Cultural history Archives - Page 22 of 23

Virginia Woolf biography

December 2, 2011 by Roy Johnson

a short critical study of her life and works

The life of Virginia Woolf’s is now quite well known in its main details. Quentin Bell (her nephew) produced the definitive factual biography, and there have been interpretive studies by Lyndall Gordon, John Lehmann, Alexandra Harris, and Hermione Lee amongst others. There’s plenty of scope for writing about her life because Woolf wrote so much about herself – in letters, essays, diaries, and notebooks. She was, as Elizabeth Wright claims in this new study, possibly the most self-documented writer of the twentieth century.

Wright herself adopts a generally chronological account of the life and the works, She traces Woolf’s early upbringing in Kensington where she and her siblings produced the very amusing satirical newspaper Hyde Park Gate News. On the death of her mother at only forty-eight. Woolf experienced the first of her many mental breakdowns This was followed by the death of her half-sister Stella Duckworth, both of which events resulted in her father Leslie Stephen becoming more and more emotionally dependent on her and her elder sister Vanessa.

When her father died she became an object of attentions for her half-brother George Duckworth – attentions which are now the source of much controversy. She found escape and self-expression in reading and writing, and in 1905 moved with Vanessa and her brother Thoby to 46 Gordon Square. This marked a completely new phase in her life, and she celebrated the beginnings of her independence by earning money as a reviewer for the Manchester Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

Once established in Bloomsbury, this was also the period of throwing off Victorian taboos – staying up late with friends discussing ideas, smoking cigarettes, using people’s first names, and even talking openly about sex. The young intellectuals who joined them for these discussions eventually became known as the Bloomsbury Group

When her sister married Clive Bell, Virginia moved with her brother Adrian to Tavistock and then Brunswick Square, and they took into their commune figures such as Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and the painter Duncan Grant. She began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia (later to become The Voyage Out and in 1912 married her house-mate Leonard Woolf – a union that Wright tactfully describes as ‘a marriage of minds rather than bodies’.

Like most of her Bloomsbury friends Virginia was opposed the First World War: she thought patriotism a ‘base emotion’. She and Leonard bought a second-hand printing press and launched the Hogarth Press as a sort of therapeutic hobby for her. But it turned out to be a great commercial success, largely because of Leonard’s good business sense and artistic judgement. More importantly, it freed Virginia from the editorial control of commercial publishers. She could write fiction in any way she pleased, and from this point onwards her work appeared under their own imprint.

In 1921 she published her epoch-making collection of experimental short stories, Monday or Tuesday which gave her the impetus and the confidence to continue her experiments into the longer literary form of the novel with Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. Around this time she also began her love affair with fellow novelist Vita Sackville-West, which although it was short-lived gave rise to the delightful fantasy biography, Orlando.

The thirties were a period of increased fame and prosperity, tarnished only by spiteful critical attacks from the likes of Wyndham Lewis, Frank Swinnerton, and the Leavises. There was one further push in experimental modernism still to come: The Waves was her attempt to combine prose, poetry, and drama.

She turned down an invitation to deliver the Clark Lectures at Trinity College Cambridge (which her father had given in 1888) and instead directed what she had to say about these institutions of male privilege and class power into Three Guineas (1938). This was the logical development of her arguments in A Room of One’s Own and the two works now form the foundation of most modern branches of feminism.

It was certainly a productive decade. In addition to her steady stream of reviews and journalism, she produced a major critical study The Common Reader: Second Series, a long novel The Years, a play Freshwater, and even Flush, a playful biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog.

By the end of the decade there were less than two years left – yet despite her personal depressions and worries regarding the war, she continued writing and produced the ‘official’ biography of her friend Roger Fry (a thoroughly anodyne work) and left the much more spirited Between the Acts in proofs at her death.

The main strength of Elizabeth Wright’s short biography is that it strikes a good balance between the life and the works – and her account isn’t spoiled by any of the hysteria and gender bigotry which undermines so much critical commentary. After all, Virginia Woolf might have had psychological demons with which she struggled throughout her life, but she was also a prodigiously creative artist, an original analyst on some of life’s most fundamental issues, and a witty and popular figure amongst her friends.

