Virginia Woolf Archives - Page 8 of 10

Virginia Woolf – The Years

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Leonard Woolf and many critics of the time considered The Years badly flawed in characterization and structure. Recent critics, however, mostly feminist, have opened up the novel in interesting ways, making virtues out of what were thought vices. Among other points, they have argued that The Years offers compelling evidence of Virginia Woolf’s courage and genius in confronting and remaking herself as a woman in a sexist world, in focusing her frustrations to expose traditional masculine myths of marriage and sex. Such criticism and the textual studies of her revisions have made the novel seem one of the more interesting and ambitious of Woolf’s books, its very ambiguities and muted anger part of its qualities. Leonard Woolf and the early male critics though it inferior to Virginia’s great modernist novels, but the average reader in 1937 had no such qualms, flocking to it with relief after the difficulties of The Waves.

In spite of his reservations about its literary virtues, Leonard anticipated its popularity and ordered over 18,000 copies of The Years for publication on March 15, 1937. Its commercial success completely overshadowed Virginia’s other novels. It sold over 13,000 copies in the first six months. In America, Harcourt Brace printed 10,000 copies for the first edition and quickly reprinted, as The Years sold over 30,000 copies in six months. It became an authentic American best-seller for 1937, ranking sixth on a list led by such heady company as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Kenneth Roberts’ Northwest Passage and outranking John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. One check alone from Harcourt Brace on January 5, 1938 total led over $5,000.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

In 1937 Virginia Woolf appeared on the cover of Time magazine: she had achieved a remarkable level of critical recognition and esteem that was now translated into more popular acclaim and fame. The initial print run of The Years was the largest of any of Woolf’s novels to that date. The focus of the novel is the passage of time as it traces the Pargiter family from 1880 up to the ‘Present Day’. The novel met with high praise. David Garnett said the book “marks her as the greatest master of English” and is “the finest novel she has ever written” (New Statesman & Nation). Subsequent critical assessments have been more mixed. The novel sold very well in England and America making its way on to American best-seller lists. Vanessa Bell’s jacket for the book features a rose surrounded by geometric patterns and is signed with her full name.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press studies

Woolf’s-head Publishing is a wonderful collection of cover designs, book jackets, and illustrations – but also a beautiful example of book production in its own right. It was produced as an exhibition catalogue and has quite rightly gone on to enjoy an independent life of its own. This book is a genuine collector’s item, and only months after its first publication it started to win awards for its design and production values. Anyone with the slightest interest in book production, graphic design, typography, or Bloomsbury will want to own a copy the minute they clap eyes on it.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: Hogarth Press, 1917-41 John Willis brings the remarkable story of Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s success as publishers to life. He generates interesting thumbnail sketches of all the Hogarth Press authors, which brings both them and the books they wrote into sharp focus. He also follows the development of many of its best-selling titles, and there’s a full account of the social and cultural development of the press. This is a scholarly work with extensive footnotes, bibliographies, and suggestions for further reading – but most of all it is a very readable study in cultural history.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – Three Guineas

October 4, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

This is the second of Virginia Woolf’s overtly feminist polemics. In it, she develops the ideas first put forward in A Room of One’s Own and launches an incisive critique of the English establishment – concentrating on its principal bases of power – the House of Lords, the military establishment, the Church, and the educational system.

“Virginia Woolf’s reading notebooks and scrapbooks [reveal] how much labour went into [her] gathering of facts: twelve volumes of notes, including three scrapbooks compiled between 1931 and 1937. In the power, anger, wit, and satire of her attack on repressive masculine institutions, Woolf chose not to write in the discourse of a traditional historian, sociologist, politician, suffragist, or guildswoman. She developed her arguments, cited her examples, digressed through provocative and unorthodox footnotes, to flail the misogyny and militarism of the patriarchal establishment with all the craft of the essayist and novelist. If she took little notice of the feminist history or the sociopolitical status of women in the 1930s as documented by Strachey and others, her book proved so welcome an offensive against enduring male sexist attitudes that her sisters in the trenches overlooked her lapses. They gleefully applauded her achievement.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Three Guineas considers women’s role in society, and more particularly, what they might do to prevent war.Woolf traces fascist elements within England’s education system and professions, highlighting monetary and material inequities of class and gender. She argues that “the public and the private worlds are insperably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other”.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

