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Under Western Eyes

September 12, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

Under Western Eyes (1911) is one of the most political of all Conrad’s novels – even though a good deal of it takes place in drawing rooms in Geneva. It is simultaneously a critique of Russian absolutism and of its reactive counterpart, revolutionary terrorism. Conrad is essentially a political conservative, but his background as a Polish national, raised under Tsarist rule, with an international career as a seaman before adopting British nationality, gives him a healthy non-partisan view on the political systems he considers.

Joseph Conrad Portrait

Joseph Conrad

Conrad is now well ensconced in the Pantheon of great modernists, and his novels Lord Jim and The Secret Agent are popular classics, along with impressive novellas such as The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness which are even more celebrated in terms of the number of critical words written about them.


Under Western Eyes – critical commentary

Under Western Eyes, as its title suggests, is very much a depiction of Russia from the point of view of western liberal democracy. The narrator is an Englishman who was raised in Russia (‘a teacher of languages’) who reminds readers at regular intervals that many of the surprising details of the plot are products of a Slavic regime that will seem irrational to Europeans.

There is plenty of scope within the novel for Conrad to vent his antipathy to a regime that put his own father in jail and the entire Conrad family into a form of internal exile. But he does so in an even-handed sense. The government is shown as absolutist, despotic, riddled with police spies, and completely neglectful of its citizens, the majority of whom live in a state of abject squalor. But he is equally critical of the revolutionaries, who he depicts as a collection of misguided, self-serving bigots at best, and at worst as psychopaths, unprincipled anarchists, phony feminists, and murderous brutes.

It’s a triumph of Conrad’s skill that Haldin, a politically motivated revolutionary who assassinates not only a government official but several innocent bystanders, emerges as the novel progresses as an almost Christ-like figure. Similarly, the central figure Razumov, whose only clear behaviour for the majority of the novel is to betray a colleague to certain death and then act as a police informer, in the end undergoes a convincing transformation motivated by a sort of spiritual remorse.

Irony

Joseph Conrad is a master of sustained dramatic irony. It’s easy enough for any skilled writer to drop ironic statements into a narrative, but to maintain an ambiguous attitude to a subject or character throughout an entire narrative requires a very skillful form of deception. It can only be done by creating a narrative that reveals (or appears to reveal) one thing whilst other elements reveal something else. (Vladimir Nabokov is another writer who uses this technique.)

His central character Fazumov is a student of philosophy who thinks he is perceptive and clever. The other characters in the narrative reinforce this idea because they mistake his taciturn nature for ratiocinative profundity. They have confidence in him partly because of his good looks and because they assume he is acting on some high moral principle. But in fact for most of the narrative he is a mediocrity, an empty shell, and a coward.

Much of the tension in the plot is generated by the sustained dramatic irony of Razumov’s position in relation to the people he confronts. The revolutionaries mistakenly believe he has been part of the terrorist plot and in league with Haldin, its true perpetrator. He is forced to dissemble so as to conceal the fact that he in fact betrayed Haldin to the police. He is also forced to conceal from them (though this is an easier task) that he has become a police spy, tasked with reporting on terrorist plots back to the government in Russia.

Victor Haldin’s sister Natalia has learned in a letter from her brother that Razumov is a friend who can be trusted. She has every reason to believe that the two young men were friends and she hopes that Razumov can throw some light on her brother’s last hours before being arrested. Razumov is squirming with anguish in every conversation he has with her, his voice reduced to a low rasping noise as he is forced to conceal the fact that he betrayed Haldin and brought about his death. The entire novel is heavily indebted to Dostoyevski, and to Crime and Punishment in particular. Razumov like Raskolnikov spends much of his time in discussion with the police and the revolutionaries, always on the verge of confessing or giving himself away.

Narrative

As usual in his work written in his late period, Conrad adopts a complex and very oblique manner in delivering his story. His outer narrator (an English ‘teacher of languages’) recounts events he has learned from reading a journal written by the central character Razumov, some of it composed in retrospect and some contemporaneously (‘with dates’). But as in his other late novels such as Nostromo and Chance, Conrad from time to time appears to forget the narrative structure he has created for himself, and he lapses into a traditional third person omniscient narrative mode.

He recounts the thoughts, feelings, and inner motivations of minor characters – psychological motivations which could not be known to anybody else. These are figures who the narrator could only know about from having read of them as characters in Razumov’s journal, and whose inner life would therefore be hidden, certainly from a limited character such as Razumov and doubly so from another person reading about them in his reminiscences.

These flaws are not so severe that they destroy one’s faith in the novel as a whole, but they do undermine our confidence in a narrator who makes so many claims of moral discrimination – most of them on Conrad’s own behalf – despite his efforts to distance himself from the teacher of languages. They make us wonder why Conrad devises such a complex strategies when he both contravenes their logic and fails to keep accurate control of them.

The first part of the novel is relayed to us in first person narrative mode by the teacher of languages. He is reconstructing the story from a journal (‘a journal, a diary, yet not that exactly in its actual form’) kept by Razumov, that has come into his possession after the events of the novel have finished. This does not stop Conrad from drifting into third person omniscient narrative mode, speculating about issues that it is very unlikely anyone would record in a diary.

In the second part of the novel the teacher of languages talks to Haldin’s sister Natalia, who recounts her meeting with Razumov. But the events are once more delivered in third person omniscient mode:

The dame de compagnie, listening where now two voices were alternating with some animation, made no answer for a time. When the sounds of the discussion had sunk into an almost inaudible murmur, she turned to Miss Haldin.

This sort of focalisation is simply not consistent with a narrative which is supposed to originate with Miss Haldin and is being passed on to us by the teacher of languages. There are many such instances throughout the novel. Conrad also makes comments on events which are illogical or asynchronous. The teacher of languages, speaking of Haldin, observes: ‘I did not wish indeed to judge him, but the very fact that he did not escape … spoke to me in his favour’.

But he already knows why Haldin did not escape. In fact he knows the entire story before he delivers it as the novel readers hold in their hands. There are also instances where the teacher of languages invents scenes he has not witnessed and nobody has described to him. In the middle of recounting the story relayed to him by Miss Haldin, he speculates ‘I could depict to myself Peter Ivanovitch rushing busily out of the house again, bare-headed, perhaps, and on across the terrace with his swinging gait, the black skirts of the frock-coat floating clear of his stout, light-grey legs.’

