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major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

major writers, biographical notes, and literary criticism

Virginia Woolf selected criticism

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

literary criticism and commentary

T.E. Apter, Virginia Woolf: A Study of her Novels, New York: New York University Press, 1979.

Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, London: Hogarth Press, 5 volumes, 1977-1984.

Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968.

Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: a Biography, 2 Vols, London: Hogarth Press, 1972.

Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist, second edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Rachel Bowley, Virginia Woolf: Feminist Dimensions, Oxford: Blackwell, 1988.

Maria Di Battista, Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1980.

David Daiches, Virginia Woolf, second edition, Norfolk Conn.: New Directions, 1963

Susan Dick (ed), The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Hogarth Press, 1985.


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject. Ideal for beginners.   Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book here


Avron Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Ralph Freedman, Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity, Berkley: University of California Press, 1980.

B.J. Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, second edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and her Works, trans. Jean Stewart, London: Hogarth Press, 1965.

Jeremy Hawthorn, Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’: a Study in Alienation, Sussex University Press, 1975.

Mitchell A. Leaska, The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.

Hermione Lee, The Novels of Virginia Woolf, London: Methuen, 1977.

Robin Majumdar and Allen McLaurin (eds), Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1975.


Virginia Woolf selected criticismThe Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf is collection of essays which addresses the full range of her intellectual perspectives – literary, artistic, philosophical and political. It provides new readings of all nine novels and fresh insight into Woolf’s letters, diaries and essays. The progress of Woolf’s thinking is revealed from Bloomsbury aestheticism through her hatred of censorship, corruption and hierarchy to her concern with all aspects of modernism. This book explores the immense range of social and political issues behind her search for new forms of narrative.   Buy the book here


Jane Marcus, New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1981.

Herbert Marder, Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1968.

Allen McLaurin, Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Makiko Minow Pinkney, Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject, Brighton: Harvester, 1987.

A.D. Moody, Virginia Woolf, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963.

Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautman (eds), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 Vols, London: Hogarth Press, 1975-84.

Roger Poole, The Unknown Virginia Woolf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

N.C. Thakur, The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf, London: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Eric Warner (ed), Virginia Woolf: A Centenary Perspective, London: Macmillan, 1984.

Jane Wheare, Virginia Woolf, Methuen, 1989.

Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, Berkley: University of California Press, 1986.

© Roy Johnson 2005


Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
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Virginia Woolf – life and works


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Literary criticism, Literary studies, Modernism, Virginia Woolf, Virginia Woolf criticism

Virginia Woolf selected essays

May 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

non-fiction meditations from a great novelist

Virginia Woolf selected essays is a completely self-contained, and can be read for the pleasure which she thought was the purpose of the essay form. But they also illuminate her larger works of fiction. They are a small proportion of her total output (which runs to five volumes) but they represent some of the most important themes which pervade her work as a whole. They are also amazingly prophetic – on women as writers, on the death of Empire, and on the speed and locomotion of modern life.

Virginia Woolf Selected EssaysShe writes about the Tube, the telephone, the motor car, and aircraft, which were all recent developments at the time. The essays are arranged in chronological order in four groups – reading and writing, biography, feminism, and contemporary culture. She had inherited the skill of writing from her father Leslie Stephen and by the time these essays were written had honed that skill into a high form of art. She believes that the essay is an expression of the individual vision, but it is interesting to note how much of her own expression is couched in generalizations addressed in the first person plural – “We feel .. this and that”. I was reminded of George Orwell who whilst railing against generalizations and stereotypes was quite happy to fall into the trap of devising his own – as in ‘What is Englishness?’.

It’s also true to say that a lot of her argument is conducted in extended similes and metaphors. These give the essays unquestionable elegance, but they also allow her to hide behind these rhetorical flourishes. They often conceal a paucity of concrete examples to back up her arguments.

It’s a subtle and seductive method, because it draws any unwary reader into accepting unfounded generalizations without their realising it. Her judgments are sound whilst she is in the safe traditions of earlier centuries, but when it comes to her contemporaries – well. “Ulysses was a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster.”

But her analysis of reading fiction (‘How Should One Read a Book?) is truly inspirational. In it, she argues for a totally sympathetic submersion in the writer’s work, followed by an equally severe judgment in which each work is held up for comparison against the finest of its kind.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it … It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.

