All posts in category Essays

In summer 1940 P.G. Wodehouse was living at his house in Le Touquet on the French coast when the Germans launched their lightning attack on France. In May he was captured by German forces and then sent to a series of internment camps – at Lille, Liege and then to Tost in Upper Silesia. In total he spend just over a year in captivity. Then, to his own surprise, in June 1941 he was transferred to the Adlon Hotel in Berlin and invited to make radio broadcasts for the Nazis. You can read a really detailed account here:

PG Wodehouse: Second World War: internment and broadcasts (Wikipedia)

Wodehouse recorded five broadcasts, starting on 28 June 1941. They gave a light-hearted account of his own experiences, along with humorous opinions on the war and politics. The quotes from the broadcasts I’ve read are very funny in the typically light-hearted Wodehouse manner:

Young men, starting out in life, have often asked me, ‘How do I become an Internee?’ Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa and the Germans do the rest.

Outcry in Britain

In Britain the broadcasts were seized on as embarrassing and damaging, causing uproar in Parliament and the press. Critics accused Wodehouse of allowing the Germans to score propaganda points, of giving the impression the regime was far more relaxed and tolerant than it really was. When he casually remarked that ‘whoever wins the war’ he seemed to be implying that Britain could lose and so was accused of defeatism. Soon afterwards it was learned that Wodehouse was then released from internment giving the impression that he had done a deal, ‘betraying his country’ for his liberty, opening himself to accusations of being ‘a traitor, collaborator, Nazi propagandist, and a coward’. Leading figures in the press and politics led a campaign to excoriate his name. Libraries withdrew his books and the BBC banned his work.

Orwell’s Defence

First of all, Orwell’s defence was written after the war had ended, which is to say after years of slaughter (particularly on the Eastern Front), and after the full horror of the Holocaust and the atom bomb had been revealed.

Next: for me, the key fact about the essay, the reason it’s lasted as a piece of writing, is that it combines two distinct elements. Orwell was not only a political analyst of rare insight and intelligence; he was also himself an imaginative writer, with four published novels behind him and was in the process of writing two of the greatest political novels of the century, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

With the result that his essay is not just an exoneration of Wodehouse’s actions but combines shrewd literary insights into the nature and appeal of his works, plus an insightful explanation analysis of the wider political context of both the original broadcasts, and then of the press hysteria which was whipped up about them.

Orwell’s interpretation of Wodehouse’s motivation

Apolitical Orwell follows the opinion of those who interviewed him before and after the broadcasts, that Wodehouse didn’t have a political bone in his body. He was completely unpolitical and didn’t understand the political, geopolitical, diplomatic and wartime consequences of his broadcasts. He was an entertainer. He wrote musicals and plays and stories to entertain his audience. Later, Wodehouse explained that he’d received hundreds of letters from American fans worried about his wellbeing. His motivation was to address his American fans, reassure them that he was OK and, as Orwell puts it, ever the entertainer, get a laugh in the process.

America not at war with Germany It’s also important to remember that when Wodehouse made the broadcasts, America was not yet at war with Germany – that would come in December 1941 – so when Wodehouse made his broadcasts to America, plenty of other American journalists were doing just the same. The difference was that they were the Berlin correspondents for CBS etc and so were doing it via their own stations, whereas Wodehouse was doing it via Nazi radio. This was the distinction he just didn’t grasp at the time because he thought any opportunity to greet his American fans, reassure them and, as ever, turn his (internment) experiences into light-hearted comedy, was a jolly good thing.

Wodehouse thought himself American And another element is that Wodehouse regarded himself as American. He had this funny schizophrenia. Despite being a British subject, sent to a solid English public school and all the rest of is, Wodehouse had actually spent a lot of time in America from the period of the Great War onwards, in New York trying to break into musical theatre (with some success) and then in Hollywood, trying to break into the movies. In an interview given at exactly this time with Harry Flannery of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Flannery tells us that Wodehouse seemed to regard himself as an American citizen. He had contemplated naturalisation (as a US citizen) but never got round to filling in the necessary papers. In conversation, according to Flannery, he even used the phrase, ‘We’re not at war with Germany’, by ‘we’ meaning we Americans.

His American affiliation always comes as a surprise to anyone who’s only read Wodehouse’s work and is not familiar with his biography. Indeed, once the war was over, he settled in the States where he lived for the next 30 years and never returned to England.

The Nazis’ propaganda aim

Orwell points out the timing of the broadcasts which was crucial, although nobody in the wider world realised it at the time. This was because it was right on the brink of Germany’s huge invasion of Soviet Russia. I can’t put it better than Orwell himself:

Wodehouse was released two or three days before the invasion of the U.S.S.R., and at a time when the higher ranks of the Nazi party must have known that the invasion was imminent. It was vitally necessary to keep America out of the war as long as possible, and in fact, about this time, the German attitude towards the U.S.A. did become more conciliatory than it had been before. The Germans could hardly hope to defeat Russia, Britain and the U.S.A. in combination, but if they could polish off Russia quickly — and presumably they expected to do so — the Americans might never intervene. The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the Germans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously. That presumably was the calculation, though the fact that Wodehouse was only broadcasting for about a week suggests that he did not come up to expectations.

So Wodehouse was allowed, indeed encouraged, to broadcast to America, at a strategically vital moment. But Orwell thinks the Nazis’ motivation for doing this was mistaken, and based on a misreading of Wodehouse’s works.

The Nazis’ misunderstanding of Wodehouse

Orwell argues that to those outside the world of Wodehouse fandom, to those with only a superficial knowledge of his works, they seem on the face of it to mock and ridicule, to satirise and therefore undermine, the English aristocracy. Bertie Wooster is just the most notable of his gallery of upper-class twits, which stretches out to include the other members of the notorious Drones Club, as well as the extremely dim Lord Emsworth, his dimwit son Freddie, and a raft of other comic caricatures.

Orwell suggests that the Nazis made the mistake that other foreign readers of Wodehouse frequently do, of thinking all this amounted to blistering satire and critique. And so they, the Nazis, mistakenly thought that encouraging Wodehouse to broadcast to America would play to the very large constituency in US culture which despised Britain and its tottering empire. It would remind those groups of anti-Brits just why they despised Britain with its hoity-toity class system, led by feeble aristocrats like Neville Chamberlain, and so give them ammunition to keep America out of Britain’s war.

But, Orwell, argues, this interpretation of Wodehouse’s works is hopelessly wrong. Wodehouse’s satire of the English upper classes derives from love and affection for them, the same soft-headed affection shown by his countless fans, not least because (second point) they are a kind of dream or fantasy. Wodehouse’s works never had anything to do with real life.

Orwell’s interpretation of Wodehouse’s worldview

To explain this in more detail, Orwell’s essay takes a major detour into an analysis of Wodehouse’s work, in which he identifies a number of key strands:

1. Wodehouse was not a critic of the upper class

Wodehouse was not anti-British or anti-upper class. Orwell cites an Indian nationalist who made this mistake, and thinks the Nazis made the same one. Because:

Wodehouse’s attitude towards the English social system is the same as his attitude towards the public-school moral code — a mild facetiousness covering an unthinking acceptance.

The Earl of Emsworth is funny because an earl ought to have more dignity, and Bertie Wooster’s helpless dependence on Jeeves is funny partly because the servant ought not to be superior to the master.

An American reader can mistake these two, and others like them, for hostile caricatures, because he is inclined to be Anglophobe already and they correspond to his preconceived ideas about a decadent aristocracy.

2. Wodehouse not satirical enough

This is all the clearer to Orwell, because of his genuine left-wing views. From Orwell’s progressive point of view, the thing about Wodehouse is he is nothing like satirical enough.

Wodehouse’s real sin has been to present the English upper classes as much nicer people than they are. All through his books certain problems are constantly avoided. Almost without exception his moneyed young men are unassuming, good mixers, not avaricious.

In other words, Wodehouse’s upper class characters are nowhere as grasping, greedy, scheming, as reactionary and prepared to use violence, to call in the police and army to preserve their privileges, as the actual British ruling class very obviously was.

3. Wodehouse’s datedness

Wodehouse’s subject matter and style were fixed much earlier than people think. People associate him with the bright young things of the 1920s and ’30s but his characters were actually first invented during the Great War, and don’t reflect the young people of the Jazz Age so much as the knuts, the beaux and the macaronis of the late Edwardian era. They were old-fashioned and nostalgic from the start. Bertie Wooster makes his first appearance in a short story in 1915. Lord Emsworth and the idyllic world of Blandings Castle, also first appeared in 1915. What may be my favourite Wodehouse character, Psmith, first appeared in 1908!

Obviously over the following years, the characters are smoothed out and rounded and Wodehouse became more adept at handling a novel-length plot, but the characters and their essence were defined long before the Great War ended, and in a world before the arrival of the Jazz Age.

Superficially, in lots of details – like fast cars, the telephone, cocktails, the Modern Girl and so on – Wodehouse nods to the accessories of the 1920s and ’30s. But precisely what his fans love about his works is their sense of timelessness, agelessness, evoking a paradisiacal world of childish innocence and silliness.

His picture of English society had been formed before 1914, and it was a naЇve, traditional and, at bottom, admiring picture… In his radio interview with Flannery, Wodehouse wondered whether ‘the kind of people and the kind of England I write about will live after the war,’ not realising that they were ghosts already.

‘He was still living in the period about which he wrote,’ says Flannery, meaning, probably, the nineteen-twenties. But the period was really the Edwardian age, and Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915.

Wodehouse’s world feels so prelapsarian because it is essentially as if the Great War and all the horrors which followed from it (anarchy across Europe, revolution in Russia and its threat elsewhere, the rise of fascism) had never happened. He mentions some of these things in his stories but they’re not real, they have no impact on the hermetically sealed world of his fictions.

4. Orwell dismisses Wodehouse’s ‘Fascist tendencies’

Some of Wodehouse’s critics in Britain used the controversy to go hunting through his fictions in search of ‘fascist tendencies’. Orwell thinks this is ludicrous. First because there are none, and second because there are no political tendencies of any kind in Wodehouse’s works precisely because, as explained above, they don’t exist in the real world.

It is nonsense to talk of ‘Fascist tendencies’ in his books. There are no post-1918 tendencies at all.

Wodehouse didn’t realise how Britain had changed by 1941

I’ve mentioned the importance of the date in connection with the German invasion of Russia. But there was also a domestic, UK-based aspect to the broadcasts’ timing, which Orwell brings out and which is very interesting to anyone interested in the history of the period. This is that the mood of the nation, of Britain, changed drastically, between the date of Wodehouses’s arrest (June 1940) and the date of the notorious broadcasts (June 1941).

When Wodehouse went into internment, we were still in the phoney war. After Germany’s invasion of Poland, there was a long lull in hostilities. Popular feeling about the ‘war’ was very half-hearted. There was hardly any fighting, the Chamberlain Government was unpopular, eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Wodehouse took that mindset, that the war was still a bit of a joke, into captivity.

It was only after he was locked up that things began to get serious. He would only have heard garbled accounts of the panic-stricken evacuation of Dunkirk (May 26 to June 4 1940) and nothing about what followed, namely the Battle of Britain (July 10 to October 31 1940) and then the Blitz (7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941). Suddenly the war became intense and real as Brits started to die and our country was faced with the real threat of invasion and then tyranny under the Nazis. After the fall of France the Battle of the Atlantic intensified as German submarines were able to use bases all along the French coast to sink merchant ships in an attempt to starve Britain into submission. Winston Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister in May 1940s but it was only later that year that he started to give the famous speeches designed to rally a nation which was now really under siege and serious threat of defeat. The war became immensely real to every citizen and a matter of real life and death.

All this Wodehouse, insulated in a succession of internment camps, completely missed. Which helps explain why his references to the war in the broadcasts retained the half-hearted, jokey tone of the phone war.

Thus Wodehouse was a man out of time in two distinct senses: 1) stuck in an Edwardian world of toffs and valets, he had never been a part of the modern world; and 2) he was still stuck in the light-hearted mindset of the phoney war. No wonder his broadcasts to Americans making light of the whole thing triggered such outrage in British listeners who were suffering under rationing, were dying in mass bomber raids, whose husbands and sons were being sunk in British ships on the high seas. How dare he treat the whole thing as a joke?

Class war

Finally, Orwell makes another political point, a point about class inequality and political power in wartime Britain. Orwell suggests that the furore stirred up around Wodehouse was very convenient for the powers that be because it distracted attention from their own, far worse, sins.

For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and ‘Cassandra’s’ articles in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time.

In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse — as ‘Cassandra’ vigorously pointed out in his broadcast — was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society.

To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook [owner of the right-wing Daily Express]. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not of the possessing class. Even if his income touches £350,000 a year he has only the outward semblance of a millionaire. He is a lucky outsider who has fluked into a fortune — usually a very temporary fortune — like the winner of the Calcutta Derby Sweep. Consequently, Wodehouse’s indiscretion gave a good propaganda opening. It was a chance to ‘expose’ a wealthy parasite without drawing attention to any of the parasites who really mattered.

Plenty of rich, powerful and influential people had actively supported Hitler and the Nazis in a far more flagrant and treacherous manner than Wodehouse ever did. So they were more than happy to use their influence and their outlets (such as the press) to distract attention from their own scandalous record and bring the nation’s wrath down on the head of this poor naive sap who only ever intended to amuse his audience.

