tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Simple Melody was probably written around 1925 and is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925).

John Crome 1768-1821

A Simple Melody – critical commentary

The narrative is presented almost entirely from George Carslake’s point of view, with no authorial comment to cast any interpretive light on how his character might be viewed. Certainly, like all the other guests who feature in these Mrs Dalloway’s Party sketches, he is locked into his own thoughts in an entirely solipsistic manner. He doesn’t engage with any of the other guests at all – except in his imagination.

And even though he comes close to serious topics for reflection, such as the nature of religious belief, his musings are on the whole completely banal, escapist, and trivial. He is searching for over-simplified explanations of social phenomena which he finds threatening.

One of the most interesting secondary aspects of the story is that it features cameo appearances of characters from the other short sketches in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence.

Prickett Ellis, the middle-aged solicitor from The Man who Loved his Kind, appears as ‘that angry looking chap with the toothbrush moustache’, and as he glances round the room, George Carslake sees Mabel Waring, the central figure from The New Dress:

Just as he was thinking this, he saw Mabel Waring going away, in her pretty yellow dress. She looked agitated, with a strained expression and fixed unhappy eyes for all she tried to look animated.

We know from that story that Mabel Waring feels her new yellow dress is a fashion choice disaster which has resulted in her social humiliation, yet Carslake thinks of it as ‘pretty’, which confirms that her agitation is a self-induced sense of insecurity.

Similarly, he spots Stuart Elton, the protagonist of Happiness, another character who is self-absorbed, disatends to the people around him, and is alienated by his own egoism. Yet George Carslake sees him quite differently:

Mr Carslake saw him [Stuart Elton] standing alone lifting a paper knife up in his hands and looking at it in a very strange way … For underneath, though people seeing him casually would never believe it, Stuart was the gentlest, simplest of creatures, content to ramble all day with quite undistinguished people, like himself …

This poses an interpretive problem. The separate story Happiness establishes Stuart Elton as vain, rude, and emotionally costive. So – do we take George Carslake’s reading of him as accurate? – or does it reflect a limitation in Carslake’s understanding of other people?

The possible solution to this conundrum is to recognise that there is always a potential mismatch between what people think about themselves and how they are perceived by others.

A Simple Melody – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

A Simple Melody – story synopsis

George Carslake, a bachelor barrister, is in the company of Miss Merewether at Clarissa Dalloway’s party, and is comforting himself by regarding a genre painting of a heath on the wall. He fantasises about walking back to Norwich with Queen Mary and some of the people at the party, his thoughts rambling inconsequently over what they might talk about. He generalises about religious belief and seems to be searching for a sense of communication in order to escape his feelings of emptiness and isolation.

To the other guests he appears to be alert and gracefully composed, but in fact his thoughts are riven with uncertainties, and whilst he is physically present in the drawing room, his mind is elsewhere – walking back to Norwich. He wants to comfort himself with the idea that all people are essentially the same, but he cannot escape the realisation that all social interaction reveals differences.

A Simple Melody – characters

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia 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..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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 at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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.

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

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

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

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

A Summing Up is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925). The story was first published in A Haunted House (1944) and then later reprinted with the collection of stories and sketches Mrs Dalloway’s Party published by the Hogarth Press in London in 1973.

houses in Westminster

A Summing Up – critical commentary

Like all the other stories in the Mrs Dalloway’s Party sequence, this is principally a study in social alienation, egoism, and the life of the imagination. It is yet another example of people interacting politely in what appears on the surface to be a civilized manner, whilst the narrative reveals the emotional and intellectual chasms that separate them.

Bertram Pritchard is an almost comic study of the crashing bore, even though he is ‘an esteemed civil servant and a Companion of the Bath.’

Written down what he said would be incredible — not only was each thing he said in itself insignificant, but there was no connection between the different remarks.

Sasha Latham on the other hand is ‘tall [and] handsome’ but inwardly feels lacking in confidence. Disattending to her fellow guest, she retreats into a series of imaginative speculations concerning the nature and the history of society.

There is no overt criticism of Pritchard, only deeply ironic counterpoint. Sasha Latham even manages to feel sympathetic towards him as she searches through a jumble of memories and sense impressions for some sort of meaningful insight.

And she finds it – very briefly – in the vision of a tree she sees in the garden. She also realises that the revelation might come by accident, and it does as she feels that the human soul ‘is by nature unmated, a widow bird; a bird perched aloft on that tree’ – before the revelation is shattered both by Pritchard guiding her back to what he sees as their social duty in the house, and by the inarticulate shriek she hears from the city that surrounds them.

