
guished from them by its relation to temporality. For Good, diary and
autobiography structure their representation of the self along chronolo-
gical or narrative sequences, while the essay mimics in its very form the
experience of a scattered and only loosely connected self. Thus, if the
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6 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
essay offers no general rules and truths, Good nevertheless insists that,
as a genre, it does put forth a claim for the truthful representation of the
general experience of selfhood, so that `the essayist's personality'
becomes `an example . . . of an „actually existing'' individual and the
unorganized „wholeness'' of his experience'.7
In the essay, experience appears then not just as the raw material from
which writing is moulded but also as the product of writing itself. With
the essay, experience acquires a form and a shape, even though that
form and shape remain much looser than those of highly formalised
genres such as tragedy or poetry. Good argues that the formlessness and
pliability that characterise both essay and novel are the marks of their
roots in bourgeois individualism, where the uniqueness of personal
experience does not tolerate compression into any schema or pattern.
Following Ian Watt's analysis of the rise of the novel in English culture,
Good argues that the episodic character of early examples of the genre
marks a break with the strictly codified rules of medieval and Renais-
sance romance in the attempt to give a more truthful representation of
individual experience. As an inversion of the knightly quest, the picar-
esque novel offers the story of an individual's education through experi-
ence of the world rather than scholastic learning. But while the form of
the novel subsequently crystallised into the Bildungsroman of the nine-
teenth century, Good argues that the essay has preserved a radical
resistance to the imposition of any system upon the representation of
individual experience.
While the novel has become, then, the locus of schemas and formulas
to which experience is made to conform, the form of the essay lets
experience itself shape the text. But, since experience is as much a
product of essay-writing as its source, the essay as a genre makes
problematic any appeal to the notion of an unmediated, transparent
experience. Good recognises this much, but argues that to see some-
thing as constructed is not necessarily to deny its reality. He argues that,
although the essay constructs and shapes experience in a certain way,
the refusal to resolve that experience into a system of knowledge
amounts to a commitment to retain the fundamental formlessness of
personal experience. For Good, the essay thus becomes the most suitable
form with which to combat both the homogenisation of individual
consciousness by mass culture and the systematic reduction of that
consciousness to an abstract entity in the theories of the human
sciences.
In its coupling of mass culture and modern science as destructive of
individual freedom, Good's analysis of subjectivity in the essay shows to
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Introduction 7
be strongly indebted to Adorno's and Horkheimer's critique of the
Enlightenment project. In the influential Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1944), Adorno and Horkheimer had argued that the separation of
facts and values that founded the modern project harboured in itself
the possibility of both freedom and domination. Adorno saw in the
development of mass culture a continuation of the total domination
of consciousness by capitalist power structures and equated this dom-
ination with the subjugation of materiality and the object to the con-
cept. Thus the effects of mass culture and advanced capitalism on
individual consciousness are in line with the kind of identity-thinking
that Adorno claims has characterised the history of Western metaphy-
sics since its beginning. Identity-thinking is the mode of consciousness
that corresponds to the structuring of human relations in capitalist
societies. Adorno follows Marx in arguing that the relation between
the worker and the capitalist appears as a property of the commodity
produced by the worker under the guise of surplus value. In capitalist
societies, surplus value is what makes it possible to exchange commod-
ities through the mediating instance of money. But what appears as the
property of the commodity is in fact the intrinsic human essence of the
worker that is being sold off to the capitalist as labour.
For Adorno, the alienation of human consciousness produced by
capitalist relations of production is at the foundation of a fetishistic
relation to objects. In capitalist societies, objects are perceived either as
resources to be exploited or as commodities. This endowing of the
object with properties that do not belong to it is also reproduced,
according to Adorno, in that mode of consciousness that he calls iden-
tity-thinking. Identity-thinking consists in an endless reduction of the
particular and of the differences between things to their universal idea
or concept. This domination of the particular by the universal amounts
to the annihilation of the otherness of the object carried out by the
observing or dominating subject. This reduction of the object to an
instrument of the subject structures the relation to materiality inscribed
by modern technology and corresponds to the domination of individual
consciousness by the totality of the capitalist structure of production.
The only form of consciousness that escapes such total domination is,
according to Adorno, non-identity thinking, that is, that mode of think-
ing that breaks up the appearance of absolute equivalence between, on
the one hand, different objects and, on the other, objects and concepts.
Non-identity thinking is made possible by the contradictions implicit
in capitalist societies and, in particular, by the dialectic of the Enlight-
enment. The separation of fact and value that liberated science from
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8 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
morality and enabled the development of the technology necessary to
the production of capital also sanctioned the fundamental non-identity
of concept and object that had previously been covered over by schol-
asticism. The legitimation of experience and direct observation as a
ground for the critique of authority thus uncovered the lack of an
absolute adequacy between the order of things and the order of
words. Adorno argues that this other side of the dialectic of the Enlight-
enment founds the very possibility of freedom and emancipation by
revealing the inadequacy and limits of identity-thinking. As this free-
dom remains in a dialectical relation to the principle of domination, it
can only be a limited or negative kind of freedom, rather than the full
realisation of human potential envisaged by the notion of (utopic)
emancipation.
As Gillian Rose argues in The Melancholy Science (1978), the essay
represents for Adorno the form that remains most faithful to non-iden-
tity thinking as it refuses to resolve thought into either a logical argu-
ment or a story-line.8 For Adorno, the essay presents the relation
between concepts as a constellation rather than a derivation from first
principles. Unlike LukaÂcs, however, Adorno does not align the particular
configuration offered by the essay to art rather than science. He remarks
that to see the essay as art is in fact to reinforce the hegemony of the
scientific model of knowledge as the only valid one. As an instance of
non-identity thinking, the essay does not endow objects with properties
that do not belong to them, nor does it bend materiality to make it fit
into a hierarchical structuring of thought. Because of its attention to the
irreducibility of the particular, `the essay has something like an aesthetic
autonomy that is easily accused of being simply derived from art,
although it is distinguished from art by its medium, concepts, and by
its claim to a truth devoid of aesthetic semblance'.9
In Adorno's work, the essay thus functions as the privileged vehicle of
non-identity thinking and negative dialectics. As Gillian Rose remarks,
Adorno's search for a form of consciousness and thought that would not
be liable to assimilation by the totalizing drive characteristic of capital-
ism led him to develop a style of writing that, by its very difficulty and
impenetrability, resisted the possibility of being traced back into the
imperialism of equivalence. Rather than developing systems of thought,
Adorno preferred to elaborate his critique in the form of fragments,
aphorisms and essays. His analysis of scientific knowledge and practices
as the most evident realisation of the domination of the object by the
subject led him to reject the notion of method and substitute that of
style. This choice was also in agreement with Adorno's contention that
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Introduction 9
art and artistic practice represent the only locus of resistance to the
impending totalization of consciousness by capitalism.
Adorno's style is thus often seen as performing the resistance against
reification he theorises. Rose has described the chiasmus as the funda-
mental structure of this style. The intersection of sentences so that the
second sentence inverts the word order of the first one may be seen as a
plastic rendering of the workings of negative dialectics in writing but, as
Rose remarks, has also made Adorno's thought liable to being reduced to
a series of sound-bites. The ironic fate of Adorno's attempt to escape
commodification can be explained by the disjunction between essay
and aphorism that is often overlooked in his writing. This disjunction
corresponds to a theoretical problem in Adorno's thought. As we saw
earlier, although Adorno claims that the essay represents a form of non-
identity thinking and therefore the other side of the dialectic of freedom
and subjugation, his reliance on Walter Benjamin's concept of constel-
lation also reveals a tendency to propose the other side of the dialectic as
an alternative in itself to the reification of thought effected by identity
thinking. Adorno's theory of the essay therefore hovers uneasily
between a purely dialectical understanding of history and the tempta-
tion to set up an alternative metaphysics.
This alternation between dialectic and metaphysics has been
described by John Snyder in Prospects of Power (1991) as the fundamental
difference between the French and the English tradition of essay-writ-
ing. According to Snyder, Montaigne's and Bacon's essays differ in their
relationship to temporality: while Bacon's aphoristic writing aims to
crystallise time into eternity, Montaigne's essays simply substitute the
temporality of the private for the macro-time of public office and pol-
itics. Snyder observes that the essay springs from an historical situation
of retreat from public life into a sort of exile that is usually located in the
countryside. This situation of retreat marks the essay as the locus of
freedom from the occupation and preoccupation of public life and
leaves writing free to roam over any topic without having to resolve its
thoughts into a system. The essay thus gives shape to an alternative
dimension that is completely autonomous from that of action and
history, the dimension of discourse itself: `The essay is self-reflexive
discursivity, the proper function of which is to declare a private politics
of liberation from history by generating a verbal state, the state of
verbality.'10
For Snyder, the essay then replaces the legal and administrative frame-
work of the modern state with a form of discourse whose only aim is the
generation of the parallel and autonomous dimension of pure verbality.
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10 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
He argues that for Montaigne the essay functioned as an opportunity for
liberating the self from the strictures and determinations of history by
providing an arena where the self can be continuously re-fashioned and
re-generated.11 As Graham Good argues in The Observing Self, the essay
emerges out of the split between the order of words and the order of
things that occurred during the Renaissance, but does not align itself
with either the empiricist or the scholastic position. Rather than deter-
mining the epistemological superiority of either ontology, the essay
creates a world and a self out of words and thus endows language with
the power to generate a different order of reality. This reality remains in
a shifting or changing relation to the reality of history and politics. In
Montaigne, the relation of private to public sphere is non-antagonistic
and ruled by co-existence rather than conflict, as conflict itself belongs
to the particular historical situation Montaigne is trying to escape. In
Bacon, the ambition of the genre is enlarged to make it an instrument of
the essayist's own claims to status in history, that is, the essay is con-
ceived as a monument to the man who aspires to direct and control his
fortune: `Bacon looks not for continuity of actions in writing, but for
suspension from time altogether, from politics or time as power,
through recourse to a supposedly timeless discourse about things pol-
itical'.12
Bacon's ambition to elevate himself above the accidents of time and
history produces the aphoristic style as a means of stopping the move-
ment of history in language. While Montaigne's essays are characterised
by a movement of digression that constitutes self and object as a set of
possibilities, Bacon's aphorisms crystallise that movement into an alter-
nation of thesis and antithesis that shapes thought as nuggets or gems of
wisdom. The point-like character of Bacon's writing makes his pro-
nouncements therefore much easier to quote than Montaigne's fluid
discourses. As sound-bites, Bacon's sentences can indeed achieve an
independence from the situation of their formulation that approaches
the eternal character of monuments. Although structured by an anti-
thetic movement, as a whole his sentences present themselves as synth-
eses, as the ultimate realisation of the course of history. `The aim of this
second step [the synthesis]', Snyder points out, `is to make the essay
itself, as aphoristic language, „follow the example of time'' ' and thus
`maneuver out of the apparent stasis of determinist time'.13
For Snyder, then, the essay arises out of the historical situation of
retreat from the public world of politics and history but does not deter-
mine or fix the relation of the private sphere it generates to the public
world it leaves. This amounts to saying that the essay is in effect an
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Introduction 11
exploration of the meaning of that historical situation of retreat from
which it springs. In Montaigne's case, this retreat comes to signify a
refusal to engage in the bloody conflicts of religion that characterise his
historical moment. It therefore founds the private sphere as the absence
of conflict where the emblematic form of relationship to the other is
friendship. In Bacon's writing, the sphere of discourse is forced to enter
into competition with that of actions and history and attempts to
establish itself as the truly transcendental realm of existence. Because
history is understood by Bacon as what lasts rather than what passes,
discourse is then made to take the place of history, to imitate the stasis
of a history that does not pass but stays. Thus, the form of the aphorism
takes the generating power of discourse to build a sphere of existence
that is liberated from the accidents of historical being and, therefore,
eternal. While in Montaigne writing is parallel to history, in Bacon it
hovers above it.
As Snyder remarks, it is not surprising to find that women writers in
general and feminist critics in particular have often engaged with the
essay as a form for their exploration of the intersections between private
and public, personal and political. Although the essay founds the split
between the two spheres that has been so forcefully contested by fem-
inists, it also endows the personal or private sphere with the kind of
autonomy from history that makes possible such a contestation. Snyder
concedes that `among the genres, the essay has never dominated', but
also insists that it is the only genre capable of `accommodat[ing] . . .
those deepest rhythms of the kind of personal transformation that is
also completely political.' As instances of this kind of exploration
Snyder cites both Woolf and Adrienne Rich, though adding that their
essay-prose tends to swerve towards `the perfection of stasis'.14 In this,
he claims, British and American feminists tend to follow the tradition
outlined by Bacon rather than Montaigne's attempt to liberate the self
from history.15
Snyder claims that Montaigne's essay might in fact be the most appro-
priate genre for feminism precisely because it invests language with the
power to generate different selves and worlds. As a genre, Montaigne's
essay would therefore enact a synthesis of language and sexuality that
counters the Cartesian split between mind and body which feminism
has radically criticised. But as this synthesis is predicated upon a situa-
tion of retreat from public life, the choice of the essay as the genre of
feminism ends up by reinforcing rather than challenging the private/
public split. While the essay might be the only genre that makes possible
an exploration of the personal as political, it still cannot accommodate
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12 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
an analysis of the public side of the political, that is, of institutions. The
historical occasion of the essay limits its intervention in history to a
series of isolated pockets of digression from the main course of history.
In this sense, the essay does not and cannot offer a real challenge to the
linearity of either logic or historical plots. Hence, what Snyder sees as
Woolf's and Rich's swerve towards metaphysics testifies to the difficulty
of finding alternative ways of writing history that would not fall out of
history altogether.
This dilemma and the problems it raises for feminist critics and writers
is also in evidence in the history of the feminist reception of Woolf's
essays. Although the essays and the questions of genre they raise have
only recently become the focus of explicit investigation in feminist
studies of Woolf's work, it was the intervention of feminist criticism
itself that opened up the canon of her work to a complete re-evaluation.
The attention to issues of sexual difference that animated the `new'
readings of Woolf that began to appear towards the end of the 1960s
and the early 1970s brought to the forefront the notion of androgyny
and, with it, texts such as A Room (1929) which had previously been
confined to the niche dedicated to Woolf's `feminist pamphlets' and
thus isolated from the rest of her writing.16 This foregrounding of A
Room at the centre of Woolf's work carried with it the possibility of re-
thinking from scratch the role of her non-fictional writings and their
relation to her novels. This possibility was realised by MicheÁle Barrett in
1979 with the publication of Women and Writing, a selection of Woolf's
most outspokenly feminist essays. Although Barrett preserved Leonard
Woolf's clear-cut distinction between essays and novels as two essen-
tially separate and very different forms of writing in Woolf's oeuvre,i n
her introduction she argued for a reversal of their respective positions in
the canon, claiming that Woolf's essays and critical writings offered a far
more empowering model for feminist critics than the aesthetics of
impersonality pursued by Woolf in her fictional work.
Published at the end of a momentous decade that saw the appearance
in print of Quentin Bell's official biography of Woolf (1972), of her
letters (1975±84) and then of her diaries (1977±84),17 Women and Writing
explicitly took issue with the kind of images and representations that
were being projected by the controversies surrounding the representa –
tion of Woolf's private life and the interpretation of her work based on
it. In her introduction, Barrett argued that the essays countered the twin
images of madwoman and delicate Bloomsbury aesthete that were cur-
rent at the time with that of an intellectually powerful woman capable
of providing both `a general theoretical account of women's literary
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Introduction 13
work' and `a detailed critical assessment of many individual authors'.18
According to Barrett, the essays showed a clearly defined attempt at
elaborating a materialist analysis of the history of women's oppression
that was at odds with Woolf's sustained belief in the autonomous char-
acter of artistic expression. She claimed that this opposition between
Woolf's modernist and feminist commitments had been generally
overlooked by feminist studies of her work, which had rather preferred
to characterise her oeuvre as a drive towards the unification of oppo-
sites.19
While to Barrett the importance of the essays lay in the revised read-
ing of Woolf's work they could provide, until very recently Woolf studies
had generally left unheeded her suggestion of a link between two ques-
tions: the compatibility of Woolf's feminist and modernist commit-
ments and the issue of genre in her work. In fact, one of the most
influential intervention in the history of feminist debates around
Woolf, Toril Moi's Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), effectively reversed Bar-
rett's suggestion to argue that A Room itself should be read not so much
as a blueprint for feminist criticism but rather as a modernist text akin to
her novels in its rhetorical and textual strategies. Moi famously criticised
Elaine Showalter's dismissal of A Room in A Literature of Their Own
(1979), where Showalter had condemned Woolf's celebration of the
androgynous ideal as a `flight' from the pains and conflicts of the
experience of womanhood and embodiment in patriarchal society.20
Moi replied that, like many other Anglo-American feminists, Showalter
had failed to realise the value of Woolf's work for the deconstruction of
polarised gender positions through the `textual practice' of her writing
rather than just its content, adding that `that practice is of course much
more marked in the novels than in most of her essays'.21 Crucially, then,
her argument rested on reading A Room not so much as a programme or
manifesto for the development of feminist criticism but as a modernist
text whose fictional strategies carried out a radical destabilisation of
gendered identities.22
This valorisation of the fictional character of A Room as the locus of its
feminist critique showed that Moi was implicitly working on the basis of
a hierarchical disposition of different kinds of discourse where fiction
dominated as the genre both of modernism and of feminism, while the
essay was associated with a `naive' kind of reading that privileged con-
tent over form. This unexamined distinction became the focus of expli-
cit investigation in Rachel Bowlby's monograph on Woolf, first
published in 1988 and then re-issued in an expanded version in 1997.
Feminist Destinations opened with an extended reading of `Mr Bennett
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14 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
and Mrs Brown', arguing that Woolf's importance to the development of
feminist criticism lied not so much in her privileging of fiction over
other genres, but rather in the way in which Woolf's writing set out to
undermine the very distinctions between them.
Intended as the first comprehensive study of Woolf's work in the light
of literary theory, Feminist Destinations was immediately concerned with
providing new readings of very well-known texts, from Mrs Dalloway
(1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) to Three Guineas (1938) and Between
the Acts (1941). Bowlby returned, though, to the question of Woolf's
essays a few years later, in her introduction to the Penguin edition of
two selected volumes of essays, which were brought out as part of a
series marking Woolf's temporary exit from copyright in 1991. Penguin's
inclusion of the essays in its series on Woolf indicated an enlargement of
the canon that was both aided and confirmed by the publication of the
first four volumes of Andrew McNeillie's The Essays of Virginia Woolf.
McNeillie's edition of the essays started to appear in 1986 and will, when
completed, mark the end of the process of attribution, publication,
collection and referencing of Woolf's writings that seals a writer's accept-
ance into the canon of English literature. His introductions have under-
scored this process of canonisation by refusing to take a polemical
stance and focusing rather on the historical outline of Woolf's career
as an essayist and reviewer both in its own right and in relation to her
fiction.
In a move that parallels the progressive canonisation of Woolf's essays
signalled by McNeillie's edition, the two Penguin volumes, A Woman's
Essays (1992) and The Crowded Dance of Modern Life (1993), set out to
make the essays more available to a larger public, while at the same time
attempting to reject the opposition of popular to elitist, lowbrow to
highbrow that has relegated them to the role of minor work.'23 Focusing
upon the way in which these oppositions translate into a separation
of Woolf the novelist from Woolf the essayist and of her modernism
from her feminism, Bowlby argued in her introductions that Woolf's
own writings both invite and undermine the establishment of a definit-
ive hierarchy between the different kinds of writings in which she
engaged. She remarked that while Woolf tended to see writing for
money as incompatible with the demands of artistic creation, she also
considered it as one of the first instruments of financial and psycholo-
gical emancipation for women. Conversely, Woolf was very keen upon
restricting the space for polemics and arguments to the form of the
essay, which, in her hands, often transforms itself into a fictional
account.
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Introduction 15
The instability of the distinctions between essay and fiction suggested
by Woolf also undermines, according to Bowlby, any attempt at defining
the confines of Woolf's feminist and modernist commitments. The first
dedicated to women and writing and the second to the experience of
modern living, the Penguin volumes are meant to illustrate that, in
Bowlby's words, `the two topics for which Woolf's essays have been
known ± modern writing and feminism ± are intimately connected, as
modern writing daughters work out the strength of their ties, or lack of
ties, to mothers, fathers and patrons of all sorts' (WE, xiv). Rejecting
Barrett's split between feminist politics and modernist aesthetics,
Bowlby insists that the question of women's space and place is trans-
lated by Woolf into the question of which forms and which genres
might be best suited to women's writing. Unlike the novel, which for
Woolf represented the possibility of experimenting with new forms and
shapes, the essay remained for her attached to the paternal figure and
therefore became the arena where the relationship between tradition
and modernity was explored. Far from standing in opposition to each
other then, Woolf's essays and novels can be seen for Bowlby to articu-
late complementary aspects of the same project: to tell stories left untold
and represent new forms of consciousness.
In its stress upon the radical instability of hierarchical formations
within Woolf's writing Bowlby's work has been instrumental to opening
up Woolf studies to a wide range of critical and historical approaches.
Like Moi before her, Bowlby set out to dismantle the kind of impassable
oppositions that have regulated the reading of Woolf's work as either a
modernist or a feminist, an essayist or a novelist, a refined aesthete or a
committed socialist revolutionary. In linking the existence of these
oppositions to questions of literary historiography and of genre, Moi
and Bowlby have strongly contributed to steering the course of Woolf
studies towards the question of the essay as one of the crucial points of
intersection between gender and genre, between literature and its cul-
tural and historical context.
The second half of the 1990s has in fact seen the appearance of a
cluster of monographs exclusively dedicated to Woolf's activity as a
cultural critic, journalist, reviewer and literary historian. Beth Carole
Rosenberg's Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson (1995), Juliette Dusinber-
re's Virginia Woolf's Renaissance (1997), Leila Brosnan's Reading Virginia
Woolf 's Essays and Journalism (1997), the articles collected in Virginia
Woolf and the Essay (1997) have all effected a widening of the frames of
reference deployed to read Woolf's non-fictional writings. They have
enlarged both the historical context of Woolf studies, which now
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16 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
includes the Renaissance and the eighteenth century in addition to the
more familiar early twentieth century, and their critical pool, which has
brought authors such as Bakhtin and his theory of the dialogic character
of language at the centre of many of these readings of Woolf's essayistic
practice.24
The focus on the dialogic nature of Woolf's essay-writing that is
typical of these studies has tended to ally her work with the Mon-
taignian tradition, with its stress on the importance of friendship and
the humility of a writing persona identified by the tag `Que scais-je?'.25
Although this might indicate a return to a belletristic conception of the
essay as an exercise in style that is devoid of true content, the Bakhtinian
notion of the dialogic in writing has in fact worked to radicalise the
`familiar' or `personal' essay as practised by Woolf. Defined in these
recent studies as a profoundly democratic practise capable of destabilis-
ing hierarchies of power, Bakhtin's dialogic has helped to translate
Woolf's focus on the conversational character of her essay-writing into
an instrument for the feminist critique of more traditional models of the
construction and transmission of knowledge. As dialogue, Woolf's
essays are therefore seen as explicit contestations of the dominance of
the authoritative `I', for which they substitute a provisional formation
which, like Montaigne's `Que scais-je?', does not offer meaning as
truth but as the result of an intersubjective process of reading and
writing.
This view of the essay as an anti-authoritarian form of writing that
privileges process rather than result has, as we saw, its origin in the work
of LukaÂcs and Adorno and in their analysis of the nature of knowledge in
post-Enlightenment, capitalist societies. Its re-emergence in recent fem-
inist studies of Woolf's essays indicates a convergence of critical frames
that places her activity as an essayist at the intersection between a
feminist critique of patriarchal power structures and a Marxist analysis
of the ideological formations of capitalism. But this intersection in its
turn raises important questions about the suitability of the essay itself
and of Woolf's understanding and practising of it for the articulation of
a type of literary history that could be defined as specifically feminist.
Juliette Dusinberre's recent study of Woolf's readings of Renaissance
literature suggests in its very subtitle, Woman Reader or Common Reader?,
that the tendency to identify the essay as such with feminist critique
makes it in fact quite difficult to differentiate between the `woman
reader' and the `common reader' in their strategies of dissent and dis-
articulation of the discourses of authority, whether patriarchal or other-
wise.
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Introduction 17
The privileging of the essay as a fragmentary and unsystematic genre
that is common to feminist studies of Woolf's critical writings and to
Marxist theories of the genre also brings with it important questions
about the possibility of writing history at all, about the very idea of
history as a viable concept. If, as we saw with LukaÂcs and Adorno, the
essay can be understood as an essentially modernist genre that resists
the pull towards continuity and follows instead a digressive logic, what
kind of history can it write and what would the relationship between an
essayistic history and other types of history be like? This is a question
that returns constantly in Woolf's work but which also finds no resolu-
tion or clear-cut answers there. In this, Woolf's essayistic practice comes
perhaps closer to the kind of `Essayism' described by Robert Musil in The
Man Without Qualities, a novel which alternates narrative and discursive
reflection in much the same way as Woolf's The Pargiters was supposed to
do. Defined by Musil as a way of `living hypothetically' or in the realm
of the possible, `Essayism' is offered to his readers as a `Utopian idea' to
be opposed to the increased rationalisation of the modern world, a form
of living and of writing that is dispersive and without an organising
26centre. Like many of the protagonists of Woolf's novels from Jacob
Flanders to Orlando, Musil's Ulrich refuses to shape his life into the
coherent narrative of the Bildungsroman and chooses instead the provi-
sional, more circumscribed formation of a collection of separate
moments and points of view.
Although the notion of Essayism as described by Musil has far more
critical currency in Continental Europe than in Britain and America,
these parallels between Musil's and Woolf's work suggest that a shift in
the context of reading Woolf's work towards European modernism
might also bring with it a change of perspective on the essay, high-
lighting its role as a site of reflection on the problem of modernity as a
historiographic concept. My aim in this book is to investigate whether a
modernist understanding of the genre as Essayism is compatible with
Woolf's practice as one of the first feminist historians of literature. This
means analysing Woolf's essay-writing in the light of the theories of the
essay elaborated in Continental Europe, but also, at the same time, using
Woolf's own essayistic practice to question the boundaries that define
the difference between `Continental Essayism' and the English essay.
From the well-established opposition between Bacon's and Montaigne's
writings to more recent attempts to differentiate between `essayistic'
mode and the essay as a genre,27 this split between two understandings
of the genre has long regulated its critical study. The question that
remains to be asked is whether this distinction continues to be valid
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18 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
when sexual difference and gender identities intervene as significant
elements in the history of the essay.
Chapter 1 will present a sort of prehistory of Woolf's involvement
with the genre by charting her beginnings as an essayist and reviewer,
while at the same time raising questions about what it means to read
those beginnings now, in the light of Woolf's unique position in the
history of feminist criticism. Drawing on Woolf's own interrogation of
the notion of continuity and interruption in literary history, this chap-
ter focuses its attention on the two most prominent characteristics of
her early writings. It stresses the fluidity of generic boundaries between
Woolf's early journals, her essays and her short stories, calling into
question her own insistence on a rigid distinction between private
(and uncensored) forms of writing and public ones marked by editorial
intervention. It also traces, though, Woolf's developing sense of the
lacunae or gaps that punctuate the smooth narrative of historiographic
institutions such as the Dictionary of National Biography and which she
identified with a series of marginal figures, first called the `eccentrics',
then the `obscure' and, ultimately, `Anon'.
These two sides of Woolf's writing practice, her essayism and her
interest in the marginal figures of literary history and biography, can
also be identified in her reconstruction of the history of the essay. As we
shall see in Chapter 2, Woolf outlined a tradition of essay-writing that
run from Montaigne to the Edwardians, stressing the genre's affiliation
with a form of autobiography that offers a non-narrative alternative to
traditional biography. It is in this sense that she most cherished the
essay as the first of modernist forms in its fragmentary, unresolved and
preliminary character. But this interpretation of the modernism of
the essay comes into conflict in Woolf's writing with her perception of
the modernity of the genre, which she saw as indissolubly linked to the
emergence of mass readership, consumer culture and narcissism. Thus
Woolf's ambivalence toward the essay shows in fact the existence of a
split that is also at the heart of Adorno's understanding of the genre. For
both writers the essay functions both as a modernist form that might
offer an alternative to the relentless drive forward of the dialectic and, at
the same time, as one of the foremost participants in the process of
commodification of thought they associated with the spread of mass
media and consumer society.
These two poles of Woolf's understanding of the genre correspond to
her own implicit distinction between the literary essay and journalism
and are the defining limits of her own practice as an essayist. This binary
distribution of her position on the essay was disturbed, though, by the
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Introduction 19
issue of sexual difference and gender roles which, as we shall see in
Chapter 3, forced Woolf to consider the connection between writing
for money and women's emancipation. Although Woolf is often cele-
brated as the champion of women's professional involvement with
literature, her representation of the relationship between women writers
and working women reveals in fact a constant attempt to differentiate
between the two. Chapter 3 will focus in particular on the relationship
between audience and speaker inscribed in some of Woolf's most famous
speeches, from A Room to `Professions for Women', and will compare it
to her representation of the audience's point of view in `Memories of a
Working Women's Guild'. It will then turn on to Three Guineas to
analyse how Woolf renounced any attempt at reconciling women wri-
ters and working women in the late 1930s and how this renunciation
produced a radical restriction of her intended audience to `the daughters
of educated men who do not need to earn their living'. At the rhetorical
level, this inscription of the split between women writers and working
women breaks apart the synthesis of argument and fiction that Woolf
had produced in A Room and `Professions for Women' and which had
found its figurative expression in the image of the woman novelist
fishing along the banks of the imagination. This splitting-up process
can be witnessed in the pages of Three Guineas, where words and images
are separated by a gap that is as profound as the gulf that divides the
daughters of educated men from their brothers and fathers.
Chapter 4 continues the analysis of the relationship between text and
image that was initiated by the use of the Spanish photographs in Three
Guineas by focusing first on Woolf's memoirs, `A Sketch of the Past', and
then on Orlando. The inclusion of these works within a study of the
essays indicates both the extreme flexibility of the genre itself and the
ways in which the historiographic concerns that animated Woolf's cri-
tical writings were not confined to them but tended to spill over into
other, often unclassifiable texts. Woolf's extensive use of visual meta-
phors can in fact only be understood in the light of the reflections on
the form of the sketch which organise her memoirs, where the sketch is
seen as Woolf's own way of, as she puts it, `marking the past'. Her
explanations of this tendency are, as it is appropriate for the memoirs,
autobiographical, indicating once again the emergence of that anxiety
about the dangers of `writing essays about oneself' that we saw in the
diary entry for June 1923. What is crucial, though, is that this anxiety
which in the diary entry referred to the status of modernist fiction, in
the memoirs becomes an anxiety about the permanence of memory and
its veracity.
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20 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Orlando in its turn shows how those anxieties were made productive
for Woolf by defining a new genre of writing, the fictional (auto)bio-
graphy. It is read here as a re-inscription of Woolf's own personal history
within the larger tableau of the history of literature in a way that con-
flates the distinctions between private and public, shared and individual
that will become so troublesome for Woolf in the 1930s and early 1940s.
This chapter focuses on the ways in which Orlando plays against each
other the conventions of different genres and discourses ± biography,
historical romance and fiction ± and yet manages to retain as operative
some of the constitutive features of those genres. In particular, it argues
that Orlando uses the trope of marriage to contain and limit the signific-
ance of Woolf's own relationship to Vita Sackville-West, which the book
translates from lesbianism into androgyny in order to make it compa-
tible with heterosexuality as a legal institution.
Chapter 5 then turns to analyse Woolf's more explicit reflections on
questions of historiography by returning to A Room and its privileging of
fictional rather than historiographic discourse. This chapter reveals the
other side of the erosion of generic boundaries performed by Woolf in
her writing and shows how Woolf actively relished the possibility of re-
inventing history in `Lives of the Obscure' as an occasion for hinting at
and suggesting those things which she felt could not be said directly or
outside the boundaries of fictional discourse. It is as the chronicler of the
`obscure' and of women's forgotten lives that Woolf has perhaps been
identified more clearly as the founding pioneer of feminist literary
history. But her own analysis of the way in which her historical imagi-
nation works in `A Sketch of the Past' also indicates that Woolf perceived
this recourse to fiction as problematic, often dismissing the little cameos
that resulted from it as the symptoms of an artistic failure.
This is one of the least well-known sides of Woolf's work but, as I
explain in Chapter 5, a fundamental addition to any attempt at under-
standing her contribution to debates about the possibility of writing a
specifically feminist type of literary history. Woolf's ambivalence
towards the kind of textual strategies she deployed throughout her
career and for which she is often celebrated as `the mother of us all'28
by feminist critics emerges only in some of the most marginal of her
critical writings and especially in the essays that reflect upon the
relationship between painting and literature. These writings reveal her
discomfort with a purely formalist understanding of art that is intrinsic-
ally linked to the intervention of class structures within English litera-
ture. In fact the imagination on which Woolf relies to bring back to
life the forgotten and marginal figures of history is here revealed as a
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Introduction 21
hopelessly limited faculty whose arena of intervention is strictly defined
by the artist's position within a class-system that Woolf describes as a
cluster of `glass boxes', invisible and yet isolating.
This failure of the imagination in transcending its own historical
situation represents a critique of the kind of classicist aesthetic that
guided Woolf's diffidence towards the autobiographical impulse and
her chastisement of Charlotte BronteÈ's thinly disguised identification
with Jane Eyre. It explains the difficulties encountered by Woolf and by
her feminist supporters in articulating the intersection between issues of
class and of gender in her work,29 but also reveals Woolf as keenly aware
of the sociological inflections carried by any form of writing, at least as a
reader if not always as a writer. When feminism and history meet in
Woolf's non-fiction, the question of class is always there, underlying
many of her chosen strategies of argumentation and shaping the very
angle of vision from which history is perceived and re-written. This
hidden and yet always present thorn in the side might in fact be the
most important of Woolf's legacies to feminist criticism itself.
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1
Eccentric Histories
Virginia Woolf Practising
Virginia Woolf started her career as a professional writer in December
1904, with the publication of a cluster of articles that appeared in the
women's page of the Guardian, a clerical weekly.1 She was then Virginia
Stephen, aged 22, and just recovering from the nervous breakdown that
followed the death of her father in February of that year. Her introduc-
tion to the Guardian had been fostered by her friend Violet Dickinson,
who put her in touch with Mrs Lyttleton, the editor of the women's
page. Between 1904 and 1907 Stephen2 contributed more than thirty
articles to the Guardian on a disparate range of subjects and books. She
wrote personal essays on the death of her dog and on laughter, reviews
of Jane Carlyle's letters and Henry James's essays, an obituary of Caroline
Emelia Stephen, her `Quaker' aunt, and the review of a `how-to-do'
manual for aspiring young writers, reviews of biographical studies and
of `light' contemporary novels.
Writing for this `pretty dull clerical newspaper' (E 1, xii) exercised
Stephen, who often complains in her letters of Mrs Lyttelton's editorial
interventions and of the need to mould her own writing to suit the
moralising tone of the paper and the expectations of its readers, which
she dubbed `the Parsonesses' (L 1, 178). Her contributions to the paper
dwindled as she developed her association with the Times Literary Sup-
plement, which was to become the main outlet for her journalism
throughout her life. Her first article for the TLS appeared in 1905, after
she had been introduced to Bruce Richmond, the editor, in the course of
a dinner party given by friends of Violet Dickinson's in January 1905.
Initially her contributions to the TLS consisted mainly of short notices
that were made up of a very quick summary of the content of the book
23
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24 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
and a few words of evaluation. Between 1905 and 1906 she wrote over a
dozen of these, serving a kind of apprenticeship in the paper which soon
led her to be commissioned longer articles on prominent literary figures
such as Wordsworth (`Wordsworth and the Lakes', 1906, E 1, 105±9),
Sidney (`Philip Sidney', 1907, 139±43), Shelley (`Shelley and Elizabeth
Hitchener', 1908, 174±8), Christina Rossetti (`Letters of Christina Ros-
setti', 1908, 225±7), and Gissing (`The Novels of George Gissing', 1912,
355±62).3
But this attention to established authors was complemented by other
articles on biographies, memoirs and letters of more minor figures, some
of which appeared in the TLS but most of which were published in `The
Book on the Table' series of the Cornhill Magazine, of which Leslie
Stephen had himself been an editor from 1871 to 1882. Throughout
1908 Virginia Stephen alternated with Lady Robert Cecil, with whom
she shared the series, in writing for the Cornhill on books which should
have been chosen by them but were, as Andrew McNeillie points out, in
fact often imposed on them by Reginald Smith, the editor of the Corn-
hill. Stephen wrote six articles for `The Book on the Table', reviewing
memoirs (`The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt', E 1, 164±71; `The Memoirs
of Lady Dorothy Neville', 178±83), biography (`John Delane', 188±94; `A
Week at the White House', 204±10; `Louise de La VallieÁre', 215±20), and
journals (`The Journal of Elizabeth Lady Holland', 230±9). In 1909 she
submitted to Smith `Memoirs of a Novelist' (SF, 69±79), where she pre-
tended to review the non-existent biography of a fictional character. The
fictional review was rejected by Smith and signalled the end of her
association with the Cornhill.
Besides writing for the Guardian, the TLS and the Cornhill Stephen
occasionally contributed articles to other journals, from the Academy &
Literature, which in 1905 published her first signed article (`The Decay of
Essay-writing', E 1, 24±7), to the National Review, which accepted `Street
Music' in the same year but then never employed her again, to the
Speaker, which published three of her articles in 1906. From 1909 to
1912, though, she wrote exclusively for the TLS but not in the same
volume as in previous years. 1905, 1906, 1908 and 1909 were the most
prolific years of the early part of her career as a literary journalist,
yielding respectively 35, 21, 19 and 16 articles each. From 1910 to
1912 she produced only 7 articles, partly due to a recurrence of her
mental illness but mainly because she was busy re-writing and
revising her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was submitted to Duck-
worth in 1912 but whose publication was delayed by Woolf's illness
until 1915.
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Eccentric Histories 25
In many ways, the year 1912 works, then, as a sort of caesura in
Woolf's career and personal life, a pause which is also a break changing
the places where the accents fall in our reading of her work.4 It marks a
change of name from the Virginia Stephen of articles and reviews to the
Virginia Woolf of novels, short stories and feminist pamphlets. This
change in the status of her signature as an author corresponds to a
change of legal status from `spinster' (as registered in her marriage
certificate) to married woman, from daughter of Leslie Stephen to wife
of `a penniless Jew' (L 1, 500), as she put it in her letters announcing her
engagement to Leonard. It is also the beginning, though, of a protracted
period of mental illness during which she is said to have suffered of
hallucinations, mania, depression, violent revulsion of her husband
first, then of her nurses, as well as making a serious attempt at taking
her own life. By bringing together marriage, authorship and `madness'
this year signals also the symbolic beginning of a certain way of reading
Woolf that concentrates specifically on questions of sexual difference
and sexuality, writing and repression, madness and femininity.5
But if 1912 can be seen as the beginning of a life and career that we
have come to recognise as Woolf's own, this leaves open the question of
how should we read the work that preceded her emergence as, in Rachel
Bowlby's phrase, the `exemplary woman writer' of the modernist per-
iod.6 Her early childhood and adolescence, with their traumatic losses
and intimations of child abuse, have been extensively investigated and
become part of the critical knowledge that informs the reading of her
work.7 But the period from 1904 to 1912 remains uneasily suspended
between the `life' and the `work', a hybrid that appears to have no
connotations of its own and tends to be subsumed under the early
history of the `Bloomsbury Group'. Hermione Lee's recent biography
of Woolf, for instance, fragments this period into a series of changes and
experiments in the attempt to break up the chronological sequence of
conventional biography into a series of thematic lines. This stress on the
birth of Bloomsbury represents also Woolf's own preferred self-narrative,
which will become a few years later part of the mythology surrounding
the group and Woolf's relations to it.8 That this was her own narrative
does not, however, necessarily bind her readers to its acceptance as
the only possible one or even as an account of events `as they
happened'.
The temptation when faced with such an amorphous and unremarked
time is of course to reverse the terms of discussions and claim for it a
significance that is both historical and theoretical, a sort of `blind spot'
in the reception of Woolf's work that needs to be brought to light,
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26 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
examined and removed. In this reversal of current critical paradigms
that privilege the work of later years, Woolf's early years as a professional
writer might come to be seen as the germs of her future developments.
They all show the beginning of her interest in the tangential and
obscure figures of literary history, the development of that ironic twist
that is typical of her critical persona, the blend of autobiographical and
critical elements that were to characterise her later essays. If her short
notices for the TLS and the Guardian give, by their nature, little indica-
tions of the directions her writing will take, longer pieces such as `The
Sister of Frederic the Great' (1906; E 1, 87±91) or `Lady Fanshawe's
Memoirs' (1907; E 1, 143±7) are full of echoes of Woolf's more mature
prose and reflect many of the questions and points of view that in later
years will guide her approach to history and her investigation of
women's place within it.
This search for the beginnings of `Virginia Woolf' as we have come to
know her can in fact be extended as far back as her composition of the
family newspaper, Hyde Park Gates News, which Leila Brosnan has ana-
lysed as evidence of Woolf's early consciousness of `the theoretical and
practical implications of writing essays . . . as well as professional journal-
ism'.9 Other, recent studies of Woolf's essays and criticism also share this
stress on the essential continuity of her writing career, linking together
beginnings and ends under the aegis of Woolf's continuous interest in
the intersection between literary history and gender.10 This approach
has the obvious advantage of confirming our current views of
who `Virginia Woolf' was and what constitutes her importance for
feminist literary criticism. But precisely because of its reassuring char-
acter, it raises important questions about the scopes and methods of
feminist criticism and its role in establishing Woolf as a literary and
cultural icon.
Some of the questions about literary canons, aesthetic values and
gender issues which are now explicitly and implicitly raised by feminist
readings of her early writings were familiar to Woolf herself in her
practice as a critic and reviewer. Intensely preoccupied with the process
that determines the value of a writer's work, Woolf often found a way of
articulating her concerns by writing and thinking about another kind of
literary icon, the Jane Austen whom she felt had been quite literally
canonised by the male critical establishment of her day. In her 1922
review of a posthumous edition of Austen's first work, Love and Freind-
ship, Woolf set out to warn her readers against the dangers of being
suffocated by the smothering embrace of received critical opinion,
which she compares to the comforting layers of bedclothes on a cold
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Eccentric Histories 27
summer night, reassuring and yet excessive. `All over England for the
past ten or twenty years,' Woolf continues, `the reputation of Jane
Austen has been accumulating on top of us like these same quilts and
blankets' (`Jane Austen Practising', E 3, 331), to the point where any
attempt at reading her work without being influenced by her growing
reputation has come to require `a frightful effort' (332).
Love and Freindship provides for Woolf precisely the opportunity of
sliding off from underneath the oppressive weight of idolatry and read-
ing `Jane Austen before she was the great Jane Austen of mythology'
(332). This vision of Austen `practising' the rudiments of her art repres-
ents then a chance to dig beneath the brilliant, perfected surface of her
masterpieces, revealing that, as Woolf will put it in a later essay, she `was
no conjuror after all' (`Jane Austen', 1925, E 4, 149), toiling on version
after version of her stories until her sentences acquired that apparently
effortless elegance which Woolf herself was later to celebrate in A Room.
In the 1922 essay, though, this promise of a different critical angle on
Austen's work is not delivered, as Woolf concedes that, even as `a girl of
seventeen', Austen was `not writing to amuse the schoolroom' (E 3,
332), but was already `trying over a few bars of the music for Pride and
Prejudice and Emma' (334). Woolf admits that this kind of reading back
into Austen's early work the seeds of her later ones might be the effect of
her canonisation as `the most perfect artist in English literature' (332).
Yet she insists that Austen's `music' has remained untouched by her
elevation to iconic status and can still be heard over and above the
chorus of approbation provided by `the elderly and distinguished', by
`the clergy and the squirearchy' (331).
The language and practices of criticism, and especially of academic
criticism, have changed considerably since Woolf's time, so that it is
now unlikely to find a critic setting out in search of the beginnings of
Woolf's `music'. But the sense of continuity, of persistence of voice that
is embodied in Woolf's metaphor keeps on guiding our reading of her
disparate and heterogeneous oeuvre. Even critics such as Rachel Bowlby,
who have argued for the radical irreducibility of Woolf's work to any one
single scheme of thought, have admitted that the `gesture of deification'
is nearly impossible to resist and goes by its very nature with the history
of Woolf's reception.11 Others still have suggested that Woolf's canoni-
sation is a direct result of reading her work through certain kinds of
critical frames, of historico-empirical and Anglo-American extraction.