For long stretches of the narrative Conrad has to pretend that the teacher of languages is unaware of the dramatic irony of presenting Razumov as a ‘friend’ of Haldin – when in fact at the very moment of starting the tale he has all the facts at his disposal. But because he takes part in the events as a fictional character, large sections of the book are related from his point of view as a spectator at the time of the events being described. This form of narration is an illusion, a conjuring trick on the author’s part. But it must be said that Conrad fails to keep the balls in the air some of the time. It’s difficult to escape the impression that Conrad was simply not paying sufficient attention to his work, although similar problems occur in other of his late novels.

Genesis of the text

These issues are further complicated by the very complex manner of Conrad’s process of composition. He wrote the novel over a two year period, breaking off at one point to produce his novella The Secret Sharer (which also deals with a character who shelters a murderer). Under Western Eyes was composed in longhand to produce a first draft, and these pages were then typed up to produce a version that Conrad corrected by hand. The result was then in turn typed into what approximated to a finished version. One problem is that all three of these stages were taking place at the same time, and another is that even when the process was complete Conrad made huge cuts and changes to the story for its publication both in serial and then in single volume form. On top of that there were also English and American editions of the novel that contain differences.

The best available version of the text is in Oxford Classics, which is based on the first English edition. But there are lots of problems in the text which need copious footnotes and extracts from other versions to explain. At one point Conrad even gets the full name of one of his important characters wrong.

Dostoyevski

Joseph Conrad claimed that he did not like the work of Fyodor Dostoyevski – an opinion perhaps fuelled by his anti-Russian feelings in general, having been exiled from his Russian-controlled Poland with the rest of his family early in life. But the parallels with Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment (1866) are unmistakable.

Both the protagonists – Razumov and Raskalnikov – are students. They both commit crimes and are subsequently haunted by a fear of being found out, whilst at the same time they both feel a passionate need to confess. Both men contemplate suicide as a relief from their anguish. Both these protagonists confess to a woman they love, and in a sense both are ultimately redeemed by this love.


Under Western Eyes – study resources

Under Western Eyes Under Western Eyes – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon UK

Under Western Eyes Under Western Eyes – Oxford World’s Classics – Amazon US

Under Western Eyes Under Western Eyes – annotated Kindle eBook edition

Under Western Eyes Under Western Eyes – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

Under Western Eyes Under Western Eyes – PDF version at RIA Press

Pointer The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Pointer Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

Pointer Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

Pointer Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

Pointer Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Pointer Joseph Conrad at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Under Western Eyes


Under Western Eyes – plot summary

The protagonist is a young Russian student of philosophy named Razumov, a conservative and career-motivated young man. He has never known his parents, but he is in fact the natural son of Prince K—, who pays for his education. One day he returns home to find a student acquaintance named Victor Haldin sheltering in his apartment. Haldin informs Razumov that he has just committed a political assassination. He has evaded the police and intends to escape. This news causes Razumov a great deal of unease, as he has no sympathy for Haldin’s actions and feels that he is in danger of being implicated in the crime. .

Joseph Conrad Under Western EyesHaldin asks Razumov to contact a cab driver called Ziemanitch, who may be able to help Haldin escape successfully. Razumov fears that all he has worked for is slipping away, but after much soul-searching agrees to help Haldin – primarily with the intention of getting him out of his apartment as soon as possible. When Razumov finds Ziemanitch in a drunken stupor and unable to assist, he beats him unmercifully. Then, in a state of heightened outrage at being placed in such a difficult position, he decides to betray Haldin to the police.

Razumov goes to the one person that may be able to assist him – the official who arranges his sponsorship at the university. They go to the chief of police, General T – who agrees to keep Razumov’s name out of any official reports, because of his connection with Prince K—. Haldin is arrested, tried, and hanged. Razumov finds himself taking the first step to becoming a secret agent, although at this time he has no such intention.

The narrative then shifts to Geneva where Natalia and Mrs Haldin, the sister and mother of the executed revolutionary, have received the tragic news. In his last correspondence to his sister, Victor Haldin mentioned a certain serious young man named Razumov who was kind to him. Nathalie learns that Razumov is scheduled to arrive in Switzerland, and she impatiently awaits the arrival of her late brother’s final friend, hoping he might be able to shed light on Haldin’s last days.

In Geneva Razumov joins a group of exiled Russian revolutionaries who are planning an insurgency in the Baltic regions in an attempt to foment revolution in Russia. They regard Razumov as a hero, because they mistakenly think he was an associate of Haldin’s in the assassination plot. In fact he has gone to Geneva working as a spy for the Russian government.

All the publicly available evidence suggests that Razumov’s part in the arrest of Haldin can not become known. This is reinforced when news arrives that Ziemanitch has committed suicide. It is generally assumed that this was an act of remorse for betraying Haldin (which was not the case). But the strain of concealing his part in betraying Haldin causes Razumov a great deal of distress. This is compounded when he is forced to meet Nathalia and she asks him about the exact nature of his last contact with her brother.

This process of being interrogated is repeated with the key figures amongst the revolutionaries. At each stage Razumov is put under greater and greater psychological pressure and he feels more role strain and conflict of interests. He is being praised for a revolutionary act of terrorism that he did not commit, and his true political beliefs are deeply conservative.

However, powerfully affected by Natalia’s beauty and trustful nature, he finally breaks down and confesses to her. He then does the same thing with the revolutionaries, who punish him by bursting his ear drums. As a result of his deafness, he is run over by a street car and rendered a cripple. At the end of the novel, after her mother dies, Natalia goes back to Russia to do good works amongst poor people. Razumov has gone back too, but is not expected to live long.


Principal characters
I The un-named outer narrator, ‘a teacher of languages’, who presents events and participates in the story.
Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov A student of philosophy
Prince K— Razumov’s protector, sponsor, and secret father
Victor Haldin A student and revolutionary
Ziemianitch A drunken cab driver
General T— Government official to whom Razumov betrays Haldin
Kostia A dissolute student with a rich father
Gregory Matvieitch Mikulin Police investigator
Natalia Haldin Victor Haldin’s sister
Mrs Haldin Victor Haldin’s mother
Peter Ivanovitch A revolutionary and feminist
Madame de S— Russian society revolutionary sympathiser
Father Zosim Priest and police informer
Tekla Servant and former revolutionary
Sophia Antonovna Revolutionary
Nikita Necator Revolutionary assassin – and police spy
Julius Caspara Magazine editor and anarchist

Joseph Conrad – biography


The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.


Heart of Darkness - manuscript page

Manuscript page from Heart of Darkness


The Complete Critical Guide to Joseph ConradThe Complete Critical Guide to Joseph Conrad is a good introduction to Conrad criticism. It includes a potted biography, an outline of the stories and novels, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early comments by his contemporaries to critics of the present day. Also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Conrad journals. These guides are very popular. Recommended.