‘The New Biography’ is her thoughtful response to the subject, prompted by her reading of Harold Nicolson’s excellent and much under-rated Some People. She is astute enough to spot that he was onto something quite new (and what a shame it is that he didn’t produce some more writing of this kind).

A companion piece to this essay is ‘The Art of Biography’, a meditation on Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians and Elizabeth and Essex, arguing that the former is more successful because Strachey stayed within the confines of known facts, whereas in the latter he invented them, and turned the book into a work of artistic imagination – whereupon it failed by straying outside the ‘rules’ of biography.

‘On Being Ill’ is a reflection on the fact that illness, although a common human experience, is hardly present in literature as a subject. It was written before she read Marcel Proust, but it also dances around the subject of what literature we read (and cannot read) when ill.

‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ expresses her ambiguous political notions but her personal sympathy with a movement which her husband Leonard Woolf had enthusiastically supported, along with the Co-Operative movement. She knows perfectly well that she is privileged, a ‘lady’, but it doesn’t stop her entering imaginatively into the lives of Mrs Burrows from Edgebaston and Mrs Philips from Bacup – delegates to a conference she attended.

The collection ends with essays on contemporary life and culture. There’s an extraordinarily prescient reflection on the end of Empire prefigured by an account of a thunderstorm at the Wembley Exhibition of 1924; a meditation on the art of the cinema (1926) in which she correctly predicts that its time was yet to come; and a riveting account of flying over London in an aeroplane which perfectly demonstrates her imaginative skill – since she had never done any such thing.

© Roy Johnson 2008

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US


David Bradshaw (ed), Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.244, ISBN 0199212813


More on Virginia Woolf
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Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, English literature, Essays, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf short stories

March 15, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorials, synopses, commentaries, and study resources

This is an ongoing collection of tutorials and study guides featuring the short stories of Virginia Woolf. The earliest story dates from 1906 and the latest from 1940, written for American Vogue magazine shortly before her death. They are presented here in alphabetical order of title. The list will be updated as new titles are added.

Virginia Woolf short stories   A Haunted House
Virginia Woolf short stories   A Simple Melody
Virginia Woolf short stories   A Summing Up
Virginia Woolf short stories   An Unwritten Novel
Virginia Woolf short stories   Ancestors
Virginia Woolf short stories   Happiness
Virginia Woolf short stories   In the Orchard
Virginia Woolf short stories   Kew Gardens
Virginia Woolf short stories   Moments of Being
Virginia Woolf short stories   Monday or Tuesday
Virginia Woolf short stories   Phyllis and Rosamond
Virginia Woolf short stories   Solid Objects
Virginia Woolf short stories   Sympathy
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Evening Party
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Introduction
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Lady in the Looking-Glass
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Legacy
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Man who Loved his Kind
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Mark on the Wall
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Mysterious Case of Miss V
Virginia Woolf short stories   The New Dress
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Shooting Party
Virginia Woolf short stories   The String Quartet
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Symbol
Virginia Woolf short stories   The Watering Place
Virginia Woolf short stories   Together and Apart


Virginia Woolf podcast

A eulogy to words


Study resources

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Virginia Woolf short stories Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf short stories The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf short stories The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle

Virginia Woolf Concordance Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf’s works

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources


Writing app

Mont Blanc pen - Virginia Woolf edition

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


Further reading

Red button Quentin Bell. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Red button Hermione Lee. Virginia Woolf. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Red button Nicholas Marsh. Virginia Woolf, the Novels. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Red button John Mepham, Virginia Woolf. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992.

Red button Natalya Reinhold, ed. Woolf Across Cultures. New York: Pace University Press, 2004.

Red button Michael Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Study. New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Red button Susan Sellers, The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Red button Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader. New York: Harvest Books, 2002.

Red button Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.


Other works by Virginia Woolf

Kew GardensKew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - Kew Gardens Buy the book at Amazon US


Virginia Woolf: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon UK
Virginia Woolf - A Biography Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2014


More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf web links

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf - portrait
Red button Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Virginia Woolf web links Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Virginia Woolf web links Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Virginia Woolf web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Red button Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Virginia Woolf web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

Virginia Woolf web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

Virginia Woolf web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.