To these they have opposed alternative (mainly French) types of femin-
ist theory as the foundation for a different kind of Woolf criticism that
would be capable of attending to those uncomfortable, uncomforting
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28 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
moments in her writing where her identity as `the mother of us all'
becomes difficult to sustain.12
In her critique of Jane Marcus's insistence on staging Woolf as the
origin of feminist criticism, Bette London has suggested that the places
of discomfort in the iconic celebration of Woolf's work might be located
precisely in the question of the continuity of her voice over and against
the interruptions and disjunctions that characterise her writing and the
history of its reception. She points out that there are many points in
Woolf's own work, both in the novels and in her critical essays, where
the notion of voice itself comes under investigation as a far from natural
construct whose relationship to identity is heavily structured by sexual
difference. Encapsulated in the poetics of `not speaking out', Woolf's
interrogation of the notion of voice is for London a form of `resistance to
the appropriation of one's words' which nevertheless `remains incom-
plete, poised precariously between subversive mastery and submissive
consent',13 a gesture towards feminist critique which, at the same time,
refrains from articulating the exact positioning of that critique vis-aÁ-vis
the notion of authority.
The precarious character of Woolf's critical strategy is, as London
points out, perhaps best illustrated by her often-cited comments about
the connection between `tea-table training' and her criticism. Looking
back upon the early part of her career towards the end of her life, Woolf
lamented in her memoirs, `When I read my old Literary Supplement
articles, I lay the blame for their suavity, their politeness, their sidelong
approach, to my tea-table training. I see myself not reviewing a book,
but handing a plate of buns to shy young men . . .' Having established
this parallel that casts the manners and mores of upper middle class
Victorian society as a negative influence on her own critical writings,
Woolf nevertheless proceeds then to undermine her own statement,
adding that she is `not sure' whether that kind of training is `a
disadvantage in writing'. `The surface manner,' Woolf goes on, in fact
`allows one, as I have often found, to slip in things that would be
inaudible if one marched straight up and spoke out loud' (MB, 150).
London's reading of this passage as exemplary of the kind of problems
bequeathed by Woolf to feminist criticism has been more recently
revised by Leila Brosnan in Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays and Journalism
(1997), the first critical monograph to analyse Woolf's non-fiction from
a feminist perspective14. Following the development of Woolf's prose
style from the family newspaper to her career as a professional literary
journalist, Brosnan has argued that Woolf's `sidelong approach' took
shape through a life-long engagement with the demands and
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Eccentric Histories 29
expectations of her editors, which led her to deploy `a language of
duplicity, a double-voiced ability' to fit `her complex and often con-
demnatory meanings . . . under the cover of superficial respectability'.15
For Brosnan, then, although Woolf's essayistic style is itself split between
the surface of her pronouncements and their actual meaning, its con-
tinuity through time is guaranteed by her relentless fight against the
strictures of censorship, both overt and covert, and of propriety.
In stressing the effects of censorship upon the development of a
critical persona marked by irony and satire, Brosnan's interpretation of
Woolf's critical practice echoes the young writer's own record of clashes
with the `official eye' (L 1, 178), that is, with editors who tried to
influence her reviews, censored specific uses of words, cut her pieces
down without consultation or rejected her work as not `academic' (188).
Faced with such obtuseness, Virginia Stephen vented her frustration in
her private writings, where she can often be found parodying the `flu-
ent, rounded style' of her published essays and contrasting it with the
`curt and mordant' manner of her letters (198). This self-consciousness
about the different sides of her writing persona gives then a different
picture from the one Woolf will provide more than thirty years later in
her comments about tea-table training. It shows Virginia Stephen dis-
tancing herself from the restrictions and conventions required by con-
temporary reviewing practices, which she treats as if they were a mask
behind which her true self and opinions remained untouched.
This separation between private and public forms of writing explains
the somewhat old-fashioned character of her early essays. Pieces such as
`Street Music' (1905; E 1, 27±32) or `The Value of Laughter' (58±60) are
well-written in a conventional, Edwardian way, with sentences rolling
smoothly after each other, exemplifying the kind of `suavity' and con-
centration on the surface of writing which Woolf was quick to condemn
in other essayists.16 In reading them now, outside of their original
historical context and against the background of her identification
with a markedly modernist and feminist type of writing, we are
reminded of the fact that at the time when she started writing most of
the works we consider to be central to the modernist canon lay still
unpublished and, indeed, unwritten.17 Of Woolf's future friends and
associates, only E. M. Forster was already active as a novelist at the
time, with the publication of Where Angels Fear to Tread in 1905. D. H.
Lawrence, with whom Woolf will later recognise a certain affinity of
intents, only published Sons and Lovers in 1913, while Conrad, whose
Nostromo appeared in 1904, was discounted by Woolf on the grounds of
his nationality. On the other hand, the writers who were being
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30 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
published around this time included precisely that triumvirate of
Edwardians who will famously become the targets of Woolf's criticism
in `Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown': H. G. Wells's Kipps appeared in 1905,
John Galsworthy published The Man of Property the following year, while
Bennett's Anna of the Five Towns had appeared in 1901 and The Old
Wives' Tale was published in 1908.
This historical and cultural situation of transition, of pre-modern and
post-Victorian literature and culture is clearly perceptible in the
`absurdly formal'18 tone and style of the early essays, which are in
many ways closer to those of Woolf's Victorian progenitors than to the
ironies and seduction of, say, A Room. It explains Woolf's discomfort,
more than thirty years later, at the sight of her youthful self, as well as
the link she establishes between her own essay-writing and a culture and
tradition that elsewhere she emphatically rejected as not her own. And
yet, the reluctance to dismiss that kind of double-writing that is in
evidence in the memoirs also indicates an understanding of the
dynamic between private and public statements, indirection and direc-
tion that is more subtle and complicated than the opposition between
the `curt and mordant' manner and the `fluid, rounded style' she set up
in her early letters.
This more subtle interaction between different styles and forms is also
reflected in Woolf's writing practice, which shows that in the early
stages of her career she was not always working within the parameters
of genre but rather wrote through and across a variety of texts, from the
autobiographical to the epistolary to the descriptive to the journalistic.
Stephen's diaries, letters, travel journals and short stories are in fact
characterised by such an extreme fluidity of generic boundaries that
their identification with any of the chosen categories must per force
remain precarious and a matter of argument. Her early journals, for
instance, are very different from the confessional, intimate kind of
diary that she was to start writing in 1915. They are rather exercise
books, where Stephen tried a variety of forms and voices, alternating
descriptive pieces to self-reflection to journalistic spoofs.19 This record
of a painstaking apprenticeship in professional writing constituted for
Stephen a reservoir of potential articles into which she dipped quite
often, modelling her published essays onto descriptions of travels and
visits that had already been sketched out in the journals or reported in
her letters.20
But the most sustained and most visible of these generic cross-overs ±
and the one which was later to become one of the distinguishing fea-
tures of her work ± was not that between journals and journalism but
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Eccentric Histories 31
rather that between fiction, which at this stage in Stephen's career
meant mainly short stories, and essay-writing. The earliest of the short
stories date back to 1906 and were composed during Stephen's stay in
Norfolk. The style and subject of these four stories, [`Phyllis and Rosa-
mond'], [`The Mysterious Case of Miss V.'], [`The Journal of Mistress Joan
Martyn'], [`A Dialogue Upon Mount Pentelicus'] (SF, 17±68), clearly
indicate that at this point Stephen was relying on her two-year experi-
ence as a writer of essays to forge her path into the writing of fiction. All
of the stories are introduced by a discursive paragraph that eases the
reader into the story rather than presenting him or her with one of those
abrupt beginnings in media res that are characteristic of Woolf's later
prose. These introductions address the reader as a `you' in a way that
transgresses the fundamental differentiation between narrative and dis-
course in terms of the disposition of the positions of address.21 As a
consequence, the narrator does not occupy the conventional position of
the omniscient observer, but becomes herself almost a character in the
story, much in the same way as Elia or Sir Roger de Coverley work as
fictional personae in Charles Lamb's essays (1820±33) or Addison's and
Steele's Spectator articles (1711±14).
The exchange between fiction and essay-writing, though, never
worked just in one direction for Woolf. In fact it was only after she
started writing Melymbrosia sometime in 1908 that what we have come
to recognise as her characteristic essayistic persona begins to emerge.
Essays such as `The Memoirs of Lady Dorothy Neville' (1908; E 1, 178±
83), `ChaÃteau and Country Life' (1908; 222±4), `The Duke and Duchess
of Newcastle' (1911; 345±51) show Stephen appropriating for her critical
writing the freedom of invention and expression that fiction had taught
her. Unlike the 1906 short stories, which were introduced by a discursive
or analytical preamble, these later essays open up with a fictional scene
that carries with it a sense of immediacy which was not there in her
earlier essays and which helps her to establish a sense of intimacy with
her readers that bypasses the formalities of literary and critical conven-
tions.
The mixture of fictional and analytic discourse that is typical of these
essays, and their tendency to establish a sense of dialogue with their
readers, show that Stephen's development as a writer of essays was quite
consciously modelled on the Platonic dialogues. In a review of Vernon
Lee's essays on culture and aesthetics, Stephen described the structure of
the dialogues as a progressive ascent through `pages of questions and
answers' to `the constructive part' of the argument, which is normally
given not through analysis but as `a myth or in the words of some wise
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32 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
woman' (`Art and Life', 1909, 279).22 This stress on the fictional or
mythological character of the Platonic dialogue reflected Stephen's dis-
like of the analytical mode of writing as exemplified by her father's
writings, which she felt lacked `imagination' (L 1, 285). But the fact
that Stephen at this time saw fiction as a sort of counterpart to the driest
forms of literary criticism also indicates the extent to which she herself
remained unclear about the future direction of her career when she
started publishing essays and reviews. In fact for some time before she
started writing Melymbrosia in 1908, her declared ambition was to write
history rather than fiction (190), but a kind of history which she was
striving to infuse, like Miss Merridew in [`The Journal of Mistress Joan
Martyn'], with the breath of living life rather than with the hard con-
tours of facts. As she progressively invested more and more into the
writing of fiction, though, the project of writing history was pushed to
the background and, although Woolf will return to it many times during
her lifetime, `the real historical work' (L 1, 202) which she first envisaged
in 1905 will remain the great unfinished project of her career.
Traces of this unrealised project can be found scattered throughout
Woolf's critical work. After writing The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and
Day (1919), in 1919 she started to consider a book of criticism which was
initially conceived not as a collection of critical essays, but as a more
connected overview of English literature, from its pre-history to the
present day. Today the remnants of this project, and the difficulties
which for Woolf were associated with it, are still visible in `Reading'
(1919; E 3, 141±61), an essay which was never published during Woolf's
lifetime or in Leonard's editions. `Reading' weaves together different
temporal planes, from the passage of time within a day to the course
of human life from childhood to maturity and old age, interlacing these
different stages with the history of English literature. According to
Andrew McNeillie, it represents the first germ of the critical book that
was eventually to become the first Common Reader (xvi). It shows Woolf
trying to grapple with the difficulties raised by attempting to tell the
story of the development of literature in a country where `the art of
speech came late', making it impossible to access its pre-Renaissance
literature through language and dialogue. As a consequence of this
absence, the landscape of this period is perceived by Woolf as a sort of
silent film, with `knights and ladies' wearing `apricot . . . dresses' and `gilt
crimson' and moving with the hieratic gestures of picture portraits: `it is,
after all, a question of seeing them' (143).23
This separation between sight on one side and speech on the other
was for Woolf a historiographic problem which required the moulding
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Eccentric Histories 33
of a critical language and form capable of articulating the silences of
literary history. In `Reading' the problem is not so much resolved as
given a formulation, as Woolf attempts to convey at one and the same
time both the historical narrative of the development of English literat-
ure and the experience of reading the sources on which that narrative is
based. In the course of the years, this attempt at keeping the broader
picture in the background will progressively be abandoned and Woolf
will come to rely more and more upon the immediacy of the reading
experience as a way of enabling the historical imagination to bypass the
obstacle presented by the fact that `speech came late to England'. In this,
she looks back upon a whole tradition of Victorian and late Victorian
historiography, which believed that history must be absorbed through
the act of the imagination, must in fact be relived in order to be com-
prehended.24 This conviction leads her to try and establish with her
readers the same sense of intimacy that pervades her own relationship to
books, which, as she often remarks in the essays, are not so much objects
as subjects, friends and confidants.25
The process of forging a critical language imbued with intimacy and
immediacy was, however, far from straightforward and led Woolf to
experiment with a variety of solutions before she arrived at the idea of
the common reader as its realisation. Throughout the early 1920s she
kept on experimenting with different forms and languages for her crit-
ical writings, much in the same way as she tried out different ways of
writing fiction through the short stories that subsequently led to Jacob's
Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). During this period Woolf became
increasingly self-conscious about the interaction of analytical and fic-
tional discourse she had identified in Plato, often including within her
pieces explicit comparisons between their respective domains. The most
sustained of these comparisons occurred perhaps in `Byron and Mr
Briggs' (1922; E 3, 473±99), the draft of the introductory essay to her
projected book on reading which will later metamorphose into the first
Common Reader.26
Like the earlier `Memoirs of a Novelist', `Byron and Mr Briggs' is
framed as the fictional review of an equally fictional book, The Flame
of Youth, a contemporary first novel which the narrator is preparing to
evaluate. Within this frame Woolf inserts a number of scenes of reading
centred around a variety of texts, from Byron's letters to an anonymous
medieval poem. Each of these scenes is meant to illustrate the difference
between the book lover's approach to literature, exemplified by the Mr
Briggs of the title, and that of the scholar or critic. Claiming that the
reviewer's task is to convey the common reader's experience rather than
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34 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
that of the critic's, Woolf defines it as a reading which is done `according
to the needs of the moment' (E 3, 492) and goes from book to book in
search of complementary feelings that, when put side by side, `form a
nucleus' which then grows into `a vast body of emotions which
increases according to our capacity to feel' (488). Through this stress
upon the common reader's need to `make a whole' (482), reading is then
compared to the activity of making up stories about people one over-
hears while travelling on a train, a piecing together of enigmatic scraps
of language and meaning into a coherent story that might or might not
be an accurate reflection of the facts.
Woolf will return to the image of the train carriage a few months later
in the more famous `Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', where the experience
of observing one's fellow passengers is explicitly offered as a metaphor
for novel-writing. The intervention of the comparison between reading
as a critical activity and the scene in the railway carriage in `Byron and
Mr Briggs' indicates then that at this point in time she was striving to
define a form of criticism that would effectively be indistinguishable
from the writing of fiction. In this, `Byron and Mr Briggs' looks forward
to some of Woolf's more extreme experiments with the mixture of essay
and fiction which she will attempt in many of her better-known works.
It is peopled with fictional characters from her early and later novels
(Terence Hewet, Clarissa Dalloway) and alternates fictional scenes and
critical commentary in a way which anticipates The Pargiters, the essay-
novel which Woolf will start about ten years later, but never finish.
Closer in time, the dramatisation of different critical and readerly posi-
tions through the dialogue between Mr Briggs and the narrator/reviewer
has echoes both of Stephen's earlier pieces, from the short story [`A
Dialogue upon Mount Pentelicus'] (1906; SF, 63±8) to the essay `A Talk
About Memoirs' (1920; E 3, 180±6), and of the later, and seminal, essay
`Mr Conrad: A Conversation' (1923; E 3, 376±80).
By Woolf's own account, `Mr Conrad: A Conversation' represents a
turning-point in her search for an alternative form of criticism that
would cross over the distinction between essay and fiction and thus
give voice to what the form of the essay on its own could not articulate.
The article appeared in the Nation & Athenaeum in September 1923, and
was used by Woolf to test the viability of her own version of the Platonic
dialogues, where the argument of the essay is constructed through the
exchange between two fictional characters. It features Penelope Otway,
whom Woolf describes as `the oldest unmarried daughter' who `had
always, since the age of seven, been engaged in reading the classics'
(376), and her friend David Lowe, who has received a more traditional,
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Eccentric Histories 35
institutional kind of education. Like a female version of Socrates, Penel-
ope challenges her friend's obsolete and fixed ideas about the right of
modern writers to aspire to the status of a `classic' and makes a compel-
ling case for enlisting Conrad among them. Penelope Otway is herself a
figure who will become increasingly familiar to the readers of Woolf's
fiction, a sort of early incarnation of Eleanor Pargiter who functions in
this dialogue as the antagonist of received opinion and traditional
truths and the champion of individuality and first-hand experience.
Like Mr Briggs before her, she represents yet another embodiment of
that idea of the common reader which, in one form or another, returns
with insistence throughout Woolf's critical writings of the early 1920s.
The links between `Mr Conrad: A Conversation' and the first Common
Reader are confirmed by a diary entry, where Woolf reports her reaction
to the reception of the article and, at the same time, announces the
discovery of the idea of the common reader for her book of criticism.
Taken aback by the lack of response elicited by the Conrad article, which
she claims `[n]o one has mentioned', Woolf resolves to turn it into a
positive spur, and comments that `[a] cold douche should be taken (and
generally is) before beginning a book', as it `has the effect of making me
more definite and outspoken in my style'. The net result of what Woolf
sees as the failure of the article on Conrad is then to push her straight
into the writing of that critical book which she had been projecting
throughout the early 1920s. `At any rate,' she announces in the same
entry, `I began for the 5th but last time, I swear, what is now to be called
The Common Reader' (D 2, 265).
This bold announcement of the birth of the Common Reader on 5
September 1923 represents in fact the culmination of a process of reflec-
tion on and experimentation with the forms of criticism that had occu-
pied Woolf since at least 1919. It shows that the idea of the common
reader as the thread that links together different aspects of Woolf's
critical practice emerged as a compromise solution between more tradi-
tional forms of criticism on the one hand and Woolf's more extreme
experimentations on the other. A few weeks before announcing her final
choice, Woolf had in fact rejected the collection of essays as `an inartistic
method' and had sketched out in the diary the outline of a book of
criticism that differed widely from the format of the first Common
Reader. Searching for a `device' or technique that would turn the frag-
mentary character of unrelated essays into a well-structured whole,
Woolf toyed with the idea of enclosing her essays within the fictional
frame of an `Otway conversation'27 taking place among `a family which
reads the papers'. `The main advantage' of such a `device', she remarked,
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36 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
`would be that I could then comment, & add what I had had to leave
out, or failed to get in' (D 2, 261), indicating once more that the inter-
vention of fiction within a critical discourse would work on two differ-
ent levels at the same time. It would provide the fragmentary and
scattered pieces of her critical vision with a more unified form, while
at the same time giving her the space and the means of going beyond
the `suavity' and `surface manner' of her TLS leaders.
But as Woolf went on to acknowledge, this was a rather ambitious
project that `might run away with me; it will take time' (261), subtract-
ing energies from the writing of fiction which was engrossing her at this
time. The plan was therefore rejected, the Common Reader was conceived
and realised in its place, and for the rest of the 1920s Woolf showed no
sign of still considering problematic the issue of the relationship
between essay and fiction in her criticism. More preoccupied with
experiments around the form of the elegy (for To the Lighthouse
(1927)), of biography (in Orlando (1928)) and of the dramatic monolo-
gue (in The Waves (1931)), Woolf will only return to reflect upon the
interaction of essay and fiction in texts such as A Room (1929), but,
especially, in The Pargiters (1931±33), where she attempted to devise
the form of the `essay-novel' to accommodate her insights into women's
relationship to history and politics. That she will abandon that project
too suggests that the question of the relationship between essay and
fiction represented for Woolf a returning problem which she felt
compelled to address but to which she could not find a satisfactory
solution.
Eccentrics, Obscure and Anon
The search for a different form of criticism that would combine fiction
and essays was motivated for Woolf by the desire to give a voice to those
parts of literary history that could not find a representation in conven-
tional accounts. In `Reading' the silences of literary history had been
identified by Woolf with a sort of prehistory that could be captured
visually but not in writing. In her project for an `Otway conversation'
those spaces or gaps were most explicitly linked to a distinction between
private and public spheres, between the kind of intimate conversation
that takes place around a family reading the newspapers and the voice of
official criticism as embodied by Woolf's own articles for the TLS. But at
the same time as Woolf was occupied with her experiments in the form
of conversations between fictional characters, she was articulating a
different way of bringing into her criticism what was usually
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Eccentric Histories 37
marginalised and excluded from literary history. This consisted in shift-
ing the focus of interest from the question of which form to give to her
criticism to the issue of which personalities and whose work should be
deemed worthy of critical attention.
The two processes were in fact always connected in Woolf's work, as
the question of whom to include in her account of literary history
automatically called up for her the issue of how to articulate the voices
that had previously been excluded or marginalised by it. The dilemma
was already there in `Mr Conrad: A Conversation', where the fictional
dialogue was used by Woolf to question the construction of the canon of
English literature and the hierarchy of values that gives the status of
classics only to dead authors. Its most explicit articulation, though, is to
be found in Woolf's writings on less prominent and more marginal
figures than Conrad, whom she variously called `the eccentrics' or `the
obscure'. Although the two terms alternated in a chronological
sequence in Woolf's writings, her deployment of them shows consider-
able areas where their meanings overlap, as well as points of differentia –
tion. Between them the eccentrics and the obscure encompass some of
the most crucial stages in Woolf's thinking about historiographic ques-
tions and will lead her to formulate the idea of Anon as a point of
intersection between historiography and sexual difference.
In Woolf's earliest diaries and letters the problem of the literary canon
and of the aesthetic and cultural values that define it is generally called
up implicitly through her fascination with figures who cannot be easily
accommodated into pre-existing schemes. In a 1912 letter to Lytton
Strachey, who was himself intensely interested in questions of biogra-
phy and history, she asserted that `the most interesting thing to observe'
from a historical point of view are not the `distinguished spirits' such as
Donne, Meredith or E. M. Forster `but the humble ones, the slightly
touched, the eccentric' (L 1, 499). Although this letter is important for
the way in which it connects eccentricity to madness (the `slightly
touched'), it does not represent her earliest definition of the eccentrics.
In 1910, her essay on Lady Hester Stanhope had made clear that the
label had been appropriated from the Dictionary of National Biography
whose writers, as she puts it, `have a pleasant way of summing up a life,
before they write it, in one word, thus ± „Stanhope, Lady Hester Lucy
(1770±1839), eccentric'' ' (E 1, 325). Woolf's parodic appropriation of the
official definition serves to highlight the element of prejudice and bias
that is inscribed in the label, so that the life is summed up before it is
written, its value fixed before it can be told. At the same time, though,
the essay works to reverse those values which would have Lady
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38 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Stanhope cursorily dismissed as a `slightly touched' noblewoman and
uses her example to question the limits of a historiographic practice that
is bent upon encasing people into pigeonholes.
In her writings about these figures Woolf insists that the pigeonhole
marked `eccentrics' is the least stable of all of them, calling into question
the very possibility of categorising lives and people with absolute cer-
tainty, in a final verdict. In `The Eccentrics' she makes clear that this
most precarious of identities cannot be faked by assuming the external
signs of recognisably unorthodox behaviour, such as `walk[ing] up and
down the Tottenham Court Road wrapped in a towel in imitation of the
Greek' (1919; E 3, 38). The essence of eccentricity in fact lies for Woolf in
the lack of self-consciousness, in the inability to see oneself as reflected
by others, so that `all true eccentrics . . . never for a moment . . . believe
themselves to be eccentric' (38). It is a lack that places the eccentric in a
complete misalignement with the rest of the world, which they consider
to be `cramped and malformed and spiritually decrepit, while they alone
have lived their lives according to the dictates of nature' (38).
Unable and unwilling to subscribe to the rules of human society, the
eccentrics represent then for Woolf the intervention of a natural, unfet-
tered form of identity into a highly codified and regulated world.
Defined by the rest of society as an exception, they see themselves as
the rule perverted by the artificial and assumed identities of the social
world. They thus come to embody a hyperbolic realisation of the notion
of individuality, which stresses the uniqueness and inimitability of
identity in a way that paradoxically highlights its susceptibility to cat-
egorisation, to becoming a type and a caricature of individuality itself.
As Woolf points out, `a touch of the ridiculous' always seems to accom-
pany the `sublimity' of the eccentric's life. Lady Stanhope's decision to
ride a horse `in the trousers of a Turkish gentleman', for instance, was
undermined by her maid's insistence on retaining the standards of
English life even if she was `dressed in man's clothes [and] expected to
ride like a man' (E 1, 327). Margaret Cavendish's appearances in London
were greeted by a crowd of laughing boys and courtiers, whose jeers were
then recorded for posterity in the biting mockery of Pepys's diaries (`The
Duchess of Newcastle', 1911; E 1, 349). Woolf's own mockery is much
gentler, recognising the Duchess's desire for recognition and her some-
what anachronistic position (she lived `either too late or too soon'
(348)). Only later will it become a curt dismissal relegating `hare-
brained, fantastical Margaret of Newcastle' (RO, 79) and all the other
`solitary great ladies' (82) to the pre-history of the tradition of women's
writing she will outline in A Room.
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Eccentric Histories 39
The space in time and thinking that separates Woolf's early interest in
the eccentrics and their marginalisation in A Room marks a change of
focus in her historiographic projects. Woolf's insistence in 1929 that the
history of women's writing can only be said to have started with the
advent of the middle-class, income-generating Aphra Behn is meant to
empower a wider category of women but carries with it the price of
excising from that history the great aristocratic women she had earlier
described as prime examples of eccentricity.28 In its turn this shift of
emphasis from the aristocracy to the middle classes underlines the con-
nection between eccentricity and class location that is essential to
Woolf's understanding of the term. When writing about Lady Stanhope
and the Duchess of Newcastle in the early 1910s, Woolf had clearly
identified in their nobility a necessary precondition for their eccentric
behaviour and choices, to the point of turning the two terms into near-
synonyms. Lady Stanhope's and the Duchess's aristocratic birth are
described as placing them above the sets of rules that govern the life of
their contemporaries and form the foundations of their deep belief in
their own individuality. Lady Stanhope is said by Woolf to have `had a
conviction of the rights of the aristocracy, and ordered her life from
an eminence which made her conduct almost sublime' (E 1, 326).
Similarly, Margaret Cavendish's shortcomings as a writer, the fanciful
character of her imagery and the lack of logic in her disquisitions, are
imputed to `the irresponsibility of the child and the arrogance of a
Duchess' (E 4, 84).
Although not all of the figures that Woolf treats as belonging to the
eccentrics are aristocrats, there is a clear sense that her definition of
eccentricity overlaps significantly with her understanding of what it
means to belong to an aristocratic family. Describing her early meetings
with Lady Bath and her daughters, Woolf wrote in 1936 that what made
nobility attractive to her was its ability to `breed . . . confidence' (MB,
208) and its consequent `indifference to public opinion' (207). Because
of this disregard for the kind of social conventions that regulated the life
of her upper middle class existence in Kensington, aristocrats represent
for Woolf `human nature in its uncropped, unpruned natural
state.. . . the aristocrat is freer, more natural, more eccentric than we
are' (208). As with her essay on Lady Stanhope and her life in the Middle
East, there are clear echoes here of the freedom of travel and manner
that characterise the life of Woolf's fictional version of the eccentric
aristocrat, Orlando.
But this connection between eccentricity and nobility also brings out
the peculiar dialectic of permanence and evanescence, belonging and
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40 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
individualism which structures the identity of the eccentric for Woolf.
After all, the unthinking and unconscious self-assurance that charac-
terises nobility emerges, as Woolf is quick to point out, from the
permanence of their state, from the `land . . . and country houses' (208)
to which the nobility is wedded and which imprints their identity as
firmly as the land is shaped by their presence. This sense of permanence
was typical of Woolf's understanding of the nobility and found perhaps
its clearest representation in Orlando's near-eternal existence. Histori-
cally, though, it has been analysed as part of the British aristocracy's own
strategy of legitimation, emerging between the end of the eighteenth
and the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when, as David
Cannadine has pointed out, the upper classes found themselves engaged
in a process of radical renewal and re-shaping of their own position
within the burgeoning British Empire.29
If eccentricity represents, then, for Woolf the expression of an extreme
individualism that is unfettered by the constrictions of middle-class
conventions, it is nevertheless steeped in another type of group identity,
that of the family and of the land. Notions of Englishness and of
belonging are as deeply implicated in Woolf's understanding of eccent-
ricity as the idea of marginalisation from the historical process. Review-
ing an account of the history of the Legh's in 1917, Woolf remarked on
the effect that family letters have on the historical perspective. They
show `the indifference of contemporaries to events which to us seem of
the greatest, perhaps of the only, importance' (E 2, 98). This different
type of history has to do more with `men and women in the mass' (E 1,
241) than with the biographies of great men, as Woolf puts it in Jacob's
Room (1922). It is silenced in the historical records that privilege actions
30and events over the longue dureÂe , the sense of continuity through time
which for Woolf was embodied in a community deeply rooted to a
specific place.
This connection between eccentrics, continuity, place and national
identity explains Woolf's desire, as she expressed it in a diary entry of
1915, to write `one day . . . a book of „Eccentrics''' that was to have
included `Mrs Grote.. . . Lady Hester Stanhope. Margaret Fuller. Duchess
of Newcastle. Aunt Julia?' (D 1, 23). Like many other of Woolf's histor-
ical projects, the book was never realised and today we only have frag-
ments of its conception in essays such as `The Eccentrics', which
mentions all of the figures listed by Woolf in the 1915 diary entry as
instances of offbeat, unconvential lives that `must not be forgotten' (E 3,
40). Woolf, though, appears to have herself forgotten about them, since
apart from the essays on Lady Stanhope and Margaret Cavendish which
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Eccentric Histories 41
she had already written before the 1915 diary entry, she subsequently
returned to only one of the figures listed there, the `aunt Julia' whose
inclusion among the eccentrics was marked by doubt.
`Julia Margaret Cameron' (E 4, 375±86) appeared in 1926 as the intro-
duction to a volume of Victorian photographs published by the Hogarth
Press. In it, Woolf described her maternal great-aunt as an eccentric,
over-generous woman living at the heart of a circle of Victorian notables
which included Tennyson, Watts, Burne-Jones and Henry Taylor, who
called it `Pattledom' in reference to the Pattle sisters of whom Cameron
was one (377). The essay opens with the well-known family story of
Cameron's father, whose corpse is said to have burst open of its coffin
during its transport from India to England, revealing the `indomitable
vitality' which also characterises Cameron in Woolf's portrait. But Woolf
also insists that Cameron's inheritance was as much marked by her
father's spirit as by her mother, a French noblewoman descended from
a page of Marie Antoinette who impressed in her daughters `her love of
beauty and her distaste for the cold and formal conventions of English
society' (376).
This heritage of eccentricity, conviviality and disregard for social
conventions can be seen to have marked not just Cameron's life, but
also Woolf's own, forming some of the precedent for the formation of
the Bloomsbury Group in its insistence on the importance of art and
beauty as well as in its experimentation with alternative life-styles. In
her biography of Woolf, Hermione Lee has suggested that the pre-
Raphaelite, mid-Victorian environment of Little Holland House where
Woolf's own mother grew up might be a more appropriate `spiritual
ancestor' to Bloomsbury than the Clapham sect, which is more usually
seen as its most immediate predecessor.31 Woolf was herself keenly
aware of the role played by this environment in the constitution of
her mother's character and life. In her 1940 memoirs, she described it
as `a summer afternoon world', where people sat in the garden sipping
tea while Watts painted and Tennyson read poetry aloud (MB, 87).
Although Woolf acknowledges that the picture is derived from the
memoirs of that time she read in the course of her adult life, she also
remembers being taken as a child to the spot where the house used to be
and observing her mother as she `gave a little spring forward, clapped
her hands, and cried „That was where it was!'' as if a fairyland had
disappeared' (87). For Woolf, Little Holland House came then to symbol-
ise a period of extreme happiness in her mother's life, a sort of Eden on
earth that preceded her widowhood and the aura of mourning and
sadness that will characterise her own memories of Julia.
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42 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
The dynamic of luminosity and obscurity that structures Woolf's
description of her mother's world in the memoirs also suggests some
of the paths through which her interest in eccentricity transformed
itself into a focus upon the forgotten and obscure. The projected book
on the eccentrics was in fact superseded in the 1920s by an exploration
of the other side of the radical individualism she had celebrated in her
essays on eccentric figures. Obscurity and anonymity took the place of
eccentricity in the course of a gradual process that demonstrated that
the semantic catch of the two sets of terms, eccentrics and obscure, did
overlap significantly in Woolf's understanding. As early as 1906 she had
in fact already dramatised the interplay between the two concepts in
one of her first short stories `[The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn]',
whose main narrator, Miss Merridew, is herself presented as the type of
the eccentric `learned lady', who has renounced family and traditional
feminine attachments in order to pursue her interest in the early history
of England. As with all eccentrics in Woolf, Miss Merridew has run foul
of the authorities, in this case the professional historians, who have
sternly criticised her approach and methods as unscholarly. As Woolf
will do years later in `Lives of the Obscure' (1925; E 4, 118±45), Miss
Merridew acknowledges that the criticism is justified, as she has often
used her imagination to fill in the gaps left open by the historical record
and thus bring to life those aspects of the past that would otherwise
have remained beyond the purchase of contemporary readers.32
But if Miss Merridew's approach is itself moulded on Woolf's own, she
is also shown to have a certain romanticised and antiquarian interest in
the past that is implicitly criticised by the attitude of Mr Martyn, the
owner of the fifteenth-century journal which represents Miss Merridew's
invaluable discovery. Slowly but surely Miss Merridew comes to realise
that there is an enormous gulf between her own interest in Mr Martyn's
family history and the way in which Mr Martyn himself relates to that
history. For him, his ancestors and the objects they have left behind are
not segregated into a past that is cut off from the present, but are living
presences with whom he converses, surrounding his daily activities and
his sense of his own history like a sort of halo, a `clear and equable light'
that is `not romantic' but `very sober' (SF, 43±4).33
In many ways Woolf's later shift from eccentricity to obscurity is
embodied in the difference in attitudes that separates Mr Martyn from
Miss Merridew. The transformation undergone by Miss Merridew in the
course of the story charts the progress from a figure of eccentricity (and
self-mockery) to a point of understanding and identification with the
author of the precious journals, the Mistress Joan Martyn of the title
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Eccentric Histories 43
whose account of everyday life in fifteenth-century Norfolk forms the
second part of the story. As the journal is supposed to be Miss Merridew's
transcription of the original manuscript, Miss Merridew herself comes to
work within the story both as a figure of eccentricity and as the pioneer
of that kind of fictional or imaginative reconstruction of the past that
will subsequently be undertaken by Woolf in her own work on the
obscure. The intersection between the two terms that is charted by
this early story is also demonstrated by the fact that `Eleanor Ormerod',
which will appear as one of the three obscure featured in the first
Common Reader, was initially announced by Woolf in her 1919 diary as
a follow up to `The Eccentrics' which, like the previous essay, was to be
offered to the Athenaeum (D 1, 260). In fact, `Miss Ormerod' never
appeared in the Athenaeum and was only published in America in the
Dial five years later.34
This shift from the eccentrics to the obscure also made more explicit
the dialectic of untrammelled individualism and group identity which,
as we saw, linked the eccentrics to the aristocracy in Woolf's conception
of the term. Her interest in forgotten lives and the writings recording
them brought Woolf to question the hierarchy of values that structures
literary history. She warned that the `smaller books' where the lives of
the obscure are embalmed must be read with more, not less, effort than
the great ones, which `we take . . . on trust' (`A Vanished Generation',
1908, E 1, 239). What they yield in reward for their readers' labour are
`sights and voices . . . living things . . . some vague region' which are not
illuminated by `the sharp circle of light cast by one pair of eyes' but
rather by `a whole radiance' that transcends that of individual vision
(240). This process of undermining the individual as the centre of
historical writing also breaks up that sense of continuity with the past
that links the eccentric to the aristocracy, thus allowing Woolf to con-
centrate on the discontinuous character of the historical experience and
of its records. In this sense the obscure offer for Woolf the possibility of
making more explicit the critical slant that was attached to her interest
in the eccentrics. They signal a process of revision of the terms in which
literary history itself is written and on which literary honours are
awarded. This revision provides a negative answer to the questions
Woolf had placed at the end of `The Eccentrics', on whether biography
should be made up of `good books devoted to good men' (E 3, 40).
Woolf's interest in the obscure informs then not just her reading of
marginalised figures but also that of the acknowledged `greats' of the
history of English literature. As a critic and historian of literature Woolf
used the `smaller books' to put into context and draw out the particular
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44 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
significance of the masterpieces, but also to illustrate the invisible links
that join the latter to their social and historical context. This contextual –
ization was especially necessary whenever Woolf found herself writing
about the earlier periods of Engish literature, which she felt to be parti-
cularly remote to the modern reader because of the lack of documenta –
tion depicting the every-day life of, say, medieval England. When
writing about Chaucer for the Common Reader, Woolf decided in fact
to use the letters of the Pastons from the fifteenth century to envelop
her reading of his poetry but also to contrast it with the everyday reality
of his contemporary `common reader' (1925; E 4, 20±38).
The Pastons' letters offer evidence for Woolf of the constitution of the
medieval world for its average, unexalted inhabitants, who lived
cramped, toiling, harsh lives with the idea of death never very far from
their minds. Her reflections on Chaucer's poetry and its relation to the
world that emerges from the Pastons' letters are inserted as a break in the
smooth narrative that tells of the succession of various generations in
the family. Woolf creates for her readers the picture of the first Sir John's
son and heir who, after the death of his father, could be found reading
Chaucer `in broad daylight . . . on the hard chair in the comfortless room
with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes' (26).
What we have come to see as an innocuous act, Woolf suggests, signals
in fact a very deep historical change. The son's rejection of his father's
hard-working, unadorned way of life marks the end of the medieval era
and the emergence from that `hard outer shell' of `something sensitive,
appreciative, and pleasure-loving' (25).
Chaucer embodies for Woolf precisely that moment in history when
the burden of survival is lifted and a lighter kind of humanity begins to
take shape. She speculates that `he must have heard' the same language
of the Pastons' letters, `matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far better fitted
for narrative than for analysis'. But to this `very stiff material' (35)
Chaucer brought the gift of transformation of the poet, `the architect's
power' which took the various elements that made up the Pastons' lives
and shaped them into a `better order' (32). His individuality is that of
the poet, who marks a particular point in history through his work and
is in his turn marked by it. But the individuality of his fifteenth-century
reader is swamped under the collective identity of the Pastons, whose
letters `heap up in mounds of insignificant and often dismal dust the
innumerable trivialities of daily life', the contingency of human exist-
ence which should be swept away by the wind of change and yet has
more permanence than the solid stone of Caister Castle, of which `only
ruined walls remain' (20).
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Eccentric Histories 45
`The Pastons and Chaucer' traces the outline of an understanding of
the dynamic between social and literary history that we have come to
recognise as distinctively Woolf's own. It was summarised in A Room by
the famous assertion that `masterpieces are not single and solitary
births', but rather `the outcome of many years of thinking in common,
of thinking by the body of the people' (RO, 85). For Woolf, the produc-
tion of great works of art is always nourished by the unrecognised and
yet steadfast toil of a silent majority, which prepares the ground for the
emergence of those exceptional creations. In this sense, masterpieces
share with the eccentrics their position as exceptions to the rule which is
always, in Woolf's interpretation, tempered by a sense of what they owe
to the background of anonymous faces and lives that went before them.
The change of terminology in Woolf's projected historical work from
the eccentric to the obscure signals then also a shift of focus from
exceptional individualities and characters who cannot be assimilated
to anything other than themselves to figures who are so embedded in
communal textures that their contours become indistinguishable from
the historical background. This transformation of terminology is also
marked by an increasing awareness of the ways in which sexual differ-
ence and gender identities appear to determine the positions occupied
by these figures in relation to a centre that for Woolf remained relent-
lessly structured by patriarchal power. Although Woolf's list of eccentrics
in the 1915 diary is made up exclusively of women, eccentricity never
became for her as explicit a tool of feminist critique as the notion of the
obscure or, later, as that of Anon. There was always a composite side to
the tag of eccentric which helped to normalise the exceptions or the
subversives by situating them in relation to a well-established centre.
The connection between eccentricity and nobility did not help either, as
it prevented its deployment in the service of the emancipation of the
middle class woman which Woolf advocated in A Room. As she remarks
of Lady Winchelsea, `men, of course, are not snobs . . . but they appreci-
ate with sympathy for the most part the efforts of a countess to write
verse. One would expect to find a lady of title meeting with far greater
encouragement than an unknown Miss Austen or a Miss BronteÈ at that
time [seventeenth century] would have met with' (RO, 75).
The importance of the unknown Miss BronteÈ or Miss Austen for Woolf
lied precisely in their being representative of an average rather than an
exception. As such they provided an a posteriori argument on the basis of
which she could claim for women the authorship of anonymous or
unsigned literary works. Women writers who adopted male pseudonyms
during the nineteenth century proved, in Woolf's eyes, how difficult it
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46 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
was for them to expose themselves to the criticism and censure of their
contemporaries. For `Currer Bell, George Sand, George Eliot' anonymity
represented `the relic of the sense of chastity' (65) that maintained their
link with a history of oppression but also with a tradition which Woolf
speculates might date as far back as the beginning of English literature:
`Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a
woman' (63).
Merely a hint or a suggestion in A Room, about ten years later this
hypothesis about the origins of vernacular literature became the guiding
theme of Woolf's project for a continuous history of English literature,
which she called `a Common History book' (D 5, 318). As with the two
Common Readers that preceded it, this later historical project emphasised
the multiple meanings of `common'. For Woolf the term indicated not
just the low extraction of the figures which replaced the eccentrics or of
the readers to whom she addressed herself. `Common' also suggested
the sense of something shared, the foundation of a community, in a way
that joins this later stress on anonymity to the interest in questions of
permanence ± both geographical and historical ± that ran through
Woolf's fascination with the nobility.35 This transformation of com-
monness into communality can best be witnessed in Between the Acts
(1941),36 the novel Woolf was in the process of finishing when she
started jotting down notes on her Common History book. The `orts,
scraps and fragments' that form the background of the novel's actions
would, in other contexts, be read as mere gossip, senseless conversations
or doggerel. Within Between the Acts, though, they become the glue that
holds together a community whose history stretches back to the begin-
ning of written records.
The emphasis on group identities marked by the mundane and every-
day that is characteristic of Woolf's last novel also transpires from the
surviving manuscripts of her plans for writing a Common History book.
First conceived in September 1940, the book took shape quite rapidly. By
November of that year Woolf had begun to draft an introductory essay
which she called `Anon'; the following essay, provisionally called `The
Reader', was left incomplete at the time of her death in March 1941.37 As
the editor of Woolf's last two essays, Brenda Silver has remarked that the
preliminary notes made by Woolf for the Common History book reveal
quite clearly her persistent attraction for the idea of writing a contin-
uous history of English literature, but also her distrust for what she
called the `text book' approach which privileges ` „periods'' ' rather
than `the genuine scent ± the idea of the moment'.38 This distrust for
the academic and the scholarly was evident in the titles Woolf chose for
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Eccentric Histories 47
her projected book, Reading at Random and Turning the Page, which both
underline her belief in an unsystematic and informal approach to lit-
erary history that proceeds by hints, suggestions and intuitions rather
than by pre-ordained categories or classifications. Equally, as the
method of `reading at random' reverses the traditional procedures of
historical research, so the substance of Woolf's historical enquiry would
have encompassed precisely those aspects of literary production that are
often overlooked or marginalised in traditional accounts of the devel-
opment of English literature.