A Summing Up – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

A Summing Up – story synopsis

Bertram Pritchard and Sasha Latham are guests at an evening party given by Clarissa Dalloway in central London. They stroll together in the small garden in the shadow of Westminster. He is a civil servant and a complete bore: she is uncertain about herself, but the story is articulated largely from her point of view.

Because Bertram Pritchard is a non-stop talker about trivialities, she stops listening to him and thinks instead of how there is now a civilized society where once there were swamps. She admires the courage and the sophistication of other people to succeed in society – even Bertram Pritchard.

They look over the garden wall, and she becomes conscious of the fact that they are in the middle of a busy city. Then they sit and talk to people she doesn’t actually know, and her thoughts drift back to fragments of what she learned at school. She wonders which of her impressions of the world are the most accurate. She has a visionary experience that the human soul is single and unattached. But at that precise moment an inarticulate cry sounds from within the city, and her vision escapes into the night.

A Summing Up – characters

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a triptych of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia 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..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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 at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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.

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

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

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

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

tutorial, synopsis, commentary,  and study resources

Ancestors was probably written in 1923 – between the composition of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). It was first published in the magazine The Criterion in April 1923 – edited by fellow Bloomsburyite T.S. Eliot. It is one of a number of short stories Virginia Woolf wrote which feature guests at a party given by Clarissa Dalloway at her home in Westminster.

Virginia Woolf

Ancestors – critical commentary

Biography

This is another of Woolf’s stories in which there is more or less a complete absence of authorial comment to guide the reader’s interpretation. However, it is quite clear that Mrs Valliance is romanticising her ‘ancestors’ and that we are being invited to see her disdain for younger contemporaries in a critical light.

But it is also possible that Virginia Woolf is celebrating the rich cultural life she inherited from her own parents. After all, her mother was a society beauty and model for some of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and her father was a celebrated Victorian intellectual, with colleagues ranging from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Henry James and Thomas Hardy. We note that Mrs Vallance’s father is some sort of public figure who she expects Jack Renshaw to know, and his friends are Sir Duncan Clement and a Greek scholar – just the sort of people with whom Leslie Stephen surrounded himself.

Mrs Vallance also seems to be an even more precocious version of Virginia Woolf herself: ‘She had read all Shelly between the ages of twelve and fifteen’. The connection is once more the biographical link between Woolf and her father, who gave her free access to his library as a child. It might also be borne in mind that Virginia Woolf never went to school in the sense we think of that term today. She was ‘home educated’

We know that Woolf regarded over-attention to dress as rather frivolous, and she was often criticised for her own choice of clothes. But on the other hand, she did write for Vogue, and when young she did play cricket. However, it would seem to be wrong to draw the parallels between Mrs Vallance and Virginia Woolf too closely, for Mrs Vallance at one point thinks ‘She could not bear to walk in London and see the children playing in the streets’ and it is difficult to think of anyone who has celebrated walking in the streets of London more memorably that Virginia Woolf, particularly in the case of her celebrated character, Clarissa Dalloway.

Geography

Mrs Vallance’s memories of her idyllic family life are located in Scotland according to the text- and yet the story creates no sense of such a location. It is not evoked or represented in any way. This is rather like To the Lighthouse which is supposed to be set in the Hebrides, when it is quite clear from what we know of Virginia Woolf’s life and the places she lived that the setting is based on St Ives and the nearby Godrevy lighthouse.

This is odd – because Woolf marvelously evoked the places in which she lived and worked – central London, the Sussex countryside, even the ‘suburbs’ of Richmond. She was also quite well-travelled considering the difficulties of inter-nation travel at the time she lived. But these fictional excursions into locations she didn’t actually know do not work at all.

Ancestors – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Ancestors – the text

Mrs Vallance, as Jack Renshaw made that silly, rather conceited remark of his about not liking to watch cricket matches, felt that she must draw his attention somehow, must make him understand, yes, and all the other young people whom she saw, what her father would have said; how different her father and mother, yes and she too were from all this; and how compared to really dignified simple men and women like her father, like her dear mother, all this seemed to her so trivial.

‘Here we all are,’ she said suddenly, ‘cooped up in this stuffy room while in the country at home — in Scotland’ (she owed it to these foolish young men who were after all quite nice, though a little under-sized, to make them understand what her father, what her mother and she herself too, for she was like them at heart, felt).