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E.H.Wright, Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf, London: Hesperus Press, 2011, pp.144, ISBN: 1843919095

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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

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Weather Bird

June 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the state of jazz at the dawn of its second century

This book covers the writing of prominent jazz critic Gary Giddins from 1990 to 2003. There are reviews of concerts and broadcasts, record reviews, and transcripts of interviews, but mainly reprints of the column entitled Weather Bird which he wrote for the Village Voice between 1974 and 2003. His range is wide. It goes from Traditional figures such as Louis Armstrong to contemporary and avant-gard figures such as Cecil Taylor and young modernists such as Javron Jackson. In between there’s a rich appreciation of figures such as Benny Carter, Gerry Mulligan, Cassandra Wilson, Sonny Rollins, and Jimmy Heath. He even writes with generous recognition of fellow jazz critics Martin Williams and Leonard Feather.

Between the profiles and concert reviews there are features such as The Best Jazz Records of the Year. After the lapse of up to a decade, it’s interesting to see how many names you can recognise, and sad to note how few of these records are still available. His reviews of jazz concerts give a vivid impression of what it’s like to be immersed in the world of jazz, but because there are often so many people to mention, these reviews sometimes become bewildering lists of names and tune titles.

As a reviewer myself I admired the dextrous way he manages to avoid “… and the next tune … then they play … next comes …”. He certainly writes in a crisp style which is never dull:

The MJQ is almost too good. Fixed snapping rythms embellished with bells and chimes support contrapuntal melodies and compelling improvisation. Clipped, jabbing piano and vivid blues complement saturated sonorities augmented by bowed bass and accelerated vibrophone vibrato. A seductive book, assiduously reworked and enhanced for decades, transfigures popular songs into originals and vice versa.

He is amazingly well informed, and shows it in such fascinating and surprising features as a political and social history of jazz in Denmark. It’s a very instructive compilation for non-US readers. There are lots of musicians discussed who I had never heard of before, and his appreciation of the much under-rated bop vocalist Bob Dorough had me scanning the listings at Amazon in an instant.

He even finds positive things to say about people who have often struck dubious relations with the traditions of jazz such as Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and Ornette Coleman.

Longer pieces such as a book chapter essay summarising the avant gard in jazz, and his sleeve notes for the complete Columbia recordings of Bille Holiday, and his ‘roadmap’ to jazz 1945—2001 which analyses one significant recording from each year of the post-war period.

He puts the relative newcomers such as Cyrus Chestnut and Jason Moran into a rich historical context, and he’s not afraid to reveal the weaknesses in revered (some would say over-rated) figures such as Winton Marsalis.

One thing’s for sure. If you have listened to jazz of any style or flavour from the last seventy years or so, you’ll find something to interest you here. This is a tremendously comprehensive guide and a rich source of reference, as well as a stimulating critique of America’s one indigenous art form.

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Gary Giddins, Weather Bird, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.632, ISBN: 0195156072

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Weaving the Web

July 3, 2009 by Roy Johnson

the history of the Web – by the man who invented it

Everybody knows that Tim Berners-Lee is the man who invented the World Wide Web – and that he hasn’t become a millionaire. Weaving the Web explains the reasons why. It’s his own account of one of the most profound developments in twentieth century technology – almost as important as the invention of the Net itself. His story begins in one of the spiritual homes of computing – Manchester UK – where his both his parents worked on the first commercial mainframes made by Ferranti in the 1950s.

He wrote his first program to link information in 1980 with “no loftier reason than to help me remember the connections amongst the various people, computers and projects at the [CERN] lab”. He was concerned to share information amongst a community of scientists who were equipped with different languages, different computers, and different operating systems – and it’s interesting to note the persistence of this altruism as the development unfolds.