Mont Blanc pen - Virginia Woolf edition

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition


Virginia Woolf - Companion - book jacketThe Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf is collection of essays which addresses the full range of her intellectual perspectives – literary, artistic, philosophical and political. It provides new readings of all nine novels and fresh insight into Woolf’s letters, diaries and essays. The progress of Woolf’s thinking is revealed from Bloomsbury aestheticism through her hatred of censorship, corruption and hierarchy to her concern with all aspects of modernism. This book explores the immense range of social and political issues behind her search for new forms of narrative.

© Roy Johnson 2005


Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
Virginia Woolf – life and works


Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Bloomsbury Group, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf, Web links

Virginia Woolf’s Women

July 24, 2014 by Roy Johnson

biographical studies of major figures in her life

Virginia Woolf’s Women is a study of the principal females in Virginia Woolf’s life and the influences they may have had in shaping her views of the world. It begins naturally enough in her early home life. Vanessa Curtis argues that Virginia Woolf inherited suffering, illness, and self-deprecation from her grandmother Mia and her mother Julia Stephen whose saintly beauty was cut short by an early death when Woolf was only thirteen. In this environment she also had direct personal contact with the concept of ‘the angel of the house’ against which she was later to argue. Its author Coventry Patmore was a visitor to the house as a friend of her grandmother.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Julia Stephen

Following Julia’s death, Woolf’s older step-sister Stella Duckworth became a surrogate mother to the seven children of the Stephen family. But no sooner was she established in this role than two events snatched away her comforting presence – first her marriage to Jack Hills, and then immediately following the honeymoon, her sudden death.

Curtis traces echoes of these events in The Voyage Out and Night and Day and even the much later To the Lighthouse. Of course it is legitimate to see elements of biography expressed in the fiction – but it is not a legitimate practice to read back from fiction as a valid source of biographical information. More legitimately, Curtis attributes Woolf’s scepticism about the prospects of successful heterosexual love to this trio of family martyrs.

The next major figure is her elder sister Vanessa (Bell), who took over from Stella as head of the household. The two sisters had a very close relationship, yet one which occasionally spilled over into rivalry. Vanessa was a liberating factor in organising the family’s move from Kensington to Bloomsbury after their father’s death. She also remained closely alongside Virginia when she sank into periods of depression and near-madness.

The two sisters established weekend homes near each other in Rodmell and Charleston in East Sussex, and they shared a common circle of friends amongst the various members of the Bloomsbury Group. The roles of care-giver and invalid were only ever reversed on the occasion of Vanessa’s collapse when her son Julian was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Even Bloomsbury enthusiasts might not recognise the importance in Woolf’s life of the next figure – Violet Dickinson – a six foot tall upper class woman (seventeen years older) who was a lifelong supporter and Woolf enthusiast. It was Dickinson who first introduced her to newspaper and magazine editors – which enabled her to establish herself as a reviewer and a journalist.

Curtis speculates about the exact nature of the relationship between the two women, her uncertainty reflected in the fact that she calls it Woolf’s “first emotional and physical love” whilst admitting that there is no evidence of any physical connection between them. Her summing up is probably more accurate – a ‘warm-up’ for the later relationship with Vita Sackville-West.

Woolf’s relationship with Ottoline Morrell does not reflect well on her in terms of sincerity, or moral integrity. Like many of the other artists and writers who accepted Morrell’s generous hospitality at Garsington Manor, she repaid it by scoffing and making fun of the hostess behind her back.

He relationship with Katherine Mansfield was of a different order. The two writers circled round each other, both of them aware that they were literary rivals, yet respectful of each other’s work. They chose similar topics to write about, and for a while even had similar literary styles. They shared a profound scepticism about heterosexual males, and both wrote cautious tales of Sapphic desire. Following Katherine Mansfield’s early death in 1923, Woolf expressed the wish that she had been closer to her rival.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Dora Carrington

A whole chapter on Dora Carrington fails to establish any significant influence on Woolf herself, despite uncovering many similarities between them as creative artists. The two women were simply rivals for the friendship of Lytton Strachey, to whom they were both attached – and Carrington won hands down on that attachment, for which she paid with her life.

Curtis has more success, understandably, with Vita Sackville-West. The history and nature of their affair is well known – an affair facilitated by the fact that neither of them had sexual relationships with their own husbands. There is a detailed tracing of the ups and downs of the emotional tensions between them, but the account ignores opportunities to consider any possible mutual influence as writers.