7. Orwell’s conclusion

Orwell concludes that:

yes, the broadcasts were a mistake
yes, they caused immense offence in Britain
yes, they were seen as undermining the all-important morale and social cohesion of a nation fighting for its life
but Wodehouse was a political innocent who simply didn’t grasp the content or implication of what he was doing
and so he should not be judged as though he were a conscious and deliberate political actor or propagandist

Wodehouse’s mistake was one of naivety and lack of political awareness rather than ‘betrayal’. The intense hostility against him was driven more by wartime propaganda needs and class resentment than by genuine evidence of treason.

My conclusion about Wodehouse

Based on my own recent reading of Wodehouse, I totally buy Orwell’s interpretation. Plus it was a long time ago and nobody cares now.

My conclusion about Orwell

Isn’t it an awesome essay? It’s just packed with ideas. These days, although I read political journals (the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Conversation, the Atlantic) I rarely actually read the articles but just skim them in order to get to the amusingly caustic comments – and this is because so many modern articles, if you actually read them, so often stretch half an idea or insight out for 1,000 or 1,500 words, padded out with quotes and truisms, and leaving you wondering why you bothered.

Whereas this brief essay, just 4,100 words long, is absolutely packed with insights, wisdom and common sense. What an amazing mind, and what a clear, fluent and compelling writer Orwell turned himself into.

Related reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on December 22, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Politics

Posted by Simon on December 22, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/12/22/in-defence-of-p-g-wodehouse-george-orwell/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 4. Looking On

‘… to give up this arduous game… of assembling things that lie on the surface…’
(Woolf describing the effort required to hold her mind together, in ‘Flying over London’, page 211)

‘Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it.’

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of her essays, reviews and articles and groups them under four headings:

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I broke my review of the book up into multiple blog posts. This post summarises and comments on the ten essays contained in the fourth and final section of the selection, titled ‘Looking On’. Unlike the essays in the previous sections, which closely addressed the relevant topic heading, the volume’s editor, David Bradshaw, has deliberately chosen these ones to be more diverse in subject matter and approach. The essays are:

Thunder at Wembley (1924) [the British Empire exhibition at Wembley]
The Cinema (1926)
Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927) [a walk from her home at Hyde Park Gate to the Strand one winter evening as night was falling]
The Sun and The Fish (1928) [a solar eclipse and visit to London Aquarium]
The Docks of London (1931)
Oxford Street Tide (1932)
Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942)
Flying Over London [an imagined flight in a small plane over London]
Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936)
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940)

I keep reading references to Woolf being an ‘intellectual’ which astonishes me because she hardly anywhere mounts clear, sustained arguments, with reasons and evidence to support her. Even when she is making a point – as in her essays criticising the Edwardian novelists and promoting her new version of literature, or discussing what a feminist literature might be like – what her essays are far more noticeable for their slow beginnings, their whimsical digressions, her easy distraction by the surface of things, objects and phrases, by her indirections and odd approaches, which sometimes barely make sense.

This is more than usually true of these ten descriptive and impressionistic pieces.

If there’s one common theme or thread linking all of them, and maybe all her writing as a whole, I think it’s her mental illness. In Street Haunting, Sun and Fish and Evening over Sussex she describes having multiple ‘selves’, which initially sounds cool and post-modernist but, I think, was an aspect of her mental illness.

You particularly feel the struggle it involved when she talks about the need to marshal all these selves back together, to create a unified personality to face society with. This isn’t a criticism, it’s the opposite: it’s sympathy. Both my kids have mental health issues and I struggle sometimes. Maybe that’s why I’m making too much of it as an issue…

Anyway, my interpretation is that her obsessive listing of everything she sees, on all her walks and travels, her distraction by endless streams of shiny details, was both a symptom of her problems but also a way of coping with them. When the inner world gets cluttered with multiple selves all shouting at you, you take refuge in the ever-changing world outside you to try and regain, and hang onto, some calm, something outside yourself. I take this to be the message made explicit in ‘Street Haunting’ and lurking, implicitly, beneath all the other pieces; maybe, beneath her whole oeuvre.

1. Thunder at Wembley (1924: 3 pages)

A brisk description of attending the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley. It has an odd tone. She mocks the organisers for not making the vast concrete edifice which enclosed the exhibition, sealed off from the sky, for making the error of letting nature intrude here and there: a few trees, some birds. But the real feeling that comes over is Woolf’s lofty snobbish view of the crowds who are attending it. The words vulgar and mediocrity recur. She ironically comments that the exhibition would have been much better if the organisers had only kept all the people out. In the last paragraph she becomes delirious and has a vision of the end of the world.

The sky is livid, lurid, sulphurine. It is in violent commotion. It is whirling water-spouts of cloud into the air; of dust in the Exhibition. Dust swirls down the avenues, hisses and hurries like erected cobras round the corners. Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. From every quarter human beings come flying—clergymen, school children, invalids in bath-chairs. They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither confusion nor dismay. Humanity is rushing to destruction, but humanity is accepting its doom.

What?

The Cinema (1926: 5 pages)

It starts out in the typically frivolous and gaseous style which makes Woolf’s essays such a trial to read.

No great distance separates [we moderns] from those bright-eyed naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart. The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up and seems about to haul itself out of chaos.

Woolf briefly describes the black-and-white newsreels of the day. She begins to be interesting when she says that one of the disconcerting features of film is that it shows what life is like when we’re not there and a world which has gone.

But that’s newsreels and factual movies. As to the development of fiction movies, lots of other arts stood ready to help. Of course Woolf has only one art in mind, her own specialist subject, literature. But the marriage of literature and film has been a disaster. Why? Because literature shows people from the inside, shows us their minds and thoughts and emotions, whereas movies can only show them as stock figures from the outside.

So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy.

I’m sure all Hollywood screenwriters were flattered by this description. On the other hand, I like this next bit which I totally agree with, that movies simplify complex human emotions down into stock gestures and expressions.

A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse.

In Woolf’s view film needs to free itself from a literalistic interpretation of content from another medium, books, and free itself to explore its own language and vocabulary.

It seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression… Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words?

Interesting thought. Obviously there’s been a hundred years of movies since Woolf wrote but you feel her point is still valid. Film ought to consist of more than just popcorn-munching, Technicolour-fabulous summer blockbusters, surely it does have the potential to convey human experiences in an utterly novel and revolutionary way. And yet it has failed. The movies I see nowadays (2025) are crushingly banal and familiar, and the whole concept of a ‘film’ is bleeding out into the extravaganzas shown on Netflix et al. There are more films than ever before but at the same time, a strong sense of exhaustion and repetition.

As usual, Woolf invokes Shakespeare, her go-to guy for symbolising the peak of literary complexity i.e. multiple associations are triggered in the brain by his verse. But it’s precisely the multi-faceted and evanescent and subjective nature of the reader’s response, which is unique to literature and cinema’s tactic of showing a man on a screen talking fails to convey.

Instead, she repeats the thought: surely there are visual symbols, maybe accentuated with music, which could convey complex emotions in a purely filmic way.

That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently – of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed.

Then indeed when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command.

All this guessing and clumsy turning over of unknown forces points at any rate away from any art we know in the direction of an art we can only surmise.

She concludes with the thought that cinema has been born the wrong way round: it demonstrates tremendous sophistication of technology, engineering, design and logistics, but has no soul, no content, no emotional complexity worth the name.

The mechanical skill is far in advance of the art to be expressed.

This falls into the category of one of her Hortative Essays. In linguistics, hortative modalities are verbal expressions used by the speaker to encourage or discourage an action. In more common speech, hortative is an adjective meaning something which to encourages, urges, or calls to action. So in an earlier section of the book, ‘Life-Writing’, we read her essay claiming that the genre of biography was poised at the dawn of a new era, which would require hard work and commitment but would lead through to a new vision. Same here. In her opinion film is just at the start of an era of innovation and discovery.

I guess she was right, insofar as film was poised on the brink of introducing talkies (published in 1926, this whole essay is based on the experience of only silent movies) and continued to evolve at a rate of knots throughout the twentieth century. But whether it ever developed the symbols and methods to really convey the human soul, as she hoped, is very much to be doubted. Maybe in lots of rarer, indie or art or non-American movies. One for film buffs to discuss forever.

3. Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927: 11 pages)

How beautiful a London street is…

After a long day cooped up in a room writing, what better release than going for a ramble across London. Evening is best and winter the best season when there is magic in the air. The lamplight gives the bustling passersby a spurious glamour.

This is all unusually high-spirited and positive for Woolf and she deploys some stylish phrases.

Here under the lamps are floating islands of pale light through which pass quickly bright men and women, who, for all their poverty and shabbiness, wear a certain look of unreality, an air of triumph, as if they had given life the slip, so that life, deceived of her prey, blunders on without them. (p.178)

Once or twice she is tempted to imagine the lives of the people in the houses and has to remind herself to stay on the surface of things, an observer, a wandering eye, as the characters in so many of her books.

The eye is not a miner, not a diver, not a seeker after buried treasure. It floats us smoothly down a stream; resting, pausing, the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks… Let us… be content still with surfaces only—the glossy brilliance of the motor omnibuses; the carnal splendour of the butchers’ shops with their yellow flanks and purple steaks; the blue and red bunches of flowers burning so bravely through the plate glass of the florists’ windows.

For some reason she pops into a shoe shop and is there when a dwarf enters, accompanied by two normal-sized adults. Woolf describes her preening over he normal sized foot but when she goes back out into the street and Woolf follows her, she finds all the other passersby infected with the grotesque.

(This all reminds me of the French poet, Charles Baudelaire, famous for his visions of strange passersby in the streets of Paris, and of the whole French nineteenth century intellectual cult of the flaneur, all of which was being written about seventy years before Woolf wrote this essay.)

The dwarf had started a hobbling grotesque dance to which everybody in the street now conformed…

So she sees two drunk men pass by both leaning on a small boy, a stout woman dressed in shiny sealskin, a feeble-minded boy sucking the silver knob of his stick, an old man squatting on a doorstep as if suddenly overcome by the absurdity of the human spectacle – the randomness of these people seen in the street reminds me very much of all the background people who appear in her wandering-round-central-London novel, Mrs Dalloway.

In shops windows she sees good which spark fancies. Sofas and furnishings allow you to create and decorate a fantasy home of your own. When you wave that away, a glimpse of pearls in a jewellers’ window prompts visions of herself at a grand party in Mayfair, in June, looking out over the darkened streets while back in the main room the Prime Minister describes some political crisis to Lady So-and-So.

Why this continual turnover of fantasies? Because nature made human beings with ‘instincts and desires which are utterly at variance with his main being, so that we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture’.

I’ve commented on how the same dozen or so ideas recur across Woolf’s oeuvre. Here she mentions the idea of multiple selves which features in the mature novels and Orlando.

Is the true self this which stands on the pavement in January, or that which bends over the balcony in June? Am I here, or am I there? Or is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there, but something so varied and wandering that it is only when we give the rein to its wishes and let it take its way unimpeded that we are indeed ourselves? (p.182)

Then she comes to the neighbourhood of second hand book shops and for a couple of page sings the delights of exploring the strange detritus of sold-off libraries and dead men’s collections, the eternal hope that you will take down some little treasure and be transported by dashing narratives or wonderful poetry, and all those travellers to far-off lands. But there’s no end to books and so after this cosy interlude in a warm second-hand bookshop, it’s back out into the streets.

She passes two women complaining about how selfish ‘Kate’ is, then they’re gone and she never finds out more. Two men discussing racing tips under a lamp-post. Thousands of other commuters, freed from work and thronging from the Strand over Waterloo bridge, who she fondly fantasises are themselves fondly fantasising about being ‘great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need.’

When you stop and read that you realise how essentially childish her view of other people is. Those aspirations – ‘great cricketers, famous actresses, soldiers who have saved their country at the hour of need’ – are the aspirations of the Famous Five. Real people who are worried about money, worried about their marriages, their children about work, don’t enter in, they are too real, sordid, vulgar. None of her imagined people ever think about sex because that is crude and vulgar. The fantasy must be kept pure, romantic, chaste and childish.

Coming into the Strand she feels her conscious mind telling her she has to do something. What was it? Oh yes, the spurious aim of buying a pencil with which she justified this evening stroll in the first place. That’s one self, the practical self. But another self steps in and says Why can’t we just enjoy ourselves and ramble where we wish? Multiple selves in conflict. You can see why she was interested in Freud’s dynamic model of the mind, and why the Hogarth Press was to publish his complete works in a definitive English translation. You can also hear a ghost of her lifelong mental problems: the voices in her head, conflicting and arguing.

From a psychiatric point of view it’s telling that the only way she can manage the voices is to transcend them with another image, with the sight of the wide cold black River Thames. And memory. Memory which we saw so important in coping with a task in Memories of a Working Women’s Guild and Leslie Stephen, The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories. We get a deeper understanding that backing away from the clamorous present and retreating into distant memories is not so much a cop-out as a psychological coping mechanism.

This becomes really obvious when she remembers leaning over the parapet last summer and being happy. Maybe if she goes to the same place now she can regain that mood of calm.

We see it through the eyes of somebody who is leaning over the Embankment on a summer evening, without a care in the world. Let us put off buying the pencil; let us go in search of this person—and soon it becomes apparent that this person is ourselves. For if we could stand there where we stood six months ago, should we not be again as we were then—calm, aloof, content? Let us try then…

But the attempt fails. A young couple are smooching nearby, the air is cold, a tug with two barges slowly passes under the bridge, she can’t regain that last-summer mood. She draws the conclusion that:

It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace.