Further reading

Pointer Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Pointer Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Pointer Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941.

Pointer Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010.

Pointer Hillel M. Daleski, Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977.

Pointer Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Pointer Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Pointer John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940.

Pointer Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958.

Pointer Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992.

Pointer Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979.

Pointer Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990.

Pointer Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Pointer Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

Pointer Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Pointer Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976.

Pointer Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985.

Pointer Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Pointer Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Pointer George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Pointer John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Pointer James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Pointer Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Pointer Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Pointer J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Pointer John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Pointer Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Pointer Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980.

Pointer Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work, London: Northcote House, 1994.


Major novels by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad NostromoNostromo (1904) is Conrad’s ‘big’ political novel – into which he packs all of his major subjects and themes. It is set in the imaginary Latin-American country of Costaguana – and features a stolen hoard of silver, desperate acts of courage, characters trembling on the brink of moral panic. The political background encompasses nationalist revolution and the Imperialism of foreign intervention. Silver is the pivot of the whole story – revealing the courage of some and the corruption and destruction of others. Conrad’s narration is as usual complex and oblique. He begins half way through the events of the revolution, and proceeds by way of flashbacks and glimpses into the future.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Joseph Conrad The Secret AgentThe Secret Agent (1907) is a short novel and a masterpiece of sustained irony. It is based on the real incident of a bomb attack on the Greenwich Observatory in 1888 and features a cast of wonderfully grotesque characters: Verloc the lazy double agent, Inspector Heat of Scotland Yard, and the Professor – an anarchist who wanders through the novel with bombs strapped round his waist and the detonator in his hand. The English government and police are subject to sustained criticism, and the novel bristles with some wonderfully orchestrated effects of dramatic irony – all set in the murky atmosphere of Victorian London. Here Conrad prefigures all the ambiguities which surround two-faced international relations, duplicitous State realpolitik, and terrorist outrage which still beset us more than a hundred years later.
Joseph Conrad Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad - tutorials Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Red button Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad - eBooks Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad - further reading Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad - adaptations Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Joseph Conrad - etexts Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

Joseph Conrad - journal The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

Conrad US journal The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Joseph Conrad - concordance Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

© Roy Johnson 2010


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Filed Under: Joseph Conrad Tagged With: English literature, Joseph Conrad, Literary studies, Modernism, Study guides, The novel, Under Western Eyes

Vanessa Bell a biography

July 19, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Bloomsbury painter, matriarch, and bohemian

Vanessa Bell is best known as the sister of Virginia Woolf, but she was a distinguished artist in her own right, and her reputation has risen in recent years, along with other women artists such as Dora Carrington and Gwen John. Her father Leslie Stephen was a literary figure (editor of the Dictionary of National Biography but he encouraged Vanessa’s early enthusiasm for painting and drawing, and in 1901 she entered to study at the Royal Academy. Then following her father’s death she moved with her sister Virginia and their younger brother Adrian to live in Gordon Square.

Vanessa Bell a biographyWhen their elder brother Thoby brought home his friends Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner from Cambridge, it was there that the Bloomsbury Group began. She married Clive Bell in 1906 and achieved what seemed like immediate happiness with him – yet within two years she was completely taken up with her son Julian, and Clive had resumed an affair with his previous lover Mrs Craven-Hill.

As a biographer, Frances Spalding is frank and explicit regarding the behaviour of secondary characters, but she protects her principal subject behind a smokescreen of evasion and omission. Even though she documents the movements and actions of her characters on what is often a day-to-day basis, Vanessa has been engaged in a sexual relationship with Roger Fry for several months before it is even mentioned, and then obliquely, as if it is solely his decision:

Roger Fry was still legally married. Discretion necessarily surrounded his affair with Vanessa which at first was kept from Clive

She is on much stronger ground when discussing the development of Vanessa Bell’s painting. The influence of Roger Fry, the Post-Impressionists, and her exposure to French art (Gaugin, Derain, Picasso, Braque) are traced quite intelligently and linked well to the illustrations in the book which have been selected to represent some of her most important works.

Despite Frances Spalding’s efforts to turn her into a saint, Vanessa Bell emerges as a fairly scheming egoist – quite content to keep both the legal and sexual connection with her husband intact, whilst developing her affair with Roger Fry, then replacing him with Duncan Grant, and keeping all three in her orbit – which Spalding interprets as an example of generosity of spirit. On their part maybe, but on hers?

When Duncan Grant (who was a homosexual) makes her pregnant, the resulting child (Angelica) is passed off as Clive Bell’s for the sake of propriety and probably economics (given the amount of money which Bell’s family was pumping into hers). It was something which had fairly dire consequences for the girl, as she documents in her own version of events, Deceived with Kindness. But all this is passed over with very little comment.

Despite all the bohemianism, everything is based on a foundation of rock-solid middle-class economics: multiple property ownerships; a permanent retinue of servants (cook, housemaid, nurse, housekeeper); and stock-market investments carefully managed by John Maynard Keynes. Since he was at the time was an advisor to the Treasury, this is something we would today call insider trading. It’s is a world where bells (not Bells) rang at one for lunch, five for tea, and dinner at eight.

In the 1920s and 1930s Vanessa divided her time between Charleston (the much decorated house that she shared with Duncan Grant) and Cassis in France, where she helped to popularise the Cote d’Azur amongst artists. Her exhibitions were quite successful, and she had commissions for decorative work.

It’s often said that she retreated into a reclusive lifestyle at this time, but she flits from Paris to Rome, and back to London and Sussex at a dizzying rate, and Spalding’s pages are dense with the names of writers, artists, and upper-class socialites, plus Duncan Grant’s gay hangers-on (who presented a constant threat to their partnership).

Then there comes a period of personal loss: the death of Lytton Strachey, followed by Roger Fry, and most damaging of all her son Julian (killed in the Spanish Civil War) and her sister Virginia’s suicide. Further losses were sustained in the post-war years, but she continued to paint and complete decorative commissions.

But the later years of her life were dominated by her pleasure at being a grandparent [always much easier than being a parent] and though she became something of an establishment figure (sitting on artistic committees) her retreat in the last two decades of her life was into the pleasures of what was left of her family and friends.