‘Are you Scotch?’ he asked.

He did not know then, he did not know who her father was; that he was John Ellis Rattray; and her mother was Catherine Macdonald.

He had stopped in Edinburgh for a night once, Mr Renshaw said.

One night in Edinburgh! And she had spent all those wonderful years there — there and at Elliotshaw, on the Northumbrian border. There she had run wild among the currant bushes; there her father’s friends had come, and she only a girl as she was, had heard the most wonderful talk of her time. She could see them still, her father, Sir Duncan Clements, Mr Rogers (old Mr Rogers was her ideal of a Greek sage), sitting under the cedar tree; after dinner in the starlight. They talked about everything in the whole world, it seemed to her now; they were too large minded ever to laugh at other people. They had taught her to revere beauty. What was there beautiful in this stuffy London room?

‘Those poor flowers,’ she exclaimed, for petals of flowers all crumpled and crushed, a carnation or two, were actually trodden under foot, but, she felt, she cared almost too much for flowers. Her mother had loved flowers: even since she was a child she had been brought up to feel that to hurt a flower was to hurt the most exquisite thing in nature. Nature had always been a passion with her; the mountains, the sea. Here in London, one looked out of the window and saw more houses — human beings packed on top of each other in little boxes. It was an atmosphere in which she could not possibly live; herself. She could not bear to walk in London and see the children playing in the streets. She was perhaps too sensitive; life would be impossible if everyone was like her, but when she remembered her own childhood, and her father and mother, and the beauty and care that were lavished on them —

‘What a lovely frock!’ said Jack Renshaw, and that seemed to her altogether wrong — for a young man to be noticing women’s clothes at all.

Her father was full of reverence for women but he never thought of noticing what they wore. And of all these girls, there was not a single one of them one could call beautiful — as she remembered her mother, — her dear stately mother, who never seemed to dress differently in summer or winter, whether they had people or were alone, but always looked herself in lace, and as she grew older, a little cap. When she was a widow, she would sit among her flowers by the hour, and she seemed to be more with ghosts than with them all, dreaming of the past, which is, Mrs Vallance thought, somehow so much more real than the present. But why. It is in the past, with those wonderful men and women, she thought, that I really live: it is they who know me; it is those people only (and she thought of the starlit garden and the trees and old Mr Rogers, and her father, in his white linen coat smoking) who understood me. She felt her eyes soften and deepen as at the approach of tears, standing there in Mrs Dalloway’s drawing-room, looking not at these people, these flowers, this chattering crowd, but at herself, that little girl who was to travel so far, picking Sweet Alice, and then sitting up in bed in the attic which smelt of pine wood reading stories, poetry. She had read all Shelly between the ages of twelve and fifteen, and used to say it to her father, holding her hands behind her back, while he shaved. The tears began, down in the back of her head to rise, as she looked at this picture of herself, and added the suffering of a lifetime (she had suffered abominably) — life had passed over her like a wheel — life was not what it had seemed then — it was like this party — to the child standing there, reciting Shelly; with her dark wild eyes. But what had they not seen later. And it was only those people, dead now, laid away in quiet Scotland, who had known her, who knew what she had it in her to be — and now the tears came closer, as she thought of the little girl in the cotton frock, how large and dark her eyes were; how beautiful she looked repeating the ‘Ode to the West Wind’; how proud her father was of her, of how great he was, and how great her mother was, and how when she was with them she was so pure so good so gifted that she had it in her to be anything. That if they had lived, and she had always been with them in that garden (which now appeared to her the place the place where she had spent her whole childhood, and it was always starlit, and always summer, and they were always sitting out under the cedar tree smoking, except that somehow her mother was dreaming alone, in her widow’s cap among her flowers — and how good and kind and respectful the old servants were, Andrewes the gardener, Jersy the cook; and old Sultan, the Newfoundland dog; and the vine, and the pond, and the pump — and Mrs Vallance looking very fierce and proud and satirical, compared her life with other people’s lives and if that life could have gone on for ever, then Mrs Vallance felt none of this — and she looked at Jack Renshaw and the girl whose clothes he admired — could have had any existence, and she would have been oh perfectly happy, perfectly good, instead of which here she was forced to listen to a young man saying — and she laughed almost scornfully and yet tears were in her eyes — that he could not bear to watch cricket matches!