Hogarth Press studies

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

October 5, 2009 by Roy Johnson

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Advance sales totaled over 1,600 copies, more than twice the number for Mrs Dalloway. Virginia’s mood at the time expressed itself in her gaily ironic joke with Vita Sackville-West. When Vita returned from her second trip to Persia, she found a copy of To the Lighthouse waiting for her, inscribed by Virginia, “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written”. It was a bound dummy copy, with blank pages. Leonard Woolf, anticipating both an artistic and a commercial success for To the Lighthouse, ordered 3,000 copies printed by R. & R. Clark (a thousand more than Mrs Dalloway) and quickly ordered another 1,000 copies in a second impression. The novel outsold her previous fiction. The American publisher of Hogarth Press books, Harcourt Brace, printed 4,000 copies initially (almost twice the number of copies for Mrs Dalloway). American readers had begun to take notice of Woolf’s novels.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

Hogarth Press studies

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Virginia Woolf a critical memoir

June 27, 2009 by Roy Johnson

critical study – plus personal memoir

Virginia Woolf A Critical Memoir was the first extended study of Virginia Woolf’s work to be written in English. It appeared in 1936, whilst Woolf was still alive, shortly after the publication of her last major work, The Waves. The author Winifred Holtby was herself a novelist (best known for South Riding) a journalist, a radical feminist, and lifelong friend of Vera Britten, who wrote about their relationship in Testament of Friendship.

Holtby takes what at the time was a fairly conventional approach to literary criticism, which was to read what was known of the author’s biography into the fiction as a way of explaining it. Thus the parent figures in both The Voyage Out and To the Lighthouse are assumed to be portraits of Woolf’s own mother and father; and the recurrence of sea imagery in her work is seen as simply a reflection of her childhood holidays in Cornwall. There’s a certain amount of truth in this approach, but fortunately it does not hinder her exploration of deeper issues.

In fact the surprising thing – which makes this study so readable – is that Holtby had already identified all Woolf’s main themes and innovations, even though she was writing at the same time as some of the work was still appearing.

She discusses the main works – summarising the story, commenting on ‘well-rounded’ characters, and identifying the ‘moments of being’ for which Woolf is now famous. She also relies on huge chunks of quotations from the text, and is often so carried away with enthusiasm that her own commentary blends into Woolf’s narratives in a way which sometimes makes it difficult to see where one ends and the other begins.

Night and Day is seen in comparison with Jane Austen and judged to be the lesser for it – but for reasons which Holtby sees as political. She rightly identifies the short experimental fictions A Haunted House, Monday or Tuesday, and A String Quartet as works marking a major breakthrough in Woolf’s technique, and she offers a stunningly insightful reading of this transition.

It’s occasionally surprising to remember that she had met Virginia Woolf, and was writing at a time when both of them were commercially successful authors. Holtby’s prose style is eloquent and fluid, and she becomes almost rhapsodic when describing Woolf’s achievement as a literary critic:

She has, moreover, an almost perfect taste. Few critics have ever been more alert to detect humbug, the spurious, the second rate; few have been more generously and freely appreciative of real merit, even if it appears under strange disguises. Taste for her is a natural gift, never blunted by the adolescent ignorance, the commercial pressure, the confusion of aim and distractions of fashion, to which so many critical judgements are subjected.

She deals with Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse in the same chapter, largely it seems on the grounds that they deal with the issue of Time in complementary ways.

She ends, fortunately for us, with The Waves, for not long after having written it Winifred Holtby died at the age of only thirty-seven. This is a remarkable book for its time, and still eminently readable now – seventy years after it first appeared.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.206, ISBN 0826494439

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

Virginia Woolf a writer’s life

November 7, 2009 by Roy Johnson

a biography as seen through her major works

What does this biography have that the many others don’t? Well, Lyndall Gordon claims that Virginia Woolf a writer’s life was written to counteract the prevailing orthodoxy of Virginia Woolf being depicted as a tormented and unhappy artist – just as she was by Nicole Kidman in The Hours. What Gordon wants to offer as an alternative is a portrait of a sensitive young woman who was provoked into ‘madness’ on three occasions, lived a happily married life, and when she was on top form converted her life experiences into works of experimental fiction.