His narrative is the now-familiar one of noble intentions battling against indifference, resistance, and outright opposition. There is a wonderful sense of intellectual excitement in following the step-by-step struggle to convince people that information could be linked and shared. And all this is as recent as 1990.

There were also conceptual difficulties. Ten years ago, people on the Net were regularly ‘lost in Cyberspace’ – an expression you don’t see used much any more. How difficult it was for most of us to conceptualize all this back in the early 1990s. It was not an easily intuitive thing to take in that when you clicked on a link you were ‘going’ to a computer at the other side of the world. Worse still – when the connection dropped, you felt as though you had fallen out of an aeroplane in mid-Atlantic. We’ve learned since not to worry when something disappears off the screen.

He discusses the competing systems such as Gopher and WAIS [remember those] and the strategic advantage of making SGML the base for hypertext markup language [HTML], the lingua franca of the Web. He is also forthright enough to admit his own failings, and even describes a conference paper which was rejected, as well as a rather sadly uneventful meeting with Ted Nelson in 1992. There’s also an explanation of how the rather clumsy term URL came about, though he continues to use URI [Indicator] throughout the book.

Once the Web takes off in the early 1990s, people such as Jim Clark and Marc Andreesson start to come into the picture. But whilst they make their fortunes turning Mosaic into Netscape, Berners-Lee selflessly devotes his energies to keeping the Web universal, out of the control of individual interests.

It has to be said that the story begins to dip a little at this point, with important but less dramatic decisions to be taken about protocols and standards.

By 1996 we’re deep into the details of the Web Consortium [WC3] and its workings. The story picks up again as he covers the Netscape-Microsoft squabble and the move towards extensible markup language [XML]. He goes on to discuss the problems of encryption, privacy, censorship, domain name registration, and policies which should be in place to protect the individual. He also indulges in a little futurism, speculating about the consequences of permanent online connections [Yes please!] and the benefits of XML, which he strongly endorses. His account culminates with a prediction that the Web will evolve into what he calls the ‘Semantic Web’ – a system whereby information will be more intelligently and qualitatively structured.

It’s a relatively easy book to read. I had the impression that it’s a transcript of interviews. And he ends, rather surprisingly, by revealing his belief in parallels between the Web and a ‘non-religious’ faith he has taken up in the US. But one thing remains constant throughout – his passionate desire to keep the Web an open, international standard – and for that we can all be grateful.

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Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web, London: Orion Books, 1999, pp.244, ISBN 0752820907

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What Good are the Arts?

June 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a bracing and polemical look at theories of art

The chapter titles of John Carey’s book on art theory make his sceptical position quite clear. ‘What is a work of art?’, ‘Is ‘high’ art superior?’, ‘Do the arts make us better?’, ‘Can art be a religion?’. He is taking a radical perspective on claims that are traditionally made for the appreciation of art. And his answers to those questions (in order) are – Art can be anything people claim it is – No, ‘high’ art is not necessarily superior – No, there is no evidence it makes us better – and Yes, unfortunately, art is sometimes seen as a form of religion. He asks challenging questions and raises points some readers might find quite difficult to take on board.

For instance, on the issue that the appreciation of art is capable of inducing feelings of transcendent ecstasy, he points out that such states of mind can be perceived as essentially complacent and selfish, since they are customarily associated with a feeling of harmony and oneness with the world. In a world where a huge part of its population is living in starvation and misery, this is hardly a desirable state of being and certainly not one which can claim to be ethically superior.

He manages some of his arguments by slightly devious means. For instance in attacking Kant’s absolutist values he claims that aesthetics were ‘invented’ in the eighteenth century – conveniently omitting Aristotle’s Poetics which he clearly knows about, because he mentions them in a later chapter.

It’s a very amusing read, because he takes an ironic and dismissive attitude to the snobs and the vainglorious commentators on art, including some celebrated figures whose bogus ideas he is debunking. Nobody is spared: lots of Big Names are dealt with by almost summary execution – Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer – all ‘essentialists’ who believed that great works of art had something unreachable and transcendent which lesser works did not. But they couldn’t ever prove it.