Virginia Woolf (left) Vanessa Bell (right)

Ancestors – story synopsis

Mrs Vallance is at a party in London at the house of Clarissa Dalloway. She is irritated by the attitudes of a young man Jack Renshaw who says he doesn’t like to watch cricket matches and passes admiring comments on a younger woman’s dress. She soothes her irritation with a series of of reminiscences about her parents, whose cultivation she sees as superior to her current surroundings. She resuscitates nostalgic images of reverential figures in after-dinner conversations on summer nights conducted under big trees in starlight.

She feels that her parents have instilled in her a sense of beauty, and that they understood her in a way that her present company does not. Even the household servants of her childhood are romantically summoned, and she wishes the whole of this idealised past life could have continued unabated, to spare her from the current discomfort.

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia 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..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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 at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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.

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

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

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

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

tutorial, synopsis, commentary, and study resources

Happiness was probably written in early 1925. It is one of a number of short stories by Virginia Woolf set at a party in the Westminster home of Richard and Clarissa Dalloway, the hosts of the central social event in her novel Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Virginia Woolf

Happiness – critical commentary

This is a study in egoism and self-absorption of a particularly acute variety. Stuart Elton thinks of himself in the most self-congratulatory manner – likening himself to the petals of a rose.

He is socially rude, and is smug about his self-sufficiency – a state of being which is so fragile he is terrified of any unforeseen event in his life. He prides himself on having successfully avoided commitment to a woman earlier in his life, and he is typical of the male narcissist figures who appear in Virginia Woolf’s work. It is interesting to note that he finds solace in the very symbolically male physical object of a paper knife.

It has to be said that in all these short sketches and stories based on figures circulating in Clarissa Dalloway’s drawing room, there is a common theme of a failure of communication. Occasions which are designed to offer social interaction to her guests are revealed as a series of communication breakdowns, gulfs of empathy, and studies in solipsism.

It is also worth noting that Stuart Elton will still be playing with the paper knife when he appears again in A Simple Melody written later the same year – though he will be viewed from someone else’s perspective, in a far less critical light:

Mr Carslake saw him [Stuart Elton] standing alone lifting a paper knife up in his hands … Stuart was the gentlest, simplest of creatures, content to ramble all day with undistinguished people, like himself, and this oddity — it looked like affectation to stand in the middle of a drawing room holding a tortoise-shell paper knife in his hand — was only manner.

This may of course reveal a lack of perception and good judgement on Mr Carslake’s part, but it certainly illustrates Woolf’s penchant for expressing the relative nature of social perceptions.

Happiness – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics [£6.74] Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Happiness – story synopsis

Stuart Elton, a middle-aged bachelor, is in conversation with Mrs Sutton, a would-be actress. They actually exchange very few words, because his interior monologue is all about himself, and he perceives her as a menace to his precious sense of selfhood. He also has some unspecified ailment which prevents him from eating lobster.

She perceives him as happy and fortunate, and complains about not getting on in the theatre. But he isn’t listening to what she’s saying. She is exasperated by what seems to be his impregnable self-containment.

He feeds her scraps of inconsequential information, and meanwhile thinks of himself as if pursued by wolves. He thinks back to an earlier period of his life involving a woman from whom he eventually ‘recovered’. He is very glad not to be dependent upon anyone, and he feels that the slightest disturbance in the balance of his relationship with the outside world will shatter his sense of satisfaction.

Happiness – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia 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..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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 at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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.

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

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

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

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2014

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and full text

In the Orchard was written in 1923 – between the composition of Jacob’s Room (1922) and Mrs Dalloway (1925). It was first published in the magazine The Criterion in April 1923 – edited by he friend and fellow Bloomsbury Group member T.S. Eliot.

Virginia Woolf – by Vanessa Bell

In the Orchard – critical commentary

Structure

The story is in three parts, each one starting with the same words ‘Miranda slept in the orchard’. The external events alluded to remain the same in each section, but the images and leitmotifs, and to some extent the perspective changes in each section – which are only signaled by extra space between paragraphs.

Content

Part One – In this section the dominant motifs are sounds – the cries of the children learning multiplication tables; the church organ where Hymns Ancient and Modern are being played; the church bells when women are being churched; and the squeak of the weather vane on the church tower as the wind changes direction. These elements are also are also discussed on a vertical axis in relationship to each other.