To be honest, I don’t understand what that means. Finally, she arrives at a stationery shop where she can buy the pencil which was the pretext for this trek and this essay. As soon as she enters she realises she’s interrupted an argument between the old couple who own it. They break up and the old buffer tries to find her a pencil but keeps making mistakes amid the many shelves and boxes, until his wife comes back into the shop and silently indicates the correct box. Even then, Woolf lingers in order to enjoy the experience of the couple slowly calming down until, eventually, full peace is restored.

The old man, who would not have disgraced Ben Jonson’s title-page, reached the box back to its proper place, bowed profoundly his good-night to us, and they disappeared. She would get out her sewing; he would read his newspaper; the canary would scatter them impartially with seed. The quarrel was over.

Now, either you think that last sentence is beautifully imagined or, like me, you find it too pat. In fact the entire episode feels too neatly rounded and complete to be a depiction of real life, which is always more edgy and incomplete than this little fable.

When she exits back onto the street, it is completely empty and she walks home through the silver city which triggers another reflection on the idea of multiple selves.

Walking home through the desolation one could tell oneself the story of the dwarf, of the blind men, of the party in the Mayfair mansion, of the quarrel in the stationer’s shop. Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer. And what greater delight and wonder can there be than to leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men?

On my reading, all of literature provides a cure for mental illness by allowing us to escape from our troubled selves into other, more completed and so simpler, more manageable lives.

She sings the praises of her big ‘adventure’ in the streets of London and this triggered a memory of Three Guineas with its angry attack on how women in her lifetime and for all British history before her, had been legally, socially and financially excluded from public life, from all the professions, from business, from paid work, from any independence. And so had to make from the tiny incidents of their cramped lives what satisfaction and adventures that they could.

And one last thought: any writer, male or female, can describe the lovely, warm comfort of arriving home but, given the Enid Blyton interpretation I’ve given to much of the narrative, I couldn’t help the ending feeling like the cosy rounding-off of a reassuring children’s story.

As we approach our own doorstep again, it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round; and the self, which has been blown about at so many street corners, which has battered like a moth at the flame of so many inaccessible lanterns, sheltered and enclosed. (p.187)

4. The Sun and The Fish (1928: 5 pages)

This is the most peculiar essay in the selection.

Exordium: The introduction tells us that memory works by yoking together two, sometimes random elements i.e. we remember things best when they’re associated with something else memorable.

[A] sight will only survive in the queer pool in which we deposit our memories if it has the good luck to ally itself with some other emotion by which it is preserved. Sights marry, incongruously, morganatically… and so keep each other alive.

This appears to be the justification for the collocation of the two memories which follow.

Memory 1: On 29 June 1927 Leonard and Virginia Woolf travelled with a party of friends to Bardon Fell in Yorkshire, where they stood on the ridge at dawn with thousands of others to witness a total eclipse of the sun. That is a rational, factual account of the event, but Woolf’s account is delirious. She compares the watchers to participants in the prehistoric ceremonies at Stonehenge and then gives a vivid description of the eclipse itself, during which the entire world loses colour and laments its death. Fear and anxiety lest the sun never returns. I’ve been reading D.H. Lawrence alongside Woolf, and this essay is more or less the only which one which has the psychological intensity of Lawrence. Maybe because it’s the only place in any of her works where the narrator is scared.

This was the defeat of the sun then, and this was all, so we thought, turning in disappointment from the dull cloud blanket in front of us to the moors behind. They were livid, they were purple; but suddenly one became aware that something more was about to happen; something unexpected, awful, unavoidable, The shadow growing darker and darker over the moor was like the heeling over of a boat, which, instead of righting itself at the critical moment, turns a little further and then a little further; and suddenly capsizes. So the light turned and heeled over and went out. This was the end. The flesh and blood of the world was dead and only the skeleton was left. It hung beneath us, frail; brown; dead; withered… (p.191)

Memory 2: But weirder is to come because Woolf links the eclipse memory to a visit she made to London Zoo and, in particular, to the Aquarium. This again makes it seem nice and logical when it is anything but. Instead it’s a fantasia on the life and being of fishes, in their watery tanks, and the sense of them being far more at home in their element than we poor, helpless, pink animals are on ours.

The fish themselves seem to have been shaped deliberately and slipped into the world only to be themselves. They neither work nor weep. In their shape is their reason. For what other purpose, except the sufficient one of perfect existence, can they have been thus made, some so round, some so thin, some with radiating fins upon their backs, others lined with red electric light, others undulating like white pancakes on a frying pan, some armoured in blue mail, some given prodigious claws, some outrageously fringed with huge whiskers? More care has been spent upon half a dozen fish than upon all the races of mankind.

And having exhausted this strange vision, the essay finishes with the abrupt line:

The eye shuts now. It has shown us a dead world and an immortal fish.

5. The Docks of London (December 1931)

In 1931 Woolf published The London Scene, a collection of six essays published individually in ‘Good Housekeeping’ magazine, over the course of a year. They were not published as a collection until long after her death. According to Wikipedia, the title was not chosen by Woolf but comes from the 1975 republication of five of the essays. Originally the essays were referred to as ‘Six Articles on London Life’.

The first of the six essays was The Docks of London. It records a guided tour Woolf was given round the docks on a Port of London Authority launch on 20 March 1931.

Compared to the eclipse fantasia it is a model of sense and description. She describes coming up the Thames from the Kent end, coming across ruined warehouses and reeking waste dumps and barges full of the city’s refuse, a pub and a few trees in this wasteland, then turning a corner and coming across the beautiful Greenwich Hospital buildings, up and round and so arriving at the Tower of London.

She cuts to a description of a cargo ship being unloaded with careful regulated industry and all its goods being stored in a low unadorned warehouse. She lists the bizarre items sometimes found stashed amid all this imported goods: a snake, a scorpion, a lump of amber, a basin of quicksilver. Among a pile of elephant tusks the customs officers have found older browner ones which they think come from mammoths. Virginia is finding out about the big world of work, and the imperial trade which her pampered life relies on for its luxuries and perquisites. She learns the great principle:

Trade is ingenious and indefatigable beyond the bounds of imagination. (p.196)

Everything is weighed and graded. A use is found for everything. Nothing is wasted. She savours the ‘dim sacerdotal atmosphere’ of the wine vaults. In the precision and dexterity of the work, the endless movement of the cranes, the unloading and stacking and packing and storing, she sees beauty. This feels like an awakening for young Virginia into the world of real work and the appeal of doing a job well, the subject of so many Rudyard Kipling stories.

She ends with the slightly unexpected thought that it is we, the consumers, who dictate all this energy, day in day out, all year round. It is we with our taste for shoes, furs, bags, stoves, oil, rice pudding, candles, that dictate what crops are grown, what animals are reared, what minerals extracted, what is brought here to the world’s largest port. So that:

One feels an important, a complex, a necessary animal as one stands on the quayside watching the cranes hoist this barrel, that crate, that other bale from the holds of ships that have come to anchor. (p.198)

6. Oxford Street Tide (1932: 4 pages)

The garishness and gaudiness of the great rolling ribbon of Oxford Street has its fascination. (p.199)

This was the second piece in her ‘Six Articles on London Life’ series, published in the January 1932 issue of Good Housekeeping. As you might expect, it’s about shops. In her day, as now, Oxford Street didn’t have the best shops, in fact it was looked down on for its bargains and sales. ‘The buying and selling is too blatant and too raucous’.

What stood out for me was the differences. In 1932 one could find barrows parked selling fresh tulips, violets, daffodils; see magicians make bits of paper unfold into clever shapes on bowls of water; sell live tortoises which are kept in litters of straw.

She gives a blizzard of sense impressions: placards selling endless editions of newspapers; a whole brass band; omnibuses grazing kerbs; buses, cars, vans, barrows streaming past. The old aristocracy were dukes and earls who built grand town houses along the Strand. The new, commercial, aristocracy build department stores along Oxford Street which dole out music and news, welcome you in to their high and airy halls, thickly carpeted and with the magic of lifts. (The notes tell us that the American Harry Gordon Selfridge opened his department store on Oxford Street in 1909.)

You can’t help noticing how flimsy these new stores are, concrete walls and metal floor bases. When you see other buildings being demolished so quickly and thoroughly, you realise these stores, to large and showy, with such modelled facades, are less solid and enduring than a labourer’s stone cottage from the time of Elizabeth I.

Then again, that’s the appeal. ‘The charm of modern London is that it is not built to last; it is built to pass.’ The owners of the citadels of consumer capitalism must:

persuade the multitude that here unending beauty, ever fresh, ever new, very cheap and within the reach of everybody, bubbles up every day of the week from an inexhaustible well. (p.202)

It is vivid and wrily comic, and she doesn’t mention Shakespeare once!

7. Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942: 3 pages)

Despite the title, it’s a very static, ghostly impression of Sussex, which she prefers to imagine at dusk, as night falls and the stars come out and the busy fret of the day disappears and you see the country in its essentials, as it was in days past. She gives a vivid poetic description of the county but then feels unhappy, conflicted. It is too beautiful, too big to contain, to master and this triggers her characteristic psychological reaction or problem, of feeling divided into multiple selves.

It is well known how in circumstances like these the self splits up and one self is eager and dissatisfied and the other stern and philosophical.

She has to struggle with herself, to force herself to sit still and take in what’s in front of her. While these two selves argue about how to cope with beautiful scenery, a third self, observes to herself how happy both the other selves were when they were driving around in a motor car, just to see the never-ending stream of sights. Although when they were quiet and happy, the conscious self was in fact unhappy at the thought that everything is transient, everything passes out of sight and memory so fast as you zoom around the country.

This is, in other words, an essay about Virginia coping with her mental health issues and struggling to maintain an even keel. Compare ‘Street Haunting’, where she similarly struggles with the voices in her head and tries to find some way of calming them. Her mental illness is never very far from the surface.

Then there appears a fourth self, an ‘erratic and impulsive self’, interrupts the others with an unexpected perception, pointing out a light hovering in the sky. Only after some moments of confusion does her rational self realise it’s a car’s headlights coming over the brow of a hill, but this visionary self takes it as a portent of the future, of a distant future when Sussex will be full of magic gates and electric light.

In the final paragraph she tells us she assembles her many selves, as official presider over them, and tries to reckon up the sights they have all seen. But this is a surprisingly thin list and almost immediately describes ‘disappearance and the death of the individual’. That’s a bit shrill, isn’t it?

David Bradshaw’s notes tell us this wasn’t published during her lifetime but in the posthumous collection Death of the Moth and Other Essays. Is it an indication of how she was ‘declining’ into mental illness? Or does its candour about the struggle of managing multiple selves suggest a new art, a new style which she might have explored and expanded?

8. Flying Over London (6 pages)

The notes tell us this essay was only published in 1950. Reading the book’s notes builds up the impression that Woolf wrote a huge amount, that gathering together all the essays and fugitive pieces published in numerous outlets, from classy Vogue to transient student magazines, has taken decades to track them all down and been a labour of love for Woolf scholars.

It opens with a strikingly fanciful analogy, comparing the planes lined up at the aerodrome to giant grasshoppers, ready to spring into the air. She is self-consciously aware that ‘a thousand pens have described the sensations of leaving earth’ and you can’t help feeling how dogged she is by a self consciousness so intense that it is consciousness of multiple selves. Woolf is crippled by selves-consciousness.

Anyway, she makes the original observation that, when the plane takes off it’s not so much that the land falls away as that the sky falls upon you, immerses you. A lifetime of judging all objects in your field of view by their static appearance at ground level is swept away by this radical new perspective. ‘Land values’ have to be swapped for ‘air values’.

She wonderfully describes being in the air, amid the clouds, where perspectives and orientation disappear and this reminds me of the extended passage describing looking up at the clouds in ‘On Being Ill’.

And yet, as the previous essay has made clear, there is always another self in Woolf, tugging and restraining all her attempts at spontaneity. She knows it. ‘So inveterately anthropomorphic is the mind’ that she imagines the plane is a boat, and then imagines it, as in some Victorian poem, sailing towards a harbour:

And there we shall be received by hands that lift themselves from swaying garments; welcoming, accepting. (p.207)

Don’t you think that’s very Pre-Raphaelite, the hands that lift from swaying garments? I’m sticking with my impression that, despite the so-called modernism of her deploying a dreamy kind of stream-of-consciousness and jumping between characters’ points of views in her books, deep down – in fact not very deep down at all – Woolf has an essentially Victorian sensibility, Keats and Tennyson and Christina Rossetti, everything must be elegant and decorous and just so.

She sees the Thames as the Romans saw it, as paleolithic man saw it, reprising the theme of prehistoric London found in Mrs Dalloway and especially Between the Acts where Mrs Swithin is reading H.G. Wells’s Outline of History which starts with just such prehistoric descriptions of dinosaurs in what were to become London landmarks. But then things suddenly take a dark turn.

It was the idea of death that now suggested itself; not being received and welcomed; not immortality but extinction. (p.208)

She sees a flight of gulls and thinks how alien they are, where only gulls are, is death. ‘Life ends; life is dowsed in that cloud… That extinction now becomes desirable… And so we swept on now, up to death’ Why? Again you have the strong sense of a woman fighting her own psychological demons.

The pilot’s head suddenly reminds her of Charon, the ferryman across into the realm of the dead, and she claims the mind is proud of extinction ‘as if it deserved extinction, extinction profited it more and were more desirable than prolongation on other terms by other wills.’ Usually the experience of flying in a small plane is one of exhilaration. For Woolf it brings flooding thoughts of death. She wants to die, and die she soon would, at her own hand.