Woolf's interest in the anonymity of early literary productions and in
the question of post-Renaissance authorship were by this time inescap-
ably linked with the analysis of the history of suppression and silencing
that characterised women's condition. Her aim in A Room had been to
exploit this connection by reclaiming for women the collective author-
ship of unsigned literature. But, as Woolf's notes indicate, by the time
she came to write `Anon', this connection between women and obscur-
ity had been enlarged to encompass the general condition of literary
production in the times before the invention of the printing press, when
literature arose out of a collective instinct for singing that preceded the
separation of reader from writer and of public from author. This earlier,
pre-modern and almost pre-historical condition also corresponded for
Woolf to a time of undifferentiated creative urges that did not distin-
guish between `stone, wool, words, paint' but simply got themselves
expressed in whatever medium was available.39
For Woolf, then, the idea of anonymity, and especially of anonymous
literature, brought together a series of issues that had informed her
reflections on the nature of history throughout her writing career. It
worked as a figure or a metaphor for that alternative way of writing and
thinking about history, literature and sexual difference that she had
attempted to articulate in a more piecemeal fashion in the critical essays
that preceded this project. Anonymity symbolised the unity of public
and private, of different artistic forms and media for which Woolf had
been striving in the attempt to heal what she perceived to be the painful
splits endured by the modern subject.40 As such, it designated for Woolf
also the pre-history of English literature and of individual psychology, a
sort of collective unconscious which, as Silver remarks, got articulated
and expressed in the artistic works of a society or community.41 As this
collective unconscious, anonymity also enabled Woolf to reverse at a
figural or imaginative level the historical condition of obscurity and
silence that had traditionally been women's lot into a positive source
of artistic creativity and underlying permanence.
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48 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Although Woolf's projected revision of English literary history in the
name of anonymity was terminated by her suicide on 28 March 1941,
there are strong indications that the incomplete character of the surviv-
ing fragments is not just accidental but reflects fundamental problems
in the conception of the book. As Silver points out, it is clear that Woolf
encountered considerable difficulties in linking up the overview of the
anonymous origins of literature she gives in `Anon' with the description
of the emergence of the modern audience she had planned for `The
Reader'.42 The problematic character of the transition from the pre-
historical to history proper exercised Woolf so much that, as Silver
remarks, it remains unclear whether her last, uncompleted book of
criticism was to preserve the sense of narrative continuity she outlined
in her preparatory notes for Reading at Random or would rather have
turned into the third volume of The Common Reader.43 Paradoxically,
and perhaps even rather sadly, the book that was going to join together
the scattered pieces of Woolf's critical vision remains itself the most
enigmatic of all those fragments.
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2
The Essay as Form
The Essay as Autobiography
The interest in questions of marginality that characterises Woolf's focus
on eccentrics, obscure and Anon also marks her reading of the history of
the essay as a genre. Woolf wrote extensively both on the essay and on
specific essayists throughout her career, starting in 1905 with the `Decay
of Essay-writing' and up to her essay on De Quincey published in the
second Common Reader (1932). Her approach to the history and to the
nature of the genre was always marked by an attempt to identify within
what she saw as a male tradition an alternative line of descent to which
she could affiliate herself. This she outlined by stressing the connection
between the essay and autobiography, but a type of autobiography
which she insisted was essentially non-narrative and presented the self
as a conglomeration of moments of perception and reflection. In read-
ing the essay as an autobiographical genre Woolf thus defined a form of
writing that could bring together criticism and the private experience of
reading in an intimate kind of historiography that allowed her to speak
of and through the gaps which narrative sequence had conspired to
close off.
`Almost all essays,' Woolf wrote in 1905, at the very beginning of her
career as a critic and reviewer, `begin with a capital I ± „I think'', „I feel''
± and when you have said that, it is clear that you are not writing history
or philosophy or biography or anything but an essay, which may be
brilliant or profound, which may deal with the immortality of the soul,
or the rheumatism in your left shoulder, but is primarily an expression
of personal opinion' (E 1, 25). Categorical and yet not too exclusive, this
definition of the essay represents Woolf's first attempt at marking out
the boundaries of a genre she wrote in throughout her life. It occurs in
49
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50 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
`The Decay of Essay-writing', a discussion of the Edwardian essay which
was cut by half and shorn of its original title, `A Plague of Essays', in a
series of heavy-handed editorial interventions that exasperated Woolf.
Even so, this essay presents many points of agreement with her later
pronouncements on the genre, arguing that the Edwardian essay repre-
sents a betrayal and a perversion of the original and essential character
of the genre. For Woolf, the essay was born with Montaigne, `the first of
the moderns' (25), to satisfy the need for self-expression, but has
become in modern times a vehicle of vanity and exhibitionism,
encouraging its writers to indulge their taste for a good turn of phrase
without providing any food for thought. She warns that this sundering
of form and content has led to the formulation of ill-informed and
superficial judgements upon aesthetic matters that are the written
equivalent of small talk. Expounding on the merits or faults of art is
not, Woolf insists, the topic most suited to the `peculiar form' that is
typical of the essay (25). The freedom and ease of writing characteristic
of the genre should rather be taken as a rare opportunity for exploring
and bringing to light what other genres cannot or do not want to
expose. `If men and women must write,' she intimates, they should
`leave the great mysteries of art and literature unassailed' and concen-
trate instead on `themselves' (26) as the subject matter most appropriate
to the form of the essay.
Both self-portrait and book of the self, the autobiographical essay
Woolf here offers as an ideal to strive for effectively returns the
genre to its origins in Montaigne's writing. Reviewing a new edition of
the Essais in 1924, Woolf opened her article with the picture of
Montaigne standing in front of the King of Sicily's self-portrait and
lamenting the impossibility of reproducing the same effect in writing
(`Montaigne', E 4, 71±81). She argued that in the original conception of
the genre Montaigne had reversed the hierarchy of values typical of the
Edwardian essay by placing the simplicity of direct self-expression at a
far higher level of achievement than the sophistication of style or `good
writing'. In his search for self-revelation, Montaigne devised a form of
writing that escaped from the strictures of literary and scholarly con-
ventions, but also flew in the face of received opinions and moral
doctrines by revealing a soul `so complex, so indefinite, corresponding
so little to the version that does duty for her in public that a man might
spend his life merely in trying to run her to earth' (73).1
Mysterious and impossible to grasp, the self portrayed by Montaigne
exposed the existence of a private dimension running parallel to that of
public life but which until then had remained obscure and inaccessible.
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The Essay as Form 51
While a definitive blow to the knowledge accumulated by tradition, the
opening up of this hitherto unknown dimension was for Woolf indis-
pensable to the development of modern literature. As she argues both in
`On Not Knowing Greek' (1925; E 4, 38±53) and in `The Elizabethan
Lumber Room' (1925; E 4, 53±61), the passage from the universality of
poetry to the particularity of prose marked a significant change in the
whole history of Western literature. Woolf remarks that in the case of
Greek literature the transition took place as smoothly and as naturally as
the change from summer to winter or from outdoor to indoor activities.
Stripped of its chorality, the dramatic structure of Greek tragedy was
simply transferred into Plato's dialogues to follow the paths of Socratic
reasoning. While a necessary stage in the development of prose-writing,
this unproblematic transition from tragedy to philosophy was for Woolf
in marked contrast with the far more momentous change that occurred
in English literature in the seventeenth century.
Like Classical Greece, Elizabethan England had found in tragedy the
best embodiment of its spirit and culture; unlike Greece, however, it had
been granted no Plato to extract a fully mature prose out of its dramatic
poetry. While well-suited to a fiery imagination and the staging of
universal passions, the atmosphere of the Elizabethan playhouse was
naturally inimical to the development of a more private, more finely
attuned language. Stiff and dignified at best, riotous and undisciplined
at worst, Elizabethan prose had none of the elegance and the subtle
modulations that characterise Montaigne's contemporary Essais. With-
out a language fit for the complexities of introspection and intimacy,
even Elizabethan letters and diaries fail to give any indication of their
writers' personalities. As Woolf writes of Gabriel Harvey's sister, `Noth-
ing, one feels, would have been easier for Mercy than to read her lover a
fine discourse upon the vanity of grandeur, the loveliness of chastity, the
vicissitudes of fortunes. But of emotion as between one particular Mercy
and one particular Philip, there is no trace' (`The Strange Elizabethans',
1932; CR 2, 14).
Ignoring Bacon and his contribution to the development of English
prose writing, Woolf claims that the first English author to introduce the
language of self-consciousness and intimacy into his writing was Sir
Thomas Browne, who wrote in the middle of the seventeenth century
and therefore at least a generation later than Bacon. Like Plato in
Greece, Browne succeeded in shifting the focus of English literature
from `the publicity of the stage and the perpetual presence of a second
person' inward to `that growing consciousness of one's self, that brood-
ing in solitude over the mysteries of the soul' which had been pioneered
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52 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
by Montaigne in French (`The Elizabethan Lumber Room', E 4, 58). A
medical doctor trained in Italy and France, Browne represents for Woolf
a figure of transition in more than one sense. He straddled the old
culture of authority and submission and Bacon's new experimental
science, but was also for her a sort of pioneer in the landscape of
seventeenth-century literature, exploring the wilderness within that
had been left untouched by the geographical discoveries of the Renais-
sance (`Reading', 1919; E 3, 141±61). Because he was the first to lay his
eyes upon the region of the self, Browne managed for Woolf to preserve
the candour and innocence of discovery which she argues have since
been thwarted by awkwardness and vanity: `The littleness of egotism has
not yet attacked the health of his interest in himself. I am charitable, I
am brave, I am averse from nothing . . . I, I, I ± how we have lost the
secret of saying that!' (156).
As the first to leave such an indelible impression of himself in writing,
Browne had also opened up for Woolf one of the most crucial questions
in the history of literature:
In short, Sir Thomas Browne brings in the whole question, which is
afterwards to become of such importance, of knowing one's own
author. Somewhere, everywhere, now hidden, now apparent in what-
ever is written down is the form of a human being. If we seek to know
him, are we idly occupied, as when, listening to a speaker, we begin to
speculate about his age and habits, whether he is married, has chil-
dren, and lives in Hampstead? It is a question to be asked, and not
one to be answered.
(156)
Emerging from the development of a literature in prose, the opening of
this question represents for Woolf a turning-point in the history of
literature which irrevocably separates the moderns from the classics.
She argues that the discovery of introspection in literature brought
along a marked change in the experience of reading, which shifted
from the public character of theatrical performances to the privacy of
the individual book. This more intimate kind of reading has made the
modern reader `accustomed to find himself in direct communication
with the writer' (158) and therefore at a loss when faced with a book that
offers no foothold for establishing the same kind of relationship.
Trained by the psychological novel or the biography, even a reader as
gifted as Woolf must confess her inability to enter fully the world of the
classics, where the focus is not on the individual self but on the
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The Essay as Form 53
universality of the human condition. Thus, if, as we saw with Mon-
taigne, the introduction of the self in writing opens up the dimension
of privacy, it does so at the expense of shutting off any access to trans-
cendence.
Both Browne and Montainge are seen by Woolf as developing an
alternative to history, a purely subjective form of writing that in its
turn initiates a completely different kind of history, allowing the reader
to inhabit a continuous present, to enter into intimate contact with his/
her authors in a way that is made impossible by the transcendental
impersonality of the classics. For Woolf the transient is what remains,
enabling readers to re-experience the writing anew and thus connect to
the past; the transcendental or universal is what cuts the readers off
from that past, consigning it, if not to oblivion, certainly to the dryness
and boredom of the classroom or the lecture theatre.
As an autobiographical genre, then, the essay works for Woolf both to
enable a more direct apprehension of the past and, at the same time, to
initiate modernity as a new condition that is marked by a focus on
subjectivity as the new universal trait. As she points out in `The Modern
Essay' (1922; E 4, 216±27), this is a genre that has transformed the
writer's self from something that lies outside literature into its control-
ling force. As a formless form, the essay has no structural equivalent of
the fictional plot or the poetic rhyme to inform and sustain the vision
expressed by its authors. It is thus left open to the twin dangers of empty
form and unprocessed matter, so that the very informality or formless-
ness of the genre paradoxically require from its practitioners a degree of
artistry that is unparalleled by other genres. As Woolf intimates, `there is
no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other,
by dint of labour or bounty of nature, the essay must be pure ± pure like
water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits
of extraneous matter' (217±18). It is an uncompromising demand for
perfection which recalls the genre's association with belles lettres, mak-
ing of the essay the centrepiece of a conception of prose that puts the
achievement of elegance and poise above everything else.
But Woolf laments that this restrictive definition of what constitutes
`good writing' is rooted in the controlled perfection of Addison's essays
and has led to a purely imitative understanding of style. She claims that
in the English tradition style has not been taken to designate the weld-
ing of self and writing effected by Montaigne's essays, but rather indi-
cates a standard of formal perfection which is divorced from the
substance of writing. Taken to its extreme, this position leads to the
absolute achievement of Max Beerbohm, who, as Woolf herself
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54 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
acknowledges, invests his own self with such a consummate artistry that
`we do not know whether there is any relation between Max the essayist
and Mr Beerbohm the man' (220±21). Beerbohm is credited by Woolf
with the merit of having restored the essay to its eighteenth-century
prototype, making the Victorian essay both less gloomy and more
intimate. Known to his readers by his first name, Beerbohm has re-
introduced into the essay its most characteristic element, `that self
which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous
antagonist' (221). But the relationship of self and writing is not equal
in Beerbohm's essays; being a dandy, he cannot allow the self or the life
outside literature to spoil the writing but focuses all his energies on
transforming life itself into an art object.
As Woolf points out in an earlier review of Beerbohm's writings (`The
Limits of Perfection', 1919; E 3, 124±6), turning life into art deprives art
itself of the nourishment it draws from life, preserving it in a splendid
and yet deadening isolation. As a genre of small pretensions, the essay
has for Woolf a very restricted brief, whereby its only purpose is the
bestowal of pleasure: `Vague as all definitions are, a good essay must
have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us,
but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out' (`The Modern Essay', E
4, 224). Like a shield against pain and discomfort, the essay wraps its
readers up in an atmosphere of secluded intimacy that excludes the
outside world. While meant to bring about a more intense appreciation
of life, this seclusion often threatens to result in a substitution of life
by art.
To the tradition of mastery and control over life exemplified by the
eighteenth-century essay and its epigones, Woolf opposes the exuber-
ance and excesses of Romantic autobiography. Thomas De Quincey is
her favourite essayist as the only writer in the history of English literat-
ure who attempted to push prose beyond the limits of eighteenth-
century elegance.2 As Woolf acknowledges in her essay on The English
Mail Coach (1906; E 1, 365±8), De Quincey's style is nowhere as neat and
harmonious as that of Walter Pater or Robert Louis Stevenson, who are
traditionally understood to represent the peak of English prose-writing.
He has none of the urbanity and composure of their style, is excessive
and unruly, with a tendency to see `everything a size too large', using
`words which are also a size too large' to articulate his overwhelming
visions (366). While making him incapable of dealing with the prosaic
nature of facts, these very defects are for Woolf what gives his writing its
individual flavour. Endowed with the outlook of a poet and the ear of a
musician, De Quincey stretches language beyond the limits of reason
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The Essay as Form 55
and measure to accommodate the `beautiful sights and strange
emotions [which] created waves of sound in his brain before they
shaped themselves into articulate words' (367).
But Woolf also points out that De Quincey's attempt to translate into
prose some of the qualities that are usually associated with poetry
exposed him to the criticism of those who demand a strict separation
between the two forms of writing. In `Impassioned Prose' (1926; E 4,
361±9) she argues that in the English literary tradition prose has tradi-
tionally been identified with the writing of fiction, where it has been
heavily influenced by the demand for verisimilitude. She claims that
fiction works by leaving implicit the universal theme and concentrating
instead on the particulars, the details of everyday life. It therefore trans-
forms what poetry attempts to articulate into the narrative line, embed-
ding the universal theme `so deep beneath page after page and chapter
after chapter that the single word when it is spoken is enough to start an
explosion' (362). The method of fiction goes then against that of poetic
prose, which attempts to bring the universal breath that animates
poetry into the prosaic world of everyday life.
De Quincey's development of his `impassioned prose' was, as Woolf
admits, besieged by considerable difficulties. As a man plagued by
dreams and visions, De Quincey had to find not only a language in
which to convey his visions, but also a form in which they could subsist
as prose poetry. Woolf warns that `[a] prose writer may dream dreams
and see visions, but they cannot be allowed to lie scattered, single,
solitary upon the page. So spaced out they die' (363). The link De
Quincey provided to hold his visions together was himself, albeit a self
that, as Woolf remarks, remains quite aloof and never becomes as inti-
mate as that of other essayists. It is only in his autobiographical writings
that De Quincey's extravagant gifts find their match in scenes remem-
bered from the past and so far away in time that they take on the
appearance of dreams. As these sketches blur the distinction between
fact and vision, dream and reality, they manage to give voice to a part of
human life which Woolf claims is usually left unsaid in traditional kinds
of biographical writings.3
Yet, although De Quincey found in autobiography the mode of writ-
ing best suited to his individual talents, he was not perhaps himself the
subject most appropriate for the kind of autobiography he advocated.
Woolf points out in `De Quincey's Autobiography' (1932; CR 2, 132±9)
that his insistence upon the value of the inner, subjective life showed up
the limits of the English tradition of biographical writing but did not in
itself lead him to write the perfect autobiography. Too biased towards
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56 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
the subjective life, De Quincey lacked for Woolf that attention to
outward reality that is indispensable to (auto)biographical writing. `To
tell the whole story of a life,' Woolf insists, `the two levels of existence
. . . the rapid passage of events and actions; the slow opening up of single
and solemn moments of concentrated emotions' must both `be
recorded' (139). As autobiography, De Quincey's prose writing encoun-
ters the problem that, for Woolf, haunts all biographical writing: the
need to reconcile the factual and the symbolic level, the inner and the
outer life, the subjective and the objective approach.4
In `The Art of Biography' (1939; CD, 144±51), Woolf associates these
two levels of existence with two modes of writing, one mere chronolo-
gical account of events and the other a principle of selection and mould-
ing. The difficulty of writing biography lies in combining the two kinds
of writing into a single unity capable of conveying the whole truth
about the life of the individual, both the literal and the metaphorical
one. Like the essay, biography is charged with the difficult task of com-
municating the impression of personality in writing; unlike the essay,
biography must develop this impression through the conventions of
narrative, what Woolf calls the `fiction' of biographical writing. As
autobiography, the essay occupies simply the position of the sketch
rather than that of the full-blown picture, an unresolved collection of
`moments of being'5 that belong to the pre-history of narrative.
The definition and history of the `personal' essay outlined by Woolf in
her criticism assimilates the genre to a form of writing about the self that
is not organised into a narrative. Part sketch and part epiphany, the
essay participated in and perhaps even initiated for Woolf a momentous
change in the history of literature, when prose took the place of poetry
as the dominant literary form and the cult of the author marked the end
of impersonal literature. While she conceded that this shift was funda-
mental to the development of a literature in prose and therefore of the
form of the novel, Woolf nevertheless claimed that its significance was
not restricted to fiction, but had important consequences for the whole
question of the relation between art and life, literature and experience.
In the English tradition she lamented the fact that the eighteenth-
century ideals of harmony and measure had become identified with
the mainstream of prose writing at the expense of the excesses and
surplus of life. The ultimate outcome of this strand of writing was to
turn the self into an art form, thus defusing precisely what in the self
challenges art.
Looking for a form of writing that would not assimilate life to aes-
thetic experience, Woolf discovered the rich seventeenth-century prose
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The Essay as Form 57
of Browne and the visionary style of the Romantic De Quincey. Sharing
a distance from eighteenth-century literature and culture, Browne and
De Quincey symbolise for Woolf a kind of writing that does not rest
content with its own measured achievements but is continuously
stretched beyond its own limits, reaching out to the regions where
nobody has ever been before. As Andrew McNeillie has remarked, the
preference expressed by Woolf for poetic rather than prosaic essayists
reflects in fact the kind of writing she herself experimented with in
works such as To the Lighthouse (1927) and, especially, The Waves
(1931) (E 4, xix). Her alternative version of the history of the essay can
thus be seen to unearth a submerged current of English prose writing
which functions as a literary precedent for her own search for an anti-
dote to narrative in the writing of fiction.6
Common Readers and Modern Audiences
But Woolf's attempts to rewrite the history of the essay as an essentially
modern and modernist genre were also accompanied by another, far less
positive view of the modernity of the essay, which stressed its connec-
tion with the expansion of readership and the consequent commercia –
lisation of literary practices. This link between the essay and a more
negative conception of modernity is especially noticeable when her
analysis of the history of the genre shifts from the question of subject-
ivity and authorship to that of reception. This shift from essayist to
reader was most famously articulated by Woolf through the notion of
the common reader, which she borrowed from Samuel Johnson's Life of
Gray. The shift signals Woolf's continued preoccupation with the epi-
stemological break marked by the emergence of the reader in the history
of English literature. It also represents, though, her response to the
commodification of literature, a resistance to resolving every aspect of
modern life into an overarching narrative which, at the same time,
gestures towards the possibility of a common history to be shared
among non-professional readers.
The extent to which Woolf rewrote the Johnsonian notion as a point
of resistance to modernity can be gauged by comparing her own defini-
tion to its acknowledged source. In the Life of Gray Johnson first
deployed the idea of the common reader as an ironical weapon to
deflate Gray's pretensions to literary distinction. He invoked it towards
the end of his discussion of Gray's work to mark a sharp discrepancy
between the poet's own self-perception and the public recognition of his
worth. Casting himself as a voice of dissent from the kind of learned
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58 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
commendations which Gray's work has received from professional
critics and men of letters, Johnson rejected most of that work as obscure
and selected only the `Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' as an
example of genuine achievement:
in the character of [Gray's] Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common
reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary
prejudices, after all the refinements of subtility and the dogmatism of
learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours. The
Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind,
and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.7
This aligning of the critical judgement with that of the wider, non-
specialised public constitutes an unexpected move on Johnson's part.
It marks a gap between a restricted circle of readers who have arrogated
for themselves the role of arbiters of taste and a more public and open
readership that is the repository of universal values. It thus signals the
end of the old system of patronage where the intended readership
tended to coincide with the actual one and heralds the beginning of a
much closer relation between the writer and the market. Faced with the
conflation of social and literary privilege which supported the patronage
system, Johnson invoked the idea of the common reader as the profes-
sional writer's alternative and, ultimately, more definitive source of
legitimation.
In this sense, Johnson's notion of the common reader can be seen to
lie at the intersection of a series of important and related changes in the
history of literature. It marks the transition from writing as a vocation to
writing as a profession, signalling the intrusion of the market and its
values into literary matters. This intrusion in its turn requires a radical
rethinking of the idea of literary and aesthetic values themselves and,
with them, of the very principles upon which the literary tradition rests.
Suffered by Johnson initially as a loss and then only subsequently
accepted as a source of independence from aristocratic patrons, this
turning-point in the history of literature came to be seen by Woolf in
equally ambivalent terms, at times as a source of freedom (especially for
women)8 and at times as a form of imprisonment and enslavement for
writers and readers alike.
The first and more positive set of associations elicited by the idea of
the common reader emerges in the short definition Woolf offered in the
way of an introduction to her first collection of essays. There, she
stressed both the humble character and the mediating nature of her
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The Essay as Form 59
ideal reader, whom she envisaged as a sort of third term, escaping the
two extremes of either inaccessible scholarship or mindless consump-
tion:
The common reader ± she wrote ± . . . differs from the critic and the
scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so
generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart
knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided
by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he
can come by, some kind of whole ± a portrait of a man, a sketch of an
age, a theory of the art of writing.
(1925; E 4, 17)
An amateur rather than a professional, the common reader symbolises
for Woolf the limits and opportunities of an education acquired within
the home rather than in public institutions. His or her reading is carried
out in rooms `too humble to be called libraries, yet full of books' (17); his
or her interest in literature is intensely private and almost secretive,
characterised by the strong anonymity already implicit in the name.
He or she is defective and undisciplined as a critic, but at least has
managed to preserve that enthusiasm and personal involvement in the
activity of reading which is often lacking in those who practise criticism
as a profession.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, this definition of the common reader ends
up by mirroring Woolf's own critical practice, describing a form of
criticism that is grounded in the indissoluble unity of reader and writer
rather than in the authority of learning and scholarly pursuits. Woolf's
interpretation of the idea of the common reader develops along the
lines of an opposition between amateurs and self-taught individuals
on the one hand, and professional figures and public institutions on
the other which returns Johnson's idea to the system of oppositions that
it was originally meant to scramble. While Johnson had aligned his own
critical judgement with that of the common reader, Woolf reconstructed
the latter as the critic's own antithesis.9 But such a clear demarcation
of territory became for Woolf more a source of discomfort than one of
reassurance, as it compelled her time and again to look for ways of
bridging the split not just between critic and amateur, but also between
her idealised public and the reality of a mass audience which she saw as
its negation.
In `The Patron and the Crocus' (1925; E 4, 212±25), the split
between the ideal and the abject audience is translated in fact into a
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60 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
split between modern writers and readers. In her attempt to reconcile
patronage and market values, Woolf makes a plea for the establishment
of a more immediate and more indissoluble link between modern
writers and their readers. In her definition, the modern reading public
occupies very much the position of the aristocratic patron of the arts,
who `is not merely the paymaster, but also in a very subtle and insidious
way the instigator and inspirer of what is written'. Woolf argues that the
history of English literature shows writer and patron in a relationship of
strong interdependence, with each age having its own chosen public to
write for. In the modern age, this one-to-one `alliance' (212) has been
dissolved and fragmented, as writers find themselves supplied with an
unending variety and quantity of different reading groups, each with its
own interests and values.
Under these conditions, the relationship of writers to their readers is
altered and substituted by the coupling of items as discordant as those of
the title: the writer disappears and his or her place is taken by the object
of writing, `the first crocus in Kensington Gardens' (215). The appear-
ance of the crocus as the object of the writer's inspiration signals also a
splitting of the ideal unity of `paymaster' and `instigator' which Woolf
defined as characteristic of the modern patron at the beginning of this
article. The splitting in its turn deforms the relationship of writer to
public into one of either superiority and disdain (as in the case of
Samuel Butler, George Meredith and Henry James) or subservience and
servility (as in the case of journalists and critics who write for the Press).
But to the alternative of either inferiority or superiority, Woolf prefers
the ideal of an absolutely equal relationship between readers and writers
where the two are Siamese twins soldered into a symbiotic bond:
[The patron] must make us feel that a single crocus, if it be a real
crocus, is enough for him; that he does not want to be lectured,
elevated, instructed, or improved; that he is sorry that he bullied
Carlyle into vociferation, Tennyson into idyllics, and Ruskin into
insanity; that he is now ready to efface himself or assert himself as
his writers require; that he is bound to them by a more than maternal
tie; that they are twins indeed, one dying if the other dies, one
flourishing if the other flourishes . . .
(215)10
Although the image proposed here is that of an egalitarian relationship
between readers and writers, the distribution of the positions of address
within this essay is far less than symmetrical. `The Patron and the
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The Essay as Form 61
Crocus' opens up as a sort of indirect response to a request of advice by
`young men and women beginning to write' (E 4, 212) which is formul-
ated in the third person. It is in this person that we are offered a
dispassionate overview of the history of the relationship between writers
and their audiences in English literature and an analysis of the plight of
the superior writer on the one hand and of the servile journalist on the
other. But as Woolf comes to consider the question of the ideal patron/
public, her speaking persona suddenly switches to the first person plural
to address the public in the collective voice of the modern writer: `for
whom should we write?' she asks (212).
In the course of the essay she progressively loses her equanimous
stance as her historical analysis of Elizabethan, eighteenth-century and
Victorian patrons turns into an impassioned plea for help and susten-
ance. The public becomes then the object of the writer's demands (`The
patron we want . . . is one who will help us to preserve our flowers from
decay', Woolf commands (214)) and the relationship between peers first
evoked in the essay is turned into a one-sided contract. Placed under an
enormous amount of obligations, the public figures here only as the
recipient of the writers' injunctions (he must be ready to `efface himself
or assert himself' at will), so that the writer can take up the position of
dominating subject dictating the terms and conditions of the relation-
ship.
Resembling very closely the common reader, the ideal of the patron as
both master and muse, tied to the writer by indissoluble bonds is here
revealed as the writer's own fantasy of revenge and mastery upon a
public that stubbornly refuses to shape itself in the writer's image and
therefore makes the latter's dependence upon that public painfully clear.
This other, more secret story revealed by the changes in perspective and
speaking persona in `The Patron and the Crocus' is also matched by the
far from complimentary representations of the reading public Woolf
offers in some of her less well-known essays. Because of its connection
to journalism, Woolf tends to see the essay as the form that is most
readily influenced by changes in the distribution and consumption of
newspapers and magazines and therefore by changes in the size and
composition of its readership. While at times such changes are perceived
to be for the best, it is more usual for Woolf to stress the negative effects
of an excessive encroachment of market demands upon literary activ-
ities, especially as far as the twentieth century is concerned. Oversized
audiences seem for Woolf to go with a loss of autonomy and independ –
ence which corrupts and contaminates the purity of the literary product
and, in particular, of the essay as a form.
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62 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Woolf's reviews of twentieth-century literary journalism are thus
often accompanied by terrifying and violent images of consumption
and enslavement which are at odds with the general temperament of
her writing, well-known for its ironies and subtle innuendoes. She often
tended to perceive literary journalism not just as incompatible with
`proper' literature but effectively as a possible source of contamination
for the purity of the literary product. Her intense feelings of dislike and
antagonism towards literary journalism typically found their expression
in her reviews of contemporary books of essays, which she alternately
censures either as meaningless (`Bad Writers', 1918; E 2, 326±9; `Pat-
more's Criticism', 1921; E 3, 308±9) or, in a more sinister fashion, as
disgusting and repulsive (`The Modern Essay', 1925; E 4, 216±7).
Churned out by men who are chained to the writing desk as if they
were in a labour camp, these collections of essays are aimed at a public
that is seen by Woolf as a tyrannical master whose desires are not easily
satisfied:
Books of essays somehow have the tendency to make us feel
autocratic and oriental. We are conscious of retinues of slaves.
Numbers of them have had their heads cut off and been thrown
into the moat for failing to please us already; but Solomon Eagle
[the nom de plume of John Squire, then literary editor of the
New Statesman ] amuses the Sultan; he has made the Sultan laugh;
therefore we grant him permission to go on living on condition
that he makes us laugh every night before we go to sleep for ever
and ever.
(`Bad Writers', E 2, 327)
Compelled to spin tales and tell stories for dear life, modern essayists
occupy the uneasy position of Scheherazade, faced with a public they
have to keep happy and satisfied through constant feeding. The essayists
are thus placed in a feminised position as victims of the tyrannical
whims and unwieldy appetites of the public, a sort of overgrown child
Woolf brands as monstrous and even inhuman.
Both passive and aggressive at the same time, this unwieldy modern
audience is for Woolf totally deprived of a mind of its own but rather
governed either by its animal instincts or, more ominously, by the
wishes and interests of those in authority. As enslaved in its turn as
the essayists it dominates, the public is represented as the crucial link
in a chain of oppression that is ultimately brought to bear upon both
readers and writers:
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The Essay as Form 63
The order of the serious sixpenny weekly paper must originally
have been evolved like the now almost extinct order of the
meats and the sweets, in deference to some demand of the public
appetite. It is a rule that after the politics we come to the lighter
form of the essay and so to the reviews; and as this order is never
upset, it must have been devised either for our pleasure or for our
good.
(`A Book of Essays', 1918; E 2, 212)
Here, the parallel between meals and weekly papers underscores the
sense of force-feeding which for Woolf often accompanies the reading
of contemporary literary journalism. At the same time, the idea that the
traditional ordering of the courses is somehow `extinct' attaches a cer-
tain obsolescence to the weekly paper itself and its religious observance
of a long-established tradition. In this panorama of submission and
conformity, Woolf confesses herself as a deviant and transgressive
agent who, like a prototypical modern reader, undoes the natural and
immutable quality of the existing order by refusing to swallow the
propaganda dished out through the essay and preferring rather to spec-
ulate upon advertisements as if they were short-stories. As she distances
herself from the rest of the modern reading public on the commuter
train, Woolf spares a sisterly thought of empathy for the conditions
under which modern essayists work, picturing a quite literal motion of
disgust and rejection `as our gorge rises at the thought of all the turns
and twists and devices which some fellow-creature is going through in
order to persuade us to swallow a fragment of the truth without recog-
nising it' (212).
Presented from within Woolf's own essays and reviews, these pictures
of enslaved writers and infantilised audiences raise serious questions
about the reviewer's and essayist's integrity, and are therefore in danger
of backfiring onto Woolf's own contributions to the writing of literary
history and criticism. Woolf attempted to address the problem of the
critic's integrity in the face of market relations through a proposal for
the reforming of the activity of reviewing she put forth in a 1939 essay.
`Reviewing' (CE 2, 204±17) opens with the striking image of a London
shop window, where women mending trousers and other items of cloth-
ing are exposed to the voyeuristic gaze of a crowd gathered outside the
shop. Woolf compares the working conditions of these women to those
of the modern writers, who are compelled to carry out their tasks under
the watchful eyes and sharp commentaries of critics and reviewers. She
argues that these conditions are detrimental to the writing of literature,
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64 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
as they stimulate the writers' vanity and their desire for money but leave
untouched their aesthetic values or opinions.
This inauspicious and deleterious situation has arisen for Woolf as a
direct result of the spread of publications and journalism that is
characteristic of modern times. She points out that reviewing
developed in the eighteenth century with the growth of newspaper
publishing, but was soon separated into the two different activities of
criticism (which `dealt with the past and with principles' (205)), and
reviewing proper, which concentrated upon contemporary literary pro-
duction. As the distinction between the two activities deepened, the
reviewer of the nineteenth century came to wield a considerable
amount of power over both the public and the writers themselves,
since a good or bad review could determine the fate of a book without
appeal.
Woolf claims that in recent times the reviewers' enormous power
of influence has been eroded by a tenfold increase in the number of
reviews a book normally receives. Faced with this multiplication of
demand, the contemporary reviewer has become a more modest figure
who struggles under the conflicting pull of very different briefs. On
the one hand, there are the commercial interests of publishers and the
public's need for information; on the other, there is the critics' longing
to speak to the writers and the writers' desire for the critics' honest
opinion of their work. While the first set of interests fulfils a very public
function, the second can only be damaged by the glare of publicity and
requires the protection of secrecy and privacy.11 As Woolf intimates,
`shut doors and windows; pull the curtains. Ensure that no fame accrues
or money; and still it is a matter of the very great interest to a writer to
know what an honest and intelligent reader thinks about his work' (CE
2, 211).
Because of this conflict between the private character of the writer/
critic dialogue and the need for publicity and advertisement, Woolf
proposes at this point to differentiate between the two sets of functions
and interests by splitting up what is still considered as reviewing into
two separate activities. To satisfy the needs of both publishers and public
alike, Woolf envisages a system of description and pricing of the literary
product aimed at eliding any remaining differences between books and
commodities. Reviewing will then be assimilated to working on an
assembly line, where `a competent official armed with scissors and
paste' will provide a summary of the book under review and/or cut out
a few extracts from it, to which `what is left of the reviewer' will add a
mark for approval or disapproval (209).
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The Essay as Form 65
In contrast to the mechanical and almost proletarian quality of this
`Gutter and Stamp production' (209), the activity of the critic is instead
portrayed by Woolf as an equivalent of the profession par excellence, that
of the medical doctor:
Let the reviewers then abolish themselves or what relic remains of
them, as reviewers, and resurrect themselves as doctors . . . The writer
then would submit his work to the judge of his choice; an appoint-
ment would be made; an interview arranged. In strict privacy, and
with some formality ± the fee, however, would be enough to ensure
that the interview did not degenerate into tea-table gossip ± doctor
and writer would meet; and for an hour they would consult upon the
book in question.
(212)
The figure Woolf proposes should be paid for this transaction between
writer and critic is that of three guineas, the conventional figure for
professional consultations at the time, but also the title of one of her
most famous essays. A shorter version of `Reviewing' in fact appears in
the third section of Three Guineas (1938) as a footnote to Woolf's discus-
sion of writing for money as a form of intellectual prostitution (TG, 400±
1, n. 10).
In `Reviewing' itself the thorny question of the relationship
between writing and market demands is solved by confining the
reviewer to the role of little more than a skilled worker, an automaton
in fact whose job could just as easily be performed by a machine.
This relegation of the reviewer to an inferior order of being effectively
manages to preserve the critic in a situation of integrity, and independ –
ence from literary journalism, that allies writer and critic in a very
secluded and exclusive bond. Overturning the power relationships
inscribed by the image of the shop-window, Woolf's proposal now
implicitly places the journalists in the position formerly occupied by
the working women, while writers and critics ± both members of the
same class, as Woolf points out ± can retire to the back of the shop and
out of the inquisitive public eye. Protected by `the darkness of the
workshop', the writer would not be exposed to the gaze of `a horde of
reviewers pressing their noses to the glass and commenting to a curious
crowd upon each stitch' (CE 2, 213). The reviewer in his turn would be
able to concentrate on the book and `the writer's needs' and thus stop
`cutting shop window capers to amuse the public and to advertise his
skill' (214).
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66 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
In Woolf's account, though, it is the shop window itself that disap-
pears, leaving in its place the vision of a more harmonious set of rela-
tions between author, reviewer and the public. Without the distorting
reflections produced by the system of `the shop window' and `the look-
ing-glass', the author will be transformed from an object of derision to
simply `an obscure workman doing his job' and will thus gain in the eye
of the public the respect that is due to honest workmanship (214). In
this way the hoped-for removal of the shop window signals the opening
up of a space where traditional boundaries between writers, readers and
critics can be transgressed. Woolf speculates that the introduction of the
Gutter and Stamp production might free up the space for the emergence
of a new Montaigne or a Matthew Arnold, liberating that repressed
talent which at the moment cannot find its expression because of
pressures of time, money and space. But this crossing over of the
reviewer into writer's territory does not bring with it a radical overhaul
of the system of values that sustains her representation of the shop
window, where to be a worker is to be valued while to be a spectator is
to be reviled. The reviewer might transform him or herself into a writer,
but there is no space in Woolf's representation for the other parallel
movement that would see the writer turning into the consumer of other
people's productivity.
This asymmetrical distribution of positions in Woolf's proposals for
the reform of reviewing was first noticed by Leonard Woolf, who
appended a note of his own to her essay when it was first published as
a Hogarth Pamphlet. Moved to add to his wife's `ingenious suggestion'
(216) his own interpretation of the history of literary journalism, Leo-
nard Woolf argued that reviewing and criticism already were quite dis-
tinct activities and therefore did not need to be further separated and
differentiated. He traced the birth of the reviewer back to the end of the
patronage system and argued with Goldsmith that the shift from patron
to paying public had effectively been for the best. Within this new
system, Leonard insisted, the task of the reviewer had always been one
of information and advice to the public rather than of inspired criticism
for the author. As he put it, `the reviewer, unlike the critic, in 999 cases
out of 1,000 has nothing to say to the author; he is talking to the reader'
(216).
Re-inscribing the split between critic and reviewer that Woolf had first
opened up and then closed off again, Leonard thus claimed to be speak-
ing from the reviewer's own point of view in response to an article
which he felt had been written in protection of the author's interests.
Appropriating for the reviewer the status of honest and modest work-
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The Essay as Form 67
man that Woolf had wished for the author, Leonard shifted the locus of
contradiction from within the office of reviewing to the predicament of
the artist in modern society. Torn by the opposite claims of art and
money, the modern author might crave for genuine criticism but is
effectively dependent on the reviewer for the generation of his or her
income. The source of the author's dissatisfaction with the reviewer lies,
Leonard implied, not so much in the shortcomings of the latter, as in
this relationship of power on one side and dependence on the other,
whereby `if [the author] wants to sell his books to the great reading
public and the circulating libraries, he will still need the reviewer ±
and that is why he will probably, like Tennyson and Dickens, continue
to abuse the reviewer when the review is not favourable' (217).
By pitting himself against his wife as the voice of the reviewer,
Leonard thus quite literally added an extra dimension to the split
between reader and writer which Woolf had attempted to address and
heal through the ideal of the common reader and the image of the
patron. Conceived as a substitute for Woolf's more ambitious project
of blending essay and fiction in a new form of literary criticism, the
common reader holds her critical essays together by relocating them in
the privacy of leisure and home which screens from sight Woolf's own
professional involvement in journalism. Through this retreat into the
privacy of her own rooms and away from public sight, Woolf tried to
place her criticism within the tradition of the personal essay that goes
back to Montaigne rather than within the analytical and rationalistic
kind of writing she identified with her father's own literary practice (and
of which Leonard's note is itself an example).12 But in choosing Mon-
taigne as her predecessor, Woolf left open and unresolved the issue of
the writer's relation to the public sphere and, consequently, also of the
relation between her career as an essayist and reviewer on the one hand
and as a novelist on the other.
Against this background of insistent splittings in two and comple-
mentary attempts at healing the rifts, Leonard's note signals an enlarge-
ment and redefinition of the problem. Implicitly, it adds the dimension
of sexual difference as a third term in the set of oppositions analysed and
enacted by Woolf in her writings. In translating the opposition of pro-
fessional to amateur into the split between private and public, the idea
of the common reader establishes a connection between the problem of
practising literature as a profession and the issues of sexual politics
which characterise Woolf's most famous writings, but are somewhat
absent from her discussion of the essay as a genre and of journalism as
such. From the demand of privacy and an autonomous space put forth
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68 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
in A Room (1929) to the separatist tendencies of the Society of Outsiders
she advocates in Three Guineas (1938), the question of private and public
spaces is for Woolf inseparable from the problem of women's roles in
and through history. In `Reviewing' itself, the question is posed in terms
of a parallel between the women working as trouser menders and the
writers of what Woolf calls `imaginative literature' (204), suggesting an
essential compatibility between writing and women's roles. But as the
essay proceeds, the working women fall quite literally out of the picture
together with the system of the shop window which defines their roles.
Their disappearance indicates that by this time the alliance between
working women and writers which Woolf was in the habit of invoking
had in fact become unsustainable.
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3
Professing Literature
Working Women and Women Writers
The ambivalence towards the commodification of literature and literary
journalism that is evident in `Reviewing' sits uneasily with the celebra-
tion of women's access to the profession of literature for which Woolf is
best known. Throughout her career, from her beginnings as a reviewer to
her most famous feminist essays, writing for money always represented
for Woolf the mark of professionalisation, a legitimation of women's
`scribbling' into an acceptable and socially recognised occupation. This
legitimation was so important for Woolf that it led her to curtail the
history of women's writing to the disadvantage of the aristocratic
women whom she saw as amatrices rather than professionals. When
placed against Woolf's definition of the common reader, though, this
celebration of professional women of letters reveals a deep-seated con-
tradiction in her perception of the history of literature. On the one
hand, there is her awareness of the importance of the professionalisa –
tion of women's writing as an instrument of emancipation. On the
other, there is her suspicion, as a writer and a reader, of the institutio-
nalisation of literature and of the professional critic as a figure that
symbolises a restriction rather than a widening of access and, conse-
quently, a weakening of literature's universal appeal.
This ambivalence is also apparent in A Room (1929), where Woolf's
insistence upon the connection between financial independence and
the ability to write leads her to a mystification of the distinction
between earned and inherited income. Within the argument of A
Room the same sum of money, `five hundred pounds a year', is used
first to indicate the legacy received by the narrator upon the death of her
paternal aunt (RO, 48) and then the income which a woman writer
69
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70 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
might be able to earn following the ground-breaking example of Aphra
Behn (85). Like the room of one's own of the title, the sum of five
hundred a year is used as a symbol to indicate the very strong link
between financial independence and psychological autonomy that
forms the main contention of the essay. But as this symbol also works
to erase the distinction between private and earned income, the argu-
ment of the essay itself is caught in a vicious circle whereby the five
hundred pounds a year become both the precondition of a woman's
writing (since she `must have money and a room of her own'(4) in order
to write fiction) and its final outcome (as `money dignifies what is
frivolous if unpaid for' (84)).
This circularity in the argument put forth by A Room has its origins in
the need to lend authority and credibility to its narrator by shielding her
from accusations of partisanship and sex antagonism. As the narrator
confesses, the receipt of her legacy of five hundred pounds has worked
to free her from the burden of anger, subservience and bitterness which
she identifies equally in the writings of Professor X and in Jane Eyre.
Instead of working `like a slave, flattering and fawning' with `rust eating
away the bloom of the spring, destroying the tree at its heart' (RO, 48),
the narrator suddenly finds herself endowed with a private income
which releases her from the need to please men or employers, so that
she is free to express her opinions without fear to offend. This means
that her own analysis of men's attitudes towards women's emancipation
can be presented as a balanced, unprejudiced and disinterested account
that is not influenced either by recriminations or by the need to please:
`I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any
man; he has nothing to give me' (49).