This is a loss, because at the time their relationship, Sackville-West was at the height of her fame as a writer, and she was actually published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press. But by way of compensation Curtis does acknowledge and discuss Vita’s significance as the inspiration for Orlando.

Virginia Woolf's Women

Virginia Woolf with Ethyl Smyth

The most extraordinary figure is saved for last. Ethyl Smyth was a pipe-smoking lesbian feminist composer, who by the time she met Woolf was seventy-three years old, stone deaf, and sporting an enormous ear-trumpet. Nevertheless, she fell in love with the much younger writer, and although this feeling was only weakly reciprocated Curtis makes a reasonable case for her influence on Woolf’s work as a writer.

The first influences were Smyth’s radical feminism, her support for the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and her struggles to find acceptance as a female creative artist in a musical world which was dominated by men (as it still is). Curtis points out that these topics, which Woolf discussed with Smyth, found their way directly into the bombshell polemic Three Guineas. And the other influence was that Woolf introduced musical notions of composition and form, particularly into her later works.

There are no surprise revelations in these studies: most of the information will be well known to Bloomsbury enthusiasts, and Woolf’s life has been worked over thoroughly by any number of biographists. But as a general introduction to the social and intellectual milieu of the period it’s an excellent piece of work, well illustrated, and supported by a full scale critical apparatus.

Virginia Woolf's Women Buy the book at Amazon UK
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© Roy Johnson 2014


Vanessa Curtis, Virginia Woolf’s Women, London: Robert Hale, 2002, pp.224, ISBN: B00KXX3TCU


More on Virginia Woolf
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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, English literature, Literary studies, Virginia Woolf

Vita and Harold

July 11, 2009 by Roy Johnson

The letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson

Harold Nicolson was a diplomat, a writer, and a politician, but he is best known for being married to Vita Sackville-West. They were both fringe members of the Bloomsbury Group. She too was a writer – indeed a best-selling author in the 1930s – but is best known as the woman who fell in love with and ran away with Virginia Woolf. Collectively, she and her husband are also best known for their rather unusual marriage and its arrangements which permitted them both to have lovers of the same sex whilst swearing their undying loyalty to each other. All this is recorded by their son in the equally famous account Portrait of a Marriage. Vita and Harold is a selection from their personal correspondence.

Vita & HaroldThey wrote to each other voluminously (10,500 letters) throughout their long relationship – mainly because so much of it was spent apart. He worked in Persia whilst she stayed at home. Later, he had his rooms in Albany where he lived all week: she stayed in Sissinghurst writing and tending their gardens. The children were kept out of the way, and they met at weekends. In the meantime homosexual affairs flourished and they wrote to say how much they were missing each other.

The early letters are very playful and, it has to be said, full of the protestations of a deep friendship based on shared interests and understanding on which they later claimed the success of their marriage was built.

She is very understanding when he contracts a venereal infection from another male guest at a weekend party he attended with her as his new wife. He is more concerned but ultimately forgiving when she leaves him and their two children to ‘elope’ with Violet Keppel, who had just married Denys Trefusis.

She even writes to him from the south of France whilst he is attending the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 – complaining that the exchange rate had dropped before she could convert her pounds sterling. He was negotiating the terms of the Armistice, whilst she was getting ready to gamble away her money in Monte Carlo.

It’s an interesting lesson in how letters must be put into a historical and cultural context in order to be properly understood. Vita writes a letter declaring undying love for her husband – but you would never guess it was written on the very day that she went off for the last time with Violet Trefusis.

Although Vita was the more successful author, his letters are more entertaining – at moments given to (unintentional?) humour:

[On horticulture] Shrubbery is a great problem if one is to avoid the suburban…[On his younger son] I said that about masturbation he must put it off as long as he possibly could – and that then he must only do it on Saturdays…[On education] I said that co-education was calculated to make boys homosexual for life, whereas Eton was only calculated to make them homosexual until 23 or 24.