His assessment of the American art collector John Paul Getty is typical. Pointing out that Getty’s personal opinions included support for eugenic engineering and capital punishment, he observes:

Viewed as a humanising influence, the Getty art collection was admittedly a failure insofar as it affected its owner … There is little point in acquiring two Rembrandts and a Rubens if your social views remain indistinguishable from those of any saloon-bar fascist.

You’ll have to hold on to your intellectual hat when he gets round to extolling Adolf Hitler’s interest in painting , architecture, and music – but it’s only to argue that Western culture can easily co-exist with barbarity when it is elevated to a form of quasi-religious belief.

He does skip around somewhat between painting, literature, music, and other forms of traditional art – but ultimately nails his colours to the mast in the second half of the book when he defends literature. He does so on the grounds that unlike the other arts it is self-reflective. That is, it can criticise itself, and offer multiple moral perspectives. Indeed, it demands more of participants than the other arts, because it must be interpreted through the act of reading.

He even celebrates its indistinctiveness, which accounts for so many possible interpretations – which then come out and compete with each other for acceptance. All this is illustrated by close readings from novels and poetry straight from the traditional English Literature curriculum.

When it first came out, this book upset a lot of people with an interest in maintaining ‘essentialist’ positions. So he even indulges himself with a postscript in which he replies to all the reviewers who took offence – saving his most withering remarks for the likes of the self-aggrandising ‘religion of art’ supporter Jeanette Winterson.

It’s a very invigorating and entertaining read. And it’s likely to make most people think twice about the claims they make for the art they like. I hope he follows this up with a book on modern literary criticism.

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John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber and Faber, 2005, pp.296, ISBN 0571226035

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What is Literature?

July 17, 2009 by Roy Johnson

classic statement of literature and political commitment

What is Literature? is a now-famous polemic, written in 1948 following the turmoil of the second world war. Sartre was coming into his own as the most influential philosopher and writer of the existentialist movement. He thinks out loud in his customary [slightly rambling] fashion about the role of the writer in the post-war world. What he was trying to do was reconcile and even fuse his impulses towards writing and politics. In the first part he discusses the differences between literature and other arts such as music and painting.

His argument is that prose writing is different than all other media because of the relationship between the individual and language itself. We might not know anything about musical scales for instance, but we cannot not know about language. At this point fifty years on, we are unlikely to agree with all his conclusions, but his engagement with the relationship between writing and society is certainly thought-provoking.

In the next part he deals with ‘Why We Write’. There are some fascinating and vigorous reflections on the psychology of writing and reading – some of which anticipate forms of literary criticism which were not developed until twenty years later. For instance, he explains that the meaning of writing remains only latent until it is brought alive in the reader’s mind – and his observation that “reading is directed creation” is Reader-Response Theory summed up in four words.

It’s a long, tough-minded argument, much of it drifting into the realms of philosophy. Some of the weaknesses in his argument come from over-generalising particular cases. There’s also lots of argument spun out of abstract and metaphysical notions such as ‘freedom’ and ‘commitment’ which were fashionable at the time.

The centre of the book is a long meditation on the relationship between writers and their readers. This is largely a tour through French literature from the seventeenth to the twentieth century.

He finishes with a chapter on the role of the writer in 1948. This is a passionate and well-argued plea for social engagement on the part of the writer. It also debates the temptations and the reasons for resisting the call of the Left (which at that time was the Communist Party).

You have to be prepared for a lot of history and politics, but ultimately this is a robust and bracing read which should be of interest to anybody who wants to think about the relationship between ideology and literary culture.

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Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature, (first pub 1948) London: Routledge, 2001, pp.251, ISBN: 0415254043

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Where Wizards Stay Up Late

June 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

computer and Internet pioneers – a historical account

Do you know who invented the Internet? No, it wasn’t Al Gore – even though he once foolishly claimed he did. And in fact, it wasn’t just one person. What this fascinating documentary study reveals is the teamwork, the complementary technologies, and even the engineering competition which led to its development. It also dispels the notion that the innovation was fuelled by cold war defence concerns about possible nuclear attack.