Working as a shield against the sway of patriarchal power, the legacy
of five hundred pounds represents the financial and material basis
which is required for the androgynous attitude to take hold. As the
third pole mediating between women's embittered resentment and
men's aggressive defensiveness, the narrator also offers the representa –
tion of an alternative lifestyle that is neither as lavish as the one she
experienced in the men's college nor as meagre as that of the women's.
In the section that precedes the revision of the history of women's
writing in favour of the middle-class, income-generating woman, the
scene of writing moves from Oxbridge to Bloomsbury, where the narra-
tor stops to have her first meal as a paying customer rather than as a
guest. Neither sumptuous nor inadequate, this meal functions as a third
term, a balanced but nutritious fare that stands in sharp contrast with
the extremities she experienced in Oxbridge. It is paid for with a
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Professing Literature 71
ten-shilling note whose presence in her purse is greeted by the narrator
as a miraculous appearance: `it is a fact that still takes my breath away ±
the power of my purse to breed ten-shilling notes automatically. I open
it and there they are' (47).
As Elizabeth Abel has remarked in Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of
Psychoanalysis (1989), the image of parthenogenesis offered by the nar-
rator's purse links together the issues of money, feeding and mothering
that are so prominent in the text. Abel argues that the insistence on the
five hundred pounds legacy that runs through A Room masks the
ambivalence towards mothering that is inscribed in the play between
the different narrative voices making up the argument of the essay. In
characterising money as the result of parthenogenesis, that is of repro-
duction without intercourse between the sexes, the narrator effects for
Abel a decisive split of the biological meaning of mothering from its
nurturing aspect. On the one hand, there is Mrs Seton, the biological
mother who has exhausted herself by giving birth to thirteen children
and has as a consequence been unable to provide her daughters with the
`wine and partridges and servants carrying tin dishes on their heads'
(RO, 26) that the text insists are necessary for nourishing the mind as
well as the body. At the opposite pole from Mrs Seton is the paternal
aunt, Mary Beton, who left the narrator the enabling legacy `for no other
reason than that I share her name' (47).1
The shift from Mrs Seton to Mary Beton, from `the mother who bears
[the narrator], and therefore cannot feed her' to `the one who feeds her,
but does not give birth',2 works for Abel to diffuse the anger provoked by
inadequate nurturing which is debarred from the economy of the text.
As she puts it, `Although the declared value of the legacy is freedom
from corrosive work and thus from anger and bitterness toward men, its
dramatized value is freedom from hunger and thus anger and bitterness
toward women.'3 By linking together motherhood, the legacy and the
anger that the text tries so hard to expel, Abel's reading of A Room also
opens the way for questioning the insistence on inheritance ± both
financial and literary ± that characterises the text. Although Abel con-
cedes that the ostensible aim of A Room lies in the identification of a
matrilineal heritage in response to `a defensively misogynist construc-
tion and conflation of gender and textuality',4 she also insists that the
project is undermined by the other, negative side of this idealisation,
which blames the mothers for the lot of the daughters.
This ambivalence towards mothering also inflects the question of the
value of women's work, whether paid or unpaid, professional or not. A
notoriously ventriloquist text, A Room speaks with different voices and
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72 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
to different audiences at one and the same time, arguing for the import-
ance of women's earning power to the audience of female Cambridge
undergraduates, while whispering under its breath that paid employ-
ment often fosters in women `fear, anger and bitterness'. As it has often
been noted, A Room is constituted from the beginning as an ongoing
argument which opens, as it were, in media res: `But, you may say, we
asked you to speak about women and fiction ± what has that got to do
with a room of one's own?' (RO, 3). The link between the ostensible
topic of the talk and its title is represented as a digression from the
proscribed aim which is also a movement backwards both to the origins
of the talk and to the roots of women's exclusion from culture as agents
or subjects rather than as objects.
But in re-examining the historical and material circumstances that
have led to that exclusion, Woolf is implicitly answering another ques-
tion, coming this time not from her Cambridge audience, but from the
likes of Professor X who insist on the `mental, moral, and physical
inferiority of the female sex' (RO, 39). Although the question is never
explicitly articulated in A Room, its origins can be traced back to a real-
life, rather than fictional, encounter between Woolf and some propon-
ents of the inferiority of women. About ten years before the publication
of A Room Woolf had been involved in a polemic with `Affable Hawk'
(the pseudonym of Desmond MacCarthy, a member of Bloomsbury
and therefore a friend) in the New Statesman on `The Intellectual
Status of Women' (1920; WE, 30±9). The polemic had originated with
MacCarthy's review of a collection of essays by Arnold Bennett, Our
Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord , which supported Bennett's conclu-
sion `that women are inferior to men in intellectual power' and that,
quoting Bennett, ` „no amount of education and liberty of action will
sensibly alter'' ' their inferiority (31).
In characteristic fashion, Woolf's reply was made up by a two-throng
attack. Fist of all she disputed MacCarthy's facts by calling in Sappho as
the example of a woman poet whose achievements were undoubtedly
fostered by the exceptional amount of education and liberty enjoyed by
women in Lesbos at the time. Then she set out to undo the terms of the
discussion by reversing MacCarthy's and Bennett's claims about
women's mediocrity when compared with men's achievements. The
point was, Woolf argued, that genius does not arise in opposition to
mediocrity, but as the fulfilment of a long tradition of practice. Articu-
lating for the first time the argument that will later form the backbone
of A Room, Woolf stated that `the conditions which make it possible for
Shakespeare to exist are that he shall have had predecessors in his art,
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Professing Literature 73
shall make one of a group where art is freely discussed and practised, and
shall himself have the utmost freedom of action and experience' (37).
By the time Woolf came to write A Room the background of this
discussion was erased and what remained was a primary digression or
diversion from the question of women and fiction to that of the material
and historical conditions that are necessary if women are to produce
their own equivalent of Shakespeare. Within the logic of A Room, this
insistence on the production of a female Shakespeare comes into con-
stant clash with the need to redefine the very notion of artistic and
cultural value that would put Shakespeare at the pinnacle of national
achievement. So although Woolf insists on casting Shakespeare as the
supreme embodiment of the androgynous ideal, warning that `it is fatal
for anyone who writes to think of their sex' (RO, 136), she also spec-
ulates that `the book has somehow to be adapted to the body' and that
`women's books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of
men' (101).
This clash between different systems of values is precariously resolved
within A Room by drawing in the audience of women undergraduates
from Cambridge as the anonymous predecessors that will pave the way
for the emergence of a female equivalent of Shakespeare. Having shed
the various fictional identities she had assumed throughout A Room,i n
the last few pages of the essay the narrator takes up the voice and
position of a conventional public speaker and concludes with what
she acknowledges is a classical and dutiful peroration. Building on her
claim that `masterpieces are not single and solitary births' but require
`many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the
people' (85), she addresses her original audience of young women study-
ing at Cambridge by asking them to devote their `very laborious and
highly obscure career[s]' (148) to the constitution of a collective body
from which Shakespeare's fictional sister will be reborn, `drawing her life
from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother
did before her' (149).
To fulfil the promise embodied by Judith's myth, the professional
young women of Woolf's time are invited to `live another century or
so . . . and have five hundred a year each', to learn `the habit of freedom'
and to `escape a little from the common sitting room' (148±9), so that
they might produce for their successors the conditions which the poor
Mrs Seton was unable to provide for her daughters. Those conditions
will form the inheritance, both financial and spiritual, that will enable
their own future daughters to become the (androgynous) women writers
of tomorrow. As with Mrs Seton, then, the position of the audience of
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74 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Cambridge undergraduates within the text is essentially a sacrificial one,
which sees them not as the inheritors of Shakespeare's mantle, but as the
providers for daughters who, like Woolf herself, will be absolved from
the need to earn their own living and free to produce art unencumbered
by fear, bitterness and anger.
Implied rather than directly represented in A Room, this kind of
relationship between professional women and women writers shares
many of its defining traits with those appearing in other texts by
Woolf, whether fictional or discursive. Throughout Woolf's writings
the representation of working women and women's work is always
complicated by a certain ambivalence towards professionalisation,
which often becomes apparent in the contraposition between two char-
acters. In Night and Day (1919), for instance, Katharine Hilbery's pursuit
of mathematics is presented as a mark of the heroine's difference from
the family's expectations and demands. It also distinguishes her from her
counterpart, Mary Datchet, whose involvement with the cause of
women's suffrage and political activism stand in sharp contrast with
Katharine's intensely solitary and private pursuit of the abstract, non-
human world of mathematical relations. In Mrs Dalloway (1925),
Elizabeth Dalloway is shown to be torn between her own biological
mother, who is identified throughout the text by her lack of professional
employment and her role as a society hostess, and her governess, Miss
Kilman, whose envy, bitterness and rage mark her as Woolf's own re-
interpretation of a Jane Eyre-like figure.5
In the essays, this unease towards the idea of women's paid employ-
ment is often inscribed not in the interplay between different charac-
ters, but in the relationship between writer/narrator and her audience.
Whenever Woolf found herself addressing an audience of working
women, both actual and future, her identification with them and the
sharing of common experiences were always troubled by a series of
distancing gestures that set her own experience as a woman writer
apart from that of other professional women. In `Professions for
Women' (1931; CD, 101±6), which Woolf saw as a continuation of A
Room, writing is presented much like in A Room as exemplary of a
professional activity, and yet exceptional among the professions in its
openness to women. But where A Room was concerned with the history
and even the pre-history of women's professional involvement with
writing, `Professions for Women' starts at a point in time when writing
has become a perfectly legitimate occupation, in fact the least threaten-
ing of the aspirations and ambitions that can be entertained by a young
woman. `[W]hen I came to write,' the narrator explains, `there were very
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Professing Literature 75
few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless
occupation .. . . No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and
sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare
± if one has a mind that way' (101). Here Woolf appears to take up the
position of those who insist that the absence of a female Shakespeare is
not due to material obstacles, since the requirements for the actual
writing are minimal, but rather to the lack of a mind comparable to his.
This fictionalised account of Woolf's own professional experiences
reverses the argument put forth in A Room through the tragic figure of
Judith Shakespeare. Rather than presenting writing as a dangerous voca-
tion that might lead those who pursue it to self-annihilation, it produces
the image of writing as an activity that does not involve any struggle for
recognition or emancipation. Historically more accessible to women
than all the other professions, writing is portrayed by Woolf as a spon-
taneous and effortless occupation whose natural course inevitably
includes publication (and, therefore, monetary rewards) but does not
necessarily involve professionalisation. Claiming ignorance of `the
struggles and difficulties' that characterise the lives of professional
women, Woolf admits spending her first pay cheque on `a cat ± a
beautiful cat, a Persian cat' rather than `upon bread and butter, rent,
shoes and stockings, or butcher's bills.' (102).
This contrast between writing as a frivolous occupation and the basic
and quite drabrealities of other kinds of women's work institutes a gap
or gulf of positions between the narrator and her audience. Like many of
the characters in Woolf's fiction who are represented as outsiders to the
world of working and/or professional women, the narrator of this talk
stresses her status as an amatrice who has not had to undergo the kind of
material battles that characterise the working lives of her audience. The
only point of contact or identification with her public is given by the
slaying of the Victorian figure of the Angel in the House, the idealised
version of the selfless, sacrificing and unnurturing mother represented
by Mrs Seton in A Room. The killing of the Angel is given as the only
professional battle that engaged the narrator in her pursuit of writing,
`the one act for which' she is prepared to `take some credit'. Yet, once
again as in A Room, this act which figures as the right of passage from
amatrice to professional is immediately traced back to `some excellent
ancestor of mine who left me a certain sum of money ± shall we say five
hundred pounds a year? ± so that it was not necessary for me to depend
solely on charm for my living' (103).
In the version of `Professions for Women' that was posthumously
published by Leonard Woolf in The Death of the Moth (1942), the killing
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76 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
of the Angel is presented as the first of Woolf's professional experience.
The second consists in the much more arduous task of `telling the truth
about my experiences as a body' (105) without incurring the censure of
her own reason, which the essay presents as the internalisation of men's
control over women's sexuality. In the longer version published by
Mitchell A. Leaska in his 1978 edition of The Pargiters, Woolf's depiction
of the conflict between the woman writer's imagination and her reason
is followed by a peroration to the audience of young professional
women addressed by the talk. Aware that their progress will be impeded
by the lack of female predecessors in the career of their choice, Woolf
exhorts her audience to avoid `add[ing] to your burdens a very heavy
and unnecessary burden, the burden of bitterness' by deploying the
novelist's tool, the imagination, `as a specific against bitterness'.6
To help her audience achieve this equanimity, the narrator then
suggests that they should try and identify with the men they are battling
against, the dispossessed paterfamilias , who find their privileged spaces
suddenly occupied by what they are used to consider as household
servants:
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 . . . and finds
the kitchen maid curled up in the arm chair reading Plato. 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 parlour maid knock-
ing 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?7
With its ironic slant, this scene remains poised between two conflicting
interpretations. On the one hand, the relocation of the fight for
women's emancipation within the confines of the upper middle-class
household works to professionalise the women servants by drawing a
parallel between them and the audience of young professionals to
whom the talk is addressed. In this sense, this fictional, ironic account
of their professional battles aims to bring to light the connection
between the domestic space from which the young professionals
might be seen to escape and the public arena where their struggles for
emancipation and recognition become visible. It is an anticipation of
the argument Woolf will later develop in Three Guineas (1938) about the
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Professing Literature 77
invisible thread that connects the `servilities' of the private home to
those of the public sphere (TG, 364). Unlike Three Guineas, though,
which restricts its focus and its audience to that of a specific section of
the body politic,8 this scene suggests instead that the experience of
professionalisation and the struggles and difficulties that attend to it
cut across distinctions of class, linking the young women who are
beginning to practise as `barristers, architects, decorators, solicitors'9 to
women `in service' as their unrecognised predecessors.
But this more positive interpretation of the analogy between profes-
sionals and servants is made problematic by the narrator's own position-
ing vis-aÁ-vis her audience. In exhorting her audience: `Imagine what it is
like to be a man. Put yourselves into his shoes for a moment',10 Woolf is
herself taking up the voice and role of the Victorian Angel, with her calls
to empathic identification with others at the cost of her own selfhood.
Just like the Angel had enjoined the young journalist to ` „Be sympath-
etic; be tender; flatter; deceive'' ' (CD, 101), so the narrator in her turn
uses this imaginative reconstruction of the paterfamilias 's plight as the
basis of her final peroration: `Do not therefore be angry; be patient; be
amused.'11 The censuring of anger recalls the indictment of Charlotte
BronteÈ's Jane Eyre in A Room which is here revealed as part of a class-
bound ideal of femininity requiring that anger be substituted by
`patience' and `amusement', a position of slight detachment rather
than full-blown involvement.
This deployment of literature as a tool for the dissemination and
practising of a certain ideal of femininity indicates the existence of a
slippage between that ideal and the aesthetic norm of androgyny that
barred the expression of anger and resentment from the literary field in
A Room. This slippage, which is not visible in A Room, becomes, though,
more prominent whenever Woolf finds herself engaged in the represent-
ation of working-class women and, in particular, in `Memories of a
Working Women's Guild' (1931; WE, 133±47). Woolf wrote the essay
in response to Margaret Llewellyn Davies's invitation to write an intro-
duction to Life as We Have Known It, a collection of autobiographical
fragments by working-class women. The essay is divided into two parts.
In the first one Woolf recollects her impressions of attending a Congress
of Co-operative Women in Newcastle in 1913 and her subsequent meet-
ing with Llewellyn Davies in London. In the other she relates her
impression and evaluation of the material collected in the book in
relation to her memories of the Congress. Thus, the structure of the
essay exploits the ambiguity that is first introduced by the title, indicat-
ing that the memories here in question are both the working women's
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78 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
personal recollections of their own lives and Woolf's own memories of
her first, direct encounter with those women.
At the same time, though, this doubling up of the narrative point of
view dramatises within the essay the tensions and ambivalences which
we saw structured the relationship of narrator/speaker to audience in A
Room and `Professions for Women'. `Memories' differs from those two
essays in that here the narrator herself is initially placed as a spectator/
audience to the 1913 Congress of Co-operative Women and then as the
reader/recipient of the autobiographical recollections of those same
women. In the first part of the essay, Woolf's reflections upon
the differences that divide her from the women speaking at the Con-
gress are prompted by her experience of attending the Congress in the
capacity of observer and member of the audience rather than delegate.
Finding herself alienated by and uninterested in the demands for social
improvements put forth by the speakers, Woolf both explains and
enacts her detachment by describing the differences in material condi-
tions between her own life and those of the delegates.
In charting the distance between herself and the women she is there
to observe, Woolf employs a series of bodily metaphors which translate
that gap into a split between mind and body. The demands for improved
material conditions put forth by the Co-operative women are con-
sequently assimilated by Woolf to the workings of a giant mind encom-
passing the whole country, to which she opposes her own embodied
condition, stressing the importance of a bodily reaction of sympathy
when opposed to a merely imagined identification. In a way that
reverses the invitation to sympathise with men's plight she had
proffered to the young professional women of the London/National
Society for Women's Service, Woolf admits that `[a]ll these questions . . .
which matter so intensely to the people here, questions of sanitation
and education and wages, this demand for an extra shilling, for another
year at school, for eight hours instead of nine behind a counter or in a
mill leave me, in my own blood and bones, untouched' (135).
First introduced by Woolf in this context, the question of embodi-
ment becomes one of the central themes around which the whole essay
is organised and articulates some of the difficulties that had already
been implied by the discussion of women's sexuality and its relationship
to writing in A Room and `Professions for Women'. Here bodies and
aesthetic values are not essentially compatible. Instead of the woman
fishing along the banks of the imagination for the deepest truths about
women's sexuality, `Memories' proposes the image of a collective body
of women delegates as a metaphor for the rigidity and lifelessness of a
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Professing Literature 79
military operation. Woolf's recollections of the Congress stress that
`there was something military in the regularity' with which one delegate
followed another, as `[a] bell struck; a figure rose; mounted the platform;
spoke for precisely five minutes; she descended'. Characterised by an
unbending division of time and functions, the operation has the
women delegates respond to its signals as if they were automatons.
Comparing the delegates to `marksmen' who `sometimes . . . missed'
and `sometimes . . . hit', Woolf conveys both the sense of threat
associated with `the carefulness of the aim' and, at the same time, her
reservations about the nature of those ends (134).
Coming as it does in connection with practical requests for improved
material conditions and reforms of current laws, this comparison
between the Guild women and the military implicitly links the Congress
to the activities of Emily Pankhurst and her support for violent action
both in relation to the question of women's suffrage and to England's
participation in the First World War. In sharp contrast to the world of
conscientious objectors and pacifists inhabited by Woolf herself, these
analogies between an organised women's movement and military
organisation all contribute to enlarge the distance that separates Woolf
from the working women by quite literally unsexing them and making
femininity a privilege linked to class position: `They touched nothing
lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms. Their
faces were firm and heavily folded and lined with deep lines' (137).
References to the divergence of working women's bodies from a class-
bound ideal of womanliness abound throughout the essay and are
ascribed by Woolf herself to the difference in working and living condi-
tions. The difference between signing a cheque to pay one's own bills
and doing one's own washing in a tubfilled with hot water is translated
by Woolf into different physical traits, so that the conference delegates
are depicted as strong and capable muscular bodies which evoke, by
implication, the frail elegance and refinement of the body of their
observer. Thus the bodies of working women are seen by Woolf as
entirely and completely defined by their position in the social division
of labour:
They plunged their arms in hot water and scrubbed the clothes
themselves. In consequence their bodies were thick-set and muscular,
their hands were large, and they had the slow emphatic gestures of
people who are often stiff and fall tired in a heap on hard-backed
chairs.. . . It seemed as if their muscles were always taut and on the
stretch. Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something
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80 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
actual . . . Their lips never expressed the lighter and more detached
emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease
about the present. No, they were not in the least detached and
cosmopolitan.
(137)
Reading the working women's bodies as if they were books, Woolf can
only find in their lines and characters the signs of a homogeneous living
experience that has left no space for individual variations of build or
complexion. In the essay, the living conditions experienced by the
Guild women are translated into the image of a physically powerful
but inelegant collective body which is contrasted with a type of fem-
ininity defined as the aesthetic cultivation of delicacies and refinements
of expression and behaviour.
This gulf that separates the working women from their ladylike obser-
ver signifies not just Woolf's class allegiances and her inability to sym-
pathise with the conditions of working-class women, but also a serious
disturbance in the allocation of gendered identities and positions within
the essay. If the delegates at the conference are, as we saw, initially
represented in military terms (always, for Woolf, the mark of mindless
masculinity), their subsequent association with the domestic spaces of
washing and cooking produces in its turn an ironic realisation of the
ideal of physical rather than mental androgyny.12 In this sense, they can
be seen to function as the other side of the search for a female equivalent
of Shakespeare that redefines androgyny not as the transcendence of
historical and sexual limitations but as their embodiment. In the situa-
tion portrayed in `Memories of a Working Women's Guild', androgyny
stops functioning as a means of liberation from history and/or unifica-
tion of opposing tendencies, and takes on the full weight of the contra-
dictions experienced by Woolf in her position as the observer and then
reporter of a gathering of working-class women.
In a movement that recalls the relief from conflicting pulls experi-
enced by the narrator of A Room at the sight of a couple getting into a
taxi together, the problems posed by the working women find a sudden
resolution as the essay turns from Woolf's own recollections of the
Congress to the memories and personal testimonies offered by the work-
ing women themselves. Suddenly illuminated by the light of personal
testimony, the faces which Woolf had previously read as an uninter-
rupted expanse of hot-water tubs and cooking-pots stop being chained
to their material conditions and take on something of the imaginative
strength of fictional characters. The women that emerge from their
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Professing Literature 81
autobiographical recollections are `no longer addressing a large meeting
in Newcastle from a platform, dressed in their best clothes' in an envir-
onment that had unsexed them in the eyes of their upper middle-class
spectator. They are rather relocated within a private space, `into the
four-roomed houses of miners, into the homes of small shopkeepers
and agricultural labourers', and in the working practices and conditions
of a bygone era, `into the fields and factories of fifty and sixty years ago'
(WE, 142).
Turned into a route of access to the social history of the country, the
autobiographical papers in Davies's book are reworked by Woolf into a
larger narrative celebrating the survival of the human spirit in the
harshest of conditions.13 As Woolf herself sets out to supply a common
theme linking the autobiographical fragments together, the working
women undergo a slow transformation from automatons to human
beings whose defining characteristic is the ability to experience beauty.
In place of the narrowly utilitarian and materialistic terms set out at the
Congress, Davies's book outlines the existence of an alternative dimen-
sion where the aesthetic experience becomes the repository of the
human spirit: `Put girls into a factory . . . when they are fourteen and
their eyes will turn to the window and they will be happy because, as the
workroom is six storeys high, the sun can be seen breaking over the hills'
(143).
This celebration of the reparatory power of art opens up a point of
tension within Woolf's aesthetic. On the one hand, the autobiographi –
cal impulse of the Guild women is presented as a means of liberating
them from the material and physical restrictions of their conditions as
working women. On the other, there is the notion of the androgynous
mind set out in A Room, with its emphasis on the transcendence of
personal experience as the necessary precondition for the creation of
art. This tension is at the source of Woolf's hesitations and equivoca-
tions in the essay, which reproduces in the shifts of temporal perspective
and authorial position the ambivalence at play in her historical situa-
tion as a spectator at the 1913 Congress. It will come increasingly under
pressure during the decade that followed the writing of the essay, when
Woolf will find herself the object of attacks as the representative of an
excessively refined sensibility with no understanding or concern for the
material conditions of life.
Woolf's response to these attacks will be to attempt to forge an alli-
ance between women writers and the working classes as equally
excluded from the realms of privilege inhabited by the young male
writers of the 1930s. As she points out in `The Leaning Tower' (1940;
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82 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
WE, 159±78), while speaking in favour of the disposessed, the poets of
the 1930s still continued to enjoy the privileges of an education and life
style which inevitably skewed their angle of vision and their perspective.
And yet this strategic alliance between women writers and working
classes as `commoners, outsiders' (178) is based itself on the transforma –
tion of the notion of the common reader, which is invoked by Woolf in
this essay, into that of the outsider as defined in Three Guineas. Although
Woolf presents them as synonyms, the two terms are in fact both
semantically and in terms of her own definitions closer to antitheses,
one underscoring the universality and the shared character of the
experience of reading literature as a private individual, the other mark-
ing a clear separation between society as such and its margins. It is this
conflict between commonality of experience and unbridgeable differ-
ence which Woolf voices in Three Guineas, the essay which marks the
collapse of the strategies of mediation and reconciliation symbolised by
the androgynous mind and thus opens up the search for alternative
ways of articulating communal identities that will occupy Woolf in the
last years of her life.
Art and Feminist Propaganda: Three Guineas
Although clearly related in content and setting, Woolf's two book-
length essays are very different kinds of writing from the point of view
both of form and of tone. Where A Room is playful and ironic, Three
Guineas is dead serious and sarcastic at best; while the latter insists upon
the truth of facts and photographs, the former relies on fiction and
charm; where A Room is rich in images and narrative skill, Three Guineas
presents the same argument three times over, in a progressively tighter
and tighter circle that risks to strangle its readers in the monotony of its
tone. Perhaps more significantly or in addition to all these discrepan –
cies, there is in Three Guineas no equivalent of the hopeful message of
reconciliation and resolution of conflict which A Room provides with
the androgynous ideal and the image of the couple getting into a taxi
together: Three Guineas seems, indeed, to signal the end of Woolf's
reliance on marriage and heterosexual union as a prototype for the
resolution of conflicts and splits.14 Overtly an argument against war
and conflict, Three Guineas explicitly rejects any attempt at healing
rifts and mending splits but rather insists on a strict separation of
spheres between educated men and their daughters and sisters.
Written in defence of pacifism, Three Guineas is the most combative
and most partisan of Woolf's works, spoken from a position which
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Professing Literature 83
Woolf herself narrowly and very precisely defines as that of the daughter
of an educated man (TG, 155). Unlike A Room, Three Guineas has never
occupied a place of particular prominence in the canon of Woolf's work
and was in fact received at publication as an eccentric and rather ana-
chronistic pamphlet both by members of her family and by declared
enemies.15 In more recent years, though, Three Guineas has undergone a
sort of critical re-evaluation that has linked it to A Room in its preoccu-
pation with issues of sexual politics and their relation to the structures
of power in British society. Reversing the charge of anachronism levelled
at it in the 1930s, recent feminist readings of Three Guineas have tended
to celebrate Woolf's foresight in her analysis of the connections that link
patriarchy to Fascism as cultural and political systems that rest upon and
promote a strict division of roles between the sexes.16 In the case both of
the initial reactions and of later reappraisals, however, the focus of
discussion has always been the argument Woolf puts forth in this
essay, implicitly making the question of the form the argument takes
irrelevant or, at the very least, secondary to the meaning of Three
Guineas.
In some respects, this very clear-cut separation of the politics of Three
Guineas from its form reflects the political and historical climate of
Britain in the 1930s, when a younger generation of poets and critics
started to question the strong interest in form that had characterised the
writing of the 1920s. While in the previous decade Woolf had criticised
Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy for their drabmaterialism, in the 1930s
she became herself the target of Marxist and socialist attacks which
questioned the relevance of her experiments in artistic form to the
political issues of the time. Accused of an excessive reliance upon a
nebulous sensibility rather than hard fact, for many Woolf came to
embody the refined taste and supreme delicacy of a dying ruling class
whose beliefs and principles appeared to be totally ineffectual in the
fight against Fascist brutality and violence. As Quentin Bell testifies, in
the context of the Spanish Civil War and the rise of Nazism pacifism
took on quite a different meaning from the one it had had during the
First World War.
Although conceived in the early 1930s as a sequel to A Room, Three
Guineas was late in coming and, by the late 1930s, had become part of
Woolf's response to the urgency of the political situation in Europe and
her quarrel with the generation of young writers whose involvement
with literature was qualified by their political allegiances. Where A Room
is explicitly directed to a female audience of young students (and, in
Jane Marcus's terms, potential lovers),17 Three Guineas symbolically
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84 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
addresses itself to the kind of male audience represented by Woolf's
nephew, Julian Bell. Bell had been brought up in the midst of a group
of conscientious objectors to the First World War, but had developed
throughout his life a critical attitude towards the pacifist ethics of
Bloomsbury which became reinforced by the spread of Nazism and
Fascism in Europe during the 1930s.18 In 1937 he came back from
China, where he held a lectureship in English, to go to Spain as an
ambulance driver, where he was killed in the battle of Brunete in July
of the same year.
Unable to understand the motivations that had led Bell to join the
fighting, Woolf carried on her argument with him after his death
through Three Guineas. A few weeks after Bell's death Woolf wrote to
her sister that she was `completely stuck on [her] war pamphlet' as she
was `always wanting to argue it with Julian' (L 6, 159). In September
1937 she recorded in her diary thinking about Three Guineas in connec-
tion with one of Bell's last essays, `War and Peace: A Letter to E. M.
Forster'19 (D 5, 111); almost a year after his death she admitted she
had `always been thinking about Julian' while writing the essay (D 5,
148). This sense of an ongoing dialogue with Bell is preserved by the
epistolary form of Three Guineas, while the connection with the Spanish
Civil War returns in the pictures of horror that are invoked by the essay
like a refrain.
As a defence of pacifism written in this changed context, Three Gui-
neas treats the relationship between art and politics as one of the con-
stituent problems it attempts to address not just explicitly but also, and
more significantly, implicitly, at the level of form and in terms of its
strategies of argumentation. Like `Memories of a Working Women's
Guild', it is written as a long letter prompted by a request for co-opera-
tion coming, this time, not from Margaret Llewellyn Davies, but from a
male representative of a society dedicated to the prevention of war. This
main letter in its turn contains two other sets of letters that have been
solicited by similar requests for financial and material support ± from
the treasurers of a women's college in Oxford or Cambridge and of a
society of professional women, respectively. The relation between the
main letter and the two subsidiary letters is both logical and chronolo-
gical, in that the narrator introduces their requests as a follow-up to the
line of argument she is pursuing, but actually claims to have received
them before the letter that deals with the prevention of war. Having thus
separated the logic of the argument from the logic of the story, Woolf
can then give her discussion the classical structure of a dialectic
exchange where each of the statements made by either the narrator or
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Professing Literature 85
the female correspondents is met by an objection which is in its turn
taken apart and disproved bit by bit.
But unlike the syllogism whose structure it imitates, the argument in
Three Guineas does not proceed in a linear, progressive fashion, but
rather unwinds in a series of concentric circles which resemble the
movement of a snake strangling its prey. With all its appearance of
stringent logic, Three Guineas does not so much demonstrate the
existence of a link between patriarchy and Fascism as state it as a matter
of fact, needing as little logical proof as the pictures of dead bodies from
Spain which work as the subtext of the essay. Woolf introduces these
pictures very early on, at the beginning of the first section, where she is
trying to establish the truth about the ethical value of war, whether it is
as contemptible and horrifying as Wilfred Owen described it or as
commendable as the Bishop of London finds it. Having surveyed various
sources as to the merits and faults of war, she concludes that the schol-
arly or scientific approach does not leave one any more enlightened as
to the ethical value of war, since `[i]t seems plain that we think differ-
ently according as we are born differently'. Yet, it is precisely this bewil-
dering multiplication of points of view, the distance that separates
Grenfell, advocate of militarism, and Wilfred Owen, victim of the
war's senseless horror, that pushes the narrator to look for a shared
value system, an `absolute point of view . . . a moral judgement which
we must all, whatever our differences, accept' (163).
Required to bridge the gaps between `an educated man's daughter'
and her correspondent lying at the other side of a deep gulf of silence,
the intersubjective and incontrovertible truth that is invoked by the text
is primarily to be found in the shared emotions of `horror and disgust'
(165) elicited by the pictures of dead bodies and destroyed houses
published by the Spanish government which are described, but not
reproduced, in the text. Woolf argues that as images these pictures
need no argumentation to convince of their objective truth, `they are
simply statements of fact addressed to the eye' (164). Stripped of the veil
of rhetoric, these photographs of war achieve in a flash that unity of
mind and purpose which intellectual analysis and argument cannot
bring about:
When we look at those photographs some fusion takes place within
us; however different the education, the traditions behind us, our
sensations are the same; and they are violent. You, Sir, call them
`horror and disgust'. We also call them horror and disgust. And the
same words rise to our lips.. . . For now at last we are looking at the
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86 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
same picture; we are seeing with you the same dead bodies, the same
ruined houses.
(165)
Healing the rift within that had been fostered by the analytical and
scholarly approach to the problem, the strong emotions elicited by the
pictures of the Spanish Civil War also effect a sort of sociolinguistic
unification whereby male and female members of the same class come
to speak the same language and therefore to share the same values. By
imposing the recognition of a class homogeneity that is often denied,
these photographs of dead bodies and victims of war act within the
economy of the text as a bridging device that allows the narrator to
address her correspondent through the gulf of both time and space
which divides them and which Woolf characterises as the split between
the private world of the Victorian home and the public sphere of
national and international politics. As this connection or link, they
work therefore as the visual equivalent of Three Guineas, turning its
argument for the origin of Fascism in the male psyche from an hypoth-
esis to be proven to a statement of facts.20
From this perspective, the narrow focus on the educated classes for
which Woolf has so often been criticised has more than just a biogra-
phical significance, since it allows her to examine the connection
between knowledge and power, education and class which is at the
root of British society. In a repetition of the classical dilemma of feminist
politics, Three Guineas swings between separatism and integration, envi-
saging the complete demolition of British civilisation as a utopian
dream that must be renounced in the face of reality.21 While inciting
the women's college treasurer to burn the college to the ground in a
celebration of women's resistance to assimilation by male society and its
abhorrent values, the narrator is, nevertheless, caught out by her alle-
giance to the cause of pacifism which has curbing effects upon her
radicalism. The women's college is reluctantly allowed to stand because
without formal education women `could not obtain appointments' and
would therefore be `again dependent upon their fathers and brothers'
leading them to `be consciously and unconsciously in favour of war'
(TG, 203).
Led to withdraw her conditions by this reluctant recognition of the
need for traditional education and degrees for women, the narrator still
insists on imposing much more stringent and binding restrictions for
the society of professional women. Practising a profession is not, Woolf
argues, valuable in and of itself but only as a means to the end of
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Professing Literature 87
preventing war. To realise this end, professional women must resist the
temptation of turning themselves into mirror images of their male
counterparts and practice their professions in accordance with their
own values rather than those of their fathers, husbands and brothers.
Turning her society for professional women into a sort of monastic
order, Woolf demands of professional women that they should carry
with them into public life the values that have traditionally been
associated with women for as long as they inhabited the narrow con-
fines of the private home: `the four great teachers of the daughters of
educated men ± poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal
loyalties' (269).
Providing women's emancipation with a sense of continuity with
their past, these four guiding principles are founded both in the private
experience of human relationships which individual women have
developed as part of their traditional role, and in the public equivalent
of that experience which is to be found in great works of art. In an
argument that clearly recalls Hegel's description of the master/slave
dialectic, Woolf claims that having historically been the victims rather
than the perpetrators of wrongdoing, women of her class have devel-
oped a higher kind of individual moral conscience than that of their
male counterpart, who have used their power to indulge rather than
curbtheir worst instincts. Taking Sophocles's Antigone as a sort of blue-
print for the relations between the sexes in her class, Woolf draws here a
parallel between Creon's abuse of power, albeit sanctioned by human
law, and Antigone's transgression of that same law in the name of the
higher moral authority invoked by her own sense of right or wrong.
Opposing private and public morality, outward appearances and inward
substance, Sophocles's Antigone presents a conflict of extremities that
can only end in tragedy. In the Britain of the 1930s, Woolf is brought to
the realisation that tragedy can only be avoided by bridging the gulf that
separates Antigone's personal world from the public world of institu-
tions and government.
As the role played by Sophocles's tragedy indicates, great art is privi-
leged in Woolf's argument as a site for the exercise not of refined
sensibility but of moral judgement. Located in public buildings and
accessible to all, art provides the mediating element that links the
private experience of submission and oppression to something located
outside itself and rooted in history. Stressing the importance of preser-
ving this art as available to all, Woolf also implicitly underlines the
recognition of its value by a society that normally refuses such recogn-
ition to women's insights:
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88 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Go to the public galleries and look at pictures; turn on the wireless
and rake down music from the air; enter any of the public libraries
which are now free to all. There you will be able to consult the
findings of the public psychometer for yourself. To take one example,
since we are pressed for time. The Antigone of Sophocles . . . Consider
the character of Creon. There you have a most profound analysis by a
poet, who is a psychologist in action, of the effect of power and
wealth upon the soul. . . You want to know which are the unreal
loyalties which we must despise, which are the real loyalties which
we must honour? Consider Antigone's distinction between the laws
and the Law. That is a far more profound statement of the duties of
the individual to society than any our sociologists can offer us.
(272)
Far from expounding a doctrine of aesthetic purity, Woolf's deployment
of the Antigone effectively returns to an Arnoldian understanding of the
relationship between art and morality which is surrounded by danger in
the climate of the 1930s. As Woolf herself acknowledges in a footnote
appended to the passage quoted above, her understanding of literature
as the embodiment of ethics may at times appear to come very close to
using literature as a form of political propaganda itself, starring Creon as
the Fascist dictator and Antigone as either Mrs Pankhurst or Frau Pom-
mer. But Woolf insists that this kind of reductive reading would be
forced to leave out precisely those qualities that make art what it is,
thus reducing it to the function of a mere vehicle for a political message:
`If we use art to propagate political opinions, we must force the artist to
clip and cabin his gift to do us a cheap and passing service. Literature
will suffer the same mutilation that the mule has suffered; and there will
be no more horses' (395).
In the context of the argument against male values put forth in Three
Guineas, Woolf's condemnation of propaganda as a form of castration
appears incongruous or at least puzzling, a sudden equation of virility
with fertility that seems to go against the grain of her intense dislike for
the valorisation of virility and manliness in British and European culture
in general. This disconcerting choice of words has been analysed by Jane
Marcus as the locus of an intersection between literature, politics and
the taxonomy of class which in the end supports rather than under-
mines Woolf's insistence upon a link between capitalist and patriarchal
forms of oppression. Marcus argues that Woolf was herself quite happy
to play the mule in support of the feminist cause and thus to align
herself as a woman with those who remained excluded from the
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Professing Literature 89
privileges of class and education enjoyed by her male counterparts.
Redressing Q. D. Leavis's criticism of Three Guineas as too elitist and
class-bound, Marcus insists instead on celebrating Woolf as `a feminist,
a socialist, artist and worker' without perceiving any conflict or tension
between those identities.22
But while Marcus may be at ease with the image of Woolf as a socialist
feminist, the one political stance she finds difficult to account for is
precisely Woolf's pacifism, which she admits considering `an ethical
luxury, a self-indulgence at some historical moments'.23 Difficult to
reconcile with her interpretation of Woolf's politics as revolutionary,
the opposition and resistance to war which is so fundamental to the
argument of Three Guineas is for Marcus simply a leftover of the aboli-
tionist and Quaker traditions that were part of Woolf's paternal heritage.
In keeping with her own revolutionary socialism, Marcus condemns the
rejection of violence `as the strongest of the liberal bourgeois illusions
because it pretends that violence is an ethical rather than a political
problem, and thus allows the pacifist to avoid the idea of the revolu-
tionary attack on private property'.24 For Marcus, while pacifism is in
itself a doomed stance, it was nevertheless turned by Woolf into a
weapon of resistance against the enforced uniformity of the political
opinions upheld by the male members of her family or by her friends.
By seeing pacifism on the one hand as a liberal illusion and on the
other as a tool of feminist strategy, Marcus effectively reproduces the
problem of conflicting and contradicting interests she worked so hard to
eliminate from Woolf's political stance in Three Guineas.25 If it is true, as
Marcus remarks, that the pacifism of the essay remains incomprehensi –
ble to modern readers, it is also true that the resistance to war and
violence is absolutely fundamental to the economy of the text and
cannot simply be ruled out as a sort of excess that is marginal to the
main thrust of the argument. In fact, and as we have seen, the need to
prevent war acts as a corrective to the sort of radically revolutionary
politics Marcus advocates, leading Woolf to renounce the complete
overhaul of British institutions in the service of a higher cause. This is
not to say, though, that Woolf's pacifism easily imposes itself as the
ultimate good to strive for in a final resolution of the conflicting ten-
dencies embodied and represented in the text. Woolf's insistence on the
links between patriarchy and Fascism in fact represents an attempt to
resolve a conflict of loyalties between the universal ethics of pacifism
and the claims of the members of her own sex and class.
Far from representing the feminist position, Three Guineas plays out a
confrontation between, on the one hand, a liberal understanding of
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90 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
feminism which would restrict it to the suffrage movement and the
search for economic emancipation and, on the other, a more radical,
separatist agenda bent upon building from scratch a completely alter-
native society promoting feminine rather than masculine values. The
tendency towards separatism is fuelled by the white heat of legitimate
anger and comes therefore in continuous contrast with the demands of
pacifism, which not only bars the use of violence, but actually forces a
realisation of the interdependence of the private and the public sphere
upon upper- and middle-class women. As a symbol of this connection
between private and public worlds, Woolf appropriates the classical
literary topos of Westminster bridge, which has worked as a locus for
thinking about modern life in poetry from Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot.
The bridge founds her narrative authority and yet represents also the
connection that has made it possible for what Woolf calls, in psycho-
analytic terms, `an infantile fixation' to grow into the international
threat of Fascism (TG, 341). While the narrator is portrayed suspended
on the bridge in the attitude of an observer, uncertain as to whether she
should cross and join the other side or not, the procession of patriarchs
marches on towards the inevitability of war.
Translating the march of progress into a tragic drive towards self-
destruction, Woolf's image of the patriarchal procession also questions
the value of women's progress towards financial emancipation which,
while freeing them of the patriarchs' power, still subjects them to the
less personal and yet all-pervasive dominance of the market-place. In
the last section of the essay, Woolf finally marks a clear-cut departure
from her attempts to reconcile the professional and artistic sides of
writing by restricting even further her audience and constituency. If
the daughters of educated men have the duty of learning a profession
to emancipate themselves from their fathers, they are, however,
firmly excluded by Woolf from practising those values that distinguish
them from the dictators themselves. Drawing out a comparison that
had remained implicit throughout her argument, Woolf points out
that professional women are often forced to prostitute themselves
in order to earn their living and therefore cannot be trusted with
the protection of `intellectual liberty and our inheritance of culture'
(281):
So to ask the daughters of educated men who have to earn their
livings by reading and writing to sign your manifesto would be of
no value to the cause of disinterested culture and intellectual liberty,
because directly they had signed it they must be at the desk writing
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Professing Literature 91
those books, lectures and articles by which culture is prostituted and
intellectual liberty is sold into slavery.
(288)
Matching the clear-cut distinction between art and propaganda she
proposed earlier, this separation of professional women from those
who enjoy an independent income is the founding moment of Woolf's
alternative form of society, a sort of underground cell which would work
from within to resist the spread of violence. As the true inheritors of
Antigone's moral authority, the non-professional daughters of educated
men need not join the procession or cross the bridge that brings the
private home in communication with the public world; they are there-
fore protected from contagion by either infantile fixations or the lure of
money. Their financial independence from both patriarchs and market-
places singles them out as the repositories of critical judgement and
discernment, making them capable of distinguishing truth from false-
hood, fact from propaganda, good art from bad. Self-contained and self-
assured, the daughters of educated men in receipt of legacies and private
incomes cannot, like the college treasurer or the professional woman, be
bribed and cajoled into supporting the prevention of war; they must be
convinced, as the narrator herself and her male correspondent have
been, by the plain truth of the photographs from Spain. If the connec-
tion between `the photographs of dead bodies and ruined houses' on the
one hand and `prostituted culture and intellectual slavery' on the other
is made clear enough, then, Woolf claims, `the daughters of educated
men will prefer to refuse money and fame, and to be the objects of scorn
and ridicule rather than suffer themselves, or allow others to suffer, the
penalties' graphically represented in the Spanish pictures (292).