The book also has substantial portraits of the other people who were important in her life – her father, Leslie Stephen, her mother Julia Duckworth, and her sister Vanessa Bell. Lyndall Gordon makes no bones about blending factual documentary evidence with fictional constructions, and talking about To the Lighthouse as if it were Woolf’s account of her parents rather than a fictional construct loosely based upon them. And she takes the novels in any order, to suit her purpose.

This haphazard approach is quite deliberate and conscious. She defends it as a fresh method: “The way she [VW] experienced life does not accord with the usual kind of linear chronology”. But it is indulged to such an extent that long passages of what purports to be a biographical study are no more than critical commentaries on To the Lighthouse and The Voyage Out after the manner of an undergraduate study guide. This approach reaches its nadir when her reading of The Waves as portraits of Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and so on lasts for an uninterrupted fifty-two pages, stretching over two chapters.

She focuses strongly on the issue of Woolf’s early mental illness – much of it ascribed to the loss of her mother, and she makes hardly any mention of her attachment to mother-substitutes such as Violet Dickenson.

The lack of chronological rigour and logic has important consequences. In discussing her ‘madness’ for instance, the years 1904, 1915, and 1941 are singled out as the worst – with no cognizance of the fact that they also represent the start of her career as a writer, the date of her first published novel, and the end of her career, when she was writing in the full possession of all her creative powers.

As a writer of literary biographies, Lyndall Gordon is keen to promote the notion that Woolf had similar motivations. She wonders why she is not recognised as a biographer, but looks down her nose at Orlando and Flush, and regards Roger Fry a ‘dutiful’ work – when in fact it is one of the weakest and most superficial of all Woolf’s writing.

Her attitude to Woolf’s intimate life is a combination of coyness and naivety. She skates over the sapphism and imagines that life with Leonard was very romantic, ignoring the fact that she only agreed to marry him in the first place on the understanding that she found him physically repulsive. Yet her account of their early years makes it read as if the sexual content was that of an X-rated B-movie.

When the external evidence piles up to prove that this was not the case, where does she turn for evidence to examine the case further? Well, the fiction of course. So instead of looking at the fairly well documented facts, she presents instead several pages of commentary on Leonard Woolf’s novel The Wise Virgins.

She also shares the naive views expressed by Leonard regarding the randomness of sexual desire – unable to explain why one might be enamoured of a love object whose social and intellectual qualities seem undistinguished. And she doesn’t want to countenance either Vita Sackville-West or the Orlando which was the true consummation of that relationship.

For one thing she can be commended. She has obviously read all the extant drafts of the novels, and offers a reading of them which comments on the changes, deletions, and shifts of emphasis as Woolf worked towards her final versions.

But apart from writing Three Guineas, you would not have a clue about the events of her life in the 1930s – apart from the absurd claim that she was more romantically in love with Leonard than ever.

So, for whom will this book be of any use? Well, it can be ignored as a conventional biography – because you will learn so little about Woolf’s life from it. But it does have critical analyses of her major writings, so it might be helpful to undergraduates or general readers trying to come to terms with some of the highpoints of literary modernism.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Lyndall Gordon, Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, London: Virago, rev edn 2006, pp.431, ISBN 1844081427

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

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.

So 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.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

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

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

Virginia Woolf an MFS reader

August 26, 2009 by Roy Johnson

academic essays on Woolf and her major novels

For those who may not know, MFS is not some sort of DIY building material, but Modern Fiction Studies, a prestigious academic journal, and Virginia Woolf an MFS reader is a compilation of essays on Virginia Woolf drawn from its archives going back over the last half century of its publication. The chapters are arranged in three thematic sections, each arranged chronologically according to the text under consideration.

It’s a book written by university teachers, designed to be read and (they hope) quoted by other teachers in the books that they write as part of seeking career promotion. That’s the nature of academic life today. In some instances it produces valuable results: for the main part it results in worthless dross. This system is the root of both the main strength and the weakness of this book.