Despite my reservations about the picture created here, this is a thorough and a scholarly biography, with all its sources fully documented. It’s simultaneously the complete account of a life, a rich documentary on the Bloomsbury Group, and a historical account which begins in the Victorian era and ends in modern post-war Britain.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Vanessa Bell biography Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp.399, ISBN 0333372255


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Virginia Woolf an introduction

October 7, 2011 by Roy Johnson

a sketch of her life – an appreciation of the novels

Virginia Woolf An Introduction is yet another study that combines a biography with comments on her major writing. There have been several biographies of Virginia Woolf in the last few decades. John Lehmann’s illustrated memoir is still very popular. Quentin Bell’s official biography is detailed and scholarly but in common with other accounts by Bloomsbury insiders (he was her nephew) it contains sins of omission to protect relatives and friends. Lyndall Gordon’s A Writer’s Life bases much of its account of Woolf’s life on her fiction, supposing much of it to be thinly veiled autobiography. The weaknesses in these productions mean that Hermione Lee’s more serious recent study is now regarded as the ‘standard’ biography.

Virginia Woolf an introductionSo what does a new account by Alexandra Harris have to offer – published as it is very quickly on the heels of her award-winning Romantc Moderns? Well – it turns out not to be a biography in the conventional sense, but an introduction to Woolf and her work in general, compiled from readings of her novels, diaries, and letters, strung together in a chronological sequence.

The first few chapters deal with life in the Stephen household at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, but once Woolf starts writing it is the prodigious flow of her creative work which forms the spine of the narrative – from her first book reviews and the early major task of The Voyage Out through to the last flourish of Between the Acts.

For readers new to Woolf it performs the useful function of emphasising the amazing scope of her work – for she was expressive and accomplished in all the literary genres with which she engaged. Her diaries are as interesting as Kafka’s; she excelled in the novel; her short stories are amongst the most advanced experiments in modern literature (with the possible exception of some by Nadine Gordimer); her essays and literary criticism will stand comparison with the work of any professional literary critic; and even her letters are worth reading – though she tends to recycle the same anecdotes to multiple correspondents.

As an introduction to Woolf’s major novels, it’s very successful. Harris’s impassioned account of Orlando is guaranteed to make anyone who has not read the novel dash out and buy it immediately. But at times she becomes so caught up with giving an account of the novels that her commentary becomes an act of interpretation. She switches from biography to literary criticism.

One minute for instance she might be dealing with well known details of the biography, and then at the merest mention of the book Woolf is currently writing, the narrative slides off into plot summary and a discussion of its characters as if they inhabited the same world. This will probably seem very attractive to general readers, encouraging them to engage with the fiction. But it’s likely to irritate any serious Woolf enthusiasts.

The pace is not always even. There are occasional lurches forward in chronology which are quite disconcerting. Whilst discussing the early writing in 1910, she suddenly invokes Rhoda in The Waves, which wasn’t written until twenty-one years later.

Quite surprisingly, there is very little about the lifestyle bohemianism of the Bloomsbury Group, even when it is directly relevant. Her descriptions of Virginia’s relationship with Leonard Woolf give the impression of a blissfully idyllic marriage. You wouldn’t guess from her account that it was virtually a mariage blanc. All the rich gossip and fruity anecdotes are available elsewhere of course, but the picture of Bloomsbury life that comes across is distinctly pasteurised.

One of the most interesting chapters is her last, in which she traces the development of Woolf’s posthumous reputation. Leonard Woolf, acting as executor and publisher at the Hogarth Press, slowly released the letters, diaries, and essays (only recently completed) in well edited scholarly editions. And as he did so, Woolf’s critical stock rose accordingly to the point where she is now regarded as one of the great modernists of the early twentieth century.

Romantic Moderns Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2011


Alexandra Harris, Virginia Woolf, London: Thames and Hudson, 2011, pp., ISBN: 0500515921


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Virginia Woolf – web links
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Virginia Woolf and Cubism

December 28, 2014 by Roy Johnson

the development of literary and visual modernism

Virginia Woolf and Cubism might seem at first a rather odd conjunction, but in fact her literary experimentation was taking place at exactly the same time as the pioneering movement in modern visual art, and it had very similar objectives. Picasso’s great breakthrough masterpiece Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted in 1907, and the development of his cubist works along with those of Georges Braque were created from 1910 onwards into the 1920s. This is the same period during which Woolf established herself as one of the most important figures of literary modernism.

Virginia Woolf and Cubism Picasso said ‘I paint forms as I think of them, not as I see them’ which resulted in objects and sitters portrayed in a fragmented manner, from a number of different perspectives, in a series of overlapping planes – all of which the viewer is invited to recompose mentally to form a three-dimensional image, rendered on a two dimensional surface (though there were also a few cubist sculptures).

Virginia Woolf composed in a similar fashion by analysing her subject and reconstructing it from the fragments by which it was perceived, often overlapping, and in particular from a mixture of time periods which combine the fictional present with the past – often within the same sentence of her narrative.

How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—”I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it?

Mrs Dalloway is walking in Westminster and the first world war is over, but her appreciation of the fresh morning in June evokes memories of her youth at Bourton and the man who was in love with her, who failed to marry her, but who she will meet later on in the day.

Woolf like her exact contemporary James Joyce, sought to represent human consciousness not as a linear and well-organised set of reflections on distinct topics, but as a vibrant and kaleidoscopic jumble of thoughts, often having little connection with each other. The artistry of her rendition was to provide the links between them via the selection and arrangement of details – just as the painter chooses the fragments of an object which the viewer reassembles into the object as a whole.

Woolf’s cubism is a shifting narrative viewpoint – flashes of a person’s character as seen by other people, of shifting periods of time, and changing locations and characters, the connections between which are not explicitly revealed. The result is a narrative often described as a mosaic of fragments – which is precisely the effect for which Woolf was striving.

The similarities between a literary technique and its equivalent in painting are not at all accidental. Woolf was surrounded by painters – from her sister Vanessa Bell, to Bell’s lover Duncan Grant, and most importantly the painter and art theorist Roger Fry, whose biographer she became. It was Fry who organised the important exhibition of modern post-Impressionist painters at the New Grafton Galleries in 1910, at which Virginia Woolf famously said that ‘human character changed’.

Virginia Woolf and CubismIn her study of this subject Sarah Latham Phillips offers a detailed reading of Jacob’s Room in the light of these ideas, then of Mrs Dalloway and some of the experimental short stories Woolf produced between 1917 and 1932. She makes a reasonable case for the mould-breaking story ‘Kew Gardens’ (1918) having been influenced by her sister Vanessa’s cubist painting The Conversation (which is reproduced here in full colour).