Functioning as an alternative to the Westminster bridge of the profes-
sional march, these pictures thus join the daughters of educated men
who have five hundred a year and a room of their own to their brothers
in a recognition of common humanity and universal abhorrence of the
consequences of war. Running over and above their differences, this
recognition is constantly threatened by the violent emotions produced
by the battle for women's emancipation, which here, unlike in A Room,
are located in both sexes. Clearly sided and sexed, the narrator of Three
Guineas is allowed to indulge in the partiality of strong emotions that
had been debarred from A Room as possible threats to the authority of its
speaking position(s). To the dizzying and seductive multiplication of
narrative identities typical of A Room, Three Guineas opposes then a
progressive narrowing down of its political constituency to such limited
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92 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
dimensions that it risks becoming a soliloquy rather than an exhorta-
tion addressed to a social group. As the cumbersome diction indicates,
the identity of `daughter of an educated men who does not need to earn
her living' offers only a temporary and very precarious reconciliation to
the tug of conflicting loyalties and divergent interests.
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4
Sketching the Past, or the Fictions
of Autobiography
Literature and the Scene of Memory
The restriction of Woolf's audience to the daughters of educated men in
Three Guineas signals the end of her strategies of fashioning readerships
joined together by the shared experience of private reading. Although
Three Guineas tries to bridge the gulf that separates the daughters of
educated men from their brothers, it also resists any attempt at assim-
ilating its intended readership to the wider body of societies and inter-
national campaigns set up to prevent yet another European conflict.
These two opposing tendencies are exemplified by the multiple and
contradictory functions which the text ascribes to the Spanish photo-
graphs of civilian war casualties. Presented as the unifying testimony of
the horrors of war that should bring together brothers and sisters in a
unanimous condemnation, the photographs also work to inscribe a
deep gap between language and vision, words and images.
As the gulf between text and photographs is also the gulf that separ-
ates the narrator of Three Guineas from her male correspondent, the
essay reveals the extent to which Woolf's construction of the common
reader and of other, related types of audience rests upon a coincidence of
text and image. Three Guineas has in fact no equivalent of the metapho-
rical figures that in other essays function to embody their argument in
one single image, like the trespassing narrator of A Room or the killing of
the Angel in the House in `Professions for Women'.1 The images it does
deploy, like the march of the professions or the casualties of the Spanish
conflict, are divided into two sets representing the two sides of the
argument: the horrors of war and the patriarchal institutions that still
structure public life in Britain. These two sets of images are joined
together not by a third one but rather by the argument of the essay,
93
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94 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
which is to say that the causal link that joins them is crafted through
language. Although Three Guineas offers an explicit reflection of the
ways in which words and images interact, it is the one text by Woolf
where they remain separate and do not manage to coincide.
This coincidence, and the ability of words and images to converge and
erase the distinction between writing and vision, is at the centre of `A
Sketch of the Past', the memoirs Woolf wrote during 1939±40. Started at
the time when Woolf was working on Roger Fry (1940) and then con-
tinued while she was writing Between the Acts (1941), these autobiogra –
phical notes were meant to provide a rough outline of her recollections
to be reworked later into a more finished product. But if the idea of the
sketch that is coterminous with these notes suggests the sense of an
unfinished and provisional formation, it also indicates a coming
together of verbal and visual forms of representation which is central
to Woolf's thinking about the relationship between writing and mem-
ory. In this sense, `A Sketch of the Past' offers Woolf's most extensive
reflection on the ways in which the creation of images both depends
upon memory and structures its contents.
As a hybrid form, the sketch returns time and time again in Woolf's
writings, cutting across boundaries of genre that usually keep fiction
and novels separate from essays and criticism, and essay and criticism
separate from biography and autobiography. The sketch appears in
Woolf's writing under many guises, but is generally found to function
as the visual equivalent of the text it occurs in, a sort of mirror reflection
that concentrates narrative into an image. It can be Lily Briscoe's paint-
ing in To the Lighthouse (1927), the period tableaux of Orlando (1928), the
pictures of horror from the Spanish Civil War in Three Guineas or the
scenes from the pageant of Between the Acts. But the sketch is also the
method of apprehending and communicating history deployed by
Woolf in her Common Reader articles and her essays on literary figures.
Omnipresent and all-pervasive, the sketch achieves for Woolf that coin-
cidence of method and style that marks such diverse and heterogeneous
works as integral parts of an oeuvre.
For a writer who usually displays an intense awareness of the technical
and formal aspects of her work, Woolf has left surprisingly few com-
ments on the idea of the sketch as one of her most pervasive and,
perhaps, also most instinctive ways of writing.2 While providing a
wealth of information about each and every stage of her artistic devel-
opment, diary and letters remain by and large silent on the topic of the
sketch, even as they show Woolf drawing a quick characterisation or
relating a scene observed in the streets. Against this inconspicuous
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Sketching the Past 95
background, `A Sketch of the Past' stands out as the only text where
Woolf turns back to reflect upon the meaning of the sketch to her life
and work. As in most of her other works, the memoirs of 1939±40 look at
the sketch in relation to portraits and characterisations on the one
hand, and to larger scenes or tableaux on the other. But whether it is
involved in the representation of people or of landscapes, the sketch
always remains for Woolf the distinctive way in which the past is
remembered and recorded.3
As we shall see, this intersection of writing, remembering and vision
raised for Woolf a series of troublesome questions relating to the dis-
tinction between art and life. These tensions are also mirrored in the
publication history of `A Sketch of the Past', which was first published
posthumously in 1976 as part of a collection of autobiographical writ-
ings by Woolf edited by Jeanne Schulkind with the title of Moments of
Being. The collection included a series of manuscripts from the British
Library and the Monks House Papers, all at various stages of revision.
The manuscripts were identified as five separate texts spanning the
breadth of Woolf's own literary career from its very beginning to the
end of her life. The first of them, `Reminiscences', was written between
1907 and 1908 to celebrate the birth of Julian Bell, Woolf's first nephew.
Addressed to the still unborn child, `Reminiscences' tells the story of
Vanessa's and Virginia's interconnected lives from their first encounter
in the nursery to the death of their half-sister, Stella Duckworth. A later
group of three texts forms the Memoir Clubcontrib utions, papers writ-
ten respectively in 1920±21, 1922 and 1936 and read out at meetings of
the original members of the Bloomsbury group over the years. Of these,
`22 Hyde Park Gate' follows on from where Woolf left off in `Reminis-
cences', giving an account of how she and Vanessa lived under the
influence of George Duckworth in the years that preceded the death of
their father in 1904. `Old Bloomsbury' traces the beginning of the group
that took its name from the London district the Stephens moved to in
the same year, while `Am I A Snob?' turns its focus upon the present of
writing by substituting introspection for recollection.
`A Sketch of the Past' is the last in order of composition but its subject
matter covers the same ground already mapped out by Woolf in `Remin-
iscences'. Because of their self-reflective character, the memoirs occupy
a very central position in Schulkind's collection, which is underscored
by the way in which the material has been organised. Rather than
following the chronology of composition, which would have placed `A
Sketch' at the end of the collection, Schulkind decided on an order
based on the chronology of the events narrated, attempting in this
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96 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
way to re-create out of these fragments a coherent autobiographical
narrative of Woolf's life.
This editorial decision exemplifies the kind of dilemma that has sur-
rounded the first publication of various biographical and autobiogra –
phical writings on and by Woolf in the 1970s. On the one hand, the
autobiographical material is presented as a scholarly aid to the under-
standing of Woolf's artistic production; on the other, the very publica-
tion of writings that are generally considered as `private' can be seen to
stimulate the kind of voyeuristic interest that is not normally associated
with scholarly enterprises. In Schulkind's case, the decision to publish
these far from finished memoirs and recollections is justified by the
appeal to Woolf's status as a `profoundly individual' writer whose work
therefore calls for a better understanding of her life; at the same time,
however, Moments of Being does not come with the full scholarly appa-
ratus of notes, footnotes and corrections, `since to do so would have
greatly impaired the enjoyment of most readers' (MB, 7).
This assumed tension between the scholarly and the popular, the
serious and the pleasurable repeats at another level a distinction
between different forms of writing that Woolf attempted to preserve
throughout her life. Separating what she considered to be her major
works (her novels) from the rest of her literary activities, this hierarch-
ical disposition of genres is perceived by Woolf both as a necessity and as
a problem. It is a necessity in so far as it keeps her fiction separate from
more partisan and also more personal kinds of writing that do not
correspond to the androgynous ideal of impersonality she expounds in
A Room. This hierarchy of genres becomes a problem, however, when
measured against the dissatisfaction Woolf felt for the form of the novel
and her continuous search for new forms of discourse that would ques-
tion its boundaries. As we shall see, Woolf's insistence upon the need for
a hierarchical disposition of genres raises special difficulties for the
writing of autobiography and memoirs, whose generic status is complic-
ated rather than simplified by relentless attempts at securing the bound-
aries that separate the life from the letters, facts from fictions, reality
from invention.
In this panorama of distinctions which collapse as soon as they are
asserted, the notion of the sketch emerges as the formal solution that
allows Woolf to hold in a precarious balance the diverging pulls of a
series of binary oppositions. From the beginning, `A Sketch of the Past'
presents itself as an informal piece, jotted down in a hurry and located
in the space between other, more important kinds of writing. Taking up
the tone and form of the diary or journal, Woolf opens her memoirs
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Sketching the Past 97
with a piece of family gossip that has the function of belittling their
importance and, at the same time, laying the responsibility for her
undertaking upon the shoulders of her elder sister, Vanessa Bell. The
origins of the memoirs are traced back to a specific point in time, `[t]wo
days ago ± Sunday 16th April 1939 to be precise', and to a remark by
`Nessa' inciting her younger sister to start writing her memoirs before
she gets `too old' to remember it all. Woolf gives in to her sister's
suggestion mainly because she is `sick of writing Roger's life' and
hopes that the `two or three mornings' spent `making a sketch' might
act as a refreshing digression from her `proper' work (MB, 64).
But having thus created a domestic space to confine her memoirs in,
Woolf is suddenly reminded of her own dangerous tendency to make of
any kind of writing a professional and well-turned piece of work. To
keep the memoirs in their place, she must exercise a stern kind of
discipline which rules out pauses for reflection and demands instead
immediate action. `As a great memoirs reader,' she adds, `I know of
many different ways [in which memoirs can be written]'. This profes-
sional expertise, though, is seen as a potential threat to the very status of
the memoirs as a provisional, unfinished piece of writing that functions
as a digression from work. Stressing once more that the time to be
devoted to the memoirs is strictly limited, `I cannot take more than
two or three [mornings] at most', Woolf thus gets rid of the professional
considerations about form and plunges straight in: `So without stopping
to choose my way . . . I begin: the first memory' (MB, 64).
The implied contrast between the informality of the memoirs and the
careful consideration of structure and form that characterises Woolf's
other writings could not be greater. On one side, there is the suffering
and the commitment required by Roger Fry's biography, which auto-
matically and by implication place it in the realm of `proper' art; on the
other, the spontaneous and immediate kind of writing which liberates
Woolf from the constraints of professional literature but whose very
informality prevents her from considering it as `work'. From this con-
trast between opposing kinds of writing, Woolf thus manages to shape
her memoirs in the form of the sketch, a rough and yet true-to-life
account of her own past.
But the strict and uncomplicated separation of life and letters that
Woolf thus brings about becomes problematic almost as soon as it is
asserted. On the next page, and right after she has finished giving a
summary description of her first two memories, the question of the form
± and, therefore, of the `literariness' ± of memoirs returns as an interjec-
tion and interruption to her recollections. Lamenting the inadequacy of
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98 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
the description she has just given when compared to the feelings
aroused by her recollections, Woolf insists that the gap between
immediate experience and its written re-creation can only be bridged
by making the subject of that experience a part of the memoirs itself.
Rather than presenting the past as a sequence of events disconnected
from the moment of writing, the memoirs should for Woolf blend
together narrative sequence and pure description, recollection and
introspection. Thus, the form of the diary entry that initially signified
the absence of literary ambitions has already, a few weeks later, become
an informed choice defined by something more than a purely negative
contrast with `proper' literature: `2nd May . . . I write the date, because I
think that I have discovered a possible form for these notes. That is, to
make them include the present ± at least enough of the present to serve
as a platform to stand upon' (75).
This understanding of the memoirs as the form that links the past to
the present focuses for Woolf upon the issue of characterisation and
description of the figures that peopled her childhood. Woolf insists that
while a mere chronological account of events does not necessarily con-
vey the essence of personality, personality in its turn is revealed
throughout the course of one's life rather than presented as whole and
complete at any particular point in time. This dialectic of extension and
concentration is resolved for Woolf only with death, which acts like the
ending of a book or a novel, putting a full stop to any further develop-
ments and thus fixing character once and for all. As a consequence,
some of the peripheral figures that peopled her childhood and have died
since are remembered by Woolf exactly as she saw them then, `they have
never been altered'. Their clear-cut outlines are compared with `charac-
ters in Dickens', `caricatures' which, while `immensely alive', still do not
present a great artistic challenge and `could be made with three strokes
of the pen' (73).4 Quick and summarily executed, the portraits Woolf
offers of these characters encompass their personalities in a few, over-
riding traits that admit of no complexity or subtlety. Like a Dickensian
narrative, they stick in one's memory not because of their unpredict –
ability, but rather as a consequence of their representative or exemplary
character: they are types rather than individuals.
This contrast between the lasting power of generalisations on the one
hand and the ephemeral nature of uniqueness on the other informs
Woolf's very different treatments of the maternal and the paternal
figures in her memoirs. As Woolf herself admits, the figure of her mother
represents a sort of bedrock against which her theory of characterisation
appears to break down. Having died when Woolf was only thirteen, Julia
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Sketching the Past 99
Stephen should have left in her daughter's memory an impression as
strong as that of any other peripheral character she encountered in her
childhood. Rather than remaining fixed at some point in her daughter's
past, however, Julia's invisible presence accompanied Woolf well into
her adult life, until she was exorcised by the writing of To the Lighthouse
(1927):
I suppose that I did for myself what psycho-analysts do for their
patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion.
And in expressing it I explained it and laid it to rest. But what is the
meaning of „explained'' it? Why, because I described her and my
feeling for her in that book, should my vision of her and my feeling
for her become so much dimmer and weaker? Perhaps one of
these days I shall hit on the reason; and if so, I will give it, but
at the moment I will go on, describing what I can remember, for it
may be true that what I remember of her now will weaken still
further.
(MB, 81)
In Woolf's account, three different moments in time find their final
resolution through the process of writing her memoirs. Julia's death,
the writing of To the Lighthouse and `A Sketch of the Past' are all placed
on a continuum where the act of writing first works to lay to rest the
trauma of Woolf's early loss, and is then used to read To the Lighthouse as
a (psychoanalytic) `cure' for that trauma. In this sequence, the writing of
To the Lighthouse comes to work as a sort of repetition of Julia's death,
which leaves Woolf with increasingly dimmer and weaker memories of
her mother. As Mrs Ramsay takes her place, the figure of Julia is returned
for Woolf to the mythical haze that her untimely death threw back
upon her.
In `A Sketch of the Past', this blurring of features and the threat of
oblivion that accompanies it attaches itself mainly to the maternal
figures in Woolf's life, to the point where it becomes impossible to
separate this sense of oblivion and erosion from Woolf's description of
their character and personality. Both Julia and Stella represent for Woolf
the essence of an ineffable femininity, a secret, unspoken and silent
quality which makes them particularly unsuitable to a Dickensian treat-
ment of character. Men, on the other hand, are often described by Woolf
as `types' embodying a set of traits or features that make them instantly
recognisable as members of a certain group or family tree. From Julia's
first husband, Herbert Duckworth, to Stella's widower, Jack Hills, to
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100 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Leslie Stephen himself, the portrayal of men as characters poses no great
artistic problems to Woolf, who seems always to find the right pigeon-
hole to slot them into. Herbert Duckworth, for instance, is described as
`the perfect type of public school boy and English gentleman' (90),
insipid but inoffensive; Jack Hills `stands in [Woolf's] mind's picture
gallery for a type ± and a desirable type; the English country gentleman
type' (101), while Leslie Stephen takes on, quite predictably, the robes of
the Cambridge intellectual, sharp and rigorous but `lack[ing] pictur-
esqueness, oddity, romance' (109).
This susceptibility of the male characters to utter and exhaustive
description, to a final, conclusive verdict that admits of no further
appeal is matched by the form Woolf gives to the memories of her father
in particular. While her recollections of Julia are quite diffuse and
never crystallise into any specific detail or event, the figure of Leslie
Stephen is enclosed for Woolf by a series of scenes or episodes whose
frames are incredibly precise and definite. Stephen's actions are not only
always firmly located within the bounds of a specific room of the family
home, but, to a certain extent, his very person is identified by Woolf
with the gloom and doom of Victorian upholstery and furniture.
Although Woolf makes some attempts at enlarging his character beyond
the narrow limits of the Cambridge intellectual, her father remains for
her the figure most directly associated with the years of imprisonment
and frustration that followed Stella Duckworth's death in 1897. Impul-
sive and temperamental, Leslie Stephen became then fixed for Woolf in
the figure of the Victorian patriarch which clashed against and partly
overran her more loving memories of him.
If Julia obsessed her daughter through her very elusiveness, Leslie
Stephen left an indelible mark on her through the force of his tempera-
mental outbursts. Both legitimised and encouraged by the Victorian
worship of the man of genius, these emotional tempests are presented
by Woolf at one and the same time as the sign of his humanity, of that
surplus that made him more than just a `type', but also as the mark left
by a specific historical time and place upon his character. Thus, the trait
which is eccentric to the `Cambridge intellectual' tag comes itself to
dominate Woolf's memories of her father as it crystallises in her descrip-
tion of the terrible `scenes' awaiting her and Vanessa each Wednesday.
This was the day when, right after lunch, Vanessa presented her father
with the weekly accounts for housekeeping. `The danger mark,' Woolf
recounts, was around `eleven pounds' and, when exceeded, it provoked
Stephen into `an extraordinary dramatisation of self pity, horror, anger',
which was directed at Vanessa, but to which Woolf herself was a
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Sketching the Past 101
spectator in a position that filled her with `pity' for Vanessa and `rage
and frustration' towards her father (MB, 144).
Deprived of the sympathy and nurturing Julia first and then Stella
offered him, Stephen found himself confronted with an undemonstrat –
ive and unresponsive Vanessa, whose very impenetrability exacerbated
his demands even further. These `scenes' became, then, symbolic of a
cross-generational battle over the definition of womanhood and
femininity, where Woolf's father, mother and half-sister stood for the
Victorian ideal of the `Angel in the House', while she and Vanessa
fought incessantly to preserve their autonomy as artists as well as
women. Although the Wednesday episode functions very much as
the primordial example of this battle, `scenes' always tend to occur
in Woolf's memoirs in connection with the issue of sexuality and
appropriate behaviour. As with the episode of Vanessa's affair with
Stella's widower, `scenes' always carry for Woolf the connotation of an
excessively emotional reaction which is not so much genuine as
inspired by a sense of propriety and decorum, a sense of outrage that is
faked rather than felt. While they are in the literal sense faithful repro-
ductions of real family dramas, these `scenes' also circumscribe a some-
what artificial space where `life' takes on the semblance of (bad)
`literature'.
Because of its operatic and histrionic character, the Victorian reaction
to issues of sexuality in general and femininity in particular is seen by
Woolf as a potential threat to the integrity of her autobiographical
writings, casting a strong doubt upon the authenticity and genuine
character of such a picturesque environment. Organised in a succession
of symbolic or representative episodes, Woolf's memoirs show an ever-
increasing convergence between her life-history and her fictional stories
which can only be explained by recourse to `irrational' (Woolf's own
word) or magical beliefs:
These scenes, by the way, are not altogether a literary device ± a
means of summing up and making a knot out of innumerable little
threads.. . . I find that scene making is my natural way of marking the
past. A scene always comes to the top; arranged; representative. This
confirms me in my instinctive notion ± it is irrational; it will not
stand argument ± that we are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is
convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, with-
out an effort, the sealing matter cracks; in floods reality; that is a
scene ± for they would not survive entire so many ruinous years
unless they were made of something permanent; that is a proof of
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102 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
their `reality'. Is this liability of mine to scene receiving the origin of
my writing impulse?
(142)
This description of the intersection between scenes, memory and writ-
ing is the crucial point of `A Sketch' and not only because it brings to the
surface the anxieties about the erosion of the distinction between life
and literature that run through much of the memoirs. Like the sketches
of Dickensian characters `made with three strokes of the pen', the scenes
from Woolf's past are then both memorable and definite, fixed in time
as well as in meaning. But what we have here also is a classical statement
of the mimetic relation which insists that writing only imitates some-
thing that is already there in reality and which the artist receives as if she
were a passive receptacle (a `vessel'). Underneath all this and just about
emerging through it, there is also, though, a certain intimation of
violence, of `irrational' forces at play which suddenly `flood' this float-
ing vessel with a sea of memories that threatens to submerge it.
It is at this point that a strong parallel between Woolf's understanding
of the workings of memory and Freud's notion of the `primal scene'
suggests itself. In his 1918 study of the Wolf Man case, Freud argued that
his analytical work had uncovered a particular traumatic scene at the
origin of his patient's neurotic illness, which Freud, unlike Woolf, explic-
itly identifies with a description of parental intercourse. The scene,
Freud was quick to point out, had not been spontaneously recollected
as a memory by his patient but had rather been constructed through the
course of the analysis. It emerged through the examination of the latent
content of the crucial dream about white wolves which initiated the
animal phobia from which the patient takes his pseudonym in Freud's
account. The status of this scene as `the product of construction'5 raised,
as Freud admitted, unanswerable questions as to whether the infant
child had really observed an actual event or had in fact a posteriori
projected his own sexual fantasies upon an innocent image of his par-
ents. Freud himself wavered between asserting its reality and casting it as
a fantasy; in the end, he inconclusively concluded that the question `of
the reality of the primal scene' was a `non liquet'6, a legal phrase which
indicates a suspension of judgement when faced with unclear evidence
either way.7
In his seminal analysis of Freud's Wolf Man case, Peter Brooks has
argued that this refusal to conclude represents `one of the most daring
moments of Freud's thought, and one of his most heroic gestures as a
writer',8 highlighting an awareness of the fictional character of all
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Sketching the Past 103
narrative constructs that is akin to that of major modernist writers such
as Proust, Mann and, yes, Woolf herself. As the most famous and
exemplary of Freud's case histories, the story of the Wolf Man registers
for Brooks precisely the provisional, unresolved character of all types of
biography in so far as they are dependent on narrative as their main
structure of explanation. Rather than constituting a failure of Freud's
methods, the openness of the question of the reality of the primal scene,
and the attending issues of the temporality of recollection and recon-
struction which it raises, represent then for Brooks its culmination, the
major contribution made by psychoanalysis to the modernist interroga-
tion of the significance of narrative to civilisation.
But Woolf's explorations of the form of the scene in her memoirs
reveals that, at least in her case, the interrogation of narrative structures
which undermined the distinction of fact from fiction represented as
much of a threat as an opportunity. Her attempts to explain away the
convergence of fact and fiction, life and letters illustrated by the mem-
oirs initiate in fact a chain of infinite regression that only returns Woolf
to her initial assertion of their distinction. Rather than describing the
kind of open-ended `non liquet' invoked by Freud, Woolf's memoirs close
off into a tight circle that cannot let the question of origins rest and
keeps on shifting the level of discourse from art to personal history and
back again.
Her belief in the existence of a form of reality organised and structured
like a work of art is itself traced back to a cluster of three memories or
scenes located in the St Ives of her childhood. These three memories are
presented as instances of `moments of being', that is, of sudden revela-
tions that break up the fabric of everyday life to reveal the true nature of
reality. While two of them are of a violent, extreme character, the third
and central one represents for Woolf a revelation of the network of
relations that shape life into an integral whole. She recalls looking at a
`flower bed by the front door' and realising that `the flower itself was a
part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was
the real flower; part earth; part flower. It was a thought I put away as
likely to be very useful to me later' (71). Through this memory, the
child's first aesthetic experience is made to give birth both to her con-
sciousness of living in time and to the mimetic philosophy of art
espoused by Woolf in her memoirs. In clear contrast with the brutality
and horror of her other two memories, the perception of beauty as a
perfect integration of parts and whole showed to Woolf the way towards
making sense of the traumas that besieged and marred her own child-
hood. Julia's, Stella's and Thoby's deaths can thus all be absorbed into a
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104 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
pattern which, albeit stark and relentless in its pursuit of the young
Virginia, nevertheless gives some kind of meaning to the repeated losses.
Effectively indistinguishable from the act of writing itself, Woolf's
insistent search for the meaning of life endows her subsequent choice
of career with a strong sense of mission that almost turns it into a
mystical or religious activity. Linked to the scenic character of memory,
writing is often seen by Woolf both as an antidote to and a substitute for
the act of remembering itself. As an antidote, its role is to bind together
into a meaningful structure those disconnected episodes and fragments
which are perceived as threatening when experienced or remembered in
isolation. As Woolf makes clear in her comments on To the Lighthouse ,
writing has in this case a therapeutic function that is both a liberation
and a relief. It is `the shock-receiving capacity', Woolf insists, that
`makes me a writer' since `a shock is at once in my case followed by
the desire to explain it'. Writing turns traumatic events from `a blow
from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life' into `a
token of some real thing behind appearances' (72). But this making
(up) of scenes to stave off the assault of traumatic events also has the
effect of eroding the distinction between memories of past events and
their fictional re-elaboration, turning writing into a substitute for the act
of remembering itself. If it is true that scenes survive the onslaught of
time because they are real, it is also true that for Woolf `reality' is an
attribute that belongs more properly to art than to life.9
Given these premises, it is perhaps not surprising that what Woolf
describes as preparatory notes were never re-worked into a definitive
autobiography. Never conceived as an autonomous entity, a `thing in
itself', life acquires reality for Woolf only in so far as it is sanctioned by
writing. Through this relationship of dependence, her autobiographical
narrative takes the shape of a progression towards the moment of writ-
ing, a present that symbolises the culmination of a promise that was
already there in the beginning of her life. As the text that performs and
enacts this circular trajectory, `A Sketch of the Past' works not so much
as a prelude to future books, but as the preface to Woolf's whole writing
career. In the world described by Woolf's memoirs, the sketch does not
come before the finished picture, but is rather the seal that completes it.
Orlando: Literary History as Family Romance
If Woolf's memoirs never stood a chance of developing beyond the stage
of the preparatory sketch, Orlando is the book that comes closest to
giving an extended autobiography encompassing the whole panorama
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Sketching the Past 105
of her adult life. Ostensibly a tribute to her friend and lover Vita
Sackville-West, Orlando exploits the collapse of differences between art
and life at work in `A Sketch of the Past' with the aim of reinventing
Woolf's own genealogical tree as a fantastic reinterpretation of the
history of English literature. In doing this, it translates history into a
two-dimensional landscape painting that acts as a scenographic back-
ground for Orlando's adventures. And yet, precisely because those
adventures remain characterised almost exclusively by their relation-
ship to history, the background also becomes the only thing that
matters in Orlando, thus producing the exchange between different
levels of meaning and interpretation that give it its unique flavour.
As the central narrative event of the book, Orlando's sex-change from
male to female functions as the motor for the book's unsettling shifts
between foreground and background, appearance and reality. In this
sense, the androgynous character of Orlando works both as the origin
and as the reflection of the uncertain generic identity of a book which
claims to be a biography but flaunts all the conventions of realism
and narrative verisimilitude. As a disturbance of established categories
and entrenched oppositions, Orlando also works to rewrite the meaning
of androgyny in Woolf's work. It transforms her relationship to
Sackville-West into a form of lesbianism that is not the antithesis of
heterosexuality but rather an `escapade' that remains tightly contained
and circumscribed by the legal and institutional framework of
marriage.
This coexistence of possibilities that are usually considered to be
mutually exclusive is both cause and effect of Orlando's delight in the
collapse of rigid distinctions, be they epistemological, historical or sex-
ual. Poised between two of Woolf's most experimental works (To the
Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931)), Orlando shares with the near-
contemporary A Room (1929) a veritable relish in the seductive power of
humour, which it seems, however, to celebrate for its own sake, without
any further aims in mind. While A Room states its central message
unambiguously already in the title cover, Orlando offers its readers no
sure foothold, no steady ground for its own interpretation. As Rachel
Bowlby has shown in her introduction to the World's Classics edition of
the text, the history of Orlando's critical reception testifies to the dis-
tance that separates its world of infinite possibilities from that of closed
classificatory systems and fixed oppositions (O, xii-xlvii). Incapable of
accommodating and accounting for the fluctuations that characterise
Orlando, literary criticism has traditionally insisted upon a structure of
absolute exclusions, whereby Woolf's fantastic biography comes to be
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106 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
considered as either a mere divertissement or a serious work of criticism,
but never the two together.
One the mirror-image of the other, these kinds of absolute and clear-
cut critical judgements return Orlando precisely to the world of fixed and
immutable distinctions from which it so successfully escapes. And yet,
as Bowlby points out, the impossibility of settling once and for all these
opposing claims about Orlando's value indicates itself the irreducibility
of the text's character as neither mere joke nor pure criticism. Just like its
protagonist, who emerges triumphant and untouched by the ravishing
of time, Orlando the book placidly refuses to be forged into either sub-
servience or antagonism but retains throughout the character of a
highly eccentric version of literary history.10
The first and most evident instance of Orlando's indecisive and fluc-
tuating attitude is represented by the confusion that surrounds its gen-
eric status. Subtitled by Woolf A Biography, the book presented from the
very start a series of classificatory problems, not the least of which was
the marketing difficulty of selling an alleged biography as a work of
fiction. Irritated at the booksellers' refusal to shelve Orlando as a
novel, Woolf predicted a gloomy future for such a confusing article.
`But the news of Orlando is black,' she wrote in her diary, as shops
insisted that `[n]o one wants biography' and were not swayed by
the Hogarth Press's assurance that it was a novel: `it is called a
biography on the title page . . . It will have to go to the Biography shelf'
(D 3, 198).
Mimicking the back and forth movement of the either/or dialectic,
Woolf's report of the exchange between publishers and booksellers ends
up by looking like a parody of the system of logical exclusions from
which Orlando tries to escape. Trapped in a world not of its choosing,
Orlando itself undergoes in Woolf's eyes a sort of devaluation, as the
difficulty of selling this strange ware is deemed `a high price to pay for
the fun of calling it a biography' (198), dismissing the pleasure and
enjoyment she derived from its writing as a mere prank. Yet, even as
a prank, Orlando still manages to scramble and upset those well-
established oppositions that would make of its light-hearted and
easy-going character a guarantee of popularity and success (`And I
was so sure it was going to be the one popular book!', Woolf laments
(198)).
Although Orlando subsequently went on to beat Woolf's record sales
for To the Lighthouse , this link between the question of its generic status
and the issue of its value (both monetary and artistic) reflects one of the
central preoccupations of the book itself. Like the real-life Vita Sackville-
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Sketching the Past 107
West it is modelled upon, the book's central character, Orlando, is an
aristocrat and remains such throughout the many changes of fortune
and circumstances s/he undergoes. More persistent than his/her biolo-
gical sex, Orlando's social status is never really put into question, even
when it appears to be challenged by the lawsuits that would attempt to
deprive Orlando as a woman of her rightful inheritance. Having left
England as a man in the seventeenth century, the female Orlando
returns in the eighteenth only to be greeted by the law's inability to
grapple with her changed circumstances. Her existence, and her right
to ownership of the ancestral estate, are put into question as the courts
attempt to establish whether Orlando is dead, or a woman `which
amounts to much the same thing', or, finally, `an English duke who
had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons,
which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that
all his property descended to them' (O, 161).
Suspended by the law `in a highly ambiguous condition', Orlando
becomes the embodiment of the kind of disjunction between reality
and its legitimation that is at the centre of the concerns addressed by the
book. Within the fictional world of Orlando, the rules of logic and
dialectic upheld by the law appear totally incapable of accounting for
an exception to the norm, leading the law itself to formulate a series of
mutually exclusive and contradictory hypotheses. Prepared to incur
ridicule in order to assert itself as the ultimate authority in the facts of
life, the law is compelled in the end to admit the momentary defeat of
the binary logic it worships as Orlando is permitted to return to `her
country seat' where she is `to reside in a state of incognito or incognita,
as the case might turn out to be' (161).
In a move that is typical of the strategy deployed by Woolf in Orlando,
the absurdity of the lawsuits is contrasted with the total and assured
recognition Orlando as a woman receives from both animal and human
members of staff upon her return to the ancestral home:
No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the
Orlando they had known. If any doubt there was in the human
mind the action of the deer and the dogs would have been enough
to dispel it, for the dumbcreatures, as is well known, are far b etter
judges both of identity and character than we are. Moreover, said Mrs
Grimsditch, over her dish of china tea, to Mr Dupper that night, if her
Lord was a Lady now, she had never seen a lovelier one, nor was there
a penny piece to choose between them.. . .
(163)
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108 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
The passage echoes with innumerable ironies. At first, and as usual,
Orlando's biographer is given the task of voicing the banality of a simple
reversal of the nature/nurture opposition, whereby the `dumb creatures'
are presented as paragons of intuition and understanding when com-
pared to the imbecility of the law. In the face of Orlando's recent change
of sex, though, this blind faith in the reliability of natural as opposed to
human distinctions cannot be sustained and is indeed ridiculed as soon
as it is asserted. Brushing aside the question of Orlando's sexual identity
with a non sequitur, Mrs Grimsditch shows that absurdity is not the
prerogative of the law and of more sophisticated kinds of discourse but
affects any attempt at establishing a ground for authoritative judge-
ment, be it that of nature or that of nurture.
This refusal to settle for the claims of either biology or history also
means that neither of the two genres Orlando purports to be ± novel and/
or biography11 ± offers an adequate description of its status. The book
opens not with the recounting of genealogy required by the conven-
tions of biography, but in media res, with the kind of plunge into action
that is more typical of fiction than of historical narratives. `He ± for there
could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did some-
thing to disguise it ± was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which
swung from the rafters.' (O, 13) But the boldness of this immediate start
is counteracted by the aside the biographer addresses to his/her readers.
Interposed between subject and verb, the aside functions as an interrup –
tion of the narrative flow which raises simultaneously both the question
of Orlando's sexual identity and that of the problematic status of his/her
biographer. It introduces the voice of the biographer as a break in the
convention of the omniscient narrator which thus works to undermine
rather than support the truth claims made by traditional biography. And
yet, because the omniscient narrator here speaks not as a biographer but
as a storyteller, the aside also disturbs any easy identification of Orlando
with the genre of the novel and, more in general, with the conventions
of fictional (as opposed to historical) accounts.
Having established in its first sentence an equivalence between the
problem of the book's genre (biography and/or novel) and that of its
hero/ine's sex (male and/or female), Orlando then spends the next two
chapters in preparing the ground for the full deployment of its impact.
In the early stages of Orlando's life, the disturbance of sexual identity
and the confusion of generic status are presented more as a future
potential than as an actuality. Orlando's fated love-story with Sasha
and his subsequent retreat to the countryside are told in a manner
that by and large respects the demand for verisimilitude required of
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Sketching the Past 109
realistic fiction, with only a few interventions from the biographer
which, although puzzling, do not really disturbthe progression of the
story. While the biographer may occasionally speculate on the meaning
of Orlando's physiognomy or comment upon Elizabethan moral stan-
dards, s/he generally enjoys in these chapters the kind of complete and
total access to Orlando's consciousness that is normally denied to bio-
graphers. Like the river Thames in the months of the Great Frost,
Orlando as a youth is characterised by a total transparency that flattens
out even the most brooding depths of his psychology into the charming
picture of the nobleman as an adolescent. Following Orlando as surely
in the midst of King James's court as along the corridors of his ancestral
home, both biographer and readers are lulled into the illusion of inha-
biting the imaginary world he belongs to.
But the illusion of immediacy and presence created by the conven-
tions of realist fiction is suddenly shattered as soon as the story
approaches the climactic point. Orlando's removal to the Middle East
coincides with the narrative revelation of his/her darkest secret, that
sex-change which the biographer does his/her best to advertise as loudly
as possible. Making the notion of deÂnouement quite literal, the scene of
Orlando's sex-change represents the fulfilment of the expectations for a
scandalous revelation that had been set up by the biographer's asides in
the preceding chapters. At the same time, by transferring the notion of
deÂnouement from the structure of the plot to its contents Orlando also
exposes the highly artificial and implausible character of a life modelled
upon literary clicheÂs. Thus, Orlando's lack of surprise or astonishment at
the sight of her new body highlights by contrast the absurdity and the
excess of the biographer's fight with moral conventions. It also embo-
dies Orlando's double status both as a genuine, albeit quite naõÈve, char-
acter in a story and as a vehicle for Woolf's snipes at both literary and
social conventions.
This change in Orlando's status is preceded and, as it were, ushered in
by another change in the status of the book. After the straightforward
narrative of the first two chapters, chapter three of Orlando's life opens
with a long proviso or note of caution from the biographer, who laments
the inadequacy of historical documentation to aid the reconstruction of
this most crucial period in the life of his/her subject. `The revolution
which broke out during [Orlando's] period in office, and the fire which
followed' are conveniently blamed for the destruction of `all those
papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn'. As a result
of the political upheavals, Orlando's career `in the public life of his
country' has had to be pieced together `from the charred fragments
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110 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
that remain', making it necessary for his/her biographer `to speculate, to
surmise, and even to use the imagination' (115).
Introducing for the first time the question of historical documenta –
tion, the biographer's cautionary remarks break up the kind of novelistic
illusion that had enveloped the book and its readers in the preceding
chapters. In a gesture that both prefigures and mirrors Orlando's throw-
ing aside of the blankets to reveal a woman's body, the biographer here
exposes for all to see that gap between events and their narration that
had been covered over by his/her previous incarnation as the omnis-
cient narrator of Orlando's life. Professing ignorance and a kind of (fake)
humility, the biographer is now compelled to renounce the smooth
development of a well-joined narrative for the bitty and incomplete
accounts offered by the diaries and letters of first-hand witnesses.
Paradoxically, and with a move that is typical of the way Orlando
works, this opening of the gap between events and narration does not
so much undermine the legitimacy of the story being told as it estab-
lishes the only conditions under which this enterprise could take place.
Neither biography nor fiction, Orlando's implausible life can only exist
in a world that has been removed from the demands for both historical
accuracy and verisimilitude. As the condition that makes possible the
suspension of disbelief characteristic of fiction, the demand for verisi-
militude indicates the extent to which even the construction of imagin-
ary worlds is dependent upon a principle of resemblance to historical
reality. By playing the conventions of the two genres one against the
other, Orlando effectively manages to take fiction away from that con-
striction in order to define a space where quite literally anything goes ±
even the outlandish idea of a sex-change accompanied by a life that
comes very close to being eternal.12
Although Orlando presents itself most openly and most obviously as a
cutting critique of biographical writing, this critique is nevertheless
accompanied by a deft excavation of the conventions that regulate the
writing and reading of fiction in general, and of traditional novels
in particular. As Woolf remarks in a diary entry that is often quoted in
connection with Orlando, the book was initially conceived as her own
personal reinterpretation of `a Defoe narrative' that should have
brought together and given expression to `all those innumerable little
ideas & tiny stories which flash into my mind at all seasons'. Provision –
ally entitled `The Jessamy Brides', the book was to figure `two women,
poor, solitary at the top of a house', with the suggestion of a lesbian
relationship between them. In stark opposition to the careful considera –
tion Woolf used to give her other novels, this was to be written in a quite
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Sketching the Past 111
instinctual and immediate way, `as I write letters at the top of my
speed . . . My own lyric vein is to be satirised. Everything mocked. And
it is to end with three dots . . . so' (D 3, 131).
While Orlando will turn out to be quite faithful to the spirit (if not the
letter) of its initial conception, its final transformation from `The
Jessamy Brides' into the mock-biography of Vita Sackville-West stands
in need of explanation. Woolf's choice of her friend and lover Sackville-
West as the pretext for her literary escapade has unanimously been seen
as a tribute to the latter and a celebration of the erotic relationship they
enjoyed. In this view, the allusion to marriage contained in Woolf's
initial title represents simply a satirical stabat an institution that
could not accommodate and/or contain either Sackville-West's or
Woolf's own sexuality. Quite appropriately, it was Sackville-West herself
who first suggested this interpretation of Orlando's Victorian marriage
in a letter which, with unwitting irony, she addressed to her husband.
Intimating Harold Nicolson to `keep this entirely to yourself', Sackville-
West complained that `Shelmerdine does not really contribute anything
either to Orlando's character or to the problems of the story (except as a
good joke at the expense of the Victorian passion for marriage)' and that
`marriage and motherhood' are not really compatible with the integrity
of Orlando's character: they `would either modify or destroy Orlando
. . . they do neither'.13
Sackville-West's criticism of Orlando's consistency echoes to a certain
extent Arnold Bennett's reservations about Woolf's ability to create
conventionally convincing characters in Jacob's Room (1922). Although
she might not have been aware of it, her criticism measured Orlando's
artistic success against the rather well-known and long-established
norms of internal consistency and resolution of the plot that properly
belong to the tradition of the nineteenth-century European novel and
of the Bildungsroman in particular.14 While in that tradition marriage
generally functions as both the motor and the resolution of the plot, in
Orlando it appears to Sackville-West as an accessory that has been
appended to a story that has no room for it. Neither of the story nor
extraneous to it, marriage thus intervenes to disturbthe exchange of
tributes and compliments between Sackville-West and Woolf that had
surrounded the publication of the book.
The criticism Sackville-West shares with her husband but not with
Woolf reveals then a certain discrepancy between her own and Woolf's
understanding of Orlando both as a book and as a character. On the one
hand, there is Sackville-West's desire to preserve the integrity of her
fictional alter-ego as a spirit who is free to roam the ages as well as the
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112 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
streets of London at night-time, unattached both in terms of personal
relationships and with reference to historical reality. On the other, there
is Woolf's need to place her relationship to Sackville-West within
the frame of her lifelong engagement and involvement with writing
and the history of literature. In the light of Orlando's continuous fluc-
tuations between genres and genders, Sackville-West's insistence upon
the integrity of both character and plot takes on the connotation of a
naive reading or, at the very least, a misreading of the book that is in
sharp contrast with the sophistication and literary knowledge displayed
by Woolf in her writing.
Far from constituting just a cheap joke at the expense of the Victor-
ians, marriage then works in Orlando as a complex literary topos through
which Woolf negotiates both her position in the history of English
literature and the terms of her relationship to Sackville-West. It occurs
at two crucial points in the narrative of Orlando's life. In the first one,
Orlando's marriage to Rosina Pepita faithfully reproduces the romantic
and exotic background of Sackville-West's own family history and
ushers in Orlando's change of sex. In the second instance (the one to
which Sackville-West had objected so strongly), the rebellion and anti-
conformism that had characterised Orlando's first marriage are reversed,
as her wedding to Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire initiates
her descent into respectability. Having acquiesced at last to the demands
of `the spirit of the age' Orlando finds that her second marriage has
effected a welcomed transformation: `[s]he was certainly feeling more
herself. Her finger had not tingled once, or nothing to count, since that
night on the moor' (O, 252).
The irony that is the distinguishing feature of Orlando reinforces
rather than undermines the seriousness of the function performed by
marriage in the life of the female Orlando. While at one level marriage
can be seen as a form of compliance with and submission to the Victor-
ian ideal of femininity, at another it effects a liberation of Orlando's
individual spirit for the occupation she prefers. Unencumbered by the
embarrassing sentimentality that had snatched her pen when she was
single, Orlando finds that her new status inaugurates for her a season of
happy and undisturbed productivity: `Now, therefore, she could write,
and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote' (254). Depicted by
Woolf as a liberation from the demands of her historical circumstances,
Orlando's second marriage is thus made to function as a comment and a
revision upon his first, romantic elopement with Rosina Pepita.
Whereas Orlando's secret marriage had initiated the period of wild
fluctuations that characterised her interim existence, her wedding to
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Sketching the Past 113
Shelmerdine coincides with the settlement of the lawsuits and the final
resolution of the question of Orlando's sex and status. The marriage to
Pepita is annulled, the `children pronounced illegitimate' and finally,
but most importantly, Orlando's interim existence is brought to a close as
her sex `is pronounced indisputably, and beyond the shadow of a
doubt . . . female' (243). Nullifying quite literally the effects and con-
sequences of the first marriage, the resolution of the lawsuits clears the
way for the reconciliation with historical existence symbolised by her
second, Victorian marriage. Closing off the gap between narrative and
events that had been opened wide by Orlando's change of sex, matri-
mony releases the female Orlando into modernity, where the present of
writing and that of the events narrated seamlessly coincide.