Vita on the other hand is often more philosophically reflective, even if her observations are laced with a breathtaking notions of superiority:

The whole system of marriage is wrong. It ought, at least, to be optional and no stigma attached if you prefer a less claustrophobic form of contact. For it is claustrophobic. It is only very, very intelligent people like us who are able to rise superior; and I have a suspicion, my darling, that even our intelligence…wouldn’t have sufficed if our temperamental weaknesses didn’t happen to dovetail as well as they do…In fact our common determination for personal liberty: to have it ourselves, and to allow it to each other.

Serene detachment and au-dessus de la mêlée – yet this is the woman who travelled all the way to Paris to seduce Violet Trefusis whilst she was on her honeymoon, and forebad her to have any sexual relationship with her new husband Denys.

It’s amazing how many important political events Harold was connected with. He was the only person to be present at the settlement of both world wars. And he knew just about everyone who was anyone. In the course of his busy life he hobnobs with James Joyce, Somerset Maugham, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Charles de Gaulle.

No doubt there are today people with unconventional marriages, bisexual relations, connections in high places, and lots of money – but this one offers a glimpse of a world which has gone by. And I somehow doubt that people in future will be reading the emails and text messages which have replaced the written letter as a means of communication.

© Roy Johnson 2001

Vita and Harold   Buy the book at Amazon UK

Vita and Harold   Buy the book at Amazon US


Nigel Nicolson (ed), Vita & Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson 1910-1962, London: Phoenix, 1993, pp.452, ISBN: 1857990617


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Filed Under: Bloomsbury Group, Harold Nicolson, Lifestyle, Vita Sackville-West Tagged With: Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Harold Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling novelist, lesbian, and horticulturalist

Vita Sackville-West biographyVita (Victoria Mary) Sackville-West (1892-1962) was a prolific poet and novelist – though she is probably best known for her writing on gardens and her affair with Virginia Woolf. She was born into an aristocratic family in Knole, Kent. Her grandmother was the famous Pepita, a Spanish dancer of humble descent who had formed an illicit union with Lionel Sackville-West, the 2nd Lord Sackville. She was educated privately and became a striking if slightly eccentric figure, over six feet tall. As a child she started to write poetry, writing her first ballads at the age of 11. Her first published work, the verse drama Chatterton, was printed privately in 1909 when she was seventeen, and besides further volumes of poetry she wrote thirteen full-length novels (including a detective story) as well as books on biography, and history.

In 1913 she married the diplomat and critic Harold Nicolson, with whom she lived briefly in Persia and then at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. They had two children, who became the art critic Benedict Nicolson and the publisher Nigel Nicolson. At first she played her role as a dutiful wife, but then her husband admitted that he had a male lover. The marriage survived nevertheless.

She herself caused something of a scandal by having a very public affair with Violet Keppel, the daughter of Alice Keppel, Edward VII’s mistress. Their affair continued even after Violet married and became Violet Trefusis in 1919. It reached a climax when the two women ‘eloped’ to Paris. Their husbands Denys Trefusis and Harold Nicolson chartered an aeroplane and travelled to Paris together to persuade their wives to return home.

Vita fictionalised the episode in her novel Challenge, with Julian representing Vita Sackville-West. The book was thought at the time to be so sensational and provocative that it was suppressed in Britain by both Vita’s and Violet’s parents, who feared an explosive scandal. It was, however, accepted in America, and published there in 1923.

That same year the art critic Clive Bell introduced Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, and the two became lovers, travelling to France and Italy on holiday together the following year. Much of this relationship is recorded in the voluminous exchange of letters between these two formidable women. Woolf used Vita as the model for the central figure in her novel Orlando, and indeed early editions of the book carried pictures of Vita in costumes appropriate to the story.

Vita also had affairs with Hilda Matheson, head of the BBC Talks Department, and Mary Campbell, married to the poet Roy Campbell. Vita’s father died in 1928 and his brother became the fourth Baron Sackville-West, inheriting Knole.

This was a terrible though inevitable blow to Vita. She was passionately attached to the family seat and the long tradition that it represented, but she knew that as a female offspring she could not inherit. Interestingly, in a letter to her husband she described her attachment to the building in terms of a lesbianism which directly recalls her behaviour towards Violet Trefusis:

My voluntary exile from Knole is very curious. I think about it a lot. I feel exactly as though I had had for years a liaison with a beautiful woman, who never, from force of circumstances, belonged to me wholly; but who had for me a sort of half-maternal tenderness and understanding, in which I could be entirely happy. Now I feel as though we had been parted because (again through force of circumstances and owing to no choice of her own) she had been compelled to marry someone else and had momentarily fallen completely beneath his jurisdiction, not happy in it, but acquiescent. I look at her from far off; and if I were wilder and more ruthless towards myself I should burst in one evening and surprise her in the midst of her new domesticity. But life has taught me not to do these things.