The pilot turns into a flame of death and she imagines dying together with him. ‘Extinction! The word is consummation’. But there’s a lot more. We’re only half way through. She vividly imagines flying into cloud, being immersed in the ever-changing shapes and colours.

All the colours of pounded plums and dolphins and blankets and seas and rain clouds crushed together, straining – purple, black, steel.

It’s as if John Keats went for a plane ride. Here’s a stanza from John Keats’s poem Ode to a Nightingale:

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth…

The technology and the subject and the continual changing of scene may be from the 1920s but the sensibility dates back a hundred years, to the 1820s, an impression confirmed by lots of details of phrasing like when she says that when they emerge from the clouds and see ‘the fairy earth’ beneath them.

The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
The same that oft-times hath
Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

I wonder if she’s just been reading ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and that explains why the sensibility and even specific phrases of Keats spill over into this fantasia?

One way of thinking about Woolf’s writing is that she had to adopt different techniques to shake herself out of her madness, out of being dominated by the voices in her head. The ‘Street Haunting’ essay describes one technique, which was to go to a place where she had been calm and try to recapture that feeling. A cruder one is to change the subject to something which focused all her selves into a unity, such as her feminist scorn of men. This lines up all the voices into unanimity. Here’s something the squabbling voices can all agree upon.

I think this is why, after the fantastical passages which have seen her mind split into multiple levels and ages and perspectives, she brings everything back with the tried-and-tested technique of taking the mickey out of pompous rich men in the City of London.

There were blocks in the city of traffic sometimes almost a foot long; these had to be translated into eleven or twelve Rolls Royces in a row with city magnates waiting furious; and one had to add up the fury of the magnates; and say – even though it was all silent and the block was only a few inches in length, how scandalous the control of the traffic is in the City of London. (p.211)

This is feminism as therapy, submerging her squabbling selves and the multifarious observations which threaten to overwhelm her conscious mind, into the reassuring, all-pulling-together mode prompted by the activity of mocking rich men. Ha ha ha, silly little men. Oh, I feel much better now.

The narrative goes on to describe flying over the East End and seeing good working people wave up at them, flying over Oxford Street where everyone is too busy with bargain hunting to acknowledge them, onto Bayswater with its deadening rows of identical houses and then does something odd. She claims to see a door in one house open, and to see into a flat, and to see a particular woman and… you realise it has all been a fiction. Then I woke up and it was all a dream.

And a glance at the notes indeed confirms that Virginia Woolf never went up in an airplane. The entire thing is a fiction. It is a bold and strange fiction, and candidly reveals some of the ramifications of her mental illness and yet… I couldn’t help feeling disappointed that it was utterly fictional.

In fact she tries to make a joke of it. The last paragraph is a rare attempt by Woolf at explicit humour. After she’s given a vivid description of coming in to land and bumping over the grassy airfield, she goes on:

As a matter of fact, the flight had not begun; for when Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood stooped and made the engine roar, he had found a defect of some sort in the machine, and raising his head, he had said very sheepishly, ”Fraid it’s no go today.’ So we had not flown after all.

Contemporary flying reviews

Sagittarius Rising by Cecil Lewis (1936)
The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary (1942)
Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)
First Light by Geoffrey Wellum (2002)

9. Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936: 3 pages)

Surprisingly maybe, this very short piece was first published in The Daily Worker newspaper in 1936. Woolf opens the piece, as so often, by candidly explaining the terms of its commission:

I have been asked by the Artists International Association to explain as shortly as I can why it is that the artist at present is interested, actively and genuinely, in politics.

I think her views on this subject are not much worth considering, since she had made a career out of ridiculing, mocking and ignoring conventional politics as irredeemably male. Bit late in the day to change her tune.

What struck me most about this essay was the way that, when she came to consider examples of classic artists, the very first name she came to was John Keats and the very first ‘work of art’ his poem, Ode to a Nightingale. This, for the umpteenth time, confirmed my sense that underneath her modernist tricks and strategies, Woolf remained, in her core sensibility, an unreformed Victorian Romantic of the purest kind, oblivious of the radical art being created in Bolshevik Russia or Weimar Germany, of symbolist or Expressionist or Surrealist poetry, but again and again and again and again, judging everything by the purest, most conservative, arch-Romantic figure of John Keats.

As to the essay, I found it pompous, self-satisfied twaddle. This is because of her narrow, blinkered, restricted and wildly unrealistic notion of what an Artist is and what Art is, something pure and untainted by Society which aspires to the perfection of a Shakespeare. Instead of a much more realistic sociological view of ‘art’, which sees it being produced by a huge array of people, working in all kinds of fields, at multiple levels.

It is a fact that the practise of art, far from making the artist out of touch with his kind, rather increases his sensibility. It breeds in him a feeling for the passions and needs of mankind in the mass which the citizen whose duty it is to work for a particular country or for a particular party has no time and perhaps no need to cultivate.

This notion of the artist as a special superior and privileged personage, blessed with more sensibility than the average person, feels, to us today, I think, absurd. Artists in all fields may have been trained to a level of specialist knowledge in particular fields and techniques but this doesn’t make them ‘superior’ to everyone else. Plus we have had too many examples of artists who were very superior, refined and sensitive but who still wrote books and poems against the Jews, say, or in favour of Stalin or Mussolini.

Between Woolf’s narrow, conservative values and our own times stands the dire history of the twentieth century which ought to have disabused anyone of these Victorian notions of the Superiority of Art.

She’s on firmer grounds when she leaves off her notions of art and takes a more sociological view of the pressures modern artists come under. This echoes, repeats or invokes the notion of multiple voices which we’ve encountered her struggling with in earlier essays. Here she gives them external form as types or groups or classes of people who are perpetually haranguing the modern artist, including:

the voice which cries: ‘I cannot protect you; I cannot pay you. I am so tortured and distracted that I can no longer enjoy your works of art’
the voice which asks for help: ‘Come down from your ivory tower, leave your studio and use your gifts as doctor, as teacher, not as an artist’
the voice which warns the artist that unless he can show good cause why art benefits the state he will be made to help it actively – by making aeroplanes, by firing guns etc
the voice which artists in other countries have already heard and had to obey, the voice which proclaims that the artist is the servant of the politician, of a Hitler, Stalin or Mussolini

So, in the face of all these voices shouting at him, no wonder the modern artist is forced to take part in politics, and decides to form or join societies like the Artists International Association.

And that’s what she was commissioned to explain, and she has just explained it. You can see how it’s still written from a position which mocks and scorns all these external voices, the voices of society, and tries to preserve the separateness and aloofness of the artist, the high artistic calling she learned in her father’s library in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

10. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940: 4 pages)

Written in August 1940, for an American symposium on current matters concerning women.

As she writes in London, Germans are flying overhead dropping bombs trying to kill her. This is the same situation with which George Orwell starts his famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn. The difference is that Woolf is a woman and a feminist. Therefore she is aggrieved that women on both sides of the fighting are not given guns or any material means of helping. Sure they can make guns and munitions and serve food and protect the children. But there’s another way. They can use their minds. (This is always a doubtful tactic in Woolf whose mind was liable to stray and loses its place far more than the average person, as all her writings show.)

But she sticks to her feminist message. The whole Establishment tells women they are fighting Hitler because he is the embodiment of aggression, tyranny, the insane love of power. And yet she quotes Lady Astor in a speech saying:

Women of ability are held down because of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men.

It’s the same point she made in the ferociously powerful feminist tract, Three Guineas. So I understand that the challenge is how to get rid of this subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men, but I didn’t understand what she was proposing to do.

She makes a detour to describe how training to become a soldier and readiness to fight appears to be instinctive to many men. How can this instinct be eradicated? Well, imagine if the government told all women that childbearing would be banned for most of them, and restricted to a tiny handful i.e. sought to abolish a fundamental instinct of women, what luck would it have? Not much. So trying to make young men more peace-minded is the same kind of challenge.

We must help the young Englishmen to root out from themselves the love of medals and decorations. We must create more honourable activities for those who try to conquer in themselves their fighting instinct, their subconscious Hitlerism. We must compensate the man for the loss of his gun.

What does this mean in practical terms? She repeats the same ideas in a slightly different formulation.

If we are to compensate the young man for the loss of his glory and of his gun, we must give him access to the creative feelings. We must make happiness. We must free him from the machine. We must bring him out of his prison into the open air.

These ‘We must…’ sentences could be written on till infinity but won’t change anything and so have no meaning except as expressions of fine feelings.

Comment 1: the failure of feminism

Like so many of the feminist articles and essays I read every day in the Guardian, New Statesman, London Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Conversation, the New York Review of Books, even in the Financial Times and sometimes in the Economist, Woolf laments that (some/quite a few) men are violent, in thrall to ‘the subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men’, and calls for a wholesale transformation of human nature.

Go on, then. Transform human nature. In fact I’ve been reading the same lament, and hearing it from feminist friends and girlfriends and wives and daughters for over 40 years, tens of thousands of articles, documentaries, films, plays and so on calling for a radical overhaul of human nature to try and make men less toxic and more like women.

How is the project to radically transform human (male) nature going? Well, according to the thousands of articles lamenting the election of Donald Trump or bewailing the rise and rise of Andrew Tate, it is going backwards, which is impressive. I don’t mean I applaud Trump the know-nothing bully or the poisonous snake Tate, far from it. It’s just impressive that the feminist cause seems to be going backwards.

And I’m not especially singling out feminism. Although everyone knows that they are being exploited by huge corporations and multinational banks, that every service in their lives is ripping them off, yet somehow, magically, more and more voters are turning to an essentially right-wing solution, rather than what seems to me the more obvious need for a string of left-wing policies to rein in excess wealth, excess pay and excess control of corporations over our lives. (Just think of all the privatised water companies paying their shareholders huge dividends while filling our rivers with sewage.)

Same with global warming and the environment. Although everyone knows about it now, and governments are taking steps to invest in renewable energy and diversity power grids, on the cultural level society seems to be taking against the green and environmental policies we desperately need.

What I’m trying to do is understand and report what people are actually like instead of what high-minded progressives would like them to be like.

So back to Woolf, I know she’s a patron saint for feminists, but, tome, she’s also a kind of patron saint of feminist fantasy. I mean her narrow, blinkered, limited, upper-middle-class experience of life excluded her from understanding the great majority of population in her time and my thesis is that, in following her, in adopting her voice and tone, latterday feminists make the same mistake – of not understanding human nature in all its squalid horribleness and of simply wishing toxic masculinity away, without any practical plans to deal with it. To repeat, her solution is:

Like so many progressives, she thinks that if only we could give our enemies a reading list of classic literature – and in particular make them read more Keats and Shakespeare – we could magic the problems of managing human nature away.

My position is simply that it’s much harder than that.

Comment 2: preparing for war

Eighty-five years after Woolf wrote this piece, the British government and fleets of commentators are all worrying about how to encourage more young Englishmen to cultivate their fighting instinct and join the British Army which, like the armies of all European nations, need to be significantly increased to counter the threat from Putin’s Russia.

Telling men to cultivate their finer feelings is not really an adequate strategy for coping with Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China, just ask the young men of Ukraine. Why are there always wars and the threat of wars? The feminists I knew at university and subsequently all had one answer: it’s men’s fault. It’s toxic masculinity. There. Done. Understood. Sorted. Dismissed.

Except it isn’t sorted, it’s never sorted. All the essays in the world – no matter how high minded and correct and lovely in their sentiments and wishes – can change human nature with its endless lust to fight the enemy and destroy the planet.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics (OWC) in 2008. Most but not all of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on April 30, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays

Tagged article, Artists International Association, Bardon Fell, Baudelaire, Bayswater, Ben Jonson, Between The Acts, British Army, British Empire exhibition at Wembley, cars, Charon, Christina Rossetti, City of London, consumer capitalism, D.H. Lawrence, David Bradshaw, Death of the Moth and Other Essays, driving, East End, English literature, Enid Blyton, Essays, Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car, Feminism, film, First Light, Flight-Lieutenant Hopgood, Flying Over London, Freud, Geoffrey Wellum, George Orwell, Going Solo, Good Housekeeping, Greenwich Hospital, H.G. Wells, Harry Gordon Selfridge, Hitler, Hitlerism, Hogarth Press, Hollywood, Hyde Park Gate, John Keats, Keats, Lady Astor, Leslie Stephen, London, London Aquarium, London Zoo, Looking On, Mayfair, Memories of a Working Women's Guild, mental health, mental illness, Mozart, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Swithin, newsreel, Ode to a Nightingale, On Being Ill, Orlando, Outline of History, Oxford Street, Oxford Street Tide, Oxford World Classic, Oxford World Classics, pacifism, paleolithic man, Politics, Port of London Authority, pre-Raphaelite, Putin's Russia, review, Richard Hillary, River Thames, Roald Dahl, Rolls Royce, Rudyard Kipling, Second World War, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf, self consciousness, selves, selves-consciousness, Shakespeare, Six Articles on London Life, solar eclipse, Stonehenge, Street Haunting: A London Adventure, Tennyson, The Cinema, The Daily Worker, The Docks of London, the Embankment, The Last Enemy, The Lion and the Unicorn, The London Scene, The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter's Memories, the Strand, The Sun and The Fish, Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid, Three Guineas, Thunder at Wembley, Tower of London, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Putin, Waterloo bridge, Why Art Today Follows Politics, Xi Jinping, Yorkshire

Posted by Simon on April 30, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/30/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-4-looking-on/

Virginia Woolf’s introduction to Life As We Have Known It (1931)

David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

This blog post summarises one of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’, titled ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931). For reference I list all 6 essays in the section. I reviewed the other five in a previous blog post. The essay is an introduction to a volume titled Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women‘, and it inspired me to go and read the whole book, which I have reviewed separately.