As her biographer remarks, what is experienced by Orlando the char-
acter as a liberation from the strictures of historical existence amounts
to a sort of death-sentence for Orlando the book. Eliminating at the root
the conditions that make narrative possible, the blissful coincidence of
writing and living that follows Orlando's wedding does away with the
need for biography and introduces the section of the book that deals
with the present of writing. In a clear imitation of Woolf's own fictional
treatment of the modern subject, the last section of the book abandons
the narrative reconstruction of Orlando's life in favour of a series of
disjointed episodes that describe her experience of modern living. Jolted
from the sparkling lights of Edwardian London on to the sensorial
assault of the department store and finally back to an elegiac recollec-
tion of his/her long life, Orlando retraces the steps of Woolf's own
artistic development from the more conventional realism of Night and
Day (1919) through to the formal experiments of Mrs Dalloway (1925)
and To the Lighthouse (1927). Displacing the expected culmination of
Orlando's story in the award of a literary prize, this exercise in self-
mimicry ostensibly works as a critique of the conventions of traditional
biography, but also manages to push aside Sackville-West's literary
achievements and substitute for them Woolf's own dazzling perform-
ance.
In the context of this unspoken rivalry with the object of her apparent
admiration, Orlando can be seen to appropriate for Woolf's own literary
activities the claims to legitimacy and rightful inheritance that are
embodied in Sackville-West's aristocratic lineage. Once again, and as in
`A Sketch of the Past', Woolf's narrative of the Sackville-Wests' family
history maps the same kind of psychological ground as Freud's theories
of the child's fantastic re-elaboration of its origins. First published in
Otto Rank's Myth of the Birth of the Hero (1909), Freud's short paper on
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114 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
`Family Romances' stressed at the outset that the child's tendency to
construct for itself an alternative set of parents partakes of `the nature of
myths' in its function as `the fulfilment of wishes and as a correction of
actual life'.15 Originated by the child's feelings of neglect and rivalry
with their siblings, these alternative lines of descent represented for
Freud a means of avenging the slights suffered by the child while main-
taining intact the exalted, idealised perception of the parents that char-
acterised its early years.
As with all the other literary conventions deployed in Orlando, the
family romance is both invoked and parodied by Woolf's fantastic
reworking of the Sackville-Wests' lineage into an off-beat, eccentric
version of the history of English literature. As it has often been
remarked, `Orlando' is a name that resounds with the echoes of literary
allusions, from the French medieval epic of the eleventh-century Chan-
son de Roland through to the Italian romance Orlando Furioso (1502±32).
Although Woolf's letters, diaries and reading notebooks carry no indica-
tion that she was consciously thinking of this literary ancestry in con-
nection with Orlando, the book itself offers one cryptic clue that points
in the direction of the Italian tradition of Renaissance romances. In the
plates that accompanied the first edition of the book, Woolf chose her
niece Angelica Bell to stand in as Sasha, the fake Russian princess
Orlando falls madly in love with and is then abandoned by in
his youth.16 Angelica Bell is then given a special mention `for a
service which none but she could have rendered' (O, 6) in the
mock preface to the book. In Ariosto's poem, Angelica is also the name
of the archetypal femme fatale, who bewitches the loyal and chaste
Orlando, ultimately causing his descent into madness and his
undoing.17
Buried beneath the rubble of fake acknowledgements, Woolf's oblique
reference to Orlando's literary lineage shares the same paradoxical status
that characterises the book as a whole. Working both as a joke at the
expense of the scholarly reader and as an indication of the seriousness of
her literary ambitions, the cryptic clue that connects Woolf's Orlando to
its literary ancestry defines the implied readership of her `joke' as a
restricted circle of people `in the know' that comes very close to resem-
bling the Bloomsbury group. As Woolf herself indicates in the diary
entry that first mentions the name Orlando, the book represents a
point of transition between the focus on individual consciousness that
had characterised her earlier novels and the interest in larger groups or
communities that is evident in The Waves (1931), The Years (1937) and
Between the Acts (1941):
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Sketching the Past 115
One of these days, though, I shall sketch here, like a grand historical
picture, the outlines of all my friends.. . . It might be a way of writing
the memoirs of one's own times during people lifetimes. The ques-
tion is how to do it. Vita should be Orlando, a young nobleman.
There should be Lytton. & it should be truthful; but fantastic. Roger.
Duncan. Clive. Adrian. Their lives should be related.
(D 3, 157)
Joining Orlando to the diary and both to the memoirs she will be writing
more than ten years later, the tableau vivant envisaged here reveals the
firm and inescapable connection that existed for Woolf between her
artistic and her social ambitions. Staging her closest friends and relatives
as the protagonists of contemporary history, Woolf's projected book
mirrors the transformation of what was originally the informal gather-
ing of a group of friends into the self-elected aristocracy of English
culture in the 1920s. Like Orlando's substitution of literary for social
lineages, Bloomsbury's shift from the nobility of blood to that of the
mind represents neither a radical upturn of the English class system nor
a completely uncritical endorsement of it. As the site of transaction
between personal and national history, Bloomsbury, like Orlando, does
not choose either side of the dialectic but simply oscillates between
homage and critique.
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5
Images of History
Feminist Histories
As an attempt to write social history under the guise of fiction, Orlando
forms a close couple with A Room (1929), Woolf's other main historio-
graphic text. The two books share a consistent preoccupation with the
question of writing English literary history from a position that is
inflected by sexual difference. This preoccupation is articulated in
both texts through the notion of androgyny, even though Orlando and
A Room differ significantly in their interpretation of it. While in Orlando
androgyny allows Woolf to occupy two different positions at the same
time by presenting traditional historical narratives concurrently with
her jocular critique of them, A Room deploys androgyny to reinforce a
more conventional version of literary history that recognises Shake-
speare as the pinnacle of national achievement. This divergence in the
reading of androgyny offered by the two texts is also reflected in the
different ways in which they articulate the relationship between history
and fiction that is central to Woolf's representation of the androgyne. As
a text that straddles distinctions, Orlando offers a vision where history
and fiction happily coexist and tend to exchange places, but where
neither one is privileged as more truthful than the other. In A Room
fiction is established from the outset as the only form of writing capable
of articulating the truth of women's relationship to, and place in, lit-
erary history.
Originally entitled `Women and Fiction', A Room grew out of two talks
Woolf delivered at Cambridge on 20 and 27 October, 1928. No manu-
script of the talks has survived, but from contemporary accounts and a
later article derived from these lectures and published in Forum about six
months later these appear to have been stylistically quite different from
116
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Images of History 117
the final version of A Room.1 They contained no fictional frame or scenes
and, judging from the evidence provided by the published article, they
were limited to arguing for women's financial independence by backing
it up with an overview of the history of great women novelists such as
Jane Austen, the BronteÈs and George Eliot. As the editor of the manu-
script versions of A Room comments, in `Women and Fiction' `the situa-
tion of women at Oxbridge is unmentioned, and the anger of men
unnoticed. There is no reference to the androgynous state of mind
that, according to Woolf, a good writer needs . . . And there is nothing
fictional in the article ± no narrator or novelist named Mary, nothing
about Shakespeare's sister.'2
The missing features that are so characteristic of A Room were added to
the text of the Cambridge lectures through an extensive rewriting which
occupied Woolf for over a month between March and April 1929. In
reworking her lectures for publication as a separate book, Woolf inte-
grated within their argument a fictional account of the experiences she
had had while staying at Cambridge. The famous comparison between
the fare of men's and women's colleges, for instance, was based on
Woolf's first-hand experience of dinner at Newnham and lunch at King's
College, although the recollections of those who participated at both
denied either the extreme poverty of the one or the lavish abundance of
the other real occasion. At the time Woolf was also engaged in the
drafting of an article on the `Phases of Fiction' which she had started
when revising Orlando and which was intended as a reply to E. M.
Forster's Aspects of the Novel (which also originated in a series of
Cambridge lectures). The title for A Room came to Woolf while she was
at work on the earlier article, whose publication was shelved to give
precedence to that of A Room in the autumn of 1929.3
Born of her twin preoccupation with women and fiction, A Room
presents a vision of history that stresses its role in the suppression and
erasure of women's voices. Asking herself `why no woman wrote of a
word' of Elizabethan literature `when every other man, it seemed was
capable of song or sonnet' (RO, 53), the narrator answers by highlighting
the discrepancy between fictional or dramatic representations of
women, and the picture of women's daily lives offered by history. Quot-
ing from Trevelyan, she remarks that while fictional portraits of women
emphasised their power and splendour, in real life Elizabethan women
found themselves subjected to routine beating, confinement, physical
and psychological brutality. From her survey, she concludes, `a very
queer, composite being thus emerges. Imaginatively she is of the highest
importance; practically she is completely insignificant' (56).
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118 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Aiming to bring together the fictional and the historical versions of
the life of Elizabethan women, A Room then proposes the myth of Judith
Shakespeare as its own fictional re-creation of Trevelyan's account. The
narrator speculates that `if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had
Shakespeare's genius' (62) she would have been denied access to the
education and freedom of action that is necessary to the development of
its potential. Kept at home and forced to attend to her alloted domestic
duties, Judith would have `scribbled some pages up in an apple loft on
the sly' which she `was careful to hide' (61). Even if she had managed to
escape the strictures of the patriarchal home, she would have had to face
a world that had no place for Shakespeare's `extraordinarily gifted sister'
(60) and would have `gone crazed, shot herself or ended her days . . . half-
witch, half-wizard, feared and mocked at' (64).
As a mythological creation which embodies the nature of the relation-
ship between women and history, Judith's story supplants the historical
and archival research which the narrator invites `some brilliant student
at Newnham or Girton' to undertake by collecting the mass of informa-
tion about the details of the lives of Elizabethan women lying `in parish
registers and account books' (RO, 58). In a movement that is typical of
the strategy of indirection deployed by Woolf in A Room, the importance
of this alternative line of research is apparently disavowed and belittled
with a gesture that simultaneously asserts it as a radical critique of
traditional historiography. Thus, the life of the average Elizabethan
woman, Woolf suggests tongue-in-cheek, should be called `by some
inconspicuous name so that women might figure there without impro-
priety' (58).
As the ghost book that Woolf never authored, this projected history of
the life of the Elizabethan woman reintroduces into the argument of the
essay the questions about historiography and its relation to fictional
narratives that are enacted and yet obscured by the textual strategies of
A Room. Prompted by the apparent absence of female dramatists and
poets in Elizabethan literature, Woolf's inquiry into the living condi-
tions of sixteenth-century women indicts history as such with the
repression and suppression of women's talents while casting fiction
and the products of the imagination as their saviours. Thwarted and
frustrated by the lack of historical information in her search for an
answer to her original question, Woolf is thus compelled to resort to
her myth-making abilities to fill in the gaps of historical documentation
with the figure of Shakespeare's putative sister.
This substitution of an imagined historical book with a myth, this
filling in of the gaps of history through the power of fiction and of the
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Images of History 119
imagination is a movement that is typical of A Room and could in fact be
said to be what the essay is all about. It occurs once again later on in the
text, where the narrator realises that her prescriptions for a specifically
feminine aesthetic to be modelled on Jane Austen's and Emily BronteÈ's
achievements runs against the obstacle of the lack of knowledge about
women's psychological make-up: `And yet, I continued, approaching
the book-case again, where shall I find that elaborate study of
the psychology of women by a woman? If through their incapacity
to play football women are not going to be allowed to practise
medicine Ð' (102).
As in the case of the substitution of the myth of Judith Shakespeare for
the history of Elizabethan women, this other, scientific study of the
psychology of women is replaced in Woolf's narrative by Mary Carmi-
chael's Life's Adventure , an invented work of fiction that is made to
represent the contemporary moment in the history of women's writing.
As one of the three Marys who are proposed as fictional alter egos of the
narrator at the start of A Room, Mary Carmichael occupies in the text a
position midway between that of Mary Seton, who appears towards the
beginning of the essay, and Mary Beton, who closes off its fictional part.
At first, Woolf's account of Life's Adventure appears to concentrate more
on the formal characteristics of the novel than on its psychological
contents. It is introduced as a possible point on a developmental curve
that takes the history of women's writing from personal concerns and
the need for self-expression to the impersonality and objectivity tradi-
tionally associated with a work of art. As such, Life's Adventure is made to
function as a sort of test case for the future of women's writing.
Woolf admits, though, that when compared to the smooth and flow-
ing sentences of Austen's style or to the even progression of her stories,
Carmichael's novel appears clumsy and abrupt, full of jerks and jolts as
well as sudden departures from the expected line of development. `Mary
is tampering with the expected sequence,' the narrator as reader
observes; `First she broke the sentence; now she has broken the
sequence.' Although feeling as if `on a switchback railway when the
car, instead of sinking, as one has been led to expect, swerves up
again', she is nevertheless prepared to give her author the benefit of
the doubt, waiting for the `situation' that would confirm whether these
deviations from traditional expectations are being carried out `not for
the sake of breaking, but for the sake of creating' (105±6).4
Just like the swerve in the railway carriage, this passage signals also a
change of criteria in the evaluation of Carmichael's fictitious novel. The
formalism that had characterised the initial approach is abandoned in
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120 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
favour of a more functional type of criticism, where literary value is
determined not through reference to a `gold standard' but rather as a
reciprocal relationship between form and content. All suspicions and
misgivings relative to Carmichael's somewhat innovative style are dis-
pelled as Woolf encounters the `situation' she had been waiting for:
And, determined to do my duty by her as reader if she would do her
duty by me as writer, I turned the page and read . . . I am sorry to break
off so abruptly. Are there no men present? Do you promise me that
behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is
not concealed? We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you
that the very next words I read were these ± `Chloe liked Olivia . . .' Do
not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society
that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like
women.
(RO, 106; ellipses in original)
Breaking up her account of Carmichael's novel to make sure that her
audience is the intended one, Woolf here moulds her own argument in
the shape of the imaginary novel she had been reading. Like Life's
Adventure , A Room is full of interrupted sequences and elliptical sent-
ences which thwart the expectations bred in its readers by familiarity
with the history of literature and with the rules of genre. Here, the
interruption signals a sudden shift from the objectivity and detachment
that had characterised Woolf's initial response to Carmichael's novel to
a jocular intimacy that presumes the existence of a long intercourse and
common knowledge between the speaker and her audience. As in
Orlando, the blanket of literary conventions is thrown aside to reveal,
this time, the collective body of a secret society of women writers and
readers.5
While Woolf intimates that this secret society has been in existence
for far longer than it is commonly acknowledged, the public revelation
of its existence is closely tied up with women's entrance into the profes-
sions. This passage from the confinement of the private home to the
freedom of the public sphere has affected the relationship between
women and fiction on two levels. As far as literature is concerned,
women's access to the professions has meant a move from a male-
dominated view of women's relationships and characters to a woman-
centred perspective upon women's lives, with an attendant enlargement
of the situations and events being represented in fiction. At the level of
actual human relationships, the development of professional interests
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Images of History 121
in women's lives has, Woolf argues, made possible a less claustrophobic
and more wide-ranging interaction between women, one that is not
dominated or deflected by their relationships with men. The dramatic
revelation that `Chloe likes Olivia' is accompanied by the less moment-
ous and more prosaic observation that `they share a laboratory',
and, with it, an identity that is located outside the boundaries
of the family home and which will, Woolf speculates, `make their
friendship more varied and more lasting because it will be less
personal' (109).
Postulating a direct correspondence between fictional representation
and historical reality, Woolf claims then that the change in women's
conditions represented by their free access to the professions will also
produce a change in the kind of representations of women offered by
literature, as women themselves begin to write of women as colleagues
and friends rather than as the objects of men's passions. Bridging the
gap between fiction and history that Woolf had highlighted in her
discussion of Elizabethan women, Carmichael's novel heralds a brave
new world where the obscurity of women's lives will finally be dispelled
as `Olivia ± this organism that has been under the shadow of the rock
these million years ± feels the light fall on it and sees coming her way a
piece of strange food ± knowledge, adventure, art' (110).
Aided by the unlimited freedom bestowed by fiction upon the imagi-
nation, the narrator of A Room charts, then, a course for the history of
women's writing which overturns the model implied in Woolf's account
of the story of Judith Shakespeare. In Judith's case, the historical situa-
tion was presented as the obstacle to the full expression of her ability to
create fictions and thus give full expression to the imagination. But
within the history of women's writing traced by the narrator of A
Room, Judith's story represents in fact the symbol of women's unrealised
potential which finally finds its full expression in the revelations and
innovations introduced by Mary Carmichael's imaginary novel. Both
conceived as embodiments of the oblivion and repression that charac-
terise women's relationship to traditional historiography, these two tales
propose fiction as the only discourse that can give voice and expression
to what has been left out of history. As such, they both work as a poster-
iori justifications of the initial, strategic substitution of the fictional for
the dialectical mode, bearing out Woolf's contention that, when it
comes to the question of women and writing, `fiction . . . is likely to
contain more truth than fact' (5). Although cast in a tone that charac-
teristically manages to combine self-deprecation and irony, this identi-
fication of the truth of women's lives with the truth of fiction is the
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122 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
centrepiece of Woolf's attitude towards traditional historiography and is
the source of the incessant search for an alternative way of writing
women's history that runs throughout her career as an essayist and a
literary critic.
This abiding interest in the writing of women's lives finds its clearest
expression in Woolf's continual fascination with the marginal and half-
forgotten figures which people the history of English literature. Cap-
tioned by Woolf herself as `the obscure', these marginal figures form the
linchpin of her historiographic enterprise, as both its object and the
method which shapes it. Woolf's most explicit reflections upon the
connection between `the lives of the obscure' and the writing of literary
history occur in the essay of the same name which was published in the
first Common Reader in 1925 (E 4, 118±45). Composed by a group of
three pieces which were originally published in separate form, the essay
offers Woolf's own reinterpretation of the lives of minor literary families
(`Taylors and Edgeworths'), of a fallen woman (`Laetitia Pilkington') and
of a brilliant entomologist (`Miss Ormerod'). Uneasily suspended
between fact and fiction, Woolf's re-visitations of these half-forgotten
lives represent, as Andrew McNeillie points out, an attempt to confront
and rectify the legacy of both patriarchal and personal history repre-
sented for Woolf by her father's involvement with the Dictionary of
National Biography.6
In the version Woolf revised for publication in the Common Reader,
`Lives of the Obscure' is prefaced by a short introductory paragraph
which sets the whole essay in the context of a visit to a dusty and
decrepit country library. As a receptacle for discarded and unwanted
books, the library is characterised by an atmosphere of slumber and
old age that equally envelops both its visitors and its books. As `the
elderly, the marooned, the bored, drift from newspaper to newspaper',
the neglect suffered by the books which line the library shelves is
translated into an image of physical degradation, where the books act
as a sort of mirror to the condition of the visitors to the library, and thus
reveal the existence of an inescapable link between the state of literature
and the interests of its readers. Rather than supporting the view that
books are forgotten or die because of their intrinsic lack of artistic value,
Woolf's image of the country library and its patrons manages to shift the
burden of responsibility for their death onto the shoulders of posterity.
`Why disturbtheir sleep? Why reopen those peaceful graves, the lib rar-
ian seems to ask, peering over his spectacles, and resenting the duty,
which indeed has become laborious, of retrieving from among those
nameless tombstones Nos 1763, 1080, and 606' (E 4, 118).
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Images of History 123
Their anonymity underlined by their identification by number rather
than by name, the books which Woolf manages to recover from the
rubble-heap of history are revitalised to the point of taking up a life of
their own by their contact with an interested reader. Answering the
question she imagined the resentful librarian should have asked her,
Woolf adds:
For one likes romantically to feel oneself a deliverer advancing with
lights across the waste of years to the rescue of some stranded
ghost . . . waiting, appealing, forgotten, in the growing gloom. Poss-
ibly they hear one coming. They shuffle, they preen, they bridle. Old
secrets well up to their lips. The divine relief of communication will
soon be theirs. The dust shifts and Mrs Gilbert ± but the contact with
life is instantly salutary. Whatever Mrs Gilbert may be doing, she is
not thinking about us.
(119)
Through this image of the dead who await communication and contact
with the living, Woolf here maps her historiographic enterprise upon
one of the classical topoi of Homer's Odyssey, where Ulysses is directed
by Circe to visit Hades before he heads back for Ithaca.7 Just as in the
Odyssey the dead can only speak after they have drunk of the sacrificial
blood offered by Ulysses, so in Woolf's reinterpretation of this classical
literary theme the obscure who have lain dormant throughout the
centuries are reawakened by the infusion of life brought about by the
reader's renewed interest.
But in Woolf's reworking of this classical episode the effect of a
successful resuscitation of the dead is to interrupt and check the
tendency to imagine the lives of the obscure along the patterns
long enshrined in the literary tradition. The reader's interest in the
lives of the obscure is presented as a breath of fresh air which
releases Mrs Gilbert and the rest of the `young Taylors' from the
stultifying grip of classicism and back into life in Colchester `about
the year 1800' (E 4, 119). Thus, while Woolf might imagine herself as a
romantic deliverer of these literary ghosts, the ghosts themselves appear
to oppose to such flights of fancy the reality of an everyday life that has
remained untouched by the suggestions of literary models. As Woolf
observes, the shape of these forgotten biographies resembles more
`the clouds of a balmy evening . . . thick with the star dust of innumer-
able lives' (121) than the clear-cut and well-defined forms of classical
literature.
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124 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Even in the lives of the obscure, however, this kind of hazy and
diffused representation is at times suddenly pierced by the appearance
of a scene or a character whose contours stand out sharply from the
background of anonymity and everyday life. The first part of the essay,
which is dedicated to the history of the Taylors and the Edgeworths, is
thus shaped by Woolf in the image of the pattern she discerns in the
lives of the obscure, with the perfect anonymity and tranquillity of Ann
Taylor's family functioning as a sort of backdrop to the biographical
sketch of Richard Edgeworth. As a symbol of exaggerated and dispropor –
tionate egotism, Edgeworth represents for Woolf the other pole of the
literature of obscurity, which she saw as inhabited by figures `all taut and
pale in their determination never to be forgotten' (121).
As the father of Maria Edgeworth, Richard works as the pivot that
allows Woolf to effect an ironic reversal of the father/daughter relation-
ship inscribed in traditional history. He introduces the pathetic motif of
the failed patriarch, whose incessant attempts at leaving a mark upon
history only served to highlight the exceptional character of the lives of
those who surrounded him:
Imperturbable, indefatigable, daily increasing in sturdy self-
assurance, he has the gift of the egoist. He brings out, as he
bustles and bangs on his way, the diffident, shrinking figures
who would otherwise be drowned in darkness.. . . We see him
through their eyes; we see him as he does not dream of being
seen. What a tyrant he was to his first wife! How intolerably she
suffered! But she never utters a word. It is Dick Edgeworth who tells
her story in complete ignorance that he is doing anything of the
kind.
(123)
Effectively amounting to a manifesto of Woolf's historiographic
method, this reading of Edgeworth's memoirs in spite of authorial
intentions and in the light of her own personal experience of patriarchal
institutions represents an avant la lettre example of the poetics and the
politics of `reading against the grain' which has been favoured and
championed by feminist critics in more recent times. While Woolf
herself does not name this kind of reading method as a feminist or
even a gender-inflected one,8 the advocacy of forgotten and anonymous
lives in the history of English literature turns out here to have an agenda
and a mission which goes well beyond that of an innocuous, antiquar-
ian interest in the past.
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Images of History 125
In its original version published in the London Mercury in January
1924, `Lives of the Obscure' comprised only the essay on the Taylors
and the Edgeworths and was introduced by a couple of paragraphs
where the relationship between these anonymous lives and the main-
stream of English literature was made more explicit. There Woolf
argued for the existence of an inextricable link between the mass of
half-forgotten books which are too close to life to attain transcendence
and the few exceptional masterpieces scattered throughout the history
of Western literature. Seemingly subscribing to the classicist identifica –
tion of aesthetic value with permanence, Woolf nevertheless insists that
the survival of the great classics themselves depends upon the existence
and availability of more impermanent and more transient forms of
writing: `For imagine a literature composed entirely of good books;
imagine having nothing to read but the plays of Shakespeare, the
poems of Milton, the essays of Bacon . . . Starvation would soon ensue.
No one would read at all' (140). In Woolf's formulation, then, the very
notion of aesthetic value enshrined in the classicist paradigm is radically
reworked, as the permanent character of isolated achievements is shown
to be inseparable from the transient and the impermanent quality of
masses of anonymous books.
In her analysis of particular autobiographical writings, this interde-
pendence between the memorable and the forgettable is translated by
Woolf into the play between background and foreground which we have
already seen in place in `Taylors and Edgeworths'. While clearly moti-
vated by a desire to rescue innumerable forgotten women from the sway
of patriarchal history, the reading by contrast which aims to reverse the
relationship between major and minor historical figures nevertheless
represents for Woolf both an irresistible temptation and a problematic
solution to the issue of women's historical obscurity. As she herself
remarks in her commentary on Richard Edgeworth's memoirs, the rever-
sal of the hierarchical relation between the author and his subjects
transforms the narrative of his life into a series of unrelated and isolated
sketches with no linking thread to unite them. Having to supply the
links through the use of her imagination, the reader who goes against
the grain is thus tempted to stray from the trace of proven historical
facts and make up a fictional account of the past. Though highly sug-
gestive, these improvised and unfinished sketches point to a region
beyond the documented, where history disappears together with the
foreground and the mythical or the archetypal takes over: `But here
we encounter one of the pitfalls of this nocturnal rambling among
forgotten worthies. It is so difficult to keep, as we must with highly
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126 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
authenticated people, strictly to the facts. It is so difficult to refrain from
making scenes which, if the past could be recalled, might perhaps be
found lacking in accuracy' (123±4).
While `Taylors and Edgeworths' manages to contain the temptation of
fiction within a broadly historical frame of facts, in the last of the essays
of `Lives of the Obscure' the relationship of history to fiction stops being
one of containment and becomes instead one of complete reinvention
and recreation. As Andrew McNeillie points out in his notes to `Miss
Ormerod', Woolf's account of the life of the nineteenth-century ento-
mologist is only loosely based upon biographical and documentary
sources and is for the most part a product of her own extremely fertile
imagination. Describing Woolf's ostensible quotations as `seldom verba-
tim' and as `inventions only indirectly derived from Ormerod [the
original source]' (144, n. 1), McNeillie highlights the relative autonomy
from the tyranny of documentary accuracy and faithfulness enjoyed by
Woolf in the outlining of this particular half-forgotten life. At the same
time, this knowledge of the fictional character of `Miss Ormerod' helps
to explain the strong similarities in both atmosphere and structure that
can be found between this essay and Woolf's autobiographical and
fictional writings.
From the start, `Miss Ormerod' is distinguished from the other two
essays of this group by a rather direct introduction into the narrative
which signals a shift of genres from the essayistic and discursive to the
fictional and narrative: `The trees stood massively in all their summer
foliage spotted and grouped upon a meadow which sloped gently down
from the big white house' (131). Similarly, in place of the formulaic
introductions typical of traditional biographical accounts, we are given
a scene from Eleanor Ormerod's childhood which sums up the whole
course of her life. The essay opens with a vision of Eleanor as a young girl
left alone in the house with just a glass tumbler containing some insects
to entertain herself with. Instead of `shak[ing] the tumbler, upset[ting]
the grubs, and scrambl[ing] down from her chair', the young Eleanor `set
perfectly still', her eyes `reflective, even critical' and yet `sh[ining] with
increasing excitement' as she observed that `[o]ne of the grubs had
ceased to float' and `the rest, descending, proceeded to tear him to
pieces' (132).
This first view of Miss Ormerod's entomological passion closely resem-
bles in its violence other primeval scenes that figure prominently both
in Woolf's fiction and in her memoirs, and, like those other scenes, also
functions as a sort of compressed version of the narrative which is to
follow.9 As the child's captivated fascination with the grubs anticipates
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Images of History 127
her career as a brilliant entomologist, so her father's brutal dismissal of
her observations comes to stand as just the first instance of patriarchal
domination and suppression, reinforced in this case by Miss Ormerod's
own mother.
In underlining this fight between the forces of repression and those of
affirmation in the life of Eleanor Ormerod, Woolf is once again making
use of a way of reading which goes beyond the grain of authorial inten-
tions to get at the meaning buried beneath the conventions of filial
devotions. Following one of the very few genuine quotations from
Ormerod's memoirs, Woolf expostulates:
`We deeply felt the happiness of ministering to his welfare,' Miss
Ormerod wrote, `for he would not hear of our leaving him for even
twenty-four hours and he objected to visits from my brothers except-
ing occasionally for a short time. They, not being used to the gentle
ways necessary for an aged invalid, worried him . . . the Thursday
following, the 9th October 1873, he passed gently away at the mature
age of eighty-seven years.' Oh, graves in country churchyards ±
respectable burials ± mature old gentlemen ± D.C.L., L.L.D., F.R.S.,
F.S.A. ± lots of letters come after your names, but lots of women are
buried with you!
(135±6)
Playing Charlotte BronteÈ to her Jane Eyre, Woolf here interrupts her
fictional re-construction of Eleanor Ormerod's life to draw attention to
the discrepancies between the facts as deposited in the historical record
and the truths of women's lives. Here, Woolf's embittered exclamation
reveals that the marks of distinction acquired by the fathers presuppose
the theft and murder of their daughters' creative potential. In this way,
it turns upon its head the kind of father/daughter relationship that is
enshrined in cultural institutions such as the DNB, where Eleanor
Ormerod is summarily described as a `distinguished entomologist' with-
out an entry of her own, but subsumed under her father's life.
But if Woolf's attempt to recover women's lives from obscurity is
motivated by the search for a lost inheritance, the means by which she
sets out to effect this recovery of lost treasures are, by her own admis-
sion, fraught with perils and difficulties. In `Lives of the Obscure' as
much as in A Room, fiction functions as the repository of the truth about
women's lives that has been repressed and suppressed by the historical
record. Charged with the task of converting the fragmentary traces of
women's existence into a story without gaps, fiction is used by Woolf as
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128 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
a sort of alternative version of the historical truth which is rooted in the
imagination rather than in facts. This use of fiction as an alternative to
traditional historiography is motivated by a twofold aim, whose differ-
ent components are not always compatible. On the one hand, because
fiction is not factual, it can be used to fill in the gaps of the historical
record in relation to women by inventing stories (as in the case of Judith
Shakespeare and Mary Carmichael's fictitious novel) or freely elaborat-
ing upon the details of existing lives (as with Eleanor Ormerod). At the
same time, however, this use of fiction as a supplement to and a correct-
ive of the existing historical record also implicitly challenges received
notions about the nature and definition of historical facts and
narratives.10
Whether aiming at the integration of women's lives into history or
challenging the foundations of traditional historiography as such, the
role played by fiction in Woolf's critical essays is nevertheless always
predicated on its opposition to factual or historical narratives which
confines Woolf's recreations or inventions to a region that is neither
history nor pure imagination. As her sketches of obscure figures never
coalesce into an example of an alternative form of historiography but
remain mere traces of a lost possibility, so the failure of Woolf's historio-
graphic project highlights both the opportunities and the limits of the
essay as a genre which could offer an alternative to traditional historical
narratives. Seeing in its extreme pliability and flexibility a source of
artistic liberation, Woolf had found in the essay the only form which
could accommodate the mix of fiction and facts which she thought
necessary for the recovery of women's lives from the oblivion of patri-
archal history. Unlike the novel, which shares with the essay a certain
formlessness but a very clear epistemological status, the essay repre-
sented for Woolf an opportunity to explore a border area between
dialectics and fiction where truth-claims did not need to be substan-
tiated by facts and facts themselves could be turned into suggestive or
evocative elements in forgotten narratives.
The Imagination as a Golden Cage
As Woolf's experiments with the form of the essay tended to underline
their closeness to fiction rather than to argument, in her critical writings
the epistemological ambiguity intrinsic to the essay was often stretched
to the point where her most ambitious pieces in the genre became
effectively indistinguishable from the form of the short story. This
closeness and the ambiguous character of a number of her shorter pieces
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Images of History 129
has been remarked upon by Susan Dick, the editor of Woolf's shorter
fiction. Faced with a number of pieces of dubious status which she
generically calls `sketches', Dick claims to have adopted a combination
of epistemological and formal criteria to judge which pieces should be
included and which excluded from her collection. She insists that essays
such as `Miss Ormerod' which, while highly imaginative, still preserve
some kind of grounding in historical reality cannot be clearly classified
as fiction. Conversely, those among Woolf's pieces which, although
previously published among her essays, appear to Dick as `works in
which the characters, scenes, and actions are more imaginary than
they are factual, and in which the narrator's voice is not necessarily
identical with the author's' have instead been reprinted as part of her
short stories (SF, 2). As one of these highly ambiguous pieces, `Three
Pictures' represents perhaps the ideal ground for a test of Dick's criteria
of classification.
Originally published by Leonard Woolf in The Death of the Moth (1942)
and then reprinted in the Collected Essays, `Three Pictures' (CE 4, 151±4;
SF, 228±31) was apparently written in June 1929 and based on a real
event Woolf had witnessed and reported in her diary about two years
earlier, in September 1927. Although its very close connection to a real
event should have disqualified the piece from inclusion in Dick's collec-
tion, Woolf's account of the original event is cast in such a form as to put
in question the stability of any criterion of distinction between the
factual and the imaginary, the real and the fictional. Set apart from
the rest of the diary entry and endowed with a title, this description of
the burial of a young sailor from Rodmell is shaped from its very begin-
ning more like a work of art than like the written record of a genuine
occurrence. The contrast between the tragedy of the young death
and the gaiety of the gravedigger's family thus comes to look to Woolf
`more like a picture, by Millais, or some other Victorian, of life & death,
youth & the grave, then any real sight. It was quite unconscious; yet the
most deliberate picture making; hence, unreal, sentimental, overdone'
(D 3, 154).
By the time this sketch of `a graveyard scene' was turned by Woolf into
`Three Pictures', the ambiguities which are only hinted at but cannot be
fully explored in the diary entry had become the organising principle of
the piece. Divided, as its title indicates, into three separate scenes, `Three
Pictures' both analyses and dramatises the problem of representation as
the contrast between a formulaic and conventional interpretation of
reality and the shocking truth that lies behind it. Setting the young
sailor's death as the final revelation of that truth, the piece supplements
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130 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
the scene inspired by the real event with a narrative antecedent in the
form of two other scenes or sketches. In the first of these pictures,
the young sailor is seen returning home to an equally young wife
amid the celebrations of the entire village. Whole and complete in itself,
this picture is then juxtaposed to the second image, where the sunny
character of the sailor's homecoming is offset by the dark note of an
inhuman cry waking the narrator in the middle of the night. These two
discordant and apparently unrelated pictures are then brought together
in the third scene, where a visit to the local graveyard reveals that the
inhuman cry had been uttered by the young sailor's wife upon discovery
of her husband's sudden death.
Through its recourse to a classical dialectical movement, the progres-
sion of the narrative in `Three Pictures' thus offers a neat resolution of
the split between the fiction of happiness represented by the first scene
and the reality of death inscribed in the second. But the same cannot be
said for the level of discourse, where the narrative impulse itself is
presented as the origin of a deep separation between the narrator and
the events she observes. From the beginning, the narrator is positioned
as a total outsider to the scene of collective rejoicing at the sailor's
return, while the narrative act itself is construed as the indulgence of a
voyeur:
So now at the turn of the road I saw one of these pictures. It might
have been called `The Sailor's Homecoming' or some such title. A fine
young sailor carrying a bundle; a girl with her hand on his arm;
neighbours gathering round; a cottage garden ablaze with flowers;
as one passed one read at the bottom of that picture that the sailor
was back from China, and there was a fine spread waiting for him in
the parlour . . . Everything was right and good as it should be, one felt
about that picture. There was something wholesome and satisfactory
in the sight of such happiness; life seemed sweeter and more enviable
than before.
(SF, 228)
Here the narrative activity comes to be presented as a (poor) substitute
for the intimacy and knowledge denied to the outsider, so that it is
forced into a series of splittings and disavowals which produce a rather
complex effect. As detached from the storytelling as she is from the
events she is observing, the narrator of this first original scene inhabits
effectively two registers and two genres at the same time. On the one
hand, she is the voice which relates the events and, as such, is identical
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Images of History 131
with the process of narrating them. But in the passage above, the activ-
ity of narrating is prefaced by a gesture that frames the observed scene
within the confines of a generic or stereotypical representation (`The
Sailor's Homecoming') and, in so doing, effectively distances the narra-
tor from both the activity of narrating and the contents of the story. In
this way, the narrative act itself is split into its constituent parts in a
movement that mirrors the dialectics of the story.
But while this split will eventually be resolved in the tragic and
shocking outcome of the story, its initial presence signals a discomfort
with the activity of narrating which will not go away. In the opening
paragraph of the piece, Woolf traces the origin of this ambivalence back
to the very conditions that make the narrating both possible and neces-
sary:
It is impossible that one should not see pictures; because if my father
was a blacksmith and yours was a peer of the realm, we must needs be
pictures to each other. We cannot possibly break out of the frame of
the picture by speaking natural words. You see me leaning against the
door of the smithy with a horseshoe in my hand and you think as you
go by: `How picturesque!' I, seeing you sitting so much at your ease in
the car, almost as if you were going to bow to the populace, think
what a picture of old luxurious aristocratical England! We are both
quite wrong in our judgements no doubts, but that is inevitable.
(228)
Exchanging her position in real life for her fictional incarnation as the
daughter of a manual labourer, Woolf here locates the original split not
so much in the narrative activity itself but rather in the relationship
between narrative persona and its addressee. The space between writer
and reader where the narrative activity takes place is also, Woolf claims,
the space which prevents them from acquiring full knowledge of and
intimacy with each other. Confined to their well-defined roles, each side
of the relationship appears to the other as a fixed and rigid representa –
tion of a conventional kind which reflects rather than challenges estab-
lished prejudices and expectations. Crucially, the distance that separates
narrator and addressee and the character of the representations it fosters
are ascribed here directly to the existence of class divisions which work
to confine each of the participants in the narrative act within worn-out
and well-established stereotypes.
Situated at the other extreme from the use Woolf makes of fiction in
`Lives of the Obscure', `Three Pictures' reveals the existence of a very
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132 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
strong complicity between literary and social conventions in the repre-
sentation of both real and fictional events. Usually diagnosed by Woolf
as the tendency and/or temptation to make up pictures or scenes, this
complicity is most explicitly analysed in her writings on the visual arts,
where it often takes the form of an insistent comparison between writ-
ing and painting as art forms. Surrounded by painters in an atmosphere
that was deeply imbued with the spirit and the practices of the artistic
avant-garde, Woolf struggled throughout her life to define the differ-
ences between writing and painting in terms of their relation to the
social body and its expectations. With the example of her sister Vanessa
Bell always firmly before her eyes, she often used Post-Impressionist
painting as the representative of a purely formalistic understanding of
art, to which she opposed her own need for what she saw as a more
communal and, to a certain extent, more `human' art form. Inevitably,
perhaps, given the circumstances of her personal life, this conflict
between social and aesthetic values became for Woolf indivisible from
the relationship of mirroring and rivalry she enjoyed with her sister.11
One of the early essays written by Woolf on the subject, `The Royal
Academy' (1919; CD, 13±18), focuses on an exhibition of well-estab-
lished British painters to underline the connection between bad art
and social conformity. Woolf opens the essay with a description of the
approach to the exhibition through a courtyard which features both a
statue of King Albert and a group of very expensive cars. In a parody of
the English tendency to read pictures and images as symbols of some-
thing else, Woolf describes the reaction of the average spectator to this
incongruous grouping of statue and cars as one of servile celebration of
the British Empire:
„The motor-cars of Empire ± the bodyguard of Europe ± the stainless
knight of Belgium'' ± such is our English romance that nine out of ten
of those passing from the indiscriminate variety of Piccadilly to the
courtyard of Burlington House do homage to the embattled tyres and
the kingly presence of Albert on his high-minded charger with some
nonsense of this sort.
(13)
Pointing out that the cars simply belong to the rich and have no relation
to the statue itself, Woolf reveals a fundamental disjunction between the
heightened patriotic sentiments expressed in the hackneyed phrases and
the reality of the social milieu, where cars and art exist side by side
without necessarily providing a justification for each other's existence.12
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Images of History 133
Having established this connection between the translation of images
into clicheÂs and the conventions of British society, Woolf proceeds then
to exploit the possibilities for satire and ironies thus opened up by
presenting the Royal Academy exhibition in the guise of a dinner
party. Taking to task the exaggerated realism of the pictures exposed at
the show, Woolf pretends to fall prey to their illusion as she goes from
room to room greeting the pictures of Dukes and ladies in evening dress
as if they were guests at the party. The illusion is of very short duration,
though, as she discovers that the guests resemble characters from fic-
tional stories more closely than actually living persons: `But scenes from
Rudyard Kipling must take place with an astonishing frequency at these
parties in order that the English maidens and gallant officers may have
occasion to insist upon their chastity on the one hand and protect it on
the other, without which, so far as one can see, there would be no reason
for their existence' (14).
The already quite implausible character of the representations offered
at the exhibition is compounded for Woolf by its one-sided concentra –
tion upon the most positive and most commendable of human traits at
the expense of the more disagreeable facts of life. Just as the picture of
chaste maidens and valiant gentlemen is not completed by the neces-
sary figure of the anti-hero,13 so the few pictures of working-class life
included in the show are turned simply into occasions for sentimental –
ity and easy commotion. From the painting of the impoverished family
of a dead fisherman to that of the cocaine addict, all the pictures
exposed at the Academy are modelled upon well-rehearsed and quite
worn out narrative patterns:
The point of a good Academy picture is that you can search the
canvas for ten minutes or so and still be doubtful whether you have
extracted the whole meaning. There is, for example, no. 248, Cocaine.
A young man in evening dress lies, drugged, with his head upon the
pink satin of a woman's knee. The ornamental clock assures us that it
is exactly eleven minutes to five. The burning lamp proves that it is
dawn. He, then, has come home to find her waiting? She has inter-
rupted his debauch? For my part, I prefer to imagine what in painters'
language (a tongue well worth separate study) would be called `a
dreary vigil.'
(15)
Reading pictures as if they were inscriptions in a foreign tongue, Woolf
here mocks the long-standing tradition of thinking about the sister arts
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134 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
which tends to see painting in a parasitic relation to literature. She
insists that the realism of the Academy paintings makes them far from
complete representations, in constant need of a verbal supplement to
their suggestions. These pictures do not work exclusively or primarily at
the visual level, but rather force upon their audience a collective emo-
tional response that is rooted in their recognition of the social and
political myths inscribed in their images: `It is indeed a very powerful
atmosphere; so charged with manliness and womanliness, pathos and
purity, sunsets and Union Jacks, that the shabbiest and most suburban
catch a reflection of the rosy glow. „This is England! these are the
English!'' one might exclaim if a foreigner were at hand' (17).
In `The Royal Academy' social convention and artistic formulae are
seen to go hand in hand and to reinforce each other in the definition of
a British imperialist identity that is clearly set off from its `other', the
foreigner. In a later essay devoted to the paintings of Walter Sickert,
though, Woolf examines the interaction between the two in antagonis –
tic rather than collaborative terms (`Walter Sickert', 1934; CE 2, 233±44).
Extending the metaphor of the dinner party she had already deployed in
`The Royal Academy', she places her discussion of Sickert's work within
the frame of a fictional conversation among the guests of the party. In
this context, the analysis of his paintings is preceded by the exchange of
pleasantries and small talk which creates a common ground or space
among the guests. From the difficulties of transport encountered by the
guests in reaching their destination, the talk then veers to the recently
introduced system of traffic lights and to its effects upon the visual
perceptions of modern men and women. Observing that `[c]olours are
used so much as signals now that they will very soon suggest action
merely' one of the guests hyperbolically prophesies that `[w]e shall soon
lose our sense of colour' as a direct consequence of `living in a highly
organised community' (233).