Brenda Silvers’ introductory essay huffs and puffs about the adoption of Virginia Woolf into popular culture – but it’s mainly hot under the collar about Edward Albee’s play (Who’s Afraid..) and its possibly disguised gay theme. She also goes in for some quite bogus generalizing on the interpretation of photographs:

Woolf’s photographs [she means photographs of Woolf] in general … prove frightening to their viewers.

That will be news to the many people who buy and admire her portrait wherever it is on sale.

Susan Friedman offers an account of The Voyage Out which sees Rachel Vinrace as an example of Woolf’s ‘Common Reader’ – someone unprejudiced by formal academic experience and unburdened by the authority of criticism. This is quite a useful way of matching Wool’s theory with her fiction.

Charles Hoffmann traces the development of Mrs Dalloway from a short story (Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street) to a full length novel following the connections between notebooks, manuscripts, and drafts which are scattered in various collections on both sides of the Atlantic. This is an approach to literary scholarship which has the advantage of being unencumbered by lots of ‘theory’ and is rooted in the practicality of literary texts.

Tammy Clewell has a thoughtful piece on death, mourning, and grief in Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway. This argues with persuasive supporting evidence that Woolf was promoting more radical views on these topics than is commonly supposed. She does not want her readers to relax any opposition to the barbarous mass slaughter behind every war memorial and slogans such as ‘their names shall live forever’:

In relation to these postwar forms of memorialization, Jacob’s Room stands out precisely for what it withholds: the text offers no faith in religious immortality, no applause for individual heroism, no celebration of male comradery, no stoical acceptance of fate, no aesthetic smoothing over of the war’s human cost of any kind.

The best-written essay in the collection (and unsurprisingly the most frequently quoted by others) is Karen deMeester’s on ‘Trauma and Recovery in Mrs Dalloway‘. This argues that Woolf gives accurate expression to the condition of psychological trauma – particularly of course in the case of Septimus Warren Smith, who has seen through the horrors upon which his society is based. But even more bravely, deMeester argues that Clarissa Dalloway is a social coward, because although she sees the same truths as Septimus, she chooses to re-unite with the world which has caused the horrors in the first place. As Peter Walsh says of her:

she frittered her time away, lunching, dining, giving these incessant parties of hers, talking nonsense, saying things she didn’t mean, blunting the edge of her mind, losing her discrimination

It’s not often one sees Peter Walsh (a lightweight figure) quoted with such approval. But he has a point – and so does deMeester.

Urmila Seehagiri desperately wants to offer a racial and post-colonial reading of Woolf’s work, and she digs and digs, hoping to come up with some suitable material. To the Lighthouse yields the fact that Lily Briscoe has ‘little Chinese eyes’; Woolf took part in the Dreadnought Hoax and attended the Ballets Russes. No distinction is made between fictional and biographical evidence. When To the Lighthouse is addressed in detail, broken teacups are the signal for an extended account of the history of the tea trade with India and China. Then, via a detour into the theories of art held by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, she concludes that Lily Briscoe’s ‘little Chinese eyes’

attain the ‘ultra-primitive directness of vision’ that Fry attributes to East Asian cultures, and her arrangement of forms is liberating because it is autotelic. Privileging the completion of Lily’s painting over mending broken familial structures, Woolf creates a racially differentiated model for modern English subjectivity that holds itself separate from patriarchal and imperialist hierarchies.

Many of the other essays suffer from this very dubious critical method. A single word or short phrase is seized upon; a tenuous connection with another text (fiction, biography, or theory) is made; and a literary critic’s comment upon some apparently similar phenomenon is noted. The flaw is that a logical and positive connection between the starting and finishing point is taken for granted without any critical examination or supporting evidence. The connections between these elements are at best loose, and more often mere fugitive verbal associations.

And that, I’m afraid, is the state of literary criticism in the university today. Some good solid textual scholarship, holding out against a tide of convoluted windbaggery masquerading as ‘critical theory’. Can you understand the last quote above?

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Maren Linnet, Virginia Woolf: An MFS Reader, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, pp.443, ISBN 0801891183

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

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.

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’.

In 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.