The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
Women and Fiction (1929)
Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931: 14 pages)

This is the longest and most complex essay in the section, at 14 pages. Well, maybe not complicated in structure, but complicated in 1) the eccentrically roundabout way in which Woolf addresses the subject matter and her own complicated responses to it, and 2) the multi-text nature of the book she’s introducing.

I’ll try to give a summary overview of the content, and then a description of my changing impressions as I read it through.

Summary

In 1931 Woolf was asked to write a preface to a collection of letters and photos written by members of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild and collected into a book titled Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women. The Guild was founded as far back as 1883 and Woolf was commissioned by one of its co-founders, Margaret Llewellyn Davies. The book was to be published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so it was very much an in-house project.

Woolf approaches the commission in a rather roundabout way and most of the introduction feels like a meandering digression. This is because she kicks off by describing two memories.

1) First of all, she casts her mind back to the annual Congress of the Guild she attended as long ago as 1913 and recalls, very vividly, being frustrated and bored. And also alienated by the fact that so many of the women speakers were solid working class and she found, to her dismay, that she had nothing in common with them, not even the language they spoke.

2) This is supplemented by a second memory, of going soon afterwards for a meeting with Davies at the head office of the Guild, in Hampstead, north London. Here Woolf raises the sense she had of being alienated from the predominantly working class membership of the Guild and frustration at not being able to break out of the prison of her class. She wishes the two classes of women could break through the class barriers, and simply share their experiences, talk and exchange experiences and ideas. But she fears that will never happen in her lifetime.

Although I’ve made it sound brisk and logical, that is not at all how it reads. I became quite irritated with Woolf’s alienated, detached self obsession, her inability to care about what any of the social and political issues the speakers at the Congress raised and discussed, her fatal tendency to drift off into her own world, focusing on what colour their dresses are, or inventing completely imaginary home lives for each of the speakers, rather than paying them the elementary respect of listening to what they were saying.

She tells us that it was at this point of the discussion in Hampstead that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the hundreds of letters she’d received from members of the Guild over the years, thanking her for giving them an opportunity to expand their horizons, to meet and talk and learn and gain the confidence to speak up and address political issues.

Woolf was immediately interested to read all these first-hand accounts and Davies promised to send them on but, for whatever reason, never did. Then the War came and a thousand other distractions and then the social confusion of the post-war period. So it was only years later that Davies got round to posting Woolf a big parcel packed with folders containing letters, notes and photographs from working class women, which she went through with fascination.

3) And this provides the third section of this little text, which is only three or four pages long but really vividly summarises the content of loads of those letters, one- or two-sentence summaries of the cramped, exploited, violent lives and abuse so many of these women suffered, for decades, for all their lives. It is shocking and sometimes harrowing evidence. Suddenly this short text bursts into colour, stops being about mimsy Virginia, becomes three-dimensional, acquires a completely different force from the idle, middle-class reveries which preceded it. It’s worth reading for this three-page summary alone.

These, of course, are some of the letters which were then included in the volume which Woolf was asked to write a preface to. Now the whole text comes full circle. Now you realise why she began with the apparently inconsequential and self-obsessed memories of attending the Congress. Crabwise, her introduction approaches the real core of the text – the working women’s experiences – so obliquely that when they arrive, the contrast with Woolf’s leisurely upper class existence – all opera and Shakespeare – is all the more shocking and dramatic.

So was it planned? Was this artful structuring? The self-description as a snobbish, alienated middle-class lady all a ploy to make the working class content, when it comes, more shocking? Or the much simpler result of Woolf’s artless self-absorption? Much the same question could be asked of her novels: to what extent they are artful constructions or, conversely, just the result of her letting her mind drift and then arranging the blizzard of details and sense impressions into a sort of order based grouped into a handful of characters and a vague plot…

Background

From the Yale Review archives is an introduction to this piece which must be out of date but is still useful.

These pages relating to the English Women’s Co-operative Guild are addressed to a former officer of this organization who had placed in Mrs Woolf’s hands a collection of letters written by its members. The Guild, which now has an enrolment of some 70,000 and is the largest association of its kind in England, was founded in 1883 to stimulate the ideas and activities of working women. It holds important annual Congresses, and it is of one of these which met at Manchester, in 1913.

We know the Yale text is out of date because it talks about the Guild in the present tense but we know that the Guild closed in 2016, according to the Co-operative Women’s Guild Wikipedia article.

No prefaces

This text is the Introductory Letter to a social history book called Life as We Have Known It By Co-Operative Working Women published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. She was actually invited to write a preface to the book by its editor, the founder of the Guild, Margaret Llewellyn Davies, but refused on principle, the principle being that a book should stand or fall by its content without loads of prefaces and other bric-a-brac surrounding it.

But you also quickly come to suspect it’s because Woolf couldn’t write that kind of thing. She couldn’t gracefully summarise the themes of a book, its content and the achievement of its author, that’s not how her mind worked. Not without subterfuge and artifice.

Instead of directly grappling with the content of the book or the issues it raises about working class women collaborating to improve their lives, Woolf starts by going off at a tangent. With characteristic solipsism, she approaches the book by asking what memories it prompts in her and goes on to share two in particular.

Out of her inability to concentrate, out of her tendency to lose track of what anyone’s saying, out of her tendency to drift off and look out the nearest window, daydreaming and noticing all kinds of inconsequential details, Woolf made a style, a magnificent style, a new approach to narrative which characterises her classic novels Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Years and Between The Acts. In the context of essays which are meant to be about something, it can make for a frustrating read.

Scene 1. The 1913 Congress of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

So Woolf whisks us to a hot June morning in 1913 in Newcastle where she attended a meeting of, presumably (it’s not really made clear) the Women’s Guild. She describes the hall and the people as if in a novel and describes a succession of women who’ve come from all over the country to make their 5-minute speeches. She namechecks the issues of the day:

reform of the divorce laws to allow women to petition for divorce
taxation of land
campaign for a minimum wage
the Trades Board Act
education of children over 14
complete adult suffrage

She namechecks them but, of course, she doesn’t go into them. You have to turn to Bradshaw’s notes at the back of the OUP edition to find out more about any of them. Instead Woolf glories in her superficiality, dwelling on the mustiness of the room and the appearance of the ladies. She candidly admits that all these political issues leave her ‘in her blood and bones, untouched’. And explains why – it’s a matter of class. Woolf isn’t really engaged in any contemporary politics because she is a comfortably off, middle class lady.

If every reform they demand was granted this very instant it would not touch one hair of my comfortably capitalistic head. Hence my interest is merely altruistic. It is thin spread and moon-coloured. There is no life blood or urgency about it. However hard I clap my hands or stamp my feet, there is a hollowness in the sound which betrays me. I am a benevolent spectator. I am irretrievably cut off from the actors. I sit here hypocritically, clapping and stamping, an outcast from the flock. (p.148)

This is the characteristic attitude of all her fictional characters: they all experience the sense of being outsiders, outside the conversations other people are having and, at their most delirious, of being outside their own lives, looking on. You can’t help thinking of her mental illness and repeated mental breakdowns.

Also Woolf is afflicted by a strong sense of what’s the point? None of these women or any of their resolutions will have any impact because it is 1913 and none of them have the vote. This one thought leaves her feeling ‘irritated and depressed’, as well it might, but with the rather more Woolfian threat of ‘boredom and despair’ lurking behind. See how it’s all about her, her and her mental problems?

So Woolf does what she always does and drifts away from the present and daydreams, fantasises, imagines the home life of some of the speakers, of Mrs Giles and Mrs Edwards, imagines the view from their windows (windows, that talismanic Woolfian image). In a pretty patronising tone she imagines what it must be like to be a working class woman, so very different from her own la-di-da habits of ringing up the opera to book tickets or lying in the garden enjoying sensitive reveries of Greece and Italy. Without speaking to a single working class woman she imagines their lives, and her position of irredeemable hauteur and snobbery comes out clearer and clearer.

Here is Virginia Woolf imagining the lives of the working class women of her time.

There were no armchairs, electric light, or hot water laid on in their homes, no Greek hills or Mediterranean bays in their lives. They did not sign a cheque to pay the weekly bills, or order, over the telephone, a cheap but quite adequate seat at the Opera. If they travelled it was on excursion day, with paper bags and hot babies in their arms.

They did not stroll through the house and say, that cover must go to the wash, or those sheets need changing. They plunged their arms in hot water and scrubbed the clothes themselves. In consequence they had thickset muscular bodies. They had large hands; they had the slow emphatic gestures of people who are often stiff and fall tired in a heap on hard-backed chairs.

They touched nothing lightly. They gripped papers and pencils as if they were brooms. Their faces were firm, with heavy folds and deep lines. It seemed as if their muscles were always taut and on the stretch. Their eyes looked as if they were always set on something actual—on saucepans that were boiling over, on children who were getting into mischief.

Their faces never expressed the lighter and more detached emotions that come into play when the mind is perfectly at ease about the present. They were not in the least detached and cosmopolitan. They were indigenous and rooted to one spot. Their very names were like the stones of the fields, common, grey, obscure, docked of all the splendours of association and romance.

Vivid enough, very vivid and persuasive, but at the same time so patronising and privileged. Back to the Congress, where Woolf dismissively reports that there were innumerable more speeches, exchanges of home-made jams and biscuits, songs sung and meals consumed, a new President elected, then it was over and everyone caught their trains home.

Scene 2. At the Hampstead headquarters of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

If it wasn’t obvious before, it’s really rammed home why this text is called ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’. In another writer’s hands this might involve memories of other people, of what they were like, what they said and what they achieved. In Woolf’s hands everything is always about her and her sensitive perceptions and concerns.

In the inconsequential way which you either find charming or irritating, according to taste, Woolf doesn’t remember the substance of any of the conversations she takes part in at the Hampstead headquarters – instead she remembers that the Guild’s secretary, Miss Kidd, was stout and fierce and dressed in a deep purple dress.

Nowadays, if you’re a man, you’re likely to be criticised for judging women purely on their appearance instead of their character, thoughts and achievements. Yet this is exactly what Woolf does. Lacking the mental ability or interest in what anyone says, it is appearance and quirks which appeal to her most consistently. Presumably she’d have said this is the novelist’s eye. Forget issues. Enjoy characters.

Miss Lillian Harris who, whether it was due to her dress which was coffee-coloured, or to her smile which was serene, or to the ash-tray in which many cigarettes had come amiably to an end, seemed the image of detachment and equanimity.

Had one not known that Miss Harris was to the Congress what the heart is to the remoter veins—that the great engine at Newcastle would not have thumped and throbbed without her—that she had collected and sorted and summoned and arranged that very intricate but orderly assembly of women—she would never have enlightened one.

She had nothing whatever to do—she came to the office because an office is a good place in which to read detective stories—she licked a few stamps and addressed a few envelopes—it was a fad of hers—that was what her manner conveyed. It was Miss Harris who moved the papers off the chairs and got the teacups out of the cupboard. It was she who answered questions about figures and put her hand on the right file of letters infallibly and sat listening, without saying very much, with calm comprehension, to whatever was said. (p.151)

‘She had nothing whatever to do’. Yes. Again Woolf repeats her troubled sense of class superiority to most of these working women.

To expect us, whose minds such as they are, fly free at the end of a short length of capital to tie ourselves down to that narrow plot of acquisitiveness and desire is impossible. We have baths and we have money. Therefore, however much we had sympathised our sympathy was largely fictitious. It was aesthetic sympathy, the sympathy of the eye and of the imagination, not of the heart and nerves.

This turns into a complaint about the way some of the working women who spoke at the Congress imitated and mocked the dainty speech of middle and upper class women. As you can imagine, Virginia didn’t like this, but she comes up with a principled reason. It’s because she found the working class speakers more authentic and real when they stuck to their own voices and concerns and despite the fact that ‘the range of expression is narrower in working women’.

So much does she like this authenticity that she wonders why they want to acquire money and become middle class and so lose the thing they have, their ‘contact with life’, ”facing facts’, ‘the teaching of experience’, call it what you will. Ah the bourgeois fondness for the dignity of labour, as long as it’s other people doing the labouring.

In among all this Woolf makes a claim which is so preposterously privileged it is laugh-out-loud funny, claiming that:

No working man or woman works harder with his hands or is in closer touch with reality than a painter with his brush or a writer with his pen. (p.152)

Yes, her sister, Vanessa, and all the Rogers, Quentins and Duncans in the Bloomsbury Group, they all knew far more about hard work than a coal miner! It’s precisely attitudes like this which gave the group its reputation for high-minded snobbery and condescension. And stupidity.

Woolf is painfully aware of being trapped in her upper-middle-class bubble, what she calls ‘shut up in the confines of the middle classes’. This first part of the essay records all the aspects of embarrassment and boredom and frustration which this plight triggers in her.

She finds many things to admire in ‘them’, these working class women, such as their robust sense of humour, their energy and, especially interesting for Woolf the writer, their way with words, the phrases which Shakespeare would have enjoyed (Woolf and all her characters endlessly invoke Shakespeare, in a thumpingly obvious way, as the absolute peak of poetic expression), their ‘shrewd sayings in the speeches at the Congress which even the weight of a public meeting could not flatten out entirely’ (p.153).