Part Two – In this section the content is largely Miranda’s thoughts about herself in relationship to the world – on a cliff or in relationship to the sea. She perceives these elements as connected. But they are interspersed with some of the same elements from Part One – the children in school, the cry of the drunken man, the Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Part Three – In this section there is an almost geometric account of the orchard space itself, with the apple-trees growing out of the ground, birds flitting across between its walls, and an emphasis on the relationship between the earth and the air.

The elements of this piece are distinctly rural – an orchard, a village church, apple trees, the herding of cattle – though it has to be said that Virginia Woolf went on to produce the same effects in the urban landscape of Mrs Dalloway.

Biography

It should be noted that at a biographical level of commentary, all of the elements of this story would be available when sitting in the garden at Monk’s House, where Virginia Woolf was living at the time. The garden of the House is adjacent to both the church and the local school, and the whole area is surrounded by the working environment of farming and livestock production.

Style and experimentation

Virginia Woolf was very close to a number of painters who were members of the Bloomsbury Group – primarily her sister Vanessa Bell and Bell’s lover Duncan Grant, but also the painter and art theorist Roger Fry whose biography she wrote.

They were all interested in escaping the demand for descriptive detail in painting, and rendering only what Roger Fry called ‘essential form’. That is, they wanted to render only the basic visual elements of a composition. It was a step towards what we now call ‘abstraction’. In the Orchard is fairly clearly an experiment in doing something similar with prose, rather than paint.

In Woolf’s case she removes the normal substance of prose fiction – the element of a human being involved in some form of drama – and substitutes a combination of visual imagery, of philosophic reflections, and grammatical constructs which tie these elements together. This experimental story is an exercise in what might be called literary cubism – the same scene is viewed from different perspectives. It also has elements of what many people would probably wish to call ‘impressionism’ – the fleeting evocation of sounds, light, colours, and wind to create a sense of the flux of everyday existence.

When the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and tat just above her face.

The changing subject – the flitting from visual image to aural echo, and on to geographic context – from light and shade to chimes, and on to clouds or the waves of the sea – is a literary device she used in major works from Jacob’s Room (1922) to Between the Acts (1941). She made it her own – like a signature style.

The only other prominent modernist writer who used it (but at a far slower tempo) was Marcel Proust, and interestingly enough he was doing it at the same time in the volumes of A la recherche du temps perdus he published between 1913 and 1927 and which Virginia Woolf read with great enthusiasm.

Woolf also moves fluently between narrative modes – from third person omniscient to (briefly) first person, and then back again

and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight in to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table) …

The human element of fiction

There does appear to be a human subject in the narrative – Miranda in the orchard. But she is asleep (or may not be) and she has no more importance than the other elements of the narrative except as an object to which the focus of attention keeps returning.

It is a successful exercise, a sketch, a literary experiment to place alongside Monday or Tuesday or Kew Gardens. But it does emphasise the fact that the essence of fictional narratives (as distinct from word-painting and lyrical descriptions) is that we expect to find some sort of human drama enacted, no matter how simple or understated.

The nearest we get to this here is Miranda (provided that she is not asleep) enjoys a sort of epiphany when linking together the elements of her sense experiences and feeling a one-ness with the world around her. But it has to be said that the epiphany is more of the author’s making than enacted properly in Miranda’s consciousness. Woolf as author is making these connections between the earth, the air, the wind, the orchard, and even the cabbages. She does not persuade us that Miranda is conscious of them.

In the Orchard – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon UK

Kew Gardens and Other Stories – Hogarth reprint – Amazon US

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

In the Orchard – the text

Miranda slept in the orchard, lying in a long chair beneath the apple tree. Her book had fallen into the grass, and her finger still seemed to point at the sentence ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde ou le rire des filles eclate le mieux. …’ as if she had fallen asleep just there. The opals on her finger flushed green, flushed rosy, and again flushed orange as the sun, oozing through the apple-trees, filled them. Then, when the breeze blew, her purple dress rippled like a flower attached to a stalk; the grasses nodded; and the white butterfly came blowing this way and that just above her face.

Four feet in the air above her head the apples hung. Suddenly there was a shrill clamour as if they were gongs of cracked brass beaten violently, irregularly, and brutally. It was only the school-children saying the multiplication table in unison, stopped by the teacher, scolded, and beginning to say the multiplication table over again. But this clamour passed four feet above Miranda’s head, went through the apple boughs, and, striking against the cowman’s little boy who was picking blackberries in the hedge when he should have been at school, made him tear his thumb on the thorns.