The majority of early adopters were research scientists in particle physics who simply wanted access to each other’s work. At first it was just a few research departments of US universities which linked themselves. The computers were huge mainframe affairs, and the results at that time still came through on punched tape. There were no mice or monitors, no Windows, and even the tiny amounts of memory were laughably small by today’s standards.

It’s amazing to realise how recent all these developments have been. It also emphasises the fact that this major innovation was a result of simultaneous developments in a number of separate disciplines, and one which came out of the sort of team work and democratic ethos which have left their mark on the Net to this day.

Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon’s account adopts a lively documentary approach to telling the story of how it all happened. The writing is much influenced by Tom Wolfe’s new journalism, with rapid character sketches, cliff-hanging chapter endings, use of dramatic understatement, on-the-spot point of view, and lots of well-researched technical detail. Having said that, it’s not always an easy read. The names of engineers and scientists come in thick and fast, and the chronology jumps around bewilderingly in the sixties and seventies – but what emerges is a fascinating picture of many technological developments eventually pulled together to deliver what was in fact the birth of the Internet.

There’s a wonderfully dramatic moment when all the strands are pulled together in a contract submission to run the network – the computers, the wired links, and what emerges as the heart of the Net – packet-switching technology. This was invented simultaneously by Donald Davies in the UK and Paul Baran in the US. It allows information to be broken up into small units, transmitted, then reassembled without loss at any other part of a distributed network.

Their timescale stops short in the 1970s – which means the story doesn’t include anything on the World Wide Web – and strangely enough there’s very little mention of people such as Vannevar Bush or Ted Nelson. Their focus is all on the often wacky individuals and the college-boy teams who went on to become the Founding Fathers, though I was also glad to see that they give electrical engineers their due.

Other more well-orchestrated histories of this revolutionary development may be written in the future, but this one will be difficult to beat in the short term as an account of the skills, the drama, and the sheer inventiveness of these Net pioneers. There’s a full bibliography and a good index, so it’s no surprise that this title has been chosen as a set text on one of the Open University’s most popular ever courses – ‘You, your Computer, and the Internet’.

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Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: the origins of the Internet, New York: Free Press, new edition 2003, pp.304, ISBN 0743468376

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Women Who Did

September 9, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Stories about the New Woman 1890-1914

Women Who Did present a collection of stories featuring the ‘new woman’. The short story came into its own as a literary genre at the end of the nineteenth century, as the three-decker novel died its death and the rising numbers of magazines and journals created a new market for shorter fiction. Moreover, the short story, as Angelique Richardson points out in this charming collection, “was concerned with questions rather than answers [and] was perfectly suited to give expression to the turbulence and uncertainties of the late nineteenth century”.

This was also the age which gave rise to the ‘new woman’ – the female who claimed her independence, wore what clothes she liked, flirted openly with men, smoked cigarettes, and rode a bicycle. These are the issues which form the background to this very entertaining compilation of stories from the fin de ciécle, which only really ended with the start of the First World War. Editor Angelique Richardson offers an expansive introduction which explains the developments that were taking place at that time and puts the stories into a rich context.

She makes the very good point that in the struggle for women’s emancipation, some women were in reactionary opposition to it, and some men were strong supporters. It’s for such reasons that she includes stories on the Woman Question written by both sexes – though it has to be said that those written by women (in this collection) are on the whole superior.

Some well known pieces are included: Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; Kate Chopin‘s The Storm; Katherine Mansfield‘s The Tiredness of Rosabel. Others are less well known. Mona Caird’s The Yellow Drawing Room rings somewhat comic changes on the use of yellow as a symbol of something challenging. New woman Venora Haydon has decorated an entire room in this colour, which confuses the opinionated male narrator because he cannot square her radicalism (of which he disapproves) with the fact that he is attracted to her.