Finally she arrives at the frustrated wish that if only the classes could come together and remove the class barriers between them.

We are condemned to remain forever shut up in the confines of the middle classes wearing tail coats and silk stockings and called Sir or Madam as the case may be, when we are all, in truth, simply Johns and Susans.

And they remain equally deprived. For we have as much to give them as they us—wit and detachment, learning and poetry and all those good gifts which those who have never answered bells or touched their foreheads with their forefingers enjoy by right. But the barrier is impassable.

And nothing perhaps exasperated us more at the Congress (you [Davies] must have noticed at times a certain irritability) than the thought that this force of theirs, this smouldering heat which broke the crust now and then and licked the surface with a hot and fearless flame, is about to break through and melt us together so that life will be richer and books more complex and society will pool its possessions instead of segregating them… but only when we are dead. (p.153)

Which prompts the question, Have class barriers been removed in modern England, 90 years after Woolf wrote this, 112 years after the Guild Congress which prompted it?

My impression is that these class barriers have substantially loosened, are not as absolutely impassable as they were in Woolf’s day, but they still remain. The chavs on the council estate round the corner are a slightly threatening mystery to me as I, with my civil service job and interest in the arts, might be for them. I think. The real point is that I don’t know. To a large extent everybody else is a mystery to me.

And also the entire question of ‘class’ has been ruptured and recast by the huge immigration which has changed the nature of English society over the last twenty years. In 2021 63.2% of London residents identified with an ethnic minority group. People identifying with the White ethnic group are now in a minority in London.

I grew up in an England where the main divide was between the middle and working classes and so leaned towards socialist politics on behalf of the downtrodden. But the advent of progressive or woke politics – the rise and rise feminism, the revelation of a dazzling range of gender identities, alongside the immigration of hundreds of ethnic groups which all retain their ethnic identities and allegiances – has massively confused the sociology of England and the old politics. No wonder it (the old two-party system) can’t keep up.

In my opinion these sociological changes have permanently fragmented what used to be called the Left, not only here but all across Europe, leading to the rise of right-wing populist parties. I don’t really judge any of these changes, I’m just observing what I consider to be the biggest social and cultural issue of my time, which presses fairly heavily on all of us, and so colours my readings of political or social writings from the past.

Back to Woolf, my point is that her worry about trying to break down barriers between the unknown white working class women and posh white ladies like herself who go to the opera and understand Shakespeare, these concerns now seem quaint and charming. Of historic interest. Like watching an Ealing Comedy. It is an issue from an England which has disappeared.

Her clarion cry to break down the barriers of class between women is fine and inspiring but I don’t know what they’d mean to the Kurdish hairdressers based in the Kurdish barbers I go to; to the till woman at Tesco from Ghana and Mauritius that I always chat to; to the wives of the Albanian builders who put up a new fence for me; to the Somali family or the Afghan family who live in the flats across from my place. Enjoying the blessings of Shakespeare? Most of them can barely speak English. I’m not saying that’s fatal. I’m just saying it restricts the relevance of Woolf’s discourse, these days, to an even tinier, bookish clique than it did in her day.

To summarise, Woolf feels that in this conversation at the Guild headquarters in Hampstead, she tried:

to describe the contradictory and complex feelings which beset the middle-class visitor forced to sit out a congress of working women in silence. (p.154)

Scene 3. The letters themselves

Apparently it was at this point in Woolf’s lament to Davies in the Hampstead headquarters, that Davies opened a drawer and indicated the many letters she had received from working women around the country. Woolf asked to see them but Davies, at that meeting, demurred. It was only years later, after the Great War, that she finally sent Woolf a packet of letters.

And here comes the radical transformation in the content and tone of the piece which I mentioned earlier. The simple unvarnished lives of these staggeringly poor women, the brutal conditions they grew up in, the childhood exploitation, the lives of unremitting labour garnished with the brutality of overseers, fathers and husbands, the horrors of childbirth, the lack of any healthcare, beggars belief.

Yet out of all these terrible stories, Woolf emphasises the positives, praising ‘that inborn energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench’. The women describe lives packed with debilitating toil, long hours working in fields and factories and domestic service, six days a week, with sometimes only a few hours free time each week, along with the struggle to support husbands, often ill or thrown out of work, and all the time raise numerous children, often going hungry in the process, worn out by stress and continual work, old and ill before their time.

And so, as I mentioned in my summary, the reader at last gets to the nub of the subject, the testimony of these many women and, as I suggested, realises that maybe the self-obsessed vapourings of the first half of the essay are intended as a deliberate contrast with the shocking lives depicted in the letters. Maybe. Or was Woolf that artful? Discuss.

Because of the in-your-face reality of these last few pages, this essay stands head and shoulders above the others. Maybe it’s just my old left-wing leanings being triggered, but I felt the essay only came to life with them and suddenly, from whimsical Woolfian sepia, changed into colour. Woolf, too, is thrilled by what she calls:

the extraordinary vitality of the human spirit. The dauntless energy which no amount of childbirth and washing up can quench

This is all very moving but, unfortunately, Woolf rather undermines herself, and in a characteristic way, which is that she in particular praises the women who made time in their wretched lives to read and to read the classics, which she then goes to the trouble of namechecking for us:

They read Dickens and Scott and Henry George and Bulwer-Lytton and Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Alice Meynell and would like “to get hold of any good history of the French Revolution, not Carlyle’s please,” and B. Russell on China, and William Morris and Shelley and Florence Barclay and Samuel Butler’s Note Books…

All true no doubt, and education begins with reading, but you can’t help feeling there’s something everso narrow about Woolf’s view of life. In her view the good life is reading the books she loves, the books she grew up reading in her father’s library, the same relatively short, restricted list of Great Books, Masterworks of the Spirit etc. Very narrow. Very limited.

Anyway, in the last pages she moves on to praise the work of the Guild and at this point the text morphs more into what you’d expect an introduction to be like, praising the work of the organisation it’s introducing.

It was the Guild that drew to itself all that restless wishing and dreaming. It was the Guild that made a central meeting place where formed and solidified all that was else so scattered and incoherent. The Guild must have given the older women, with their husbands and children, what ‘clean ground’ had been given to the little girl in Bethnal Green, or the view of day breaking over the hills had been to the girls in the hat factory. It gave them in the first place that rarest of all possessions – a room where they could sit down and think, remote from boiling saucepans and crying children… (p.157)

And she goes on to describe the growth of the organisation, its importance as a place where women could meet and share and think and develop their ideas.

And the force that lay behind their speeches was compact of many things—of men with whips, and sick rooms where match boxes are made, of hunger and cold, and many and difficult childbirths, of much scrubbing and washing up, of reading Shelley and William Morris and Samuel Butler, of meetings of the Women’s Guild, and committees and congresses at Manchester and elsewhere.

His final section which actually summarises the letters and the achievements of the Guild is as genuinely inspiring as Three Guineas is excoriating and anger-making. But again Woolf partly undermines what she’s saying, because she feels the (wholly unnecessary) need to pass literary judgement on these stories, lamenting their lack of literary finish like the crustiest of male critics.

The writing lacks detachment and imaginative breadth, even as the women themselves lacked variety and play of feature. Here are no reflections; no view of life as a whole; no attempt to enter into the lives of other people. It is not from the ranks of working class women that the next great poet or novelist will be drawn. (p.158)

It’s not only socially that Woolf was a snob, but in her very narrow, elitist view of Great Art. But she does condescend to comment that some of the accounts have the rude ‘accuracy and clarity’ of Defoe. In the midst of pontificating, she says something very, very symptomatic, she writes:

Writing is a complex art.

But is it? She would like to think so, but much of the great writing is not that complex. Worked over and elaborated, maybe, but not necessarily that complex. And the history of twentieth century literature since her heyday tends to demonstrate a steady simplification and de-complicating of literary writing, until our own day when much ‘literary’ writing is not, sentence by sentence, complex or difficult.

Here as in most of her writings, Woolf is judging others by her own standards and these standards are themselves a kind of aspiration to an ideal made up of a bunch of Victorian writers mashed together, Keats and Shelley and Lamb, into a vague icon of high Poetry and Truth. Her judging of the working class women’s writings says more about Woolf and her narrow idea of Literature than it does about the working class women.

This is characteristic of all her criticism. She doesn’t really engage with the meat and texture of the works under review, she tends to use them as pretexts to sound off about her hobby horses, to repeat her commitment to Poetry and Truth and hold Shakespeare up as the Great Model, time after time.

A Virago classic

I already knew that the book was published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, so there was a more than usually close connection between her and the book i.e. she was more than just an admirer of the Guild asked to write something, but the book’s publisher.

From looking on Amazon and Ebay I learned that Life As We Have Known It was one of the first books published by the feminist publishing house, Virago. So there are multiple layers of feminist history at work here: the women’s original personal experiences; the Guild which encouraged them to write about them; the collection of writings itself; the Woolf connection (publishing it and writing the introduction); and the Virago revival of it. It is quite a dense, multi-layered cultural artefact, then.

So I bought and read it and have reviewed the book as a whole, in a separate blog post.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction to the book can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on April 25, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays, History

Posted by Simon on April 25, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/25/virginia-woolf-life-as-we-have-known-it/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 3. Women and Fiction

The novel is the least concentrated form of art. (p.134)

Virginia Woolf’s writings about women, women and writing, women and fiction, are deeply felt and often inspiring, even if you’re not a woman or a writer of fiction. The one caveat is that, after you’ve read a certain number of her essays on the same subject, you find the same examples, anecdotes and arguments recurring. Bit samey. But then this is true of many other essayists. And if they’re good arguments and examples, why not?

Women and fiction

David Bradshaw’s selection of essays by Virginia Woolf for the Oxford World Classics is divided into four thematic areas.

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

This blog post summarises and comments on five of the six essays in the third section, ‘Women and Fiction’. The exception is ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ (1931), which I summarise in a separate post.

The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
Women and Fiction (1929)
Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
Why? (1934) [article for a student magazine]

Obviously there is a strong feminist tone to Woolf’s essays about women and women writers and women and fiction but in my opinion none of the six are as powerful as Woolf’s book-length essay Three Guineas. Guineas is so seismic because it brings together such a wealth of scandalous evidence demonstrating the deep-rooted sexism and misogyny operating at every level of British society, not only in the dark Victorian days, but right up to its date of publication in the late 1930s. Reading it permanently changed my view of the plight of so many women in the Victorian century and on into Woolf’s time.

1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905: 2 pages)

W. L. (William Leonard) Courtney (1850 to 1928) was a philosopher, journalist and sometime fellow of New College, Oxford. He wrote a book called ‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’. You can read it online. This is very short review of the book which Woolf published the Guardian, 25 January 1905 i.e. right at the very start of her career, when she was just turning 23.

On page one of his book Courtney says there is a feminine note in fiction and studies eight women writers of the day to show it, but Woolf quickly points out that he doesn’t, in fact, succeed. (The women writers in question are Mrs Humphrey Ward, Gertrude Atherton, Mrs Woods, Mrs Voynich, Miss Robins, Miss Mary Wilson, along with the diaries of six other women from history.) And anyway:

Is it not too soon after all to criticise the ‘feminine note’ in anything? And will not the adequate critic of women be a woman?

She summarises some of Courtney’s propositions, that women:

are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work – disproved by Sappho and Jane Austen
excel in ‘close analytic miniature work
are more happy when they reproduce than when they create
‘s genius is for psychological analysis

Woolf says this is all very nice but there have been too few successful women novelists to tell; we’ll need to come back in 100 years to see if any of it is true.

Courtney is surprised to find the women novelists in his study to be so varied, which is laughable.

He makes the characteristically stupid intellectual argument that his age is one of special and particular decline, the same thing idiot writers have claimed in every year of recorded history. Thus he says that more and more novels are written by women for women and that, as a result, the novel as a work of art is disappearing. What an arse, one of the legion of clever misogynist idiots Woolf cites to such powerful effect in Three Guineas.

To all of which Woolf (still a very young woman) sensibly replies:

The first part of his statement may well be true; it means that women having found their voices have something to say which is naturally of supreme interest and meaning to women, but the value of which we cannot yet determine.

The assertion that the woman novelist is extinguishing the novel as a work of art seems to us, however, more doubtful.

It is, at any rate, possible that the widening of her intelligence by means of education and study of the Greek and Latin classics may give her that sterner view of literature which will make an artist of her, so that, having blurted out her message somewhat formlessly, she will in due time fashion it into permanent artistic shape.

So this short review is really notable for this last bit, for her already feeling the need for art and artistry and ‘permanent artistic shape’ in the novel, things she was, of course, to go on and try to give it.

2. Women Novelists (1918: 3 pages)

Reginald Brimley Johnson (1867 to 1932) was a literary critic, editor, author and publisher. In 1918 he published a book titled ‘The Women Novelists’. This is Woolf’s review of it, published in the Times Literary Supplement.

She praises it. She says Johnson has read more novels by women than anyone had heard of. Also he doesn’t make sweeping generalisations, but is very cautious in his conclusions. She calls Fanny Burney the mother of English fiction. She laments the way the burden of proof remained with women authors to justify herself, and the practical difficulties they laboured under: Jane Austen slipping her papers under a book whenever anyone came into the drawing room; Charlotte Bronte leaving off work to pare the potatoes.