In 1929 her husband decided to resign from the foreign service and devote himself to writing and politics. They purchased Sissinghurst Castle, a near-derelict house, and started to restore it. The garden was designed from scratch and copiously stocked with plants by Vita and Harold themselves. Sissinghurst is now a tourist attraction, having been transferred to the National Trust.

In the 1930s she published The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), and Family History (1932) which portrayed English upper-class manners and life. All these books were published by the Hogarth Press (which was run by Leonard Woolf) and all of them became bestsellers. It might seem slightly surprising to us in the twenty-first century to realise that her books were much more popular than Virginia Woolf’s during the latter’s lifetime.

She recorded her own feelings about the relationship between person and place in The Land (1926) – a pastoral poem of 2,500 lines which was awarded the Hawthornden Prize and brought her the literary prestige for which she had long yearned.

This success inspired her to write a companion piece called The Garden. This was not completed and published until after the war, in 1946. She thought the poem ‘not a patch on The Land‘, but many people now see it as a finer work altogether. It won the Heinemann prize, and she spent the whole £100 prize money on azaleas for the garden.

Vita Sackville-WestAfter the war she became something of a recluse, devoting herself to gardening and writing. Her classic English Country Houses records her passionate interest the history of the English country house from the Middle Ages to the 20th century, and of the people who built and lived in them from common squires to kings and queens. Much of this was fuelled by her passionate attachment to Knole, which she had not inherited.

Her interest in gardening was rewarded in 1955 by the Royal Horticultural Society. She also wrote a regular gardening column at the Observer from 1946. That year she was also made a Companion of Honour for her services to literature. In the latter years of her life she lived rather reclusively, and devoted herself largely to her gardens and home. She died of cancer on June 2, 1962. Harold Nicolson died six years later.

Vita’s son Benedict eventually found out about his mother’s (and his father’s) dual sexual nature when he was informed of it bluntly at the age of eighteen by his grandmother. Portrait of a Marriage by Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973) gives the full story of this period of the Nicolsons’ lives, taken from an autobiographical manuscript found in a locked briefcase after Vita’s death (which he cut open with a knife).


Vita Sackville-West biography


Bloomsbury Group – web links

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

Bloomsbury Group - web links The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Bloomsbury Group web links Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Bloomsbury Group - web links Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

Bloomsbury Group - web links BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

Bloomsbury Group - web links A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury Group - web links Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling author, horticulturalist, and lesbian

Vita Sackville-West is best known these days as the woman who had an affair with Virginia Woolf, and maybe also as the woman who ‘eloped’ with Violet Trefusis. She’s also famous for being one half of a doubly bisexual relationship with her husband Harold Nicolson – recorded by their son in Portrait of a Marriage. What’s not so well known is the fact that she was also a best-selling author, and that in the post-1940 era she made herself a doyenne of writing on the English garden.

Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-WestThe first part of Victoria Glendenning’s account of Vita’s life is dominated by her equally unconventional parents, both of whom maintained barely-concealed love affairs. Sackville-West pére moved his lover and her own husband into the family home at Knowle. Mrs Sackville-West seemed to have kept her 25 stone admirer Sir John Scott more at arm’s length, but sufficiently close that she inherited from him a large capital sum, houses, and a Paris flat full of antique furniture.

Vita’s youth was a mixture of foreign travel (and languages) romantic crushes on the Renaissance, and life at the top of the social ladder. Many readers will be surprised by one thing for sure – her enormous application and productivity where writing was concerned. Youthful novels poured from her, plus poems and plays, some written in languages other than English.

Her Sapphism began early, with both Rosamund Grosvenor and Violet Keppel, though she finally did the expected thing and married Harold Nicolson. They quickly produced two children, who were housed in a separate building at their first home in Long Barn.

When Harold Nicolson announced that he had veneral disease, she switched her attentions back to Violet Keppel. Vita dressed in men’s clothing as ‘Julian’ and they booked into hotels together as man and wife. Wot larks!

