Bloomsbury Group Archives - Page 11 of 11

Virginia Woolf life and works

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelist, essayist, diarist, biographer

1882. Virginia Woolf born (25 Jan) Adeline Virginia Stephen, third child of Leslie Stephen (Victorian man of letters – first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography) – and Julia Duckworth (of the Duckworth publishing family). Comfortable upper middle class family background. Her father had previously been married to the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackery. Brothers Thoby and Adrian went to Cambridge, and her sister Vanessa became a painter. Virginia was educated by private tutors and by extensive reading of literary classics in her father’s library.

1895. Death of her mother Julia Stephen. VW has the first of many nervous breakdowns.

1896. Travels in France with her sister Vanessa.

1897. Death of half-sister, Stella. VW learning Greek and History at King’s College London.

1899. Brother Thoby Stephen enters Trinity College, Cambridge and subsequently meets Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. These Cambridge friends subsequently become known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which VW was an important and influential member.

1904. Death of father. Beginning of second serious breakdown. VW’s first publication is an unsigned review in The Guardian. Travels in France and Italy with her sister Vanessa and her friend Violet Dickinson. VW moves to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. Other residents of this Square include Lady Jane Strachey, Charlotte Mew, and Dora Carrington.

1905. Travels in Spain and Portugal. Writes book reviews and teaches once a week at Morley College, London, an evening institute for working men and women.

1906. Travels in Greece. Death of brother Thoby Stephen. Writes a group of short stories now collected as Memoirs of a Novelist.

1907. Marriage of sister Vanessa to Clive Bell. VW moves with brother Adrian to live in Fitzroy Square. Working on her first novel (to become The Voyage Out).

1908. Visits Italy with the Bells.

1909. Lytton Strachey [homosexual] proposes marriage. VW meets Ottoline Morell, visits Bayreuth and Florence.

Virginia 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’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject.
Buy the book here

1910. Works for women’s suffrage. Spends time in a nursing home in Twickenham. First exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters arranged by Roger Fry.

1911. VW moves to Brunswick Square, sharing house with brother Adrian, Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. Travels to Turkey.

1912. Marries Leonard Woolf. Travels for honeymoon to Provence, Spain, and Italy. Moves to Clifford’s Inn.

1913. Mental illness and her first attempted suicide. Put in care of husband and nurses.

1915. Purchase of Hogarth House, Richmond. The Voyage Out published and well received. Another bout of violent madness.

1916. Lectures to Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild. regular work for the Times Literary Supplement [whose reviews were at that time anonymous].

1917. L and VW buy hand printing machine and establish the Hogarth Press. First publication Monday or Tuesday. Later goes on to publish T.S. Eliot, Freud, and VW’s own books.

1919. Purchase of Monk’s House, Rodmell. Night and Day published. Brief friendship with Katherine Mansfield. Both are conscious of experimenting with the substance and the style of prose fiction.

1920. Works on journalism and Jacob’s Room.

The 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.

1921. The Mark on the Wall published. VW ill for most of the summer.

1922. Jacob’s Room published. MeetsVita Sackville-West with whom she has a brief love affair. Writing encouraged by E.M. Forster, Strachey, and Leonard Woolf.

1923. Visits Spain. Works on ‘The Hours’ – an early version of Mrs Dalloway.

1924. Purchase of lease on house in Tavistock Square. Gives lecture that becomes ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

1925. The Common Reader [essays] and Mrs Dalloway published. Major break with the traditional novel, its form and techniques.

1926. Unwell with German measles. Starts writing To the Lighthouse.

1927. To the Lighthouse published. Travels to France and Sicily. Begins Orlando.

1928. Orlando published – a fantasy dedicated to and based upon the life of Vita Sackville-West and her love of her ancestral home at Knole in Kent. Delivers lectures at Cambridge on which she based A Room of One’s Own.

1929. A Room of One’s Own published – essays on women’s exclusion from literary history which have become of seminal importance in feminist studies. Travels to Berlin.

1930. First meets Ethel Smyth – pipe-smoking feminist composer, who falls in love with VW. Finishes first version of The Waves.

1931. The Waves – a novel composed of the thoughts of six characters which takes VW’s literary experimentation to its natural limits.

1932. Death of Lytton Strachey. Begins ‘The Partigers’ which was to become The Years.

1934. Death of Roger Fry. Rewrites The Years.

1935. Rewrites The Years. Car tour through Holland, Germany, and Italy.

1936. Begins Three Guineas – a ‘sequel’ to A Room of One’s Own.

1938. Three Guineas extends the feminist critique of patriarchy, militarism, and privilege started in A Room of One’s Own.