There’s also a swirlingly romantic piece by George Edgerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne) in which a new woman seems to catechise every man in her life (including her husband) before possibly running away with a chance acquaintance. Richardson has the good sense to include a parody of this story taken from Punch the following year.

It’s not surprising that the best stories are written by the most famous writers – Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin – but there are a number of unexpected gems by writers who will be new to most readers and who certainly deserve the sort of reconsideration that Richardson’s excellent compilation brings to our attention. As one Amazon reviewer remarks – “It’s worth reading for the introduction alone”.

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Angelique Richardson (ed), Women Who Did: Stories 1890-1914, London: Penguin, 2005, pp.528, ISBN: 0141441569

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Women, Marriage, and Art

July 15, 2012 by Roy Johnson

Mistress, Muse, Mrs, and Miss

Here’s a sample of recommended studies featuring women, marriage, and art. Women not as artists themselves so much as the wives, mistresses, and the muses who have inspired creation. Some have had the misfortune to partner with monsters of egoism, but others have been women brave enough to defy social norms and live successfully in an unconventional manner.

The Bride of the Wind [full review]
Alma Mahler was an aristocratic beauty from Vienna with an appetite for painters, musicians, and artists. Her first major lover was Gustav Klimt: (that’s her portrait in his famous painting The Kiss). She then went on to marry the composer Gustav Mahler, and when Mahler died she started an affair with the painter Oskar Kokoshka. Once again, she inspired one of his most-admired paintings, The Bride of the Wind. Kokoshka wanted to marry her, but she refused, saying “I only marry geniuses”. He went off to war and was wounded. Whilst he was convalescing, she married the architect Walter Gropius, who was also serving in the war. When he was summoned from military duty to the birth of their second child, he was disappointed to learn it was not his own, but that of her current lover, the writer Franz Werfel. She stuck with Werfel through the 1920s and 1930s, but when he died after the second world war, she didn’t even go to his funeral.
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Mistress of Modernism [full review]
Peggy Guggenheim was a rich American heiress – though she protested that she was from the ‘poorer side’ of the family. The first of her many husbands introduced her to the bohemian art world of post-war Paris in the 1920s, and from that point onwards she made a habit of collecting modern art (mainly surrealism) and turning her favourite painters into lovers and husbands. Her list of conquests is fairly extensive: Giorgio Joyce (son of James), Yves Tanguay, Roland Penrose, E.L.T.Mesens, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and even Samuel Beckett. She established the museum in Venice that now bears her name, and ended her days surrounded by gay assistants and being punted round the canals in her own private gondola.
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Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov [full review]
This is a fascinating biography of a woman who devoted the whole of her life to her husband’s literary production. Vera Slonim became Vladimir Nabokov’s secretary, his editor, proofreader, and literary agent, his driver, protector (she carried a revolver in her handbag) and sometimes she even delivered his lectures. She was just as imperious and aristocratic as he was, but gave herself up entirely to his ambitions. Nevertheless, after suspecting him of dalliance with a young American college girl, she took the precaution of attending all his classes to keep a watchful eye on him.
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Among the Bohemians [full review]
The early part of the twentieth century was a period that gave rise to bohemianism in British life. People (and women in particular) kicked off the social restraints that were still hanging round as a shabby residue of the Victorian era. Most of the female figures Virginia Nicholson deals with in this study were artists and writers: Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell, painters Dora Carrington (who lived with two men) Nina Hamnet and the illustrator Kathleen Hale (who was secretary and lover to Augustus John) and the society Lady Ottoline Morrell, who had affairs with both her gardener and Bertrand Russell amongst others. These women took up smoking, wore jumble sale clothes, drank to excess, tried drugs, and refused to do any housework. Very politically incorrect role models – but fascinating characters.
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Parallel Lives [full review]
This has become a classic study of four Victorian marriages. John Ruskin was an authority on art and beauty, but he is famous for never having consummated his marriage. What’s not so well known is that when his wife divorced him on these grounds, he offered to prove his virility in the courtroom. John Stuart Mill also had a marriage blanche – but on the principle that men ought to compensate women for the social injustices they suffered. George Eliot on the other hand defied conventions by living with a married man, then when he died married a man twenty years younger than herself. She meanwhile wrote some of the classics of nineteenth century English literature.
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Singled Out [full review]
By the time the first world war ended, more than three-quarters of a million young British servicemen had lost their lives. The single young women who had ‘kept the home fires burning’ and waited for them faced an alarming shortage of marriage prospects. And matrimony was the one escape from the shame of spinsterhood offered to women at that time. This searching original study by Virginia Nicolson (grand-daughter of the painter Vanessa Bell) tells the stories of women who were forced to invent careers for themselves. They became teachers, librarians, journalists, doctors, archeologists, members of parliament, and even in one case the curator of London Zoo. Some sacrificed emotional ties to further their careers; others invented new forms of friendships and intimacy.
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Uncommon Arrangements [full review]
In an age where one third of marriages end in divorce, it’s refreshing to look at alternative arrangements some people have explored. Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) managed to keep her husband Clive Bell, her lover Duncan Grant, and her ex-lover Roger Fry all frioends with each other. Ottoline Morell helped her husband cope when he revealed to her that both his lovers were pregnant at the same time. Una Troubridge remained loyal as lesbian ‘wife’ to Radcliffe Hall (of The Well of Loneliness fame) whilst Hall (who called herself ‘John’) enjoyed a nine year long affair with a young Russian girl. Troubridge however took economic revenge when she was made executrix to her ‘husband’s will. Katie Roiphe’s study of radical alternatives to conventional marriage in artistic circles includes a fair amount of emotional suffering and masochism – but it’s certainly thought provoking to see what lengths people will go to in enjoying a little sexual self-indulgence.
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Words Words Words