When she notes the criticisms of immorality George Eliot laboured under and how they continue to constrict women writers in the preset (1918) you realise it wasn’t that long since Eliot died. George Eliot died in 1880, just two years before Woolf was born. This essay is from over a hundred years ago. Many women, like Woolf, were alive who had been born in the reign of Victoria and still remembered the terrible stifled life women led.

She makes the point that Charlotte Bronte and George Eliot didn’t just adopt men’s names so as to get published; but also to free their own minds from the matrix of restrictions placed not just on women’s social, legal and financial freedom, but on their imaginative freedom.

She repeats a point made in A Room of Ones Own and Three Guineas which is that, above and beyond the suppression of women, it’s making women authors self conscious of themselves as women which so often undermines their efforts to produce art. The truly independent artist is sexless; the issue of their sex doesn’t enter into it. They just create art.

She agrees with Johnson that all women’s writing must be marked as feminine but wonders what ‘feminine’ actually means. She thinks Johnson is wise in not reaching a conclusion about this but accepting that women writers radically differ. She quotes several of Johnson’s generalisations which all feel like sexist rubbish:

Women are born preachers and always work to an ideal.
Women is the moral realist, and her realism is not inspired by any ideal of art, but of sympathy with life.
George Eliot’s outlook remains thoroughly emotional and feminine.
Women are humorous and satirical rather than imaginative.
Women have a great sense of emotional purity than men but a less alert sense of honour.

This is why I think no-one should every generalise about the sexes: it’s impossible not to sound like an idiot.

She thinks you can immediately tell the difference between a male and a female author and, after all, this might have been true in the 1920s. She thinks as soon as they start to describe a character you can instantly tell whether it’s a male or female author.

The motive of criticising men may have motivated many women writers to take up authorship.

There are sides of each sex which are only really seen and know by the opposite sex.

3. Women and Fiction (1929: 8 pages)

Why did women suddenly start writing fiction in the mid-18th century? Why did they start producing classic after classic of English literature?

A difficulty answering this is that history is about men so that ‘very little is known about women’.

But we do know that it requires special circumstances to be able to write, time, freedom from practical worries, a space or room of one’s own, and all these for most of human history most women have lacked or, to be clearer, have been deprived of.

And then motherhood: of the four great nineteenth century women writers – Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot – none had children and two were unmarried.

Why did they all write fiction, not epic poems or plays? Easy: ‘The novel is the least concentrated form of art’ (p.134). Readers are free to pick up and put down novels in a way you can’t do to poems or plays and the same is true of their authors, and she repeats the anecdote of Austen slipping her writings under a book or blotting pad when anyone came into the room or Charlotte Bronte breaking off writing to peel the potatoes.

Banned from undertaking any profession or work, middle class women were trapped in the home where they had precious little to do except observe the minutiae of each other’s behaviour. In other words, women were trained to become novelists.

She compares the maturity of George Eliot, disapproved of by society and locking herself away in St John’s Wood, with the wild life of Leo Tolstoy, soldier, playboy, traveller, thoroughly prepared by his society to be a novelist of astonishing breadth. (The Austen, Bronte and Eliot points are all made in A Room of One’s Own; they were obviously stock examples for Woolf.)

Being women writers led, in Woolf’s view, to impurity. What she means is that reading good women’s novels you’re always aware of an element of special pleasing; they protest against restrictions and lobby for the independence of their sex. However politically valid, this compromises their artistry, the work’s integrity. It needed a very strong mind to resist ‘the temptations to anger’ at women’s wholesale oppression, a feat only achieved by Jane Austen, whose work is pure and unsullied by resentment and grievance.

And so Woolf thinks the great change that has come over women’s writing in her days is the women are no longer angry and indignant. But many challenges remain.

One is the structure of language itself, which is male, made by men for men. The male sentence is ‘too lose, too heavy, too pompous’ for a woman’s use.

Then, men and women have different values, so that the very subject of the book, all its related smaller topics, descriptions and so on, are liable to clash with the values promoted by a male society. So that male critics are likely to find what women writers write about ‘weak or trivial or sentimental’ (p.136).

Nineteenth century women’s writing was likely to be skewed and impurified by special pleading for their sex and, in the same way, tended to by autobiographical, driven by the author’s need to share her suffering. Now, Woolf reckons, having passed through this phase, women are writing more about other women.

And in so doing she discovers that so much of women’s lives has been ephemeral, the meals cooked, the clothes washed, the children raised. Looking back there are no records or monuments. Thus women’s experience is like a dark continent, unexplored.

At the same time as this is being begun, legal impediments to women in the professions were being lifted and so current women novelists have this whole new subject to record: women coming in out of the shadows and entering the male world.

Thus she sums up contemporary women’s writing as brave, sincere. It is not bitter as the writing of the nineteenth century could be, and does not insist upon its femininity.

Again the essay ends with a description of her own practice. She says now women have won the vote and are allowed to enter the professions and earn a living, some women writers will become more socially conscious and critical and political. But there will be an equal and opposite reaction by which other women writers will reject the outside world altogether and cultivate their poetic facility. Be butterflies rather than gadflies.

Then she lets herself down a bit, and indicates the weakness of her position by saying this poetic turn will lead them to ‘examine the wider questions which the poet tries to solve – of our destiny and the meaning of life’ (p.138).

It’s odd that she’s so progressive in her analysis of the sociological situation of women and yet, when questioned on her artistic goals, steps right back into the nineteenth century, venerating a notion of The Poetic, The True and The Beautiful which hasn’t changed since the death of Keats in 1821.

She ends by saying more and more women have the leisure time and little money to write and out of this will hopefully come, fiction writing that is more poetic, but also women having the time to train for slightly more demanding genres such as essays, criticism, history and biography.

4. Professions for Women (1931: 5 pages)

In 1931 Woolf was invited to address the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service. This is her talk.

She was invited to talk about her experiences in her profession. But her profession is an odd one, literature. So many women have been successful writers because there is such a low bar to entry: all you need to make a start is a pen and some paper.

She spends a couple of pages describing how the one thing she’s really proud of is killing the Angel of The House. This was the name of a hugely popular poem by the Victorian poet Coventry Patmore which, as the name suggests, depicted the stereotypical Victorian wife: selfless, kind, self-denying, retiring, modest, meek and pure. Woolf’s point is that when she began reviewing books she heard the voice of the Angel whispering over her shoulder, telling her to be modest, to respect the male author, not to say anything unbecoming an angel.

And so, in order to become herself, to become intellectually and imaginatively independent, she had to murder the Angel inside her.

Next she describes the demanding state a novelist has to cultivate:

I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. She has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. She wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. She wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while she is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which she is living–so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. (p.143)

The second big challenge she faced was writing truthfully about women’s physical experiences, ‘the truth about my own experiences as a body’, and she stumbled here. The problem is the severity of men’s criticism of such honesty. With the result that whenever she goes near the subject she can feel her censor kicking in. She still hasn’t solved the problem of honestly describing women’s physical experiences.

And she brings the talk back to her audience of young professional women by saying the obstacles she faced, which she’s just described, were psychological, the internalisation of society’s male values which she had to combat in her head. How much must her audience of young women, the first generation moving into the male-dominated professions, also be confronting their inner obstacles. That is why it is so important for them to share their stories and experiences.

6. Why? (1934)

In 1934 women undergraduates at Somerville College, Oxford, one of the two relatively new women-only colleges, launched a new magazine titled Lysistrata. (The name refers to the play of the same name by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in which the women of the Greek city states, sick of the endless Peloponnesian War, go on a sex strike i.e. deny their men sex till they agree to make peace. Which makes me think of the contemporary 4B movement, originating in Korea which has spread to the US.)

Anyway, the editor of Lysistrata asked her to contribute a piece and here it is. What is it going to be about? Well here Woolf indulges one of those flights of fancy which you either find charming and beautiful, or irritating and obtuse, depending on taste.

The whole little essay turns out to be premised on the idea that, like most people these days (1934), Woolf is constantly assailed by questions, but couldn’t find any place to ask them until she received this invitation from Lysistrata for an article. At which point, she says, a fleet of questions thronged her head all clamouring for expression. From this throng she chose one relevant to the start of a new term at a university, namely: why lecture and why be lectured?

Unlike the other essays, it almost feels as if she’s being paid by the word in this one. It feels like she’s writing any old rubbish to fill the space (2,000 words). Anyway, she spends the middle of this little text sharing a memory of attending a lecture on the French Revolution in some non-descript public building. The account is chiefly notable for the way she describes being bored and wandering off, losing the thread of the lecture and becoming distracted by details, the look of the room, the appearance of other students and then a fly buzzing around. (As she so often does; exactly as she describes losing interest in the speeches of the women at the English Women’s Co-operative Guild in the preceding essay.)

And this is exactly the kind of easily distracted, wandering attention she attributes to the female protagonists of Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse (Mrs Ramsay) and The Years (Eleanor Pargiter) and Between the Acts (Lucy Swithin). It seems fairly obvious – from the way it occurs in all those characters and that you meet it in so many of the essays – that she was describing herself in those characters.

And her description of it made me think of the over-diagnosed modern condition, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The central attribute of this is ‘having a short attention span and being easily distracted’. QED.

Anyway, back in the argument about lectures, Woolf’s description of how bored she becomes in lectures turns into a plea that universities should drop lecturing altogether. She tells us that at the start of every term writers like her, and experts in every field, are bombarded with requests to come a deliver a lecture to this or that college. But she hates it. Doing so sets you up as an expert, a personage on a stage, and lures you into writing a long discourse with all the formal trimmings, guaranteeing it will be staggeringly dull.

So: why not abandon lectures. Why not invite speakers down from the stage and onto the floor among the audience and talk like ordinary men and women?

Good. Sorted. But she has more space to fill so she reverts to contrived metaphor that she is assailed by flocks of questions and has to choose just a few of them to include in this lecture, and chooses another one. This one is: Why learn English literature at universities when you can read it for yourself in books?

Instead of answering this in a logical way, Woolf takes a characteristically oblique and anecdotal approach by recalling a visit to a friend who is a publishers’ reader and who assailed her with a diatribe against students learning English. Does anyone write better for it, no. In fact, in her friend’s opinion, the big increase in teaching of English literature and writing books about English literature means all the manuscripts she’s sent end up sounding the same. In the long term it will end up by killing English literature off altogether.

Did that happen? No. More books, more novels and all other types of creating writing are published now, in 2025, than 90 years ago, despite the explosion in the teaching and studying of English literature, let alone the explosion of creative writing classes over the last half century. So it’s a snapshot of a grumpy woman from 90 years ago, grumpy and opinionated as any red-faced colonel at the bar of his club blustering about “young people these days”. Sort of interesting as social history; worthless as contribution to any debate.

This was by far the worst of the essays in this section because Woolf phoned it in. She was just going through the motions. It feels like she just cobbled together some fatuous ‘questions’ and made no serious effort to answer them. The conceit of being bombarded by questions and having to select a few is sort of interesting and maybe had the potential to be genuinely interesting, but felt squandered.

This little squib was only written for a student magazine but still, it feels weak.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most though not all of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on April 23, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Feminism, Literature

Tagged 4B movement, ADHD, Aristophanes, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, British society, Charlotte Brontë, Coventry Patmore, David Bradshaw, Emily Brontë, English literature, Essays, Fanny Burney, Feminism, George Eliot, Gertrude Atherton, Jane Austen, Leo Tolstoy, literary criticism, literary history, Lysistrata, Memories of a Working Women's Guild, misogyny, Miss Mary Wilson, Miss Robins, Mrs Humphrey Ward, Mrs Voynich, Mrs Woods, National Society for Women's Service, Oxford, Oxford World Classics, patriarchy, Peloponnesian War, Professions for Women, Reginald Brimley Johnson, Sappho, Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf, sexism, Somerville College, the Angel of The House, The Feminine Note in Fiction, the novel, The Women Novelists, Three Guineas, Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Woolf, Why?, WL Courtney, women, Women and Fiction, women and writing, Women Novelists

Posted by Simon on April 23, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/23/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-3-women-and-fiction/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 2. Life-Writing

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s essays, reviews and miscellaneous prose pieces, and groups them under four headings:

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I broke my review up into parts, one for each section. This one addresses the four essays in the ‘Life-Writing’ i.e. biography section, being:

The New Biography (1927) [review of Some People by Harold Nicholson]
On Being Ill (1930) [fantasia]
Leslie Stephen: The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories (1932) [memoir of her father]
The Art of Biography (1939) [specifically Lytton Strachey]

Woolf, her father and biography

Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832 to 1904) was an English author, critic, historian and biographer. He was editor of the influential Cornhill Magazine. Virginia grew up in a house filled with books, and was given free rein to its large library with, crucially, the support and guidance of an extremely bookish parent. She grew up to believe and promote in all her essays the dazzlingly unoriginal idea that writing, literature and poetry, were the highest art and encapsulated indelible human truths. I wonder if anyone believes such a narrow simple-minded idea in our times. Literature quite obviously doesn’t represent any kind of truth. The case against it is similar to one of the arguments against the Bible being the word of God, simply that it expresses, with profound conviction, a vast array of completely contradictory and chaotic beliefs. In fact literature’s virtue is its lack of any one Great Truth, the whole point is its mad diversity and plurality.