1939. Moves to Mecklenburgh Square, but lives mainly at Monk’s House. Meets Freud in London.

1940. Biography of Roger Fry published. London homes damaged or destroyed in blitz.

1941. VW completes Between the Acts, her last novel, then fearing the madness which she felt engulfing her again, fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse, near Monk’s House. [Her dates of 1882- 1941 are exactly those of James Joyce.]

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.

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.

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

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: 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf on Fiction

October 6, 2011 by Roy Johnson

essays on novelists, fiction, and the novel

Virginia Woolf on Fiction is a collection of essays on the subject of imaginative narratives. Virginia Woolf never went to university – in fact she hardly even went to school in the sense we think of formal education today. Yet she had a superb education – largely via free access to her father’s library in which he encouraged her to browse. From this she gained not only a first-hand acquaintance with the literary classics, but a love of books and an appreciation of the sheer pleasure of reading. She also studied languages – including Latin and Greek.

She went on to become a pivotal figure in the development of the modernist novel, and her collected non-fiction essays now stand at six large volumes. In fact she published her first writing as book reviews in the Manchester Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. She also cultivated the discursive essay as a literary form, and this collection testifies to both the wide range of her erudition and her sharp insights into the nature of fiction as a practising novelist.

The first essay ‘Hours in a Library’ (Times Literary Supplement, 1916) deals with the pleasures of reading and the distinctions to be made between classical and contemporary writers. Not surprisingly, her sympathies lie largely with the traditional – for good reasons:

it is oddly difficult in the case of new books to know which are the real books and what it is they are telling us, and which are the stuffed books which will come to pieces when they have lain about for a year or two

In ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ (New York Herald Tribune, 1927) she challenges the critic (and herself) to do just the opposite – that is, to look at contemporary writing and hazard a guess about cultural trends and the possible literary future. She does this by explaining why poetry can no longer deal successfully with the huge contradictions which the first world war and its aftermath had made so apparent. The same is also true of the poetic drama – which by that time had become a completely dead literary genre. But prose fiction in the elastic form of the novel has a better chance.

What she goes on to do is sketch out a menu of options for the novel in terms of form and content. The novel of the future will be poetic, but written in prose. It will uncover new truths about life – by exploring those aspects of human existence which writers have so far ignored:

the power of music, the stimulus of sight, the effect upon us of the shape of trees or the play of colour…the delight of movement, the intoxication of wine

Her argument is almost a working compilation of notes for what was to be her next major experimental novel The Waves which she published only four years later.

Another essay, Women and Fiction (The Forum, 1929) is a rehearsal of the arguments she went on to expand in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ – reflections on the relationship between women and literature. Woolf emphasises that this means both literature written by women and the role of women in literature – two elements that she argues are closely interlinked.

She explores the reasons why the female writer did not produce fiction until the nineteenth century – largely because she had no independence, no income of her own, and no ‘room to herself’. But given the advantages of post-suffrage woman in the twentieth century, Woolf sees the possibility of female writers discovering their own voices. All the now-familiar issues of écriture feminine are sketched out here in their earliest form:

before a woman can write exactly as she wishes to write, she has many difficulties to face … the very form of the sentence does not fit her. It is a sentence made by men; it is too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use.

The centrepiece of the collection is ‘Phases of Fiction’ (The Bookman, 1929). In this she looks at the essential nature of the novel, and what it is that makes readers voluntarily suspend disbelief to immerse themselves in invented worlds and imaginary characters. She divides novelists into realists (Maupassant) romantics (Stevenson) creators of character (Dickens) and psychologists (Proust). Her conclusion is that the novel as a literary genre, for all its weaknesses and comparative recency, offered readers at its best a deep experience of “the growth and development of feelings”.

We watch the character and behaviour of Becky Sharp or Richard Feverel and instinctively come to an opinion about them as about real people, tacitly accepting this or that impression, judging each motive, and forming an opinion that they are charming but insincere, good or dull, secretive but interesting, as we make up our minds about the characters of the people we meet.

She stands foursquare in defence of the novelist’s art and the relevance of fiction to a civilized intellectual life – and yet in one of her many insightful asides she accurately predicts what has happened to the novel in the time since her writing.

Hence the futility at present of any theory of ‘the future of fiction’. The next ten years will certainly upset it; the next century will blow it to the winds.

This publication deserves a proper introduction, situating the essays in their original contexts, but as an example of Woolf’s supple and intelligent non-fiction writing it offers insights into the nature of fiction which are timeless.

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Virginia Woolf, On Fiction, London: Hesperus Press, 2011, pp.94, ISBN: 1843916185

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
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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 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. 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.

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.

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

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.

She 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.

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

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
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Virginia Woolf web links

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

They 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.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

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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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Vita Sackville-West biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

best-selling novelist, lesbian, and horticulturalist

Vita (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.

After 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).