June 13, 2009 by Roy Johnson

how language arises, changes, is recorded, and used

David Crystal is a world-famous authority on language development, lexicography, linguistics, and anything else which concerns the words human beings use to speak and write. Words Words Words is the latest of his many books – an easy-to-read primer in which he attempts to convey his enthusiasm for all aspects of the subject. His intention is to explore the common fascination with all aspects of language and to answer some of the questions we ask about it. How many words are there in the English language for instance?

He shows why it’s so difficult to answer this question accurately, but settles for ‘over a million’. He also tries to dispel myths. Does the Sun newspaper really use a lexicon of only 500 words? That’s a much easier problem. The answer is no. A sample he took showed the total was nearer to 7,000. He describes how dictionaries are compiled; the origins and history of words; how words are borrowed (stolen in fact) from other languages and rapidly adopted as our own – despite complaints from conservatives; how new words are created by blending (heliport) lengthening (chewing gum) shortening (demo) or simply changing the use of an existing word (gay).

He traces the history of English spelling and explains why it is so complex and irregular. His discussion of accents and pronunciation covers the way the language is spoken, and his argument is that things are changing all the time. It’s no use writing to the Times complaining that the BBC now pronounces controversy with the stress in the middle of the word, because that’s the way it is going.

He’s very good at conveying his enthusiasm for language. He writes warmly and tolerantly on slang, jargon, and even has a good word to say for cliché, and he is more tolerant of children swearing than I am:

In Caernarfon, in North Wales, you hear people calling each other cunt all the time, quite unconcernedly. It just means ‘mate’.

That might be true in Caernarfon, but it would get you a thick ear if you tried it on in Stockport. He finishes with a series of practical suggestions for those people who would like to take the subject further. He recommends dictionaries (buy two); shows you how to find the meaning of names; how to estimate the size of your vocabulary; lists dialect societies to join; and even encourages you to contribute to dictionary building.

All the points he makes are illustrated with examples from both language history and contemporary usage. He throws in lots of amusing anecdotes, and the pages are decorated with side panels showing how to take each topic further. This approach really brings his subject to life and makes the study of language sound very attractive – and certainly within the grasp of the average reader.

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David Crystal, Words Words Words, Oxford: Oxford University Press, new edition 2007, pp.224, ISBN: 0199210772

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