Lamenting the passage from an aesthetic to a functionalist apprecia-
tion of colour and images, the conversation among the guests at the
party exposes the other side of the process of communication. While the
talk about the traffic lights is used itself to break the ice and create a
common space, the establishment of a new code for the reading of
colour is apocalyptically deplored as the first step in the transformation
of human activity into mere automatism. Far from being a simple
chance remark on the way to more important subjects, the example of
the traffic lights introduces into the fictional conversation of the party
guests the conflict between the world of art and the world of social
intercourse that is at the heart of the whole essay. While Woolf had
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Images of History 135
parodied and mocked the perfect coincidence of the language of social
conventions and of painting in `The Royal Academy', here she finds
herself confronted with a total disjunction between the language of pure
form advocated by the avant-garde and the language of everyday com-
munication that joins all the guests together. Led by the first mention of
the problem of colour in the opening remarks, the conversation of the
party guests comes to rest upon the work of Sickert and the interpreta –
tion of his art. As two of the guests attempt to translate Sickert's art in
terms of its relation to different literary genres and modes, the rest of the
party brushes aside their attempts to compare his paintings to biogra-
phy, fiction or poetry and reverts instead to an analysis of pure formal
relations that stresses the autonomy of painting from verbal expression:
`And they fetched a book of photographs from Sickert's paintings and
began cutting off a hand or a head, and made them connect or separate,
not as a hand or a head but as if they had some quite different relation-
ship' (235±6).
The appearance of Sickert's paintings marks the end of the all-inclu-
sive conversation and the beginning of a long rift between the formalists
and the remaining two guests of the party. Isolated and silent in their
magic circle of pure forms, painters and art critics become themselves
inscrutable pictures in the eyes of those who do not understand their
bodily language:
Now they are going into the silent land; soon they will be out of reach
of the human voice, two of the diners said, watching them. They are
seeing things we cannot see, just as a dog bristles and whines in a dark
lane when nothing is visible to human eyes. They are making passes
with their hands, to express what they cannot say; what excites them
in [the photographs from Sickert's paintings] is something so deeply
sunk that they cannot put words to it. But we, like most English
people, have been trained not to see but to talk.
(236)
Through the comparison between the painters and the dog, the narrator
here places the circle of the formalists in a realm outside culture and yet
not quite as accessible as nature. Like `savages' in their lack of an ade-
quate language for the expression of their thoughts and ideas, the pain-
ters also indicate a fundamental failure in the long tradition of linguistic
excellence fostered by the English. If the painters themselves are cut off
from intercourse with the remaining guests, these in their turn do not
have the means for gaining access to the painters' area of silence.
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136 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
But if the setting of the piece in a dinner party conversation is used by
Woolf to draw out the discrepancy and distance between the language of
art and that of society, the choice of Walter Sickert as the painter under
discussion here works as a resolution of the rift between form and
content. Although stranded at the edges of the circle of connoisseurs ,
the two diners whose voices can still be heard in the essay refuse to leave
Sickert's art completely in the hands of the formalists and claim Sickert
himself as the authority who vindicates and validates their literary
approach to painting. He is said to have always considered himself ` „a
literary painter . . . like all decent painters'' ', which leads the two
estranged guests to speculate that Sickert might not belong to the kind
of artists represented by the rest of the company, who `bore deeper and
deeper into the stuff of their own art'. He is rather `among the hybrids'
who `are always making raids into the lands of others' and cannot be
confined to either literature or art (243).
Begging the question about the validity of a biographical and psycho-
logical approach to art criticism raised by the formalists, this reflection
upon the relationship between different art forms and their interaction
represents a disguised plea for the validity of literature as an art form. If
the art of painting suffers from the tendency to read each and every
image as a sign or symbol, the art of literature has to contend with a
similar debasement of words to simple vehicles for everyday commu-
nication. And yet, as the structure of Woolf's essay shows, this depen-
dence on everyday language also endows literature with a far wider
appeal than that enjoyed by the language of pure forms and relations
which was for her associated with modernist painting.
Autobiographical in both setting and content, `Walter Sickert' forms a
close pair with another fundamental essay Woolf wrote in 1930 as a brief
introduction to the catalogue of an exhibition of paintings by Vanessa
Bell. Although the two sisters had by this time established a consistent
pattern of collaboration, with Vanessa providing both the illustrations
and the dust-jackets for her sister's books, the `Foreword to Recent Paint-
ings by Vanessa Bell'(CD, 97±100) is uncommon and exceptional in
presenting a direct commentary by Woolf upon her sister's work.
Reflecting its introductory character in its form, the essay charts the
course of a viewer's progress towards Bell's art. It mimics the indecisions
and uncertainties experienced by the average spectator when con-
fronted with Bell's reputation as an avant-garde female artist by circling
around the question of personality and autobiography in art which will
then become the focus of Woolf's discussion. Trembling on the thresh-
old of the gallery where Bell's paintings are exhibited, the viewer is
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Images of History 137
moved to enter Bell's world not by any considerations of perfect form
and balances between masses, but by the force of the artist's somewhat
scandalous reputation: `Were it not that Mrs Bell has a certain reputa-
tion and is sometimes the theme of argument at dinner-tables, many no
doubt would stroll up Bond Street, past Messrs Colling's, thinking about
morality or politics, about grandfathers or great aunts, about anything
but pictures as is the way of the English' (97).
Although Woolf goes on to specify the nature of her sister's reputation
in purely artistic terms, this hint at the unconventional character of
Bell's own family set-up reinforces the opposition between the freedoms
(both artistic and otherwise) enjoyed by the members of the avant-garde
and the rigid conventions of British society. Thus, the image of the
threshold between the gallery and the street comes to embody for
Woolf the rift between the public dimension of the modern city and
the private world of serenity and peacefulness created by Bell's work:
But once inside and surrounded by canvases, this shillyshallying on
the threshold seems superfluous. What is there here to intimidate or
perplex? Are we not suffused, lit up, caught in a sunny glow? Does
there not radiate from the walls a serene yet temperate warmth,
comfortable in the extreme after the rigours of the street? Are we
not surrounded by vineyards and olive trees, by naked girls couched
on crimson cushions, by naked boys ankle deep in the pale green sea?
Even the puritans of the nineteenth century might grant us a
moment's respite from the February murk, a moment's liberty in
this serene and ordered world.
(98)
The image of the threshold between the street outside and the serenity
of the exhibition gallery inside echoes vividly the division between the
inner circle of painters and art critics and the two more literary-minded
guests of the party in `Walter Sickert'. But whereas in the previous essay,
painting and writing were presented as alternative and competing forms
of access to the secrets of Sickert's paintings, here Woolf's written intro-
duction is meant to ease prospective viewers into the world of comfort
and serenity created by her sister's canvases of sunny foreign lands.
Developing further the antithesis of inside and outside first suggested
by the image of the threshold, Woolf thus assimilates the opposition of
public to private to the contrast created by canvases of the Mediterran –
ean with the cold and dark atmosphere of a London street in winter. If in
a sense this contrast disturbs a too-easy association of Bell's paintings
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138 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
with the domestic subjects and treatments deemed to be suitable to
women painters, on the other hand the allusion to foreign lands also
underscores the remote and inaccessible character of Bell's inner world.
`No stories are told; no insinuations are made,' Woolf observes. The
portraits themselves are described as `pictures of flesh which happens
from its texture or its modelling to be aesthetically on an equality with
the China pot or the chrysanthemum' (98). As people and characters are
objectified into the colours that compose their incarnate, so Bell's paint-
ings rebuke any attempt at penetrating their contents in the way Woolf
found so satisfactory and fulfilling in `The Royal Academy' and `Walter
Sickert'. Objective and impersonal, the subjects painted by Bell are
surrounded by an aura of anonymity which extends to the painter
herself and thus both invokes and resists the initial titillation of biogra-
phical interest described by Woolf at the outset.
Moving from the contents of the paintings to their author, Woolf as
the average viewer encounters even there the sense of exclusion and
rejection elicited by the emergence of a different and altogether silent
language. Immune to the various attempts to make her fit some pre-
conceived ideas about women's and men's difference in interests and
focus, Bell is seen by Woolf as a complete and total inhabitant of the
inner circle, the sancta sanctorum of modern art which rejects the idea of
personal expression in art in favour of formal relationships. As `a pain-
ter's painter', Bell is described as revealing the `full meaning' of her art
`only to those who can tunnel their way behind the canvas into masses
and passages and relations and values of which we know nothing' (99).
And yet it is precisely because `[h]er pictures do not betray her' the way
in which `twenty-seven volumes of fiction' would have betrayed `a
novelist' that, Woolf insists, `they intrigue and draw us on . . . . claim us
and make us stop. They give us an emotion. They offer a puzzle' (99).
Defying the formalist dictum that would have psychology and emo-
tions expelled from the realm of art, Woolf here sets forth the claims of
the common viewer to a share in the world created by Bell's canvases. In
Woolf's interpretation and understanding of this world, silence itself,
the absence of words does not function as the merely negative side of
the dominance of the verbal she laments in British culture, but rather as
an alternative space filled in with the eloquence of a point of view
whose difference is neither protested nor defended but simply stated.
Through her association with avant-garde painting and with its rejec-
tion of narrative or literary tropes, Bell comes then to represent the ideal
of the woman artist as Woolf had expressed it in A Room. Relieved by the
pressures brought to bear upon her art by psychology and a sexed body,
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Images of History 139
Bell can then turn the silence that has historically sprung from the
oppression of women's voices and artistic gifts into a positive difference
that sets her apart from preconceived ideas about the nature of women's
art. Far from offering an androgynous combination of both male and
female attributes, both literary and figurative languages, Bell belongs for
Woolf to that independent tradition of women artists who charted the
course of their own work without any reference to public expectations
about the intrinsic nature of that work.
In this sense, Bell comprises both the image of the silent woman who
has left no trace in the historical records and the extremely accom-
plished artist who, like a new Jane Austen, has managed to create an
independent vision that bears no relationship to and is not influenced
by the sway of public opinion. If such an achievement is commended by
Woolf as comparable to Shakespeare's in A Room, her shorter essays often
offer a more ambivalent and more qualified appreciation of both Aus-
ten's and Bell's work. Insisting that their success has always been
achieved at the price of a radical restriction of their areas of influence
and/or work, Woolf establishes a certain correspondence between the
exclusive circle of painters which surrounds her sister and the narrow
emotional and social range of Austen's novels. As she points out in `Jane
Austen' (1925; E 4, 146±57), the formal perfection of her work has its
roots in the absolute discrimination Austen exercised in matters of both
sensibility and class, which after her became indissolubly welded in a
certain definition of literary taste: `Spasms and rhapsodies, she seems to
have said, pointing with her stick, end there; and the boundary line is
perfectly distinct' (148).
In an earlier version of the same essay, the kind of taste which is
exemplified by Austen's work is shown to be closely linked to the
definition of an ideal of femininity that turns women's own bodies
into aesthetic objects. Commenting upon the proliferation of editions
of Austen's works and the favour she enjoys especially among male
critics, Woolf suggests that her celebrity and fame might be due to
something more than just the objective and absolute aesthetic value of
her novels:
It would be interesting, indeed, to inquire how much of her present
celebrity Jane Austen owes to masculine sensibility; to the fact that
her dress was becoming, her eyes bright, and her age the antithesis in
all matters of female charm to our own. A companion inquiry might
investigate the problem of George Eliot's nose; and decide how long
it will be before the equine profile is once again in favour, and the
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140 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
Clarendon Press celebrates the genius of the author of Middlemarch in
an edition as splendid, as authoritative, and as exquisitely illustrated
as this.
(155)
This joining of books and female bodies in the same aesthetic category
enables Woolf to reverse the conjunction and reveal the sex-based bias
operating in the construction of the literary canon. As Austen's formal
triumphs become indistinguishable from her own personal appearance,
so Eliot's relegation to a lesser status cannot be ascribed simply to her
worth as an artist, but must as surely be related to her life-choices and
her refusal to conform to social dictates about women's behaviour. Thus,
while allegedly celebrating the universal value of Austen's work, the
critics are effectively shown by Woolf to be directed by subtle discrimi-
nations between different life styles and ideals of womanhood, which
she sarcastically reduces to differences between nose shapes, recalling
Herbert Spencer's claim that, had it not been for Eliot's nose, he would
have married her.14
Woolf's comments about Austen highlight the way in which a certain
definition of literary taste as restraint and measure is closely bound up
with the regulation of women's sexuality and behaviour. They also
indicate, though, that her own identification of the perfect woman
artist with the one that remains silent about her own personal life has
as much to do with questions of gender and sexual difference as with the
topography of class. This connection between the aesthetic ideal of
impersonality and its class determinations is never explicitly analysed
in her writings on Austen or Bell. What is clear, though, is that for Woolf
the containment of women's sexuality within the tightly controlled
boundaries of `good taste' is structurally indivisible from the influence
exercised by class in outlining the limits of English fiction. In `The Niece
of an Earl' (1932; CD, 92±6), a review of George Meredith's novels, Woolf
argued that this influence represents the great unspeakable of English
literature, even though it lends to that literature its particular national
character: `[o]ne is supposed to pass over class distinctions in silence;
one person is supposed to be as well born as another; and yet English
fiction is so steeped in the ups and downs of social rank that without
them it would be unrecognisable' (92). Both invisible and ubiquitous,
class acts for Woolf as a sort of hygienic glass screen which prevents any
intercourse between members of different classes which is not based on
reciprocal ridiculing and caricature. Because English fiction owes its
comic spirit to the existence of class divisions and social rankings,
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Images of History 141
Woolf complains that it has failed to challenge the assumptions that lie
behind those divisions. Rather than bringing down the glass screens
that separate the different classes and thus liberate its members for a
fuller type of intercourse, in Woolf's eyes English fiction has limited
itself to reflecting and reproducing `a nest of glass boxes . . . each housing
a group with special habits and qualities of its own' (93).
Having thus failed to bring down the barriers that cut across the body
of society, English fiction finds itself in a condition of isolation that
resembles very closely the one experienced by the lonely two diners of
`Walter Sickert' or by the viewer of Vanessa Bell's paintings. On the one
hand, it cannot aspire to the status of pure art because of a close con-
nection to precisely those biographical and psychological elements
which the formalists deplore and condemn. On the other, it cannot
even claim the realm of life as its absolute domain, as its ability to reflect
and interpret objective reality is strongly hindered by its participation in
the material conditions that shape that reality. Expelled from the realm
of pure art, fiction cannot even shape itself into that reservoir of com-
mon language and shared experience Woolf is continually seeking for.
Thus, for Woolf, the most painful consequence of class divisions is not
the possibility of internecine conflict, but rather that of reciprocal
indifference: `There is no animosity, perhaps, but there is no commun-
ication. We are enclosed, and separate, and cut off' (92).
The image of the glass screen or box to indicate the connections
between the limits of the imagination and the taxonomy of class is a
recurrent one in Woolf's writing. It organises her discussion of many
autobiographies by women (`The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt', 1908; E
1, 164±71, `Ellen Terry', 1941; CD, 173±8), where their lives are repre-
sented as being enclosed into separate, isolated compartments that
share with the `glass boxes' of English fiction their firmly defined
boundaries. In the case both of Terry and of Bernhardt the analogy
between life-writing and glass boxes is of course suggested by their
professions as actresses, where the stage and the different parts they
played on it functions as a metaphor for the different aspects of person-
ality that are inscribed in their autobiography. Bernahrdt's memoirs are
described by Woolf as a collection of `separate and brightly coloured
beads' (E 1, 164) which `scarcely connect', so that the life is shown in
fact to have far less coherence than the succession of scenes that makes
up a play. The dramatic sense, the eye for detail and for the expressive
gesture is, Woolf insists, the same both in the theatre and in Bernhardt's
re-interpretation of her own life. But this attempt to stage the life as if it
was a play only succeeds for Woolf in reproducing the effect of `coloured
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142 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
and animated photographs' rather than that of a coherent, dramatic
narrative (166).
But if Bernahrdt's memoirs call into question any clear-cut distinction
between the life and the art, the real person and the fictional character,
Woolf's essay on Ellen Terry indicates on the other hand that a very neat
separation between the two sides produces exactly the same result.
Terry's life as it emerges from her autobiography and correspondence
with Bernard Shaw is marked for Woolf by the same lack of continuity,
by the same absence of vital links as that of Bernhardt's; it is not `an
Academy's portrait, glazed, framed, complete' but `rather a bundle of
loose leaves upon each of which she has dashed off a sketch for a
portrait' (CD, 174). The visual metaphor for the act of memoirs-writing
is, as we have seen, typical of Woolf's perception of the peculiar char-
acter of autobiography; in this case it is reinforced by Terry's association,
through her marriage to Watts, to that circle of Pre-Raphaelite painters
and artists with which Woolf's own family had strong connections.15 It
also suggests, though, an act of mirroring of one's self that, in Terry's
case, remains incomplete as the sketch-book only furnishes parts and
fragments of her personality, but obstinately refuses to provide a sense of
how all those separate parts coalesce into a whole.
Terry is consequently portrayed as a child born to the theatre, then as
the adolescent wife of Watts `who sits mum in her corner while the
famous elderly people talk over her head' (CD, 175), then, `skipping a
page or two', as a mother of young children who has escaped from her
early marriage to retire to the countryside rolling pastry and scrubbing
children, but was later compelled to return to the stage for financial
necessity. These series of incongruent parts are reduced by Woolf to `two
sketches fac[ing] each other; Ellen Terry in blue cotton among the hens;
Ellen Terry robed and crowned as Lady Macbeth on the stage of the
Lyceum' (176). The two pictures offer no links to each other and, the
essay concludes, precisely because of this absence of connecting threads
of reason or narrative, they give us a sense of Terry's unique personality,
of what in her exceeded the fixed roles and frames of theatrical life. And
yet, precisely because of the mystery they refuse to reveal or resolve,
they become emblematic not just of Terry herself but of the distance and
difference that separates fictional representations of character and peo-
ple in their uniqueness.
In suggesting that the essence of Terry as a person exceeds the con-
ventional frames of her own representation of motherhood and acting,
Woolf here returns once more to the issue of characterisation she
broached in relation to mother- and father-figures in `A Sketch of the
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Images of History 143
Past'. Just like with Reading at Random, which she started writing at
around the same time as `A Sketch' and which was meant to reply
once and for all to the painters' accusations that literature could not
aspire to the status of art, both `A Sketch' and `Ellen Terry' take form
against a background of thinking about the relationship between mod-
ern painting and literature. In a polemic with Mark Gertler, who, as
Woolf reports in `A Sketch', had sustained that the autobiographical
impulse made literature impure from an artistic point of view, Woolf
retorted that `if one could give a sense of my mother's personality one
would have to be an artist. It would be as difficult to do that, as it should
be done, as to paint a CeÂzanne' (MB, 85). While Terry's memoirs could
not aspire to be the written equivalent of a CeÂzanne, Woolf insists that it
is their very inconclusiveness, the suggestions of their gaps and unspo-
ken links that gives them a meaning and a significance that is perhaps as
substantial as that of great works of art. In this she reversed the aesthetic
criteria upheld in Bloomsbury, which located the value of the work of art
in the relation between forms rather than the suggestiveness of the
unfinished and fragmentary, of the incomplete.
This insistence on the importance of the small, of the inconsequential
rather than of the accomplished work of genius is repeated in her review
of the autobiography of Queen Marie of Romania. Published in 1934
under the title of `Royalty' (WE, 154±58), Woolf's review praises this
royal autobiography as a momentous step in Western history which
signals the end of a whole social order based on a rigid division between
the private and the public sphere. Queen Marie's autobiography
amounts for Woolf to the opening up of the `beautiful brightly lit
room' where members of the royal family have been `worshipped, stared
at, and kept shut up, as lions and tigers are kept . . . behind bars' (154).
While an autobiography calls forth by necessity reflections upon the
psychological rather than the political effects of this seclusion, Woolf
insinuates in her review that the opening up of the psychological or
personal reality of being a member of a royal family can nevertheless
have unforeseen political and historical consequences. In this version of
the `personal is political', she brings out the fact that the mystique and
the power enjoyed by royal families is dependent upon their forced and
artificial differentiation from the rest of humanity, on their inhabiting a
golden cage which, when removed, will bring out the commonality of
the human experience and thus undermine the very foundations of
political power in the British Empire.
Rising to the challenge offered by this royal autobiography, Woolf
then proceeds to draw out a comparison between Queen Marie's
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144 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
personal recollections and Queen Victoria's official documents. Whereas
Queen Marie's prose is praised by Woolf for its freshness and vivacity,
Victoria's is condemned from an aesthetic and literary point of view for
its pomposity and formal stiffness. But as Woolf had already remarked in
relation to her sister's paintings, the absence of any trace of personal
expression in Queen Victoria's public statements has worked to rein-
force rather than undermine the Queen's hold upon the imagination of
her subjects. Although Victoria's writing is compared to the sound of an
`old savage beating with a wooden spoon on a drum', it is precisely this
lack of eloquence that is seen to lie at the basis of `her prestige'. Woolf
argues that `her inability to express herself' led `the majority of her
subjects' to regard her as `a woman immune from the usual frailties
and passions of human nature' (155±6).
Turned by her writing into the disembodied voice of authority, Vic-
toria is taken by Woolf as the paragon of a woman unsexed not so much
by her participation to the political process as by her inability to express
herself in writing. Written self-expression is thus implicitly construed by
Woolf as the mark of full womanhood, while political power is turned
into its negation, so that to be a woman and to be a queen are revealed
as mutually exclusive propositions that cannot coexist. Against the
background of the impenetrable figure of Victoria, Queen Marie's expos-
ure of the personal and private component of royal life marks the end of
a political system based upon the principle of disembodiment:
When a gift for writing lodges in a family, it often persists and
improves; and if Queen Marie's descendants improve upon her gift
as much as she has improved upon Queen Victoria . . . what will be
the effect upon their loyal subjects? Will Buckingham Palace look as
solid then as it does now? Words are dangerous things let us remem-
ber. A republic might be brought into being by a poem.
(158)
This insistence on the democratic, radical power of language both sub-
tends Woolf's historiographic project of rescuing the obscure from obliv-
ion and is at odds with the kind of formalist understanding of art that
emerges from her better-known writings and from her discomfort with
Mark Gertler's indictment of literature. On the one hand there is the
need to give a voice to those whose voices have been muffled or silenced
in the course of history. On the other there is a strong sense that those
half-heard voices, those unspoken words offer in and of themselves a
challenge that is both artistic and historical: they are the voices and
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Images of History 145
words of Anon, of Woolf's own re-interpretation of the notion of imper-
sonality in a sense that is meant to work as an alternative to the
abstracted, cut off, elitist art of the painters in `Walter Sickert'. Strad-
dling the difference between these two impulses, the historiographic
and the artistic, there is always for Woolf the question of the imagina-
tion as the faculty that allows her to fill in the gaps of the historical
record but is itself continuously checked and limited by her own histor-
ical and social position, by that sharp division in classes that occludes
the breadth of what she liked to call `the poetic vision'.
Going for depth and detail rather than for range, Woolf hoped to
transcend those limitations by uncovering the underlying continuity
of human life, that `submerged current' of semi-conscious and atavistic
existence that stretched back to Mrs Swithin's dinosaurs and as far
forward as Chloe and Olivia's half-lit cave. The contradiction she iden-
tified in her often quoted diary entry of 1929, `Now is life very solid or
very shifting? I am haunted by the two contradictions. This has gone on
for ever: will last for ever . . . this moment I stand on. Also it is transitory,
flying, diaphanous. I shall pass like a cloud on the waves.', (D 3, 218),
continued to haunt her throughout her life and found characteristically
no final solution or synthesis. In the end, `writing essays about oneself'
proved to be the only precarious response to the contradiction, the
only form of synthesis available for the modernist woman writer who
still remained, as T. S. Eliot remarked in her obituary, the last of the
Victorians.16
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Postscript: Angels and Harpies
This book opened up by making a case for aligning Woolf's work with
that strand of European modernism that has come to be known as
`essayism'. Defined mainly in the writings of LukaÂcs, Musil and Adorno,
the notion of essayism has always carried with it a critique of modernity
as the triumph of rationalisation and the culmination of a linear, pro-
gressive vision of history. When understood in this sense, essayism
becomes effectively indistinguishable from the Marxist critique of the
dialectic of the Enlightenment and might therefore suggest a certain
compatibility of intents between that critique and Woolf's historio-
graphic project. But the point of this inquiry has not been that of
substituting one critical framework (Marxism) for the feminist approach
that has dominated Woolf studies in the last three decades or so. Essay-
ism was used here as a critical angle capable of articulating and addres-
sing the question of Woolf's relationship to literary history, both in
terms of the history she wrote and in terms of the history that has
been written about her. In their turn, Woolf's writings on history,
women and the essay were deployed to read critically and help to
contextualise the idea of essayism that is linked to the Marxist critique
of modernity.
In keeping with the double focus of this study, I would now like to
conclude by concentrating on two moments of writing about history
that chart both the similarities and the differences between Woolf's
approach and that of writers and critics usually associated with the
Marxist tradition. The first of these moments is Walter Benjamin's
well-known statement of the catastrophic and elegiac image of history
that he identified with Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus. It occurs
within the `Theses on the Philosophy of History', which were completed
in the Spring of 1940, at a historical moment when the apocalyptic
146
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Postscript 147
erasure of modern civilisation seemed to have gone from prophecy to
realised possibility. Benjamin's reading of Klee's painting reverberates
with the echoes of that moment, describing Klee's messenger as `the
angel of history' intent on contemplating the destruction of humanity:
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.. . . His
face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to
stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a
storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with
such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned
. . . This storm is what we call progress.1
Caught in the wind of progress, Benjamin's angel demonstrates a suspi-
cion towards the relentlessly linear temporality of modernity which can
also be traced in Woolf's writings, from her satirical depiction of the
`march of the professions' in Three Guineas (1938) to her insistence on
rescuing from the debris of history precisely the figures that the present
has abandoned, of which no trace has remained in cultural history. In
many ways it is Woolf herself, in her activity as the chronicler of the
obscure and the nearly forgotten, who fulfils the role of healer and
resuscitator of the past that Benjamin identifies as the angel's lost mis-
sion. But Benjamin's vision of the past as an apocalyptic collapse that
`keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage' at the angel's feet is emphatically
not Woolf's own, since for her the past is more likely to mark a sense of
continuity and the possibility of a different future than a chaotic heap of
disasters.
This sense of the past as the repository of different stories offers an
alternative to the twin vision of progress and catastrophe embodied in
Benjamin's angel. It is evident in Woolf's lifelong attraction for the idea
of writing a continuous history of English literature from the point of
view of those who had been traditionally excluded from it: the
eccentrics, the obscure, the anonymous writers and singers of pre-
Renaissance literature. As Woolf made clear in A Room (1929), this re-
writing of literary history was for her intrinsically linked to the possibil-
ity that her own work might be able to survive the onslaught of time.
But this stress on continuity was also accompanied for Woolf by the
need to rescind herself from those aspects of the past that risked fixing
the future once and for all. Symbolised by the image of the Angel in the
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148 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
House, the stranglehold which the past has on the present remained
for Woolf always associated with the question of the cultural definition
of femininity and of women's space and place, both in society and in
time.
If Woolf, then, shares with Benjamin a focus on the figure of the angel
as a privileged locus for articulating her relationship to history, her
interpretation of that figure indicates that for her the shape and move-
ment of history is always inflected by the intervention of sexual differ-
ence. As a ghost emanating from the Victorian past, the Angel in the
House is alternately seen as a threat and as an opportunity, depending
on the position of the historian. When Woolf presents herself as aspiring
to the status of female Shakespeare, as she does in `Professions for
Women' (1931), the angel appears as an obstacle to be overcome on
the road to the development of an independent voice for the modern
woman writer. But when Woolf is operating as the historian of the
obscure, the Angel in the House becomes herself one of the anonymous
and self-sacrificing figures whose presence in history needs to be
recorded and whose memory must be preserved.
This stress on the positioning of the literary historian vis-aÁ-vis a past
that is never fixed into one single, determining image distinguishes
Woolf's conception of history from later, contemporary versions of
Benjamin's melancholic angel. Although Benjamin's rejection of pro-
gress and apocalyptic vision of history have often been ascribed to the
mystical side of his writing rather than to his Marxism,2 the figure of the
angel continues to guide attempts at defining a materialist approach to
the history of literature. Franco Moretti's 1988 essay on the methods and
practices of contemporary criticism is a case in point. Entitled `The Soul
and the Harpy', the essay takes its name from an image Moretti found
carved on a tombnow preserved in the British Museum. The b as-relief,
as Moretti describes it,
shows a harpy ± the upper half of its body a woman, the lower a
bird of prey ± carrying off a small human body . . . the soul of
the deceased. Below the harpy is clutching the soul tight in its
claws, but higher up her Greek arms are holding her in an attentive
and tender embrace. The soul is doing nothing to get out of the
harpy's clutch. It seems calm, relaxed even.. . . But at the same
time the soul must know that there is no escape from the grip of
the claws. For this reason it does not lower its gaze, but rests its
head trustingly on the harpy's arms. Precisely because there is
no escape it prefers to delude itself about the affectionate,
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Postscript 149
almost maternal nature of the creature dragging it away with her in
flight.
Can we blame it?3
Moretti offers this description as a last attempt to convince his readers
that literature works not so much as an agent of liberation from and,
even, of subversion of the status quo but rather as a unique tool for the
enforcement of political and ideological consensus. In his iconography,
the harpy comes to represent his vision of literature as the privileged
instrument for entrapping and ensnaring the human soul within the
cruel mechanics of a social system which is characterised by a deep
division between its predatory reality (the harpy's clutches) and its
comforting appearance (her Greek arms). In this classical interpretation
of ideology as a form of false consciousness, Benjamin's angel is trans-
formed into a predatorial winged creature who does not `awaken the
dead' but lulls them into the false security of a sleep that Moretti
suggests is not much better than death.
The reading of the British Museum bas-relief suggested by Moretti is
then stark in its simplicity. The harpy's female body is seen to act as a
deceptive cover-up of its inhuman, rapacious truth as the agent of
spiritual death. In this reading, a Marxian interpretation of the relation-
ship between base structure and superstructure is grafted upon Virgil's
representation of the Harpies in the Aeneid, where they appear as foul,
hungry creatures who threaten Aeneas and contaminate his food. But
Margaret Ann Doody has suggested that this Roman Imperial interpre-
tation of the harpy offers a revision of an earlier, more positive reading
of this mythical figure that has its origins in Asia Minor, at the extreme
Eastern border of the classical world. Drawing on the same image ana-
lysed by Moretti in `The Soul and the Harpy', Doody describes this
oriental harpy as having `an angelic aspect' in its capacity as the carer
for the soul.4 For Doody the negative representation of the harpy offered
both by Virgil and by Moretti signifies the persistence of a fear of the
feminine and its sexuality that she claims is at the foundations of Greco-
Roman civilization but was not, crucially, shared by other cultures
where women flourished and occupied positions of power.
This alternation between negative and positive readings of the figure
of the harpy on the British Museum tombindicates perhaps that the
hybrid character of that representation cannot ultimately be erased and
re-traced back within the folds of one single and unitary image. Like the
Sphinx for Oedipus, the harpy remains an enigmatic figure, whose body
of half-woman and half-bird proves intractable to any attempt at
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150 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
establishing once and for all the place and space where it properly
belongs. As this riddle, she illustrates the dangers and attractions of
`talking in pictures', of a language that borrows its impact and power
from the field of vision. Woolf, among others, was especially attuned to
the difficulties that accompany the search for one image capable of
encompassing her idea of history. In this sense, her choice of the andro-
gynous Orlando comes to signify both the temptation of giving a body
to her vision of history and her awareness of the problems that surround
its fixation into a specific form. Like harpies and angels, the androgyne
offers an image that is both truthful and deceptive, a resolution that
poses the original problem all over again.
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Notes
Introduction: Viriginia Woolf, European Essayist
1 Arnold Bennett,' Is the Novel Decaying?' (1923), p. 47.
2 Maria DiBattista has provided a similar interpretation of this diary entry
which she claims indicates `not so much that Woolf's center will not hold'
but rather that it `eludes . . . the spirit's grasp' (The Fables of Anon (1980), p.
24). As DiBattista concentrates exclusively on the novels, her reading of this
entry does not examine the link between this sense of reaching out without
being able to grasp the true `reality' and the question of the essay, which I
argue is essential to Woolf's own understanding of her artistic project.
3 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), p. 28.
4 For examples of this conceptions of the essay see Orlo Williams, The Essay
(n.d.) and Bonamy DobreÂe, English Essayists (1946). In The Rise and Fall of the
Man of Letters (1969), John Gross has offered a modified definition of this
conjunction between the essay and the idea of the gentleman by identifying
the belletrist with the unattached, freelance commentator on literary matters
whose emergence and disappearance he traces from the early nineteenth
century to the first half of the twentieth. In Gross's terms, the man of letter
is defined by its opposition to the professional academic, much in the same
way as the common reader stands in contrast to `the critic and the scholar'
for Woolf (see especially Gross's 1991 Afterword). For a discussion of the idea
of the common reader in relation to Woolf's essayistic practice see below,
Chapter 2.
5 For examples of these postwar readings see David Daiches, Virginia Woolf
(1942); Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf (1962).
6 Georg LukaÂcs, `On the Nature and Form of the Essay', p. 7.
7 Graham Good, The Observing Self,p .8 .
8 Gillian Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp. 11±26.
9 Theodor W. Adorno, `The Essay as Form' (1958), p. 5.
10 John Snyder, Prospects of Power, p. 159.
11 This focus on the possibility of fashioning and refashioning the self char-
acterises, according to Stephen Greenblatt, also the theatre of the Renais-
sance; see his Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980).
12 Snyder, Prospects, p. 174.
13 Ibid., p. 178.
14 Ibid., p. 172.
15 Snyder's choice of Woolf and Rich as representative feminist essayists leaves
out some crucial interventions made by feminists writing in the 1970s and
1980s, whose work might be seen to resemble more closely Montaigne's
approach to subjectivity. See especially HeÂleÁne Cixous's `The Laugh of the
Medusa' (1975) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis's `For the Etruscans' (1985).
Snyder's arguments about the Baconian inheritance in feminist essayists
are perhaps better reflected in more recent attempts to reclaim the essay as
151
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152 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
an essentially feminine genre either on the basis of historical questions, such
as the composition of the readership of essays in the eighteenth century, and
of politico-ideological ones. For an example of the former see Beth Carole
Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson (1995) and Michael Kaufmann,
`A Modernism of One's Own' (1997); for the latter see the articles collected in
Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman (eds), The Politics of the
Essay (1993).
16 The reference to `feminist pamphlets' is taken from Jean Guiguet's Virginia
Woolf and Her Works (1965), where A Room and Three Guineas are listed under
the heading `Feminism and Pamphlets'. For Guiguet Woolf's feminist essays
express that part of her character and personality that had been repressed in
the novels in the pursuit of artistic purity. Woolf's constant interest in the
feminist cause does not therefore reveal for Guiguet just `a considerable
degree of social consciousness' but also demands a revision of the interpreta –
tion of her work that would read into what has been seen as a self-centred
concern with individual consciousness a way of breaking out of the strictures
of neo-classicist aesthetics (p. 192). Guiguet's view of the repression of fem-
inist concerns in Woolf's novels will be echoed over ten years later by
MicheÁle Barrett in Women and Writing, but also in her more recent introduc-
tion to the Penguin edition of A Room and Three Guineas (1993).
17 Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson
and Joanne Trautmann; The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and
Andrew McNeillie.
18 MicheÁle Barrett, Introduction, in Women and Writing,p .1 .
19 Among the suggestions for further reading listed by Barrett are Herbert
Marder, Feminism and Art (1968); Nancy Topping Bazin, Virginia Woolf and
the Androgynous Vision (1973); Carolyn Heilbrun, Towards Androgyny , 2nd edn
(1973).
20 Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own, pp. 263±97.
21 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 16.
22 For some of the stages of the debates initiated by Moi, see Janet Todd's
Feminist Literary History (1988), which was explicitly conceived as a rebuttal
of Moi's arguments; Naomi Schor, `Introducing Feminism' (1986), and Diana
Fuss, `Getting Into History' (1989) both discuss the issues raised by Moi's
version of the history of feminist criticism.
23 This increased popularisation of Woolf's essays is reflected by the fact that
her work was represented within the Penguin 60s series not by her fiction but
by a selection of essays, Killing the Angel in the House (1995), which included
`Professions for Women', `The Feminine Note in Fiction', `Women Novelists',
`The Intellectual Status of Women', `Two Women', `Memories of a Working
Women's Guild', and `Ellen Terry'.
24 See especially Brosnan, Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays, pp. 10±12, and
Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson, pp. xvi-xviii. The stress on the
dialogic character of Woolf's relation to past authors had already been under-
lined by Gillian Beer, who set out to trace the lines of exchange between
Woolf and literary history in Arguing with the Past (1989). As the title of her
collection of essays indicates, though, Beer's notion of dialogue was more
antagonistic than the one proposed by Brosnan or Rosenberg and was
modelled on the parent/child relationship rather than on Bakhtin's theories.
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Notes 153
25 For examples of comparative readings of Woolf's and Montaigne's essayistic
practice see Juliette Dusinberre's Virginia Woolf's Renaissance , pp. 40±64;
Catherine Sandbach-Dahlstro Èm, ` „Que scais-je?'': Virginia Woolf and the
Essay as Feminist Critique' (1997). See also the discussion of Woolf's reading
of the Essais in Chapter 2 below.
26 Musil, The Man Without Qualities, book ii, chapter 62 (pp. 267±77). Musil's
`novel' appeared in German between 1930 and 1942, overlapping in some
ways with Woolf's own work on The Pargiters, the project for writing a `novel-
essay' which she started in 1932 and then split off into The Years (1937) and
Three Guineas (1938).
27 Claire de Obaldia's The Essayistic Spirit (1995) offers one of the clearest and
most illuminating analyses of Continental Essayism, stressing the lines of
continuity that link its earlier, modernist examples to its later revival in the
works of prominent postmodernist and poststructuralist critics, from Barthes
to Derrida. But because her interest lies in tracing those lines, de Obaldia is
forced to effect a too clear-cut separation between `Essayism' and the essay
proper which closes off any possible exploration of the interaction between
the issue of genre and that of gender.
28 Jane Marcus, `Thinking Back Through Our Mothers' (1981), p. 7.
29 For one of the very few contemporary analyses of the issue of class in Woolf
from a feminist perspective see Mary Childers, `Virginia Woolf on the Out-
side Looking Down' (1992). Woolf's alleged blindness to class determinations
was also at the centre of Q. D. Leavis's attack on Three Guineas in `Caterpillars
of the World Unite!', (1938). As I discuss in Chapter 3, though, the restriction
of Woolf's audience to a certain class segment in Three Guineas is a direct
consequence not so much of her own class position as of some of the
rhetorical strategies of argumentation she chose for the essay.
1. Eccentric Histories
1 As most of Woolf's early articles were published anonymously, the begin-
nings of her career are surrounded by a high degree of uncertainty, and
different editors have identified different essays as her first published piece
of writing. In 1986 Andrew McNeillie opened the first volume of his edition
of the essays with Woolf's review of William Dean Howells's The Son of Royal
Langbirth, which appeared in the Guardian on 14 December 1904. Six years
later Mitchell A. Leaska's notes to the early journals identified another arti-
cle, `Social England' (Guardian, 7 December 1904) as her first piece of pub-
lished work (PA, n. 16, p. 219). This confirms the nebulous character of this
period of Woolf's career, which offers the possibility of questioning the
integrity of her oeuvre and thus destabilise her twin identity of modernist
writer and feminist critic. As Michel Foucault argued in `What is an Author'
(1969), `the word work and the unity it designates' (p. 104) are an integral
part of the ideological function performed by the notion of authorship.
2 Throughout this section I will be using Woolf's maiden name whenever the
reference is specifically to her early writings; in all other cases, she will be
designated by her married name, as by convention. This alternation between
maiden and married name is meant to underline the `strangeness' or, as we
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154 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
shall see, the `eccentricity' of this period of her career to the identity of the
established figure we have come to recognise as `Woolf'. In other words,
the Virginia Stephen of the pre-1912 period is not always necessarily the
same person, in critical terms, as Virginia Woolf the acclaimed novelist,
reviewer and feminist writer.
3 For a quantitative analysis of Woolf's development from writer of notices to
established critic see Jeanne Dubino, `Virginia Woolf: From Book Reviewer to
Literary Critic' (1997).
4I n Heidegger, Art and Politics (1990) Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe has proposed to
adopt the term caesura to designate the unique historical character of the Nazi
extermination of the Jews. As `the moment at which the truth of the conflict
of representations appears as such' (p. 42), the caesura also works for Lacoue-
Labarthe to expose the logic of historicity: it is `that which, within history,
interrupts history and opens up another possibility of history, or else closes off
all possibility of history' (p. 45). Although Lacoue- Labarthe claims that we
can only properly speak of a caesura in the history of the West in the case of
Auschwitz, my use of the term is meant in the wider sense of marking the
limits of a certain way of representing Woolf, her writing and the history of
her feminist reception. As Lacoue-Labarthe acknowledges, his identification
of Auschwitz with the caesura of Western history has a decidedly apocalyptic
and catastrophic flavour which underlines its similarity to Walter Benjamin's
depiction of the Angel of History (Illuminations (1955), p. 249). Woolf's own
vision of history was, as we shall see, rather different and tended to reject such
apocalyptic temptations even though she was not immune to their seduction,
as she shows in Three Guineas. For more on this, see below, Chapter 3. For a
discussion of Benjamin's view of history in relation to Woolf and feminist
criticism see below, Postscript.
5 Feminist critics have often been quite vocal in refusing Woolf's identification
with `madness', which it is argued stemmed from her family environment and
from Bloomsbury as a way of dismissing Woolf's importance as a writer. For
examples of family accounts of Woolf's illness, see Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf
(1972±73) and Leonard Woolf's autobiography (1960±69). In early feminist
studies of Woolf, androgyny was seen to act as a remedy or balance against the
deep psychological splits which occasioned Woolf's illness, see, for instance,
Nancy Topping Bazin, Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision (1973). These
readings were then reversed in the late 1970s, with the publication of books
such as Roger Poole's The Unknown Virginia Woolf (1978), which argued that
the `madness' that had normally been ascribed to Woolf had in fact belonged
more properly to the system that surrounded her, and especially to her doctors
and to Leonard. In more recent works, the focus of investigation has shifted
towards an interrogation of the frames of interpretation that have led to link
Woolf and madness so closely together. See, for instance, Hermione Lee,
Virginia Woolf (1996), esp. pp. 175±200, and, from a different angle, Daniel
Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (1990). For a critique of
Ferrer's approach and, more in general, of Woolf's identification with madness
see Jane Marcus, `Pathographies' (1992).
6 Bowlby, Feminist Destinations (1997), p. 12
7 See especially Louise DeSalvo's Virginia Woolf: the Impact of Childhood Sexual
Abuse (1989). For a more detailed analysis of Woolf's autobiographical writings
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Notes 155
and the questions of representation and memory they raise see below,
Chapter 4.
8 See, for instance, `Old Bloomsbury' (1921±22; MB, 179±201).
9 Brosnan, Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays (1997), p. 34.
10 See Jeanne Dubino and Beth Carole Rosenberg, Introduction, in Virginia
Woolf and the Essay (1997), pp. 1±22, and Juliette Dusinberre, Virginia Woolf's
Renaissance (1997), p. 3, where she states that `Virginia Woolf's project was
always twofold: the reading by women of literature written by men, and the
discovery of women as writers and readers'.
11 Bowlby, Feminist Destinations , p. 14.
12 Although it was Toril Moi who initiated the debate for the appropriation of
Woolf's work to what was then called `French' feminism in Sexual/Textual
Politics (1985), her arguments were in fact later reversed by Bette London's
1991 intervention in the debate. `Guerrilla in Petticoats or Sans- Culotte?'
argued for the deployment of `French' feminism as a way of unsettling
Woolf's canonisation rather than as the instrument that would have led, in
Moi's claim, to her recognition as the `greatest British woman writer of this
century' (Sexual/Textual Politics, p. 8). The phrase `mother of us all' is Jane
Marcus's and is taken from `Thinking Back Through Our Mothers' (1981), pp.
1±30.
13 Bette London, The Appropriated Voice (1990), p. 126.
14 Earlier studies of the essays were carried out in the late 1970s by Marc Gold-
man in The Reader's Art (1976) and Vijay Sharma in Virginia Woolf as Literary
Critic (1977), both of whom concentrated on the theory of fiction developed
by Woolf in her critical writing rather than on the intersection of feminism
and history analysed in more recent works on the essays.