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

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

Virginia Woolf and the Arts

August 1, 2010 by Roy Johnson

essays in literary, media, and cultural studies

As editor Maggie Humm points out in her introduction to this huge collection of scholarly studies on Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Woolf spent her entire life surrounded by creative people of all kinds. Her father was an internationally renowned writer (on belle lettres and moutaineering), her sister was a painter, and her friend Roger Fry both a critic and an artist. Virginia Woolf visited contemporary exhibitions, travelled to museums abroad, and participated in aesthetic debates via her prolific output of essays and journalism.

The essays are grouped under headings of Aesthetic Theory, Painting, Domestic Arts, Publishing, Broadcasting and Technology, Visual Media, and Performance Arts. At their best they illuminate the fact that Virginia Woolf had original opinions and novel forms of expressing them on a variety of subjects, ranging from human behaviour to painting, urban and domestic life, social history, and the relationship between memory, consciousness, and time.

They cover topics such as Woolf’s depiction of aesthetic creation via painting (To the Lighthouse), Woolf and race [without touching on her anti-Semitism], Woolf and the metropolitan city, and Woolf and realism. Each essay is self-contained, with its own set of endnotes and bibliography of further reading.

At their worst (particularly those dealing with aesthetics and literary theory) they are little more than overblown meditations, dragging apparent meanings out of words (more/Moor/moor) where quite clearly none were intended – like schoolboy puns. They also indulge in settling of scores with other ‘critics’, rather than focusing on authentic literary criticism.

Fortunately, the collection improves as it progresses. The most interesting and effective essays are the least pretentious and the least to do with modern literary criticism in all its silliness. For instance Diane Gillespie on ‘Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, and Painting’ and Benjamin Harvey on Woolf’s visits to art galleries and museums.

Though even amongst the sensible essays there are disappointments. A chapter on ‘Bohemian Lifestyles’ is not much more than a description of Woolf’s relationships with her sister Vanessa, Vita Sackville-West, and Katherine Mansfield. It doesn’t explore any truly radical behaviour – such as Vanessa’s ability to live comfortably alongside her ex-husband and his lover, her own ex-lover and his current (gay) lover, and to conceal from her own daughter the true identity of her father for almost twenty years.

But there are plenty of good chapters – one on ‘Virginia Woolf and Entertaining’, another on Woolf’s sesitivity to gardens, and an especially interesting study of ‘Virginia Woolf as Publisher and Editor’ which spills over quite creatively into the Hogarth Press promotion of Russian Literature.

This leads logically enough into a chapter on ‘Virginia Woolf and Book Design’ which is like a shortened version of John Willis’s full length study Leonard and Viginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941. Patrick Collier has a good chapter on Woolf and journalism, which I wish had included consideration of her early reviews for the Manchester Guardian and The Times Literary Supplement in the period 1904-1915.

Pamela Caughie also has an interesting chapter on Virginia Woolf and radio broadcasting that cleverly points out the contradictions in Woolf’s attitude to the BBC – keen to embrace the new technology it offered in the 1920s, but perceptive enough to realise that its early Reithean paternalism was hopelessly middlebrow – a view she shared with her husband Leonard, who put his finger on an attitude which is still prevelent today:

That the BBC should be so reactionary and politically and intellectually dishonest is what one would expect … knowing the kind of people who always get in control of those kind of machines, but what makes them so contemptible is that, even according to their own servants’ hall standards, they habitually choose the tenth rate in everything, from their music hall programmes and social lickspittlers and royal bumsuckers right down their scale to the singers of Schubert songs, the conductors of their classical concerts and the writers of their reviews.

The essays at the latter end of the collection remind us just how au courant Virginia Woolf was with contemporary technology. She took photographs, broadcasted on the radio, and wrote about London’s underground, the telephone, the cinema, and even flying (without having done so). The irony here is that the critics explaining her avant-garde behaviour and interests are themselves locked into a mode that is terminally old-fashioned (the academic essay) almost to the point of being moribund.