But when Violet married Denys Trefusis, things started to go wrong. For a start, Vita was jealous, and forbad Violet to have sex with her new husband. She even intercepted Violet on her honeymoon, took her to a hotel, and had sex with her to make the point. The two women eventually eloped to France and were only brought back home when their husbands flew out in a small plane to stop them, and the affair then gradually fizzled out.

Only to be replaced by one with the architect Geoffrey Scott. She shared these problems with her mother, who was meanwhile having an affair with another archtiect, Edwin Lutyens. There were also trips to Persia to visit husband Harold who was posted there – at the same time as he was also visited by his lover Raymond Mortimer.

Her well-known love affair with Virginia Woolf appears to be a sincere enthusiasm on both their parts, but when Virginia shied away from making their relationship a full-blown adventure (a la Violet Trefusis) Vita turned her attentions to Mary Hutchinson, the wife of South African poet Roy Campbell. Meanwhile, she won the Hawthornden prize for her long poem The Land.

She followed that up with best-selling novels The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, bought a near-ruined castle in Kent, and set up her husband with his own flat in London.

There were many other lovers, but then gradually, following the death of her mother in 1936, she started to become something of a recluse. She poured her creative energy into the development of Sissinghurst and its now-famous gardens.

She and Harold continued to live separately, take holidays separately, and wrote to each other every day saying how much they missed each other. Sissinghurst survived the war, and she continued writing in a number of genres, but gradually, as she got older, she focussed all her attention on horticulture and became quite well known as the gardening correspondent of The Observer.

However, it would be a mistake to imagine that her physically demanding nature was curbed in any way. As Gelendenning observes, a propos one of her later passions:

Vita was never without love or the physical expression of love. Her great adventure was never over.

In all this tale, you need to be able to stomarch enormous amounts of upper-class snobbery, vanity, and pure greed. In her own family, there were two major law suits involving contested wills and claims to inheritance. And you also need to be reasonably tolerant to the biographer.

Because despite its having the appearance of a scholarly piece of work, Gelendenning’s method is quite amateurish. Passages from other texts are quoted for their shock value to pad out the drama almost like a stream of consciousness, without giving any indication of their sources. She doesn’t stoop to anything as demanding as page references, and she mixes scenes from West’s fiction with historical fact as if they both had the same value and status.

Despite these technical shortcomings however, this is something of a page-turner. In addition to sometimes reading like an Evelyn Waugh novel, the quasi-aristocratic-cum-bohemian lifestyle is so astonishing that it’s bound to be of interest to us lesser mortals. As Glendenning says of Vita’s own mother: “physical fidelity was not greatly valued in the marriages of the British upper classes”.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Victoria Glendenning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985, pp.430, ISBN 014007161X


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Vladimir Nabokov an illustrated life

June 20, 2009 by Roy Johnson

potted biography with charming photos and illustrations

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Nabokov’s amazingly varied yet consistent life, and his unrelenting devotion to creativity. It’s written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Even though he came from a rich and privileged background, Nabokov’s life was one which was beset by the tragic events of the age in which he lived. His childhood was idyllic – well educated, and loved by both parents, he was taken to school in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz.

Vladimir Nabokov an illustrated lifeWhen he was only seventeen he inherited a mansion, a country estate, and a fortune . Within three years however he had lost it all in the revolution and he was forced to leave Russia, never to return. In the 1920s he painstakingly established a reputation for himself as a Russian novelist, writing in the first city of emigration, Berlin, and making a living by giving tennis lessons and setting chess problems and crossword puzzles for newspapers.

When the Nazis came to power he hung on as long as possible, but was eventually forced to move to the second choice for Russian emigres – Paris. He realised that he had lost forever the audience he had spent almost twenty years cultivating, and he started writing in French, knowing that he must start all over again.

Then, with only days to spare before the Germans occupied France in 1940 he escaped to the USA and began the entire process over again, writing in English and struggling to make a living by teaching literature in a girls’ college.

Once again he succeeded in adapting himself to his surroundings, but he felt unappreciated in a literary sense – until he threw down the gauntlet by publishing Lolita. This book changed his life.

He was able to give up teaching, and interestingly, for all his fondness for America, one of the first things he did was to return to Europe. He booked into the Palace Hotel in Montreux and lived there for the rest of his life.