She also sees similarities between Woolf and cubist painters in their selection of everyday objects from the world around them as the raw materials of their art. For the painters, the newspaper, the glass and wine carafe on a bistro table; for Woolf the hustle and bustle of the London streets, or their exact opposite – the silent ruminations of a woman sitting in an empty room, reflecting upon ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

This pamphlet-sized publication comes from the Bloomsbury Heritage series of essays and monographs published by Cecil Woolf in London. These are scholarly productions which range over neglected or hitherto undiscovered topics in Bloomsbury culture – such as unpublished manuscripts, ceramics, gardens, bookbinding, personal reminiscences, painting, houses, and even anti-Semitism. The publisher Cecil Woolf is the nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and his publications do the Bloomsbury tradition honour.

© Roy Johnson 2014


Sarah Latham Phillips, Virginia Woolf as a ‘Cubist Writer’, London: Cecil Woolf, 2012, pp.43, ISBN 978-1-907286-29-2


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Virginia Woolf authors in context

July 25, 2009 by Roy Johnson

literature, politics, philosophy, art, feminism, criticism

The Authors in Context series examines the work of major writers in relation to their own times and the present day. This volume sets Virginia Woolf in the social, cultural, and political context of the period between 1900 and 1940, then looks at how we see her work now, from the perspective of the twenty-first century. Michael Whitworth starts with a biographical sketch of her life. He certainly knows all the details, and his outline might well propel readers who don’t already know about the troubled family life, the periods of creativity sandwiched between bouts of insanity, and the bohemian lifestyle of the Bloomsbury Group towards her famous Diaries and Letters for further revelations about this remarkable woman and groundbreaking modernist writer.

Virginia Woolf Authors in ContextNext comes a chapter providing the political and social background to the period 1900—1940, with its important developments in women’s rights, the rise of socialism, and the gradual erosion of the British Empire. It also contains some interesting reflections on the changing nature of ‘the family’ and ‘the household’ – particularly in relation to the employment of servants.

For those interested in the creative process, Whitworth reveals how Virginia Woolf’s method of composition started by her thinking about what she wanted to say, then articulating it in verbalised sentences, then speaking the sentences aloud. Following this, she then wrote out what she had composed in longhand, typed what she had written down, then subsequently revised it – sometimes several times over.

He deals well with problem topics, such as Woolf’s anti-semitism (even though she was married to Leonard Woolf, who was Jewish in origin if not in practice) and he knows enough about her to trace the gradual rise in self-awareness about this issue in her writing.

There’s a good chapter on what he calls The Writer and the Marketplace – that is, the writer’s financial relationship with book production and publishing – both of which Woolf practised professionally.

There are some fascinating pages which steep the reader deep into the literary and ideological culture of the period, and Whitworth is a rigorous guide to the new literary techniques which Woolf was pioneering.

He deals with the philosophic questions which permeate her work: the relationship between art and life; the nature of human perception; plus subjective and objective notions of time.

There are in-depth analyses of Mrs Dalloway, Night and Day, and The Waves, and he puts his finger on one of her most important strengths – showing the political issues in daily life:

The great strength of Woolf’s narrative method is that it allows her to present social issues in their psychological aspects; long before anyone voiced the slogan ‘the personal is the political’, Woolf identified the connection. In Night and Day, she takes the idea that the ‘professions’ might include ‘marriage’ and ‘living at home’, and uses it as the bridge between personal and public

The final part of the book looks at adaptations of Woolf’s work for the screen. This includes films of To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and Mrs Dalloway, as well as the recent version of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. Whitworth persuasively argues that we should not expect these versions to be slavishly accurate. They are versions or interpretations which allow us to re-interpret the original or see it in a new light.

This is a book which can be read in two ways. For those who already know Woolf and her works it explores the important social, artistic, and intellectual themes which she examines, and for those who don’t, it will act as an excellent introduction. It is certainly a critical study which any lover of Woolf’s work will not want to miss.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Michael Whitworth, Virginia Woolf: Authors in Context, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, pp.268, ISBN: 0192802348


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Virginia Woolf greatest works

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

fictional works – plus some film versions

Virginia Woolf greatest works Jacob's RoomJacob’s Room (1922) was Woolf’s first and most dramatic break with traditional narrative fiction. It was also the first of her novels she published herself, as co-founder of the Hogarth Press. This gave her for the first time the freedom to write exactly as she wished. The story is a thinly disguised portrait of her brother Thoby – as he is perceived by others, and in his dealings with two young women. The novel does not have a conventional plot, and the point of view shifts constantly and without any signals or transitions from one character to another. Woolf was creating a form of story telling in which several things are discussed at the same time, creating an impression of simultaneity, and a flow of continuity in life which was one of her most important contributions to literary modernism.

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Virginia Woolf greatest works Mrs DallowayMrs Dalloway (1925) is probably the most accessible of her great novels. A day in the life of a London society hostess is used as the structure for her experiments in multiple points of view. The themes she explores are the nature of personal identity; memory and consciousness; the passage of time; and the tensions between the forces of Life and Death. The novel abandons conventional notions of plot in favour of a mosaic of events. She gives a very lyrical response to the fundamental question, ‘What is it like to be alive?’ And her answer is a sensuous expression of metropolitan existence. The novel also features her rich expression of ‘interior monologue’ as a narrative technique, and it offers a subtle critique of society recovering in the aftermath of the first world war. This novel is now seen as a central text of English literary modernism.

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Virginia Woolf greatest works To the LighthouseTo 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.

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Woolf - OrlandoOrlando (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’.

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Virginia Woolf greatest works The WavesThe Waves (1931) is her most experimental and most demanding novel. Rather like her exact contemporary James Joyce, she was pushing the possibilities of the novel to their furthest limit. She abandons conventional narrative and setting altogether, and substitutes the interior monologues of six different characters. They are friends (and lovers) whose lives are revealed by what they think about themselves and each other. The monologues that span the characters’ lives are broken up by nine brief third-person interludes detailing a coastal scene at varying stages in a day from sunrise to sunset. Readers have to work out who is ‘thinking’ at any moment – but assistance is provided by patterns of imagery and fragments of repeated ideas associated with each character. Not for the faint-hearted. Read the other novels first.

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Virginia Woolf greatest works Between the ActsBetween the Acts (1941) is her last novel, in which she returns to a less demanding literary style. Despite being written immediately before her suicide, she combines a playful wittiness with her satirical critique of English upper middle-class life. The story is set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village fete at Pointz Hall. It describes a country pageant on English history written by Miss La Trobe, and its effects on the people who watch it. Most of the audience misunderstand it in various ways, but the implication is that it is a work of art which temporarily creates order amidst the chaos of human life. There’s lots of social comedy, some amusing reflections on English weather, and meteorological metaphors and imagery run cleverly throughout the book.