15 Brosnan, Reading, p. 63.
16 That Woolf at this time equated good writing with a fluent and seamless style
is also testified by her own self- criticism. On reading the proofs for `The
Letters of Jane Carlyle' in 1905 (E 1, 54±8), she wrote to Violet Dickinson that
the article was `bad ± such an ugly angular piece of writing, all jagged edges'
(L 1, 202). Woolf tended to see the relationship between Carlyle and his wife
as typical of the egotism of the Victorian man of genius, which she also saw
reflected in her father's tyrannical demands upon her mother, half-sister and
then Vanessa. The stylistic difficulties she feels she encountered with the
article on Jane Carlyle's letters can be seen to reflect, then, her discomfort
and unease at the kind of sexual politics inscribed in the Carlyles' marriage.
For more on Woolf's portrayal of her father in later years see below, Chapter 4.
17 James Joyce's Chamber Music was published in 1907; In a German Pension,
Katherine Mansfield's first collection of short stories, appeared in 1911; T. S.
Eliot's Prufrock came out in 1917; Dorothy Richardson's Pointed Roofs was
published in 1915, six months after Woolf's own The Voyage Out.
18 Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, p. 216.
19 For Woolf's descriptive pieces see for instance her 1903 journal (PA, 163±
213); for her spoofs see `Terrible Tragedy in a Duckpond' (PA, 150±2), which
Brosnan analyses at length as a parody of journalistic conventions that
shows the young Stephen to be already extremely aware of the ways in
which sexual difference inflects the distinction between fact and fiction
(Reading Virginia Woolf's Essays, pp. 30±4).
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156 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
20 For examples of these crossovers see `An Andalusian Inn' (1905; E 1, 49±52
and L 1, 187); `A Priory Church' (1905; E 1, 53±4 and PA, 215); `A Walk By
Night' (1905; E 1, 80±2 and PA, 297±8).
21 As EÂmile Benveniste has shown, the `I:you' relationship is constitutive of the
realm of discourse, while the third person singular `he or she' is the gram-
matical mark of narrative (Problems in General Linguistics (1966), pp. 205±22).
Although Benveniste's distinctions refer specifically to French rather than to
English, they have nevertheless been adopted by Hayden White as the basis
for his analysis of the relationship between fiction and historiography (see
Tropics of Discourse (1978) and The Content of the Form (1989)). White tends to
see history as a camouflage or a mystification of the essentially interpersonal
relation that structures language, so that in his writing history comes close to
being a form of false consciousness. For an analysis of the relationship
between history and fiction in terms not of radical opposition but rather of
intersection see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (1984±88). For Woolf's own
reflection on the process of writing history see below, `Eccentrics, Obscure,
Anons' and Chapter 5.
22 Woolf had in fact produced very early on her own semi- autobiographical
and semi-fictional version of the Platonic dialogue in the short story set on
Mount Pentelicus, which she had visited with her siblings in the autumn of
1906. The story is laid out as an argument between two elements of the
British group of visitors to Greece. One of the tourists laments the fact that
modern Greece and the Greeks represent a betrayal of their predecessors,
while the other argues that the vision of Ancient Greece to which the
modern country is compared is in fact the effect of a projection of an
idealised version of the British ruling class upon the classics. The argument
is resolved by the appearance of an epiphanic figure, a Greek monk who
combines in his traits both the long beard and hair of his contemporaries
and `the nose and brow of a Greek statue' (SF, 67). For more on Woolf's
reading of the Greeks in relation to the question of the essay see below,
Chapter 2.
23 `Reading' offers perhaps one of the earliest indications of Woolf's sense of the
connection between memory and vision, writing and painting, which she
never fully articulated in any one single piece, but the traces of which can
be followed through a variety of writings, from essays to short stories
to memoirs. For a detailed analysis of this connection see below, Chapters
4 and 5.
24 For a study of the complex relationship existing between Woolf's work and
her Victorian heritage see Perry Meisel's The Absent Father (1980) and Gillian
Beer, Arguing with the Past (1989), pp. 138±58.
25 On this see `How Should One Read a Book?' (1926; E 4, 388±400) and `Hours
in a Library' (1916; E 2, 55±61); for more on Woolf's sense of books as people
see also the discussion of `Lives of the Obscure' in Chapter 5 below.
26 On `Byron and Mr Briggs' as well as Woolf's projected book of criticism see
also Andrew McNeillie's Introduction (E 3, xvi±xvii).
27 The crossing over of fictional and historical boundaries is doubled here, as in
the months immediately preceding the publication of the first Common
Reader Woolf had been busy reading Thomas Otway's Venice Preserved
(1682) to prepare for an article on Restoration theatre which was to include
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Notes 157
Dryden as well, but which she never wrote (see Brenda Silver, Virginia Woolf's
Reading Notebooks (1983), pp. 222±4).
28 For a critique of Woolf's historiographic approach to the women writing
in the Renaissance see Margaret Ezell, Writing Women's Literary History (1993).
29 David Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy (1994), pp. 9±36.
30 This phrase was coined by the French historians who founded the
journal Annales as a forum for the articulation of a slow-moving social
history as opposed to the histoire eÂveÂnementielle , the faster history of events.
Rachel Bowlby has pointed out affinities between Woolf's approach to his-
tory in A Room and the Annales, both published, as she stresses, in 1929; see
Feminist Destinations , p. 32. As Franco Moretti has remarked, the understand –
ing of the dynamic of history proposed by the Annales school has very strong
elements of similarity with Darwin's evolutionary theory which is also
articulated in terms of an underlying sense of duration (the `links' in the
evolution of the species) occasionally punctuated by sudden changes
(genetic mutation); see Signs Taken for Wonders (1988), pp. 262±78. That
Woolf's understanding of the permanence of history owes as much to
Darwin as to her French contemporaries is made clear in Between the Acts,
where Mrs Swithin envisages `rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the
entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all
one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal- necked, heaving,
surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters. . . from
whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend'
(p. 8) ± in the novel Mrs Swithin represents, of course, the type of the
eccentric.
31 Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996), p. 90.
32 Louise DeSalvo has also stressed the sense of continuity that links [`The
Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn'] to Woolf's later interest in marginalised
figures. In her article `Shakespeare's `Other' Sister' (1981), DeSalvo argues
that Joan Martyn represents another version of the myth of Judith Shake-
speare that Woolf will outline in A Room more than twenty years later. Unlike
Judith `who died without writing a word', Joan Martyn `kept her journal for
more than a year' and is therefore `the historian of her own times' (p. 79). In
DeSalvo's reading she thus works as a more empowering model of women's
relationship to history-making and functions as the predecessor of Woolf's
own historiographic practices.
33 In this Woolf's understanding of the significance of family history for the
nobility or the landed gentry resembles very closely Walter Benjamin's con-
cept of the `aura' that surrounds works of art as a condensation of their
sacred history of devotion, see Illuminations , pp. 211±44.
34 For a reading of `Miss Ormerod' see below, Chapter 5.
35 The two meanings of `common' which are intertwined in Woolf's writings
are also the ones which, according to Raymond Williams, have always con-
stituted the semantic catch of the word, designating `something shared
or . . . something ordinary'; see Keywords (1976), p. 71.
36 On the historiographic concerns of Between the Acts see Gillian Beer, Arguing
with the Past (1989), pp. 159±82; on the notion of community see her The
Common Ground (1996), pp. 48±73, 149±78.
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158 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
37 The texts of these essays as well as a few exploratory notes made by Woolf in
preparation for this book were published as ` „Anon'' and „The Reader'' '
(1979).
38 Ibid., p. 373.
39 Ibid., p. 376.
40 Maria DiBattista has proposed a reading of the notion of anonymity in Woolf
that links it to the androgynous ideal which `releases and relieves the
mind . . . from those censoring and legislating powers that ordain and
govern the sphere of the appropriate both in fiction and in life' (The
Fables of Anon (1980), p. 19). Poststructuralist readings of the issue of
modernity and subjectivity in Woolf's work have all focused primarily
on Woolf's novels and, as a consequence, they tend to underline
Woolf's suspicion of and resistance against any attempt at forging a
new synthesis or a new self out of the fragmentation of the modern
subject. See Makiko Minow Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of
the Subject (1987), Daniel Ferrer, Virginia Woolf and the Madness of
Language (1990). Yet, as Ferrer remarks at the end of his compelling book,
such insistence on the deconstructive movement of Woolf's fiction always
produces as its shadow an equally clear assertion of its constructive thrust
(pp. 5±7; 148).
41 Silver, ` „Anon'' and „The Reader'' ', p. 380.
42 Ibid., p. 359±60.
43 Ibid., p. 369.
2. The Essay as Form
1 For an account of the relationship between Woolf and Montaigne see also the
Introduction above.
2 Woolf shared her preference for De Quincey with her mother who, as Woolf
recalls in `A Sketch of the Past' (1939±40), kept a copy of Confessions of an
Opium-Eater on her bedside table. John Barrell has argued that the signific-
ance of De Quincey's writings for the history of English literature and
culture goes well beyond the interest in the exploration of an unbound
subjectivity which characterises Woolf's reading of his work. He shows that
the taking of opium inextricably linked De Quincey's brand of Romantic
autobiography with the discourses and images of Empire: `the turbaned
„Malay'' . . . ; the imagery of Hindu theology; the Hindu caste system; the
vastness of space and time in India and China…all these came together to
form, in De Quincey's head, an eclectic visual style he described as the
„barbaresque'' ' (The Infection of Thomas De Quincey (1991), p. 6). Woolf's
own description of the state of altered consciousness brought about by illness
can in fact be read as a revision of De Quincey's own opium-fuelled dreams,
especially in The Voyage Out (1915), where the feverish dreams of Rachel
Vinrace's final illness are preceded by the slightly unreal, hallucinatory
experience of the voyage upstream. On the distortion of perceptions brought
about by illness see also her essay `On Being Ill' (1926; CD, 43±53).
3 For Woolf's own use of and reflections on the form of the sketch in her
autobiographical writings see below, Chapter 4.
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Notes 159
4 Woolf's definition of the characteristics of biography match precisely
LukaÂcs's view of the essay as an essentially synthetic genre bringing together
art and science, lived experience and cognition; see Soul and Form (1911) and
the discussion of critical views of the essay in the Introduction above.
5 The phrase is Woolf's own way of articulating the alternation between sud-
den, epiphanic revelations and the more mundane, everyday quality of
experience. See her account of the distinction between the two in `A Sketch
of the Past' (MB, 70±1). For a study of the notion of the moment in Woolf's
work see Jane Goldman, The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf (1998), pp.
25±38.
6I n `Jacob's Room and the Eighteenth Century' (1981), Roger Moss has shown
that Woolf's third novel, which is often considered to be her first experi-
mental one, uses the form of the essay or commentary to interrupt the
smooth progression of the psychological novel and question its validity as
if it were a piece of internal criticism. For another example of `essayism' in
Woolf's fiction see also `The Mark on the Wall' (1917; SF, 83±9), which frames
a long philosophical meditation in fictional terms. For more on Woolf's early
short stories see above, Chapter 1.
7 Samuel Johnson, The Lives of the English Poets (1779±81), p. 441.
8 See, most famously, A Room (1929) and `Professions for Women' (1931; CD,
101±6). For a discussion of Woolf's developing ambivalence towards the idea
of writing for money see below, Chapter 3.
9 For an in-depth analysis of the intertextual relation between Woolf and
Johnson see Beth Carole Rosenberg, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson
(1995), which focuses on the dialogic character of the idea of the common
reader.
10 This image of the `more than maternal tie' has been used by Rachel Bowlby
to signify the strong relation of interdependence that characterises Woolf's
position vis-aÁ-vis the tradition of essay-writing, but also the link between her
feminist and modernist commitments as well as the connection between her
fictional and her critical work (WE, xiv).
11 The publication history of `Reviewing' offers a microcosmic representation
of this tension between public and private. It was originally published as a
Hogarth Press pamphlet on 2 November 1939, eliciting an immediate
response from the TLS (`a tart & peevish leader' according to Woolf (D 5,
245)) and then, the following Saturday, from the New Statesman & Nation.
Woolf wrote a reply to the NS&N entitled `Reviewers' which was published a
week later. In a diary entry for 9 November, she remarked: `Why an answer
should always make me dance like a monkey at the Zoo, gibbering it over as I
walk, & then re-writing, I dont know. It wasted a day. I suppose its all pure
waste: yet if one's an outsider, be an outsider ± only dont for God's sake
attitudinise & take up the striking the becoming attitude' (D 5, 245). The
reference to `outsiders' underscores the connection between `Reviewing' and
Three Guineas, on which see below and Chapter 3.
12 When invited to give the first Clark lectures in 1883, Leslie Stephen chose for
his topic the eighteenth century. In 1932, when she was already collecting
her `explosive' material for Three Guineas, Woolf was invited herself to give
the Clark lectures at Cambridge. She registered in her diary how her thoughts
went out to her father, who `would have blushed with pleasure could I have
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160 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
told him 30 years ago, that his daughter ± my poor little Ginny ± was to be
asked to succeed him: the sort of compliment he would have liked' (D 4, 79).
Woolf promptly refused the invitation on grounds both of principle and of
practical considerations, but a few days later she found herself plagued by the
temptation to give in to `the devil [who] whispered, all of a sudden, that I
have six lectures written in Phases of Fiction; & could refurbish them up and
deliver the Clark lectures, & win the esteem of my sex, with a few weeks
work' (79). On `Phases of Fiction' and A Room, see below, Chapter 5.
3. Professing Literature
1 As it has often been remarked, the situation of the narrator in A Room reflects
Woolf's own position in real life. Her paternal aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen
(`the Nun') left her a considerable legacy upon her death in 1909 at the expense
of Vanessa and Adrian, who received very little. The legacy was meant to
encourage Woolf to write `a solid historical work' rather than the journalism
of which Caroline Stephen disapproved (L 1, 202). The aunt of A Room,
though, seems to be a fictional mix between `the Nun' and Julia Margaret
Cameron, the Victorian photographer and Woolf's maternal great-aunt, who
went to live in India towards the end of her life, taking with her a coffin `laden
with family china' in case proper coffins could not be had there (see `Julia
Margaret Cameron', 1926, E 4, 375±83). Like Annie Thackeray Ritchie, another
aunt-like figure in Woolf's life, Cameron represented for Woolf the prototype
of the eccentric, for more on which see above, Chapter 1.
2 Abel, Virginia Woolf, p. 100.
3 Ibid., p. 101.
4 Ibid., p. 86.
5 For Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet see especially Night and Day, pp.
226±35; for Woolf's description of the contest between Clarissa and Miss
Kilman see Mrs Dalloway, pp. 136±7.
6 Woolf, [Speech Before the London/National Society for Women's Service,
January 21 1931], in The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska, p. xli.
7 Ibid., p. xlii.
8 Three Guineas uses in fact the same example of women servants trespassing
onto the realm of their masters, but with a markedly different emphasis.
Instead of the ironic, amused tone that characterises the passage in `Profes-
sions for Women', in the later essay the comparison is marked by heavy satire
and more than a tinge of that anger which in `Professions' Woolf herself
exhorts her audience to avoid. Answering the third of the letters that form
the background of Three Guineas, Woolf remarks that for men to ask women
for their help in protecting `culture and intellectual liberty' is as `surprising'
as it would be for `the Duke of Devonshire, in his star and garter' to ask `the
maid who was peeling potatoes' in the kitchen: ` „Stop your potato peeling,
Mary, and help me to construe this rather difficult passage in Pindar'' '.
Whereas in `Professions' it is the master of the house who is caught off-
guard by the household servants' behaviour, in Three Guineas it is the kitchen
maid herself who is pictured `run[ning] screaming to Louisa the cook,
„Lawks, Louie, Master must be mad!'' ' (TG, 277±78).
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Notes 161
9 Woolf, [Speech of January 21 1931], p. xl.
10 Ibid., p. xli.
11 Ibid., p. xliv.
12 I gratefully acknowledge Rachel Bowlby's insight on the androgynous char-
acter of Woolf's representation of the Guild women. For Bowlby's reading of
`Memories' see WE, pp. xxvii±xxviii.
13 In this sense, the working women of the Guild function in the same way as
the obscure by giving Woolf the opportunity of penetrating a past and a life
that would otherwise remain inaccessible to her. On the obscure see above,
Chapter 1 and below, Chapter 5.
14 For an analysis of the relationship between the androgynous ideal and the
writing of history in A Room see below, Chapter 4.
15 For the early reception of Three Guineas see Virginia Woolf (1975) ed. Robin
Majumdar and Allen McLaurin, pp. 400±19, and Virginia Woolf (1994), ed.
Eleanor McNees, vol. ii, pp. 267±81.
16 See Jane Marcus, Art and Anger (1988), pp. 101±21; Susan Squier, Virginia
Woolf and London (1985), pp. 180±89; Brenda Silver, `The Authority of Anger'
(1991).
17 See Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (1987), pp.
163±213.
18 For a biography of Bell that analyses his personal and intellectual relation-
ship to the pacifist/liberal ethics of Bloomsbury see Peter Stansky and Wil-
liam Abrahms, Journey to the Frontier (1966).
19 The essay was posthumously published in his Essays, Poems and Letters
(1938), pp. 335±90. Given the near- incestuous character of Bell's relation-
ship to his mother as inscribed in his letters, it is interesting that Three
Guineas should be so concerned with the question of the fathers' infantile
fixation on their daughters, in a way which reverses and, therefore, silences
Julian's attachment to his mother. For Woolf's memoirs of Bell, see Quentin
Bell, Virginia Woolf (1972±73), vol. ii, appendix C.
20 In `Demythologizing Facts and Photographs' (1996) Julia Duffy and Lloyd
Davis argue that the use of photographs in Three Guineas offers a critique
rather than a reinforcement of the belief in the power of photography to
sanction objective reality. Their argument, though, is based on an analysis of
the actual plates of generals, judges, heralds, etc. reproduced within Woolf's
essay rather than of the ways in which the Spanish photographs work at a
rhetorical level. As I argue in `The Art of Propaganda' (1999), the two sets of
photographs, the ones which are described and the ones which are repro-
duced, stand in a dialectical relationship to each other. Within the terms of
the discussion carried out by Woolf in Three Guineas, the critique of photo-
graphy as a historical document that is symbolised by the photographs of
British patriarchs reproduced in the text is dependent upon and reinforces
the association of photography with objective reality which is instituted by
the rhetorical use of the Spanish pictures described in the text.
21 In her diary, Woolf famously described the amount of references and quotes
she collected in preparation for the writing of Three Guineas as `enough
powder to blow up St Pauls' (D 4, 77).
22 Jane Marcus, Art and Anger (1988), p. 121.
23 Ibid., p. 120.
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162 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
24 Ibid., p. 108.
25 This returning contradiction has also been perceived by Susan Squier, who
tries to resolve it by converting the pacifism of Three Guineas into `an aggres-
sive redefinition of the concepts of militancy and patriotism to include the
feminist fight against male oppression of women and outsiders'. Virginia
Woolf and London, p. 205, n. 4.
4. Sketching the Past, or the Fictions of Autobiography
1 For the use of metaphors in Woolf's essay-writing see Edward L. Bishop,
`Metaphor and the Subversive Process of Virginia Woolf's Essays' (1987).
2I n The World Without a Self (1973), James Naremore describes Woolf's `love of
the sketch' as `one of the basic characteristics of her personality . . . a quality
that can be felt at the most elementary level of her prose' (p. 100) and which
`is analogous to her whole approach in her more experimental fiction' (p.
101). For Naremore, though, the sketch is not so much related to questions of
memory and vision in Woolf's work as to the effort of representing con-
sciousness without itemising its contents, as is the case in the stream of
consciousness.
3 For a clear example of this unreflective, almost automatic use of the sketch in
Woolf's writing see Mrs Dalloway (1925), pp. 85±86, where Peter Walsh is
thinking about Clarissa and, in a parenthetical remark, reflects that `it was a
mere sketch, he often felt, that even he, after all these years, could make of
Clarissa'. I thank Rachel Bowlby for pointing out this passage to me.
4I n Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language (1990), Daniel Ferrer analyses
this passage in the context of his discussion of the theme of the double in Mrs
Dalloway, arguing that Woolf's focus upon the question of character both in
fiction and in her memoirs is related to the return of the repressed or the
`uncanny' (pp. 12±16). Ferrer's reading of Woolf's work tends to assimilate it
to the theories of enunciation and psychic structures elaborated by Lacan,
who in his turn relies on Freud. As I discuss later on in this section, the
analogy with Freud is indeed invited by Woolf herself during the course of
her autobiography. But her reflections on the workings of memory and
literature in relation to scenes differ quite fundamentally from Freud's in
ways which are important if we are to understand Woolf's own contribution
to the analysis of narrative both as a historiographic structure and as a
fictional one.
Woolf's discussion of the Dickensian character in terms of outlines (`three
strokes of the pen') also recalls E. M. Forster's distinction between `flat' and
`rounded' characters in Aspects of the Novel (1927). What is surprising is that
while for Forster it is `round' characters that have `the incalculability of life
about [them] ± life within the pages of a book' (p. 106), for Woolf vitality
attaches itself to the `flat' ones and makes them unforgettable. Forster's book
was reviewed by Woolf, who unfavourably compared his approach to fiction
to Roger Fry's lectures on modern painting (`Is Fiction an Art?', 1927; E 4,
462).
5 Sigmund Freud, `The Wolf Man', p. 284.
6 Ibid., p. 295.
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Notes 163
7 The question of the reality of the primal scene in Freud's theory has often
been the target of ferocious attacks from his critics, who claim that Freud
devised this notion as a substitute for the scenes of seduction by parents or
carers of children which he had uncovered in his early work on hysterical
patients; see e.g. Jeffrey Masson, The Assault on Truth (1992). Freud's alleged
cover-up has in recent times been reversed by the notion of so-called `false
memory syndrome', where therapists are indicted with `implanting' false
memories of abuse in their patients. For an account of the issues of repre-
sentation, memory and vision entangled with the issue of `false memory
syndrome' see Celia Lury, Prosthetic Culture, (1998) pp. 105±33. The question
of the reality and/or fictionality of either the primal scene or the scene of
seduction is of course particularly relevant to Woolf's memoirs, which have
often been read as offering irrefutable evidence of her experience of sexual
abuse by the Duckworth brothers. Louise DeSalvo's Virginia Woolf: The Impact
of Childhood Sexual Abuse (1989) relies heavily on the evidence provided by
the memoirs to support her claims of the ways in which the abuse shaped
Woolf's view of the world and, consequently, her work. But in treating this
text like a collection of symptoms to be interpreted by the critic/analyst,
DeSalvo erases from view precisely the question of the reliability of the
memoirs as a faithful record of the past that is at the centre of Woolf's
reflections on the form of the scene.
8 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (1984), p. 277.
9 For an analysis of the shifting boundaries between art and life in Woolf's
fiction, see also C. Ruth Miller, Virginia Woolf: the Frames of Art and Life
(1988).
10 Orlando is also the only one of Woolf's books to return to that connection
between eccentricity, aristocracy and literary historiography that is at
the centre of some of her earlier critical projects, on which see above,
Chapter 1.
11 The `and/or' tag has been described as the constitutive structure of Orlando
by Rachel Bowlby in Feminist Destinations (1997), pp. 43±53.
12 In this sense, Orlando fits Tzvetan Todorov's definition of the fantastic as a
`hesitation', a state of suspension between `the real and the imaginary', The
Fantastic (1970), p. 25.
13 Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicolson, 12 October 1928; a shorter version of
this letter is also quoted by Madeline Moore in The Short Season (1984), p.107.
14 For a compelling analysis of the conventions that characterise the Bildungsro-
man in both its Continental and English varieties see Franco Moretti, The
Ways of the World (1987), especially pp. 15±73 and 181±228.
15 Sigmund Freud, `Family Romances' (1908), p. 228.
16 In `Posing Orlando' (1994), Talia Schaffer traces the history of `deliberate
mistakes, mistreatments, and misrepresentations' through which Angelica's
photograph came to stand in for Sackville-West's first lover, Violet Trefusis
(p. 34). She also stresses how the alternation between photographs and
paintings in the plates that went to illustrate Orlando indicates Woolf's self-
consciousness about the unspoken rivalry between two sets of family her-
itages, hers and Sackville-West's: `photographs visibly encoded family history
for Woolf; her great aunt [Julia Margaret Cameron] took them, her mother
sat for them, her sister owned them. Woolf could position this artistic family
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164 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
inheritance against Sackville-West's ancestral collection of priceless portraits'
(p. 48).
17 This cryptic reference to Ariosto's Orlando Furioso also works to underscore
the similarities of tone, atmosphere and subject-matter between Woolf's
mock biography and the Italian Renaissance poem. Some of these similarities
had already been noted by Carolyn Heilbrun in Towards Androgyny (1973),
where she cited Orlando Furioso as one of the literary classics providing
examples of androgynous literature, since it is peopled with figures whose
sexual and gender identities are constantly in question, from women who
dress like paladins (pp. 26±7) to male/female twin couples where the
exchange of roles and cross-dressing constitute the norm (pp. 40±41).
Furthermore, just as Woolf's Orlando was written with the ostensible aim of
celebrating the life of Vita Sackville-West and her family, so Ariosto's poem
was presented as a symbolic legitimation of the Estense family as the rightful
rulers of the city-state of Ferrara in Northern Italy. For an analysis of the
historical situation of the writing of Orlando Furioso see further Peter V.
Marinelli, Ariosto and Boiardo (1987). Juliette Dusinberre's study of Woolf's
re-reading of the Renaissance has also stressed some parallels between her
approach to the body and comedy and the work of Sir John Harington,
Ariosto's English translator (Virginia Woolf's Renaissance , pp. 206±17).
5. Images of History
1 See Virginia Woolf, Women and Fiction, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (1992). The text
of the published article `Women and Fiction' is reprinted in Granite and
Rainbow (1958), pp. 76±84; CE 2, 141±8; and Women and Writing, ed. MicheÁle
Barrett, pp. 43±52.
2 Rosenbaum, pp. xxi-xxii.
3 Ibid., p. xxxv.
4 The same indictment of the tendency to destroy past conventions for its own
sake appears in `Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' (1924), where Woolf describes
Georgian literature as intent on `smashing and crashing' the Edwardian
novel. Among those involved in these destructive mission to save the future
of English literature Woolf singles out Joyce, whose `indecency' appears to
her as `the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels
that in order to breathe he must break the window. . . . what a waste of
energy. . .' (E 3, 433±4).
5 For a reading of A Room centred around the inscription of lesbian relation-
ships in its narrative strategies see Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Lan-
guages of Patriarchy (1987), pp. 163±213.
6 For McNeillie's comments see E 4, xii-xiii. McNeillie also notes that the
relation between Woolf's essayistic practice and her father's interest in bio-
graphy was far from being one of direct opposition, as they both shared an
interest in the lives of marginal figures which Woolf chose to rewrite in terms
of the relationship between women and history. Rachel Bowlby also makes
this point in her introduction to A Woman's Essays, pp. xxiv-xxvi. For a
sample of Stephen's own pronouncements on the issue of marginality and
biography see his essay `Autobiography' (1907).
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Notes 165
7 Homer, The Odyssey, x.488±574; the episode of the actual encounter with the
dead is in book XI and was also echoed by Virgil in book vi of the Aeneid.I
thank Rachel Bowlby for pointing out these allusions.
8 Except of course in the famous passage about `tea-table training' in her
memoirs, where this `sidelong approach' is traced back to the sexual politics
of the late Victorian household (MB, 150); for a discussion of this passage in
relation to Woolf's essayistic practice see above, Chapter 1.
9 The obvious reference in this respect is to Between the Acts (1941) and in
particular to the much-discussed scene of the toad and the snake being
squashed by Giles that is echoed in the final scene, which stages the sexual
encounter between Isa and Giles as a form of violent animal struggle (pp. 61,
129±30). Another reference is the scene of the killing of the fish on the boat
taking the surviving members of the Ramsay family to the lighthouse, where
the violence of the scene resonates with the violence of war that has been all
but expurgated from the middle section and its lyrical interludes (To the
Lighthouse (1927), pp. 196, 145). For similarly violent primal scenes in `A
Sketch of the Past' see above, Chapter 4.
10 On this see Rachel Bowlby's discussion of questions of historiography in
relation to A Room in Feminist Destinations (1997), pp. 30±2.
11 For a detailed analysis of the professional relationship between the two
sisters and its psychological significance, see Diane Filby Gillespie, The
Sisters' Arts (1988).
12 In the hallucinatory world of Mrs Dalloway the process enacted is exactly the
opposite to the one described in `The Royal Academy', as the darkened car
passing by the florist shop is seen as an embodiment of the mystique and
threat of Imperial power in the aftermath of the Great War (p. 15). On this,
see Gillian Beer, The Common Ground (1996), pp. 149±78.
13 Here Woolf's reading of the Academy pictures shows clearly the influence of
the early critical attitudes developed under the guidance of her father. In
`Impressions of Sir Leslie Stephen', the essay Woolf wrote for inclusion in
Fred Maitland's biography of her father, Woolf recalls her father's disappoint –
ment and frustration when any of his children expressed identification with
the good character rather than the villain in Walter Scott's novels (1906; E 1,
127±30).
14 The same anecdote is sarcastically reported by Edith Sitwell in her English
Eccentrics (1933; pp. 216±17), an idiosyncratic collection of lives which
includes some of the figures which Woolf herself had listed as promising
material for her projected but never realised book on the eccentrics, on
which see above, Chapter 1.
15 Terry was part of that pre-Raphaelite circle that gathered around the Pattle
sisters, of which Woolf's maternal grandmother was one. For a discussion of
`Pattledom' and Julia Margaret Cameron see above, Chapter 1.
16 For Eliot's obituary see Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (eds), Virginia
Woolf: The Critical Heritage (1975), pp. 429±31.
Postscript: Angles and Harpies
1 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , p. 249.
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166 Virginia Woolf 's Essays
2 For a study of the intersection of `Messianism' and Marxism in Benjamin's
philosophy of history, see Michael Jennings, Dialectical Images (1987), pp.
42±81.
3 Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders, p. 41.
4 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel, pp. 493±4.
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Index
Abel, E., 71
Addison, J., 31, 53
Adorno, T., 4, 7±9, 16, 17, 18, 146
Aeneid, 149, 165 n. 7
Annales, 40, 157 n. 30
anonymity, 42, 45±8
Antigone, 87±8, 91
Ariosto, L., 114, 164 n. 17
Arnold, M., 66, 88
Austen, J., 26±7, 45, 139±40
Bacon, F., 9±11, 17, 51
Bakhtin, M., 16, 152 n. 24
Barrell, J., 158 n. 2
Barrett, M., 12±3, 15, 152 n. 16
Bazin, N. T., 152 n. 19, 154 n. 5
Beer, G., 152 n. 24, 156 n. 24, 157 n. 36,
165 n. 12
Beerbohm, M., 53±4
Bell, J., 84, 95, 161 n. 19
Bell, Q., 12, 83, 154 n. 5
Bell, V., 97, 100, 101, 132, 136±9, 141,
161 n. 19
Benjamin, W., 9, 146±8, 149, 154 n. 4,
157 n. 33
Bennett, A., 1±3, 30, 72, 83, 111
Benveniste, EÂ., 156 n. 21
Bildungsroman , 6, 17, 111, 163 n. 14
Bloomsbury, 25, 41, 95, 114±15, 143,
161 n. 18
Bowlby, R., 13±15, 25, 27, 105±6, 157 n.
30, 159 n. 10, 163 n. 11, 165 n. 10
Brewster, D., 151 n. 5
BronteÈ, C., 21, 45, 77, 127
Brooks, P., 102±3
Brosnan, L., 15, 26, 28±9, 152 n. 22,
155 n. 19
Browne, T., 51±3, 57
Cameron, J. M., 41, 160 n. 1
Cannadine, D., 40
Childers, M., 153 n. 29
Cixous, H., 151 n. 15 common reader, the, 17, 44, 57±9, 61,
82
Conrad, J., 29, 35, 37
Daiches, D., 151 n. 5
Davies, M. L., 77, 81, 84; see also Woolf,
V., `Memories of a Working
Women's Guild'
Davis, L., 161 n. 20
De Quincey, T., 49, 54±6, 57, 158 n. 2
DeSalvo, L., 157 n. 32, 163 n. 7
DiBattista, M., 151 n. 2, 158 n. 40
Dick, S., 129
Dickens, C., 98, 102
Dickinson, V., 23, 155 n. 16
Dictionary of National Biography, 18, 37,
127
DobreÂe, B., 151 n. 4
Doody, M.A., 149
Dostoevsky, F.M., 4
Dubino, J., 154 n. 3
Duckworth, H., 99, 100
Duckworth, S., 95, 99, 100
Duffy, J., 161 n. 20
DuPlessis, R. B., 151 n. 15
Dusinberre, J., 15, 16, 153 n. 25, 155 n.
10
eccentrics, the, 18, 37±41, 42, 43, 45;
see also obscure, the; Orlando
Eliot, G., 140
Eliot, T.S., 90, 145, 155 n. 17
essay, the:
and autobiography, 1±3, 49±53
and fiction, 31±6, 55±6, 127±8
and historiography, 31±3, 36±7,
118±19, 121±2, 124±8, 146,
157 n. 32
and journalism, 61±6
and modernity, 4±5, 53, 57, 146
and painting, 132, 134±8, 156 n. 23
and photography, 85±6, 91, 93,
161 n. 20, 163 n. 16
173
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174 Index
essayism, 17, 146, 153 n. 27, 159 n. 6;
see also essay and modernity, the
Ezell, M., 157 n. 28
Ferrer, D., 154 n. 5, 158 n. 40,
162 n. 4
Forster, E.M., 29, 37, 117, 162 n. 4,
163 n. 7
Foucault, M., 153 n. 1
Freud, S., 102±3, 113±14, 162 n. 4
Fuss, D., 152 n. 22
Galsworthy, J., 30
Gertler, M., 143, 144
Goldman, J., 159 n.5
Goldman, M., 155 n. 14
Good, G., 5±6, 10
Gray, T., 57±8
Greenblatt, S., 151 n. 11
Gross, J., 151 n. 4
Guiguet, J., 152 n. 16
Heilbrun, C., 152 n. 19, 164 n. 17
Hills, J., 99, 100
Joeres, R. B., 152 n. 15
Johnson, S., 57±9
Joyce, J., 155 n. 17, 164 n. 4
Kaufmann, M., 152 n. 15
Klee, P., 146, 147
Lacoue-Labarthe, P., 154 n. 4
Lamb, C., 31
Lawrence, D.H., 29
Leaska, M. A., 76, 153 n. 1
Leavis, Q. D., 89, 153 n. 29
Lee, H., 25, 41
Lee, V., 31
London, B., 28, 155 n. 12
LukaÂcs, G., 4±5, 16, 17, 146,
159 n. 4
Lury, C., 163 n. 7
Lyttleton, M., 23
MacCarthy, D., 72
Mansfield, K., 1, 155 n. 17
Marcus, J., 28, 83, 88±9, 154 n. 5, 155 n.
12, 164 n. 5 Masson, J., 163 n. 7
McNeillie, A., 14, 24, 32, 57, 122, 126,
153 n. 1, 164 n. 6
Meisel, P., 156 n. 24
Miller, C. R., 163 n. 9
Moi, T., 13, 15, 152 n. 22, 155 n. 12
Montaigne, M. de, 9±11, 16, 17, 50, 51,
52, 67
Moretti, F., 148±9, 157 n. 30, 163 n. 14
Moss, R., 159 n. 6
Musil, R., 17, 146, 153 n. 26
Naremore, J., 162 n. 2
Obaldia, C. de, 153 n. 27
obscure, the, 18, 20, 37, 42±3,
45, 122±8, 144, 147, 148,
161 n. 13; see also eccentrics, the;
`Lives of the Obscure'
Odyssey, 123
Orlando Furioso: see Ariosto, L.
Otway, T., 156 n. 27
Pankhurst, E., 79, 88
Pater, W., 54
Plato, 31±3, 34, 51, 156 n. 22
Poole, R., 154 n. 5
Rich, A., 11, 12
Richardson, D., 155 n. 17
Richmond, B., 23
Ricúur, P., 156 n. 21
Rose, G., 8±9
Rosenbaum, S.P., 117
Rosenberg, B.C., 15, 152 n. 15, 152 n.
22, 159 n. 9
Sackville-West, V., 105, 107, 11±12,
113, 114
Sandbach-Dahlstro Èm, C., 153 n. 25
Sappho, 72
Schaffer, T., 163 n. 16
Schor, N., 152 n. 22
Schulkind, J., 95±6
Shakespeare, W., 72±4, 75, 118
Sharma, V., 155 n. 14
Showalter, E., 13
Silver, B., 46, 48
Sitwell, E., 165 n. 14
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sketch, the, 19, 55, 56, 94±5, 96, 97,
102, 104, 125, 128, 129±30, 132,
162 n. 2, 162 n. 3; see also essay
and fiction, the; essay and
photography, the
Smith, R., 24
Snyder, J., 9±11
Spanish Civil War: see Bell, J.; Woolf,
V., Three Guineas
Squier, S., 162 n. 25
Stansky, P., 161 n. 18
Stephen, C.E., 23, 160 n. 1
Stephen, J., 41, 98±9, 101, 143
Stephen, L., 24, 25, 67, 100, 155 n. 16,
159 n. 12, 164 n. 6, 165 n. 13; see
also Dictionary of National
Biography
Stephen, V., 23±5, 29±32; see esp.
153 n. 2, 155 n. 19
essays: `An Andalusian Inn', 156 n.
20; `Art and Life', 32; `ChaÃteau
and Country Life', 31; `The
Duchess of Newcastle', 38, 39,
40; `The Duke and Duchess of
Newcastle', 31; `John Delane',
24; `The Journal of Elizabeth
Lady Holland', 24; `Lady
Fanshawe's Memoirs', 26; `Lady
Hester Stanhope', 37±9, 40;
`Letters of Christina Rossetti',
24; `The Letters of Jane Carlyle',
155 n. 16; `Louise de la VallieÁre',
24; `The Memoirs of Lady
Dorothy Neville', 24, 31; `The
Novels of George Gissing', 24;
`Philip Sidney', 24; `A Priory
Church', 156 n. 20; `Shelley and
Elizabeth Hitchener', 24; `The
Sister of Frederic the Great', 26;
`Social England', 153 n. 1; `The
Son of Royal Langbirth', 153 n. 1;
`Street Music', 24, 29; `The Value
of Laughter', 29; `A Vanished
Generation', 43; `A Walk By
Night', 156 n. 20; `A Week at the
White House', 24; `Wordsworth
and the Lakes', 24
fiction: [`A Dialogue upon Mount
Pentelicus'], 31, 34, 156 n. 22; Index 175
[`The Journal of Mistress Joan
Martyn'], 31, 42±3, 157 n. 32;
Melymbrosia , 31, 32; see also The
Voyage Out; `Memoirs of a
Novelist', 24, 33; [`The
Mysterious Case of Miss V.'], 31;
[`Phyllis and Rosamond'], 31
journals, 30, 155 n. 19
on Platonic dialogues, 31±2, 156 n.
22; see also Plato
Stevenson, R.L.,54
Todd, J., 152 n. 22
Tennyson, A., 41
Watt, I., 6
Watts, G.F., 41, 142
Wells, H.G., 30
White, H., 156 n. 21
Williams, O., 151 n. 4
Williams, R., 157 n. 35
Winchelsea, L., 45
Woolf, L., 3, 12, 25, 32, 66±7, 75,
154 n. 5
Woolf, V.,
autobiography/biography: Moments
of Being, 28, 39±40, 95±6; `Old
Bloomsbury', 155 n. 8; Orlando, 17,
19, 20, 36, 39, 40, 94, 104±15, 116,
120, 150; `A Sketch of the Past', 19,
20, 28, 94±102, 103±4, 105, 113,
142±3, 159 n. 5, 165 n. 8
essays: ` „Anon'' and „The Reader'' ',
46±8; `The Art of Biography', 56;
`Bad Writers', 62; `A Book of
Essays', 63; `Byron & Mr Briggs',
33±4; `The Common Reader',
58±9; Common Reader: First
Series, 32, 33, 35±6, 43, 44, 94,
122, 156 n. 27; see also titles of
individual essays; The Death of
the Moth, 75, 129; `The Decay of
Essay-writing', 24, 49±50; `De
Quincey's Autobiography',
55±6; `The Eccentrics', 38, 40,
43; `The Elizabethan Lumber
Room', 51±2; `Ellen Terry',
141±3; `The English Mail
Coach', 54±5; `Foreword to
10.1057/9780230599147 – Virginia Woolf©s Essays, Elena Gualtieri
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176 Index
Woolf, V., (cont'd)
Recent Paintings by Vanessa Bell',
136±8, 141; `Hours in a Library',
156 n. 25; `How Should One
Read a Book?', 156 n. 25;
`Impassioned Prose', 55; `The
Intellectual Status of Women',
72±3, 152 n. 22; `Is Fiction an
Art?', 162 n. 4; `Jane Austen': 27,
139±40; `Jane Austen Practising',
27; `Julia Margaret Cameron',
41, 160 n. 1; Killing the Angel in
the House, 152 n. 23; `The
Leaning Tower', 81±2; `The
Limits of Perfection', 54; `Lives
of the Obscure', 20, 42, 122±3,
125, 131 (see also `Miss
Ormerod' and `Taylors and
Edgeworths' (below); obscure,
the); `The Memoirs of Sarah
Bernhardt', 24, 141±2;
`Memories of a Working
Women's Guild', 19, 77±81, 84,
152 n. 22, 161 n. 13; `Miss
Ormerod', 43, 126±7, 129; `The
Modern Essay', 53±4, 62;
`Montaigne', 50; `Mr Bennett
and Mrs Brown', 1, 30, 34, 164 n.
4; `Mr Conrad: A Conversation',
34±5, 37; `The Niece of an Earl',
140±1; `On Being Ill', 158 n. 2;
`On Not Knowing Greek', 51;
`The Pastons and Chaucer',
44±5; `Patmore's Criticism', 62;
`The Patron and the Crocus',
59±61; `Phases of Fiction', 117,
160 n. 12; `Professions for
Women', 19, 74±6, 77, 78, 93,
148, 152 n. 22, 160 n. 8;
`Reading', 32±3, 36, 52,
156 n. 23; Reading at Random, 47±8, 143; `Reviewing', 63±6, 68,
69, 159 n. 11; A Room of One's
Own, 12, 19, 20, 27, 30, 36, 38,
39, 45±6, 68, 69±72, 73±4, 75,
77, 78, 80, 81, 82, 83, 91, 93, 96,
105, 116±121, 147, 152 n. 16,
157 n. 30, 160 n. 1, 164 n. 5,
165 n. 10; `The Royal Academy',
132±4, 135, 138; `Royalty',
143±4; `The Strange
Elizabethans', 51; `A Talk about
Memoirs', 34; `Taylors and
Edgeworths', 123±6; Three
Guineas, 14, 65, 68, 76±7, 82±92,
93±4, 147, 152 n. 16, 153 n. 26,
153 n. 29, 159 n. 12, 160 n. 8,
161 n. 20, 161 n. 21, 162 n. 15,
162 n. 25; `Three Pictures': see
under fiction; Turning the Page:
see Reading at Random (above);
`Walter Sickert', 134±6, 137, 138,
141, 145; `Women and Fiction',
116±17; see also A Room of One's
Own
fiction: Between the Acts, 14, 46, 94,
114, 157 n. 36, 165 n. 9; Jacob's
Room, 1, 17, 33, 40, 111, 159 n.
6; `The Mark on the Wall', 159 n.
6; Mrs Dalloway, 14, 33, 34, 74,
165 n. 12, 113, 162 n. 3, 162 n. 4;
Night and Day, 1, 32, 74, 113;
The Pargiters, 17, 34, 36, 76,
153 n. 26
`Three Pictures', 129±31
To the Lighthouse , 3, 14, 36, 57,
94, 99, 104, 105, 106, 113,
165n.9
The Voyage Out, 1, 24, 32, 34,
158 n. 2; see also Melymbrosia
The Waves, 36, 57, 105, 114
The Years, 35, 114, 153 n. 26
10.1057/9780230599147 – Virginia Woolf©s Essays, Elena Gualtieri
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com – licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso – PalgraveConnect – 2011-03-15