Jane Grayson’s account of his life is interspersed with accounts of his major works – The Gift, Pale Fire, Laughter in the Dark, his stories, most of his other novels, and his translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which caused such a scholarly controversy when it appeared. I was slightly surprised that she skirted round the over-indulgences of Ada, his last major work.

But it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a charming experience. The images of old Russian estates which inspired so much of his work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, book jacket designs from the first editions of his work, and photographs which you rarely see elsewhere.

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Jane Grayson, Vladimir Nabokov: an illustrated life, New York: Overlook Press, 2004, pp.146, ISBN 1585676098


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Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories

May 26, 2010 by Roy Johnson

complete shorter works – commentary and annotations

Nabokov began writing shot stories as a young man in early 1920s Berlin, publishing them along with chess problems in Rul’, the emigre Russian newspaper established by his father. He continued to do so in the 1930s whilst establishing his reputation as a novelist, writing under the name Vladimir Sirin. Production slowed down when he emigrated to the USA, and then stopped. in 1950 as his academic work and his international fame as a novelist took up all his time. Nevertheless he published four volumes in all during his own lifetime, totalling fifty stories. Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories brings all those together in one volume and adds as a bonus thirteen extra tales that Nabokov didn’t think worthy of publishing in book form whilst he was alive. He listed these in a handwritten note as ‘Bottom of the Barrel’.

Vladimir Nabokov Collected StoriesNabokov used the short story as a writer’s laboratory, exploring fictional devices and strategies that he then deployed at greater length in his novels. Not that there is anything unfinished or tentative about the results: Almost all his stories are superbly shaped and polished, and the most successful of them rank amongst the greatest modern short stories.

It’s impossible to prove without seeing the original publications, but one can’t help but suspect that many of the stories were revised and re-polished for their first presentation. The whole Nabokov family was complicit in presenting its only wage earner’s work in the best possible light, and Nabokov used the services of both his wife and son as translators and literary assistants. [The recent publication of VN’s manuscript index cards for The Original of Laura demonstrates that the Olympian master was not above committing simple errors of spelling and grammar.]

Nabokov had an amazing range in the tone and subjects of his stories, even whilst retaining his own unmistakable prose style. The tales vary from lyrical evocations of childhood and prose poems which celebrate the surface textures of everyday life, through to narratives of black comedy and a taste for dramatic irony which treads a fine line between beauty and cruelty.

The Eye (almost a short novel, which strangely enough has not been included) is a masterpiece of narrative complexity and deception in which a first person narrator tries to convince us of his wit and popularity, does just the opposite, then resolves to kill himself half way through the story. How can this be? Nabokov contrives this narrative conundrum as another opportunity to show off his powers of subtlety and manipulation of point of view.

Spring in Fialta (which I think qualifies as a novella) is without doubt Nabokov’s most complex and successful achievement. The story of events is almost inconsequential. A narrator encounters an old lover and recalls his previous meetings with her. His memories of their apparently romantic past are wound together with his account of their latest episode in Fialta.

But the main focus of interest is the narrator’s reliability. He tells us one thing, but the facts as narrated suggest the opposite, even though they come to us from his account. Taken at face value, it’s just a romantic memoir: read more carefully, it’s a roccoco study in self-deception and narrative manipulation which might take several readings to fathom.

Nabokov continued his puzzle-making right to the end. One of his last short stories, The Vane Sisters is a tale in which the solution to a puzzle (a message left behind by someone who has died) is actually woven into the story itself. The narrator is unable to see the message, but provides enough information for the reader to do so. These are stories-cum-puzzles which as Nabokov himself claimed ‘can only be attempted once every thousand years’.

This is an excellent compilation of his whole oeuvre as a writer of short stories. It contains all Nabokov’s notes on the bibliographic history and full details of each story from their first publication, and it has an introductory essay by his son Dmitri which throws extra light on the collection as a whole.

Analysis of Nabokov’s 50+ Stories

Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories   Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010


Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Stories, London: Penguin, 2008, pp.333, ISBN: 0141183454


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Filed Under: Short Stories, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov Tagged With: English literature, Literary studies, The Short Story, Vladimir Nabokov, Vladimir Nabokov Collected Stories

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