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

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The Complete Shorter FictionThe Complete Shorter Fiction contains all the classic short stories such as The Mark on the Wall, A Haunted House, and The String Quartet – but also the shorter fragments and experimental pieces such as Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street. These ‘sketches’ (as she called them) were used to practice the techniques she used in her longer fictions. Nearly fifty pieces written over the course of Woolf’s writing career are arranged chronologically to offer insights into her development as a writer. This is one for connoisseurs – well presented and edited in a scholarly manner.

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Film versions

The HoursThe Hours DVD is an amazingly successful film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s fictional take on Mrs Dalloway. Fragments of Virginia Woolf’s biography are interwoven with stories from 1950s Los Angeles and contemporary New York. It’s not a direct adaptation but a stunning interpretation of Woolf and her world, her themes, and even her narrative techniques. It is beautifully photographed, and the evocation of Woolf’s creative process is particularly impressive. Nicole Kidman creates a very sympathetic portrayal of Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore glues the plot together with a magnificent performance as a woman at the end of her tether, and Meryl Streep is a slightly over-the-top but acceptable modern Clarissa. Music by Philip Glass. This is a film which no Woolf enthusiast should miss.

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Mrs Dalloway - DVDMrs Dalloway DVD is an excellent film version of Mrs Dalloway directed by Dutch filmmaker Marleen Gorris. It’s a visually low key rendering of the original, but it captures the spirit of the novel very well. Outstanding performance by Vanessa Redgrave in the principal role, and Natascha McElhone as her younger self and a young Kenneth Brannah as Charles Tansley. The screenplay was written by actor-author Eileen Atkins.

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

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© Roy Johnson 2005


Virginia Woolf – web links

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

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

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

Virginia Woolf web links Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of her novels and stories in a variety of digital formats.

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

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

Virginia Woolf web links 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Filed Under: Virginia Woolf Tagged With: Between the Acts, Bloomsbury, Kew Gardens, Literary studies, Modernism, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, The Hours, The Waves, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf life and works

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

novelist, essayist, diarist, biographer

Virginia Woolf life and works1882. 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: BiographyVirginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. An attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject.
Virginia Woolf - A Biography 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 WoolfThe 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2000-2014


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

Virginia Woolf selected criticism

September 24, 2009 by Roy Johnson

literary criticism and commentary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Wheare, Virginia Woolf, Methuen, 1989.

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2005


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


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

Women in Love

February 17, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, textual history, study resources, and web links

Women in Love (1921) begins where Lawrence’s earlier novel The Rainbow leaves off and features the Brangwen sisters as they try to forge new types of liberated personal relationships. The men they choose are trying to do the same thing – so the results are problematic and often disturbing. Many regard this as his finest novel, where his ideas are matched with passages of superb writing. The locations combine urban Bohemia with a symbolic climax which takes place in the icy snow caps of the Alps.

Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence is a writer who excites great passions in his readers – which is entirely appropriate, since that is how he wrote. He is the first really great writer to come from the (more or less) working class, and much of his work deals with issues of class, as well as other fundamentals such as the relationships between men, women, and the natural world.

At times he becomes mystic and visionary, and his prose style can be poetic, didactic, symbolic, and bombastic all within the space of a few pages. He also deals with issues of sexuality and politics in a manner which is often controversial.


Women in Love – textual history

Both The Rainbow and Women in Love have their origins in a 1913 draft called ‘The Sisters.’ The next year, Lawrence revised it further into a novel entitled The Wedding Ring, which Methuen agreed to publish in 1914. The outbreak of war late that year caused the publisher to renege on the agreement, and Lawrence decided to rework the source material, separating it into two novels.

The Rainbow, treating the early lives of the sisters, was suppressed shortly after its publication in 1915 on grounds of obscenity. Lawrence then spent four years revising the remainder of The Wedding Ring into a second novel, shopping it to publishers without success until 1920, when Thomas Seltzer published the first American edition.

Women in Love - first editionWomen in Love was originally published in New York City as a limited edition (1250 books), available only to subscribers; this was due to the controversy caused by The Rainbow. Because the two books were originally written as parts of a single novel, the publisher had decided to publish them separately and in rapid succession. The first book’s treatment of sexuality, while tame by today’s standards, was rather too frank for the Edwardian era. There was an obscenity trial and The Rainbow was banned in the UK for 11 years, although it was available in the US. The publisher then backed out of publishing the second book in the UK, so it first appeared in the US in 1920.

It was printed in England the following year by Martin Secker. Although both editions were based on the same copies prepared by Lawrence, the fate of The Rainbow led Secker to limit his exposure by cutting sections of the text which might run foul of the censors. In fact, in the English second printing, Heseltine’s threat to sue for libel resulted in changes to the descriptions of Halliday and the Pussum, changing the one from pale and fair-haired to swarthy and the other from red-haired to blonde.

In fact such are the textual complications behind the text that there are now two or more versions, some of which reproduce the original, and others which include formerly deleted scenes. The most authoritative are those published in the Cambridge University Press series of the definitive works of D.H.Lawrence.


Women in Love – study resources

Red button Women in Love – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

Red button Women in Love – Kindle eBook edition

Red button Women in Love – York Notes – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – A Casebook (Criticism) – Amazon UK

Red button The First Women in Love – definitive edition – Amazon UK

Red button Women in Love – eBook editions at Project Gutenberg

Red button Women in Love – audioBook edition at LibriVox

Red button Women in Love – audioBook (Talking Classics) – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK

Red button The Complete Short Novels of D.H.Lawrence – Amazon UK


Women in Love – plot summary

Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are two sisters living in the Midlands of England in the 1910s. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun an artist. They meet two men who live nearby, school inspector Rupert Birkin and coal-mine heir Gerald Crich. The four become friends. Ursula and Birkin become involved, and Gudrun eventually begins a love affair with Gerald. The dynamics between them all are complicated, however, by the strong connection between the sisters, as well as the more ambiguous bond between the two male friends.

Women in LoveAll four are deeply concerned with questions of society, politics, and the relationship between men and women. Ultimately however, the two relationships go in very different directions. The initial strife between Birkin and Ursula over his lingering attachment to the controlling Hermione Roddice is resolved by his eventual willingness to break off their relationship, and Birkin and Ursula give up their jobs as teachers to take up a more bohemian lifestyle.

Gerald and Gudrun begin on the firm ground of mutual sexual attraction, and their bond intensifies when Gerald’s ailing father invites Gudrun to become the art tutor for the family’s young daughter Winifred.