Next there was a solitary cry — sad, human, brutal. Old Parsley was, indeed, blind drunk.

Then the very topmost leaves of the apple-tree, flat like little fish against the blue, thirty feet above the earth, chimed with a pensive and lugubrious note. It was the organ in the church playing one of Hymns Ancient and Modern. The sound floated out and was cut into atoms by a flock of field-fares flying at an enormous speed — somewhere or other. Miranda lay asleep thirty feet beneath.

Then above the apple-tree and the pear-tree two hundred feet above Miranda lying asleep in the orchard bells thudded, intermittent, sullen, didactic, for six poor women of the parish were being churched and the Rector was returning thanks to heaven.

And above that with a sharp squeak the golden feather of the church tower turned from south to east. The wind changed. Above everything else it droned, above the woods, the meadows, the hills, miles above Miranda lying in the orchard asleep. It swept on, eyeless, brainless, meeting nothing that could stand against it, until, wheeling the other way, it turned south again. Miles below, in a space as big as the eye of a needle, Miranda stood upright and cried ‘Oh I shall be late for tea!’.

Miranda slept in the orchard — or perhaps she was not asleep, for her lips moved slightly, as if she were saying ‘Ce pays est vraiment un des coins du monde … ou le rire des filles … eclate … eclate … eclate’, and then she smiled and let her body sink all its weight in to the enormous earth which rises, she thought, to carry me on its back as if I were a leaf, or a queen (here the children said the multiplication table), or, Miranda went on, I might be lying on the top of a cliff with the gulls screaming above me. The higher they fly, she continued, as the teacher scolded the children and rapped Jimmy over the knuckles till they bled, the deeper they look into the sea — into the sea she repeated, and her fingers relaxed and her lips closed gently as if she were floating on the sea, and then, when the shout of the drunken man sounded overhead, she drew breath with an extraordinary ecstasy, for she thought she had heard life itself crying out from a rough tongue in a scarlet mouth, from the wind, from the bells, from the curved green leaves of the cabbages.

Naturally she was being married when the organ played the tune from Hymns Ancient and Modern, and, when the bells rang after the six poor women had been churched, the sullen intermittent thud made her think that the very earth shook with the hoofs of the horse that was galloping towards her (‘Ah, I have only to wait!’ she sighed), and it seemed to her that everything had already begun moving, crying, riding, flying around her, across her, towards her in a pattern.

Mary is chopping the wood, she thought; Pearman is herding the cows; the carts are coming up from the meadows; the rider — and she traced out the lines that the men, the carts, the birds, and the rider made over the countryside until they all seemed driven out, round, and across by the beat of her own heart.

Miles up in the air the wind changed; the golden feather of the church tower squeaked; and Miranda jumped up and cried ‘Oh I shall be late for tea!’

Miranda slept in the orchard, or was she asleep or was she not asleep? Her purple dress stretched between the two apple-trees. There were twenty-four apple-trees/in the orchard, some slanting slightly, others growing straight with a rush up the trunk which spread wide into branches and formed into red or yellow drops. Each apple-tree had sufficient space. The sky exactly fitted the leaves. When the breeze blew, the line of the boughs against the wall slanted slightly and then returned. A wagtail flew diagonally from one corner to another. Cautiously hopping, a thrush advanced towards a fallen apple; from the other wall a sparrow fluttered just above the grass. The uprush of the trees was tied down by these movements; the whole was compacted by the orchard walls. For miles beneath the earth was clamped together; rippled on the surface with wavering air; and across the corner of the orchard the blue-green was slit by a purple streak. The wind changing, one bunch of apples was tossed so high that it blotted out two cows in the meadow (‘Oh, I shall be late for tea!’ cried Miranda), and the apples hung straight across the wall again.

Writing – I

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia 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..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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 at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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.

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

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

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

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

tutorial, synopsis, commentary, and study resources

Moments of Being was written in July 1927 and first published in the American magazine Forum for January 1928. It was later reprinted in the collection of stories by Virginia Woolf entitled A Haunted House. It carries the sub-title (and sometimes alternative title) of ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’.

Pierre-August Renoir 1841-1919

Moments of Being – critical commentary

There are two features which are of particular interest in this story. The first is the construction of a multi-tiered chronology or time scheme within the narrative. The second is the overt subject of the story.