This is a huge and very impressive production, but one thing struck me about it – apart from its equally huge cost. Many of the essays take a long time to make a simple point. They circle around the object of enquiry with endless qualifications and even self-refutations, all made in the spirit of ‘interrogating’ their subject. It’s as if we are being offered ‘thinking aloud’ instead of considered arguments and conclusions. Having said that, the audience at which this Woolf-fest is aimed (lecturers and post-graduates) will not want to miss out on a collection that does include studies that link Woolf to many other forms of culture beyond literature alone.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Maggie Humm (ed), The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.512, ISBN: 0748635521

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

Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language

July 27, 2010 by Roy Johnson

Woolf as essayist, feminist, and anti-militarist

The Virgina Woolf industry continues at full capacity on both sides of the Atlantic, and this slim monograph Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language comes to us from the University of Pennsylvania, courtesy of Edinburgh University Press. Using the link between Virginia Woolf and Montaigne as essayists for her springboard, Judith Allen uses it as an excuse to write about contemporary political concerns, ranging from ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘collateral damage’, to ‘Abu Ghraib’ and anything else on the spectrum of abuses which have been the subject of lies, propaganda and deception by the press and the political class. One applauds the political sentiments of course, but one often searches in vain for a connection with Virginia Woolf.

Her basic argument is that the essay is an exploration of a topic or an idea, and because it looks at issues from a variety of perspectives, it is the enemy of totalising theories and systems. That seems quite reasonable, and it is true that both Woolf and Montaigne use the essay forms as a means of opening up and exploring ideas, comparing one thing with another, and discovering unexpected links between the past and the present.

The only other coherent argument that emerges is that Virginia Woolf uses images and metaphors of growth, change, flux, and mutability in her work – which Allen assumes are feminine strategies of writing, deliberately designed to challenge a masculine attempt to establish stasis, fixity, and permanence. This too might be a persuasive argument if it were supported by more in the way of evidence.

The problem is that her presentation suffers from some of the common weaknesses of academic writing produced to gain status or tenure – over-reliance on quotations from other fashionable academic writers, raising questions that masquerade as insights, and excessive signposting (‘this chapter wil look at …’). No sooner is a proposition launched than it is called cautiously into question. This is offered as a critical dialectic when it is not much more than a form of thinking aloud. There is also the bizarre practice of signposting the intention to consider a topic which is already under consideration. This represents a failure to control structure for which even an undergraduate essay would be marked down. She is also not averse to self-congratulatory asides:

Although no one has made any direct link between Bakhtin and Montaigne’s writings, Bakhtin’s dissertation on Rabelais, one of Montaigne’s contemporaries, entitled Rabelais and the World, quotes several of Montaigne’s essays, and my examination of their ideas regarding the relationship between reader and writer is quite illuminating

The discussion ranges from one essay to another, from essay to novel, from one critic to another critic’s view of the first and back again. The critics engaged to support her arguments are what might be called the usual suspects – Bakhtin, Deleuze, and Guattari. And the whole production has about it the spirit of a composition with one primary motivating factor – the quest for academic promotion. In terms of its style, nothing could be further from the clarity, simplicity, and authenticity of the writers she is discussing – Woolf and Montaigne.

A whole chapter is devoted to the fact that Woolf often changed the titles of her works, with accompanying large claims made for the significance of this practice – ignoring the fact that many writers do the same thing.

Judith Allen also has a curious habit of referring to the ‘narrators’ of Woolf’s essays, when there is in fact little or no evidence to support the notion of a fictional construct. The essays come to us quite simply as the thoughts and writing of Woolf herself. Her opinions are often offered in a playful, oblique, and metaphoric manner – but that’s her style: there is no constructed intermediary delivering her opinions.

The last parts of the book are largely devoted to a critique of US and UK policy in the war on Iraq. However much one might share her sentiments on this barbaric, illegal, and counter-productive invasion, they tell us nothing about Virginia Woolf except that she was a vehement critic of imperialism and also a pacifist – something I think we already knew.

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Judith Allen, Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Language, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, pp.133, ISBN: 0748636757

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

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

Hogarth Press first edition book jacket designs

Hogarth Press studies

critical study – plus personal memoir

a biography as seen through her major works

a sketch of her life – an appreciation of the novels

academic essays on Woolf and her major novels

the development of literary and visual modernism

essays in literary, media, and cultural studies

Woolf as essayist, feminist, and anti-militarist

Get in touch