At a party at Gerald’s estate, Gerald’s sister Diana drowns. Soon Gerald’s coal-mine-owning father dies as well, after a long illness. After the funeral, Gerald goes to Gudrun’s house and spends the night with her, while her parents sleep in another room.

Birkin asks Ursula to marry him, and she agrees. Gerald and Gudrun’s relationship, however, becomes stormy. The four vacation in the Alps. Gudrun begins an intense friendship with Loerke, a physically puny but emotionally commanding artist from Dresden. Gerald is enraged by Loerke, by Gudrun’s verbal abuse, and by his own destructive nature. He tries to murder Gudrun, and when he fails he retreats back over the mountains and falls to a sort of voluntary death in the snow.


Principal characters
Rupert Birkin a schoolteacher
Ursula Brangwen a schoolteacher
Gudrun Brangwen her sister, an artist
Gerald Crich the son of a wealthy industrialist
Loerke a German artist

Film version

Director Ken Russell 1969
Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, Glenda Jackson, Jennie Linden

Red button See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database


Further reading

Biography

Pointer Frieda Lawrence, Not I, But the Wind…, New York: Viking Press, 1934.

Pointer Harry T. Moore, The Life and Works of D.H. Lawrence, London: Unwin Books, 1951.

Pointer Keith Sagar, The Life of D.H.Lawrence: An Illustrated Biography, London: Eyre Methuen, 1980.

Pointer John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Early Years: 1885-1912: The Cambridge Biography of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Pointer Brenda Maddox, The Married Man: A Biography of D.H.Lawrence, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1994.

Letters

Pointer J.T. Boulton (ed), The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Criticism

Pointer David Ellis, D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Pointer John Worthen, The First ‘Women in Love’ (Cambridge Edition of the Works of D.HLawrence), Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Pointer Graham Handley, Brodie’s Notes on D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’, London: Macmillan, 1992.

Pointer Harold Bloom, D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ (Modern Critical Interpretations), Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Pointer Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Pointer Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D.H. Lawrence, London: Routledge, 2002.


Background reading

Pointer button Mary Freeman, D.H.Lawrence A Basic Study of His Ideas, Grosset and Dunlap, 1955.

Pointer button F.R.Leavis, D.H.Lawrence: Novelist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1955.

Pointer button Mark Spilka, The Love Ethic of D.H.Lawrence, Dobson, 1955.

Pointer button Graham Hough, The Dark Sun: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Capricorn Books, 1956.

Pointer button Eliseo Vivas, D.H.Lawrence: The Failure and the Triumph of Art, General Books 1960.

Pointer button Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D.H.Lawrence’s Shorter Fiction, University of Washington Press, 1962.

Pointer button Eugene Goodheart, The Utopian Vision of D.H.Lawrence, Transaction Publishers, 1963.

Pointer button Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D.H.Lawrence, Oxford University Press, 1963.

Pointer button George Panichas, Adventure in Consciousness: Lawrence’s Religious Quest, Folcroft Library Editions, 1964.

Pointer button Helen Corke, D.H. Lawrence: The Croydon Years, Austin (Tex): University of Texas Press, 1965.

Pointer button George Ford, Double Measure; A Study of D.H.Lawrence, New York: Holt Reinhart and Winston, 1965.

Pointer button H M Daleski, The Forked Flame: A Study of D.H.Lawrence, Evanston (Ill): Northwestern University Press, 1965.

Pointer button Keith Sagar, The Art of D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Pointer button David Cavitch, D.H.Lawrence and the New World, Oxford University Press, 1969.

Pointer button Colin Clarke, River of Dissolution: D.H.Lawrence and English Romanticism, London: Routledge, 1969.

Pointer button Baruch Hochman, Another Ego: Self and Society in D.H.Lawrence, University of South Carolina Press, 1970.

Pointer button Keith Aldritt, The Visual Imagination of D.H.Lawrence, Hodder and Stoughton, 1971.

Pointer button R E Pritchard, D.H.Lawrence: Body of Darkness, Hutchinson, 1971.

Pointer button John E Stoll, The Novels of D.H.Lawrence: A Search for Integration, University of Missouri Press, 1971.

Pointer button Frank Kermode, D.H. Lawrence, London: Fontana, 1973.

Pointer button Scott Sanders, D.H.Lawrence: The World of the Major Novels, Vision Press, 1973.

Pointer button F.R.Leavis, Thought, Words, and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence, Chatto and Windus, 1976.

Pointer button Marguerite Beede Howe, The Art of the Self in D.H.Lawrence, Ohio University Press, 1977.

Pointer button Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Pointer button Anne Smith, Lawrence and Women, London: Vision Press, 1978.

Pointer button R.P. Draper (ed), D.H. Lawrence: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1979.

Pointer button John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence and the Idea of the Novel, London: Macmillan, 1979.

Pointer button Aidan Burns, Nature and Culture in D.H.Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1980.

Pointer button L D Clark, The Minoan Distance: Symbolism of Travel in D.H.Lawrence, University of Arizona Press, 1980.

Pointer button Roger Ebbatson, D.H.Lawrence and the Nature Tradition: A Theme in English Fiction 1859-1914, Humanities Oress, 1980.

Pointer button Alastair Niven, D.H.Lawrence: The Writer and His Work, New York: Scribner, 1980.

Pointer button Philip Hobsbaum, A Reader’s Guide to D.H.Lawrence, Thames and Hudson, 1981.

Pointer button Kim A.Herzinger , D.H.Lawrence in His Time: 1908-1915, Bucknell University Press, 1982.

Pointer button Graham Holderness, D.H.Lawrence: History, Ideology and Fiction, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1982.

Pointer button Hilary Simpson, D.H.Lawrence and Feminism, London: Croom Helm, 1982.

Pointer button Gamini Salgado, A Preface to D.H. Lawrence, London: Longman, 1983.

Pointer button Judith Ruderman, D.H.Lawrence and the Devouring Mother, Duke University Press, 1984.

Pointer button Anthony Burgess, Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H.Lawrence, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Pointer button Sheila McLeod, Lawrence’s Men and Women, London: Heinemann, 1985.

Pointer button Henry Miller, The World of Lawrence: A Passionate Appreciation, London: Calder Publications, [1930] 1985.

Pointer button Keith Sagar, D.H.Lawrence: Life Into Art, London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Pointer button Mara Kalnins (ed), D.H. Lawrence: Centenary Essays, Bristol: Classical Press, 1986.

Pointer button Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: The Early Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 1986

Pointer button Peter Scheckner, Class, Politics, and the Individual: A Study of the Major Works of D.H.Lawrence, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.