The narrative

Virginia Woolf was well under way in the experimental phase of her writing when she composed this story. Indeed, it was written, as she notes herself, as a spin-off from her work on To the Lighthouse: ‘side stories are sprouting in great variety as I wind this up: a book of characters; the whole string being pulled out from some simple sentence’.

As Fanny Wilmot constructs the life history of her piano teacher Julia Craye, the story weaves together strands of a narrative present, and two levels of the past. First we are offered a picture of Julia from Fanny’s point of view:

For she was not so much dressed as cased, like a beetle compactly in its sheath, blue in winter, green in summer. What need had she of pins — Julia Craye — who lived, it seemed, in the cool, glassy world of Bach fugues, playing to herself what she liked

Secondly, Fanny adds to her own impression an embellished version of information she has received from the college principal, Miss Kingston. This concerns Julia’s past life when growing up in Salisbury:

Oh they used to have such lovely things, when they lived at Salisbury and her brother was, of course, a very well-known man: a famous archeologist. It was a great privilege to stay with them, Miss Kingston said (‘My family had always known them — they were regular Salisbury people,’ Miss Kingston said)

But there is also a third more recent past expressed as the narrative includes the occasion of this information being transmitted to Fanny by Miss Kingston:

Miss Kingston, who gave little character sketches like this on the first day of term while she received cheques and wrote out receipts for them, smiled here.

This is a hallmark of Woolf’s style – to seamlessly weave together a variety of points of view, and of historical time frames, whilst at the same time blurring the distinctions between ‘facts’ and the imagination.

The subject

Virginia Woolf wrote a number of stories in which one character imagines or fantasizes about the life of another character: see An Unwritten Novel and The Lady in the Looking Glass for instance. In those two stories the person from whose point of view the story is (largely) told has their inventions confounded by some unexpected reversal at the end of the narrative. In the case of Moments of Being Fanny Wilmot’s fantasies seem to be confirmed. The story is offered as a positive epiphany.

Fanny imagines the circumstances that have led to Julia Craye becoming a spinster – and she gradually sees these decisions in a largely affirmative manner – preserving her right to an independent state of being. However, they are gained at the price of what is possibly a lonely and pinched life – ‘travelling frugally; counting the cost and measuring out of her tight shut purse the sum needed for this journey’. But the vision ends on a triumphant note nevertheless:

She saw Julia open her arms; saw her blaze; saw her kindle. Out of the night she burnt like a dead white star. Julia kissed her on the lips. Julia possessed her.

This embrace might seem rather surprising in its directness – but Woolf herself was in no doubt about the effect she wanted to produce, as she records:

Sixty pounds just received from America for my little Sapphist story of which the Editor has not seen the point

Moments of Being – study resources

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Vintage Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Shorter Fiction – Harcourt edition – Amazon US

Monday or Tuesday and Other Stories – Gutenberg.org

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Mark on the Wall – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Moments of Being – principal characters

Moments of Being – story synopsis

Fanny Wilmot, a young woman, is having a piano lesson at a college with her teacher Julia Craye, a middle-aged spinster. Fanny speculates about Julia’s life, based on fragments of information she has picked up from the college principal, Miss Kingston, who is an old friend of the Craye family.

None of the Crayes have married, and Julia’s brother Julius – ‘the famous archeologist’ – is thought to be slightly odd, something which might also affect Julia.

Julia has mentioned to Fanny that men should ‘protect’ women – something that Fanny does not want. Julia also has memories of Kensington when it was a like a village. Fanny imagines Julia’s youthful days in Salisbury, being courted by young men from Oxford or Cambridge.

Then she pictures her with a man rowing on the Serpentine. He is just about to propose to her when she realises she must refuse him. She breaks the romantic mood between them, as a result of which he feels snubbed, and leaves her.

Even if these details were wrong, the important thing which remained true was her refusal, and her relief afterwards that she had retained the right to her independence. She has maintained her freedom because she has not got married, and she feels sorry for women who have sacrificed their liberty. She also feels that life is a constant battle against minor problems which might bring on headaches or chills. She regards a solitary trip to see the crocuses at Hampton Court as a major triumph.

Fanny wonders if Julia feels lonely, but suddenly has a positive vision of Julia’s life in all its historical richness and her making the most of limited resources – then Julia suddenly kisses her.

Moments of Being – further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Kew 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.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia 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..
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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 at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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.

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

Orlando – Sally Potter’s film archive
The text and film script, production notes, casting, locations, set designs, publicity photos, video clips, costume designs, and interviews.

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

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.

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

© Roy Johnson 2013