Pointer button Cornelia Nixon, D.H.Lawrence’s Leadership Novels and the Turn Against Women, University of California Press, 1986.

Pointer button Colin Milton, Lawrence and Nietzsche: A Study in Influence, Mercat Press, 1988.

Pointer button Peter Balbert, D.H.Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Pointer button Wayne Templeton, States of Estrangement: the Novels of D.H.Lawrence 1912-17, Whiston Publishing, 1989.

Pointer button Janet Barron, D.H.Lawrence: (Feminist Readings), Prentice Hall, 1990.

Pointer button Keith Brown (ed), Rethinking Lawrence, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1990.

Pointer button James C Cowan, D.H.Lawrence and the Trembling Balance, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990.

Pointer button John B Humma, Metaphor and Meaning in D.H.Lawrence’s Later Novels, University of Missouri Press 1990.

Pointer button G M Hyde, D.H.Lawrence (Modern Novelists), London: Macmillan, 1990.

Pointer button Allan Ingram, The Language of D.H. Lawrence, London: Macmillan, 1990.

Pointer button Nancy Kushigian, Pictures and Fictions: Visual Modernism and the Pre-War Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1990.

Pointer button Tony Pinkney, Lawrence (New Readings), Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Weatsheaf, 1990.

Pointer button Leo J.Dorisach, Sexually Balanced Relationships in the Novels of D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1991.

Pointer button Nigel Kelsey, D.H.Lawrence: Sexual Crisis (Studies in 20th Century Literature), London: Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer button Barbara Mensch, D.H.Lawrence and the Authoritarian Personality, London: Macmillan, 1991.

Pointer button John Worthen, D H Lawrence (Modern Fiction), London: Arnold, 1991.

Pointer button Michael Bell, D.H.Lawrence: Language and Being, Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Michael Black, D.H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Virginia Hyde, The Risen Adam: D. H. Lawrence’s Revisionist Typology, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

Pointer button James B.Sipple, Passionate Form: life process as artistic paradigm in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1992.

Pointer button Kingsley Widmer, Defiant Desire: Some Dialectical Legacies of D.H.Lawrence, Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

Pointer button Anne Fernihough, D.H.Lawrence: Aesthetics and Ideology, Clarendon Press, 1993.

Pointer button Linda R Williams, Sex in the Head: Visions of Femininity and Film in D.H.Lawrence, Prentice Hall, 1993.

Pointer button Katherine Waltenscheid, The Resurrection of the Body: Touch in D.H.Lawrence, Peter Lang Publishing, 1993.

Pointer button Robert E.Montgomery, The Visionary D.H.Lawrence: Beyond Philosophy and Art, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Pointer button Leo Hamalian, D.H.Lawrence and Nine Women Writers, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

Pointer button Anne Fernihough, The Cambridge Companion to D.H.Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Pointer button Fiona Becket, The Complete Critical Guide to D.H.Lawrence, London: Routledge, 2002.

Pointer button James C Cowan, D.H. Lawrence: Self and Sexuality, Ohio State University Press, 2003.

Pointer button John Worthen, D.H.Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, London: Penguin, 2006.

Pointer button David Ellis (ed), D.H.Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’: A Casebook, Oxford University Press, 2006.


Other work by D.H.Lawrence

Sons and LoversSons and Lovers This is Lawrence’s first great novel. It’s a quasi-autobiographical account of a young man’s coming of age in the early years of the twentieth century. Set in working class Nottinghamshire, it focuses on class conflicts and gender issues as young Paul Morrell is torn between a passionate relationship with his mother and his attraction to other women. He also has a quasi-Oedipal conflict with his coal miner father. If you are new to Lawrence and his work, this is a good place to start.

Lawrence greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Lawrence greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US

The RainbowThe Rainbow This is Lawrence’s version of a social saga, spanning three generations of the Brangwen family. It is the women characters in this novel who remain memorable as they strive to express their feelings. The story concludes with the struggle of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, to liberate themselves from the stifling pressures of Edwardian English society. They also feature in his next and some say greatest novel, Women in Love – so it would be a good idea to read this first.

Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon UK
Alejo Carpentier greatest works Buy the book at Amazon US


D.H.Lawrence – web links

D.H.Lawrence web links D.H.Lawrence at Mantex
Biographical notes, book reviews, study guides, videos, bibliographies, critical studies, and web links.

Project Gutenberg D.H.Lawrence at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts of the novels, stories, travel writing, and poetry – available in a variety of formats.

Wikipedia D.H.Lawrence at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, publishing history, the Lady Chatterley trial, critical reputation, bibliography, archives, and web links.

Film adaptations D.H.Lawrence at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of Lawrence’s work for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production, box office, trivia, and even quizzes.

D.H.Lawrence D.H.Lawrence archive at the University of Nottingham
Biography, further reading, textual genetics, frequently asked questions, his local reputation, research centre, bibliographies, and lists of holdings.

Red button D.H.Lawrence and Eastwood
Nottinhamshire local enthusiast web site featuring biography, historical and recent photographs of the Eastwood area and places associated with Lawrence.

D.H.Lawrence The World of D.H.Lawrence
Yet another University of Nottingham web site featuring biography, interactive timeline, maps, virtual tour, photographs, and web links.

Red buttonD.H.Lawrence Heritage
Local authority style web site, with maps, educational centre, and details of lectures, visits, and forthcoming events.

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on D.H. Lawrence
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Filed Under: D.H.Lawrence Tagged With: D.H.Lawrence, Literary studies, Modernism, study guide, The novel, Women in Love

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.

Alma Mahler - The Bride of the WindThe 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.
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art The Life of Alma Mahler Buy the book at Amazon US

Peggy Guggenheim: Mistress of ModernismMistress 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.
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Peggy Guggenheim Buy the book at Amazon US

Vera: Mrs Vladimir Nabokov 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.
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Vera Nabokov Buy the book at Amazon US

Among the Bohemians 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.
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Among the Bohemians Buy the book at Amazon US

Parallel Lives 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.
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Parallel Lives Buy the book at Amazon US

Singled Out 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.
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Singled Out Buy the book at Amazon US

Uncommon ArrangementsUncommon 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.
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon UK
Women, Marriage, and Art Uncommon Arrangements Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2012


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Filed Under: Biography, Lifestyle Tagged With: Alma Mahler, Art, Biography, Bloomsbury Group, Cultural history, Literary studies, Modernism, Parallel Lives, Peggy Guggenheim, Vera Nabokov, Virginia Nicolson

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