The point is that young Virginia grew up in a hyper-bookish household, dominated by a hyper-bookish father, and went on to spend a career telling everyone that the most important thing in the world was books and writing, as the essays in the first two sections of this book demonstrate. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Anyway, in the early 1880s, the owner of the Cornhill magazine, the publisher George Smith, approached its editor, Stephen, to sound him out about creating an encyclopedia of notable people. This led to the creation of the Dictionary of National Biography or DNB, still with us 140 years later. Stephen was the dictionary’s founding editor, working on it from 1885 to 1891. His daughter, Virginia, was to give a special place to biography in the genres of writing. Her novel Orlando is a tribute to and critique of traditional biography. I was struck by how her powerful feminist polemic, Three Guineas, relies not on data, sociology or economics, but leans very heavy on the evidence of the innumerable literary biographies she’s read. Biography was very important to this daughter of the man who founded the country’s definitive encyclopedia of biography. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

When her father resigned as editor, he was replaced by Sidney Lee, Stephen’s assistant editor from the beginning of the project. Lee served until the first edition was completed in 1900, then returned to edit the first supplement which was published in 1912.

1. The New Biography (1927: 6 pages)

This is a book review of Some People by Harold Nicholson. It starts with a quote from Sidney Lee’s 1911 book, Principles of Biography, where he writes that:

The aim of biography is the truthful transmission of personality.

Almost any educated person could spot the flaws in this statement, starting with the idea that you can ever have a truthful transmission of anything, and going on to wonder whether the point of a biography is solely to convey personality. That’s a nice outcome but surely there are a lot of other aims as well, not least getting the facts right and setting the record straight about someone’s life.

Anyway, this quote allows Woolf to set up a dichotomy between truth and personality. On the first page she astonishes with an unironic and naive praise of The Truth, believing that such a thing exists.

There is a virtue in truth; it has an almost mystic power.

Here as in so many other places, Woolf shows herself a child of the deep Victorian era, whose intellectual traces lingered for a long time in the Stephen household, her attachment to Truth and Beauty deriving from Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and so on, nothing from the thinkers, writers and artists of her own time.

But partly it’s just a rhetorical device. She builds up Truth as a big concept so she can oppose it with Personality. According to her this emerged into the genre of biography with Boswell’s ‘Life of Johnson’. We hear and see Dr Johnson as no other figure before him. We hear him, we can argue with him.

Victorian biography contained more psychology, more delving into personality than its predecessors, but was constrained by the Victorian need to dwell on virtue and goodness. The result was huge biographies which resembled the Victorian tombs of Great Men lacking all sense of life and spontaneity.

But now, she claims, twentieth century biography represents a sea change, in two main ways. Modern biographies are no longer the ten volume tombstones of the Victorian era, but are short and swift. Alongside this, the biographer no longer considers themselves a lowly drudge beavering away in the footsteps of their giant subjects; the modern biographer considers themselves the equal of their subjects, and freely able to pass judgement on them.

And now, after this thoughtful if wrong-headed introduction, we come to the book under review, Some People by Harold Nicholson. Now Nicholson was a ridiculously over-talented posh man. He was a diplomat, politician, journalist, broadcaster, historian, biographer, diarist, novelist, lecturer, literary critic, essayist and gardener nowadays maybe mostly remembered for his candid, scandalous Diaries.

He had already written fairly conventional biographies of Byron and Tennyson when he produced Some People. It consists of nine chapters, each the biography of a different person but here’s the thing – all nine are imaginary. They are: being a sort of character sketch: Miss Plimsoll; J. D. Marstock; Lambert Orme; The Marquis de Chaumont; Jeanne de Henaut; Titty; Professor Malone; Arketall; Miriam Codd.

Nicholson joked that they were all entirely imaginary, abstract character sketches. But those in the know recognised some of them as combining traits from real living people, and a couple of them are straight portraits of real people just given fictional names.

As such it is a hybrid book, biographies, but of non-existent people, except they are real people, except they are treated as fictions.

It may be worth pointing out that Nicholson was married to the posh aristocrat Vita Sackville-West, with whom Woolf was having a lesbian affair. Woolf was especially interested in biography at this time because she was quickly writing her own fictional biography, Orlando, which was in the same ballpark as Some People and which is dedicated to Sackville-West. Orlando is in fact in many respects based on Vita, even including photos of her in the text and captioning them as portraits of Orlando.

Back to Nicholson, Woolf says his chief quality is his sense of humour. He laughs at his subjects and he laughs at himself. She makes the rather obvious point that the tenth subject who emerges from this sequence of nine portraits is the author himself, mentioned self-mockingly at various moments, and whose own life and opinions emerge from references scattered throughout the other sketches.

What makes all this new is ‘the lack of pose, humbug, solemnity’, ‘freedom from pose, from sentimentality, from illusion’. He has opened new ground by deploying the techniques of fiction to biography.

At the same time she points out its limitations, which that all the characters, deliciously mocked though they are, are small. They lack real depth or complexity and they can’t be allowed it or the delicate balancing act will be spoiled.

Caveat

As I wrote this out I thought, Hang on: surely a vast number of novels have been biographies of fictional people, starting with books like Moll Flanders or Tom Jones. When she says that Nicholson writes with delightful humour well, er, Henry Fielding, let alone Dickens, most of whose early novels purport to be biographies of named people (Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby). Fiction and biography have always been closely aligned, haven’t they? Maybe Nicholson just seemed so new by contrast with the long dark shadows of the vast and pious Victorian biographer? Or maybe what was novel in his work was the pretence that his people were real? To us nowadays what Woolf finds so exciting in this book sounds to us pretty commonplace.

Or maybe what excited her was that she, also, at this very time, was writing a fantasy biography, an experimental biography, an experiment mixing fact and fiction, so it chimed with her own intense interest in this zone. As in her important essays about fiction, she is working through her own ideas in public?

Or that she was having an affair with the author’s wife. The literary world, eh?

2. On Being Ill (1930: 10 pages)

Wikipedia says:

‘On Being Ill’ is an essay by Virginia Woolf, which seeks to establish illness as a serious subject of literature along the lines of love, jealousy and battle. Woolf writes about the isolation, loneliness, and vulnerability that disease may bring and how it can make even the maturest of adults feel like children again. The essay was written in 1925, when she was 42 years old, while she was in bed shortly after experiencing a nervous breakdown.

Like most of Woolf’s essays, its premise, discussion and conclusions feel highly questionable. Take for a start her claim that that no serious writer had previously written about illness. Wikipedia points out that even when she was writing (1930), she had Proust’s extensive descriptions of illness in In Search of Lost Time (1913 to 1927) not to mention Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) set in an Alpine sanatorium, to refer to.

But facts aren’t what Woolf is about, here as in most of her essays. She mainly wants to get on and write, in a heightened poetic style, about the basic conflict between the mind and the body. And so she claims that most literature is about the mind and little attention is given to the demands, especially when ill, of the body. Partly this is due to the poverty of the vocabulary surrounding illness:

The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for him.

(Here, as everywhere, see how her mind, when considering almost any aspect of writing, immediately turns to Shakespeare as a reference point, something she does in virtually everything she wrote.)

Also, there’s the slight problem that her description of being ill bears no resemblance to actually being ill. I had flu for a week recently and Woolf’s extended and highly poetic fantasias about illness, fanciful and poetic though they are, bear no relation to the sense of exhaustion and lack of interest in anything at all which I experienced. Hers is a kind of over-literary person’s fantasy of what illness ought to be like.

In fact the whole text is really a fantasia, an imaginative extravaganza, often with no connection to the nominal subject. She describes how lying on a sick bed makes you look up into the sky and describes her impression of watching it for hours (the sky), how it continually changes like a vast open-air cinema. When I was lying sick in bed and looked up, I saw the ceiling.

Overwhelmed, as so often, by the intensity of her own sense impressions, Woolf shifts her attention to something smaller and closer to hand, roses in vases in her room. For some reason, this morphs into a fantasy about the heat death of the solar system, the sun going out and the earth being covered in ice. free-associating, she wonders whether there will be a heaven and immortality, and goes rambling on:

Surely, since men have been wishing all these ages, they will have wished something into existence; there will be some green isle for the mind to rest on even if the foot cannot plant itself there. The co-operative imagination of mankind must have drawn some firm outline.

But no. One opens the Morning Post and reads the Bishop of Lichfield on Heaven. One watches the church-goers file into those gallant temples where, on the bleakest day, in the wettest fields, lamps will be burning, bells will be ringing, and however the autumn leaves may shuffle and the winds sigh outside, hopes and desires will be changed to beliefs and certainties within.

Do they look serene? Are their eyes filled with the light of their supreme conviction? Would one of them dare leap straight into Heaven off Beachy Head? None but a simpleton would ask such questions; the little company of believers lags and drags and strays. The mother is worn; the father tired. As for imagining Heaven, they have no time.

Heaven-making must be left to the imagination of the poets. Without their help we can but trifle—imagine Pepys in Heaven, adumbrate little interviews with celebrated people on tufts of thyme, soon fall into gossip about such of our friends as have stayed in Hell, or, worse still, revert again to earth and choose, since there is no harm in choosing, to live over and over, now as man, now as woman, as sea-captain, or court lady, as Emperor or farmer’s wife, in splendid cities and on remote moors, at the time of Pericles or Arthur, Charlemagne or George the Fourth…

See what I mean by fantasia? There’s no point trying to process or assess this rationally: all you can do is relax and go with the flow of her rather delirious mind…

She eventually veers back into the world of sense when she makes the point that when we’re ill, the rational controlling mind is weakened and so, with your defences turned down, you respond more directly to sense impressions.

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this that, and the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause—which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke…

Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness… In health, meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne…

This may or may not be true. When I had flu I was too ill to read anything, to do anything, to care about anything at all, even eating. So this seems to me yet another of her poetic fantasies, it is a bookish account of what being ill ought to be like. And how characteristic that her first example of the conscious mind lowering its guard and being more susceptible, is that it be more susceptible to poetry and the Great Classics of Poetry in particular.

This dogged return of so many essays to her obsession with Poetry made me reflect that, although Woolf’s best novels are really great, in all other respects her imagination was horribly constricted. Essay after essay after essay praises the same handful of Great English Poets and, above all, Shakespeare, again and again and again. It’s like listening to a tame parrot repeat its half dozen catchphrases all day long. And lo and behold, in the very next paragraph, here is the Bard of Avon, yet again.

Rashness is one of the properties of illness—outlaws that we are—and it is rashness that we need in reading Shakespeare. It is not that we should doze in reading him, but that, fully conscious and aware, his fame intimidates and bores, and all the views of all the critics dull in us that thunder-clap of conviction which, if an illusion, is still so helpful an illusion, so prodigious a pleasure, so keen a stimulus in reading the great. Shakespeare is getting flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him, as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one’s conjectures privately, make one’s notes in the margin; but, knowing that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone. Illness, in its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves nothing but Shakespeare and oneself. What with his overweening power and our overweening arrogance, the barriers go down, the knots run smooth, the brain rings and resounds with Lear or Macbeth…

Is she seriously claiming that being ill helps you read Shakespeare better? This is not a sensible remark because it’s quite the opposite. You need your wits about you when reading such wonderfully complex, multi-levelled works – the multi-levelled complexity of plot, character, psychology and diction are key to the deep sensual but intellectual pleasure Shakespeare gives.

The last few pages of the essay follow through on Woolf’s idea that when you’re ill you’re not up to reading the Great Works of Literature and fancy something lighter. In Woolf’s case this is biography, which she goes out of her way, in essay after essay, to emphasise is not an art on the same level as writing a novel (see ‘The Art of Biography’, below).

At which point the essay takes an unexpected turn to look at a very specific author. The last couple of pages of this little essay stop being about illness at all and turn into praise for the Victorian writer, painter and raconteur, Augustus Hare (1834 to 1903). Specifically, it turns out Woolf is a big fan of Story of Two Noble Lives, Hare’s big biography of two sisters and artists, Countess Canning and the Marchioness of Waterford. Woolf gives us an extended summary of these ladies’ lives, of the extended Victorian families they lived in, of their marriages, children, careers and whatnot and then, after this brisk impressionistic summary of this now-obscure work, her favourite sick-time reading, the essay simply stops, leaving you puzzled and (pleasurably) disorientated.

Thoughts

1) Being ill is nothing like Woolf describes. This is just a literary fantasia.

2) Her obsession with Great English Literature and, above all, with Shakespeare Shakespeare Shakespeare, is enough to make you scream. English literature is huge and varied and strange but hardly any of this comes over from Woolf who makes everything, all English literature, sound like one thing, like the same, high-minded and lyrical seeking after Poetry.

3) It is symptomatic that she ends not with a novel but a biography. Biographies are easy to read, serious novels often very hard. Hence my mild criticism of the way so much of her powerful polemic Three Guineas was based on biography, anecdote and extensive newspaper cuttings rather than serious research into history or sociology. I knew medics and scientists at university who never read novels but loved a good biography. This is because reading a biography is easy, reading the biography of a writer is a lazy copout: at the risk of sounding schoolmasterish, you should always read the original works – because it’s there that the unexpected, the strange and the marvellous reside, not in biographical summaries, no matter how interesting.

4) Ten thousand critics have labelled Woolf a modernist but, in my opinion, underlying the technique of drifting, free-associating consciousness which she developed for her great novels, there actually lurks an extremely conservative, backwards-looking mentality. ‘Poetry, darling, seeking The Truth of Life. Keats and Shelley. And above all, the Master, Shakespeare!’ My reading of her novels and essays is that Woolf wasn’t the first of the moderns, she was the last of the Victorians who carried a kind of purified, quintessential Victorian aestheticism on into the troubled culture of the post-war era.

3. Leslie Stephen, The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories (1932: 5 pages)

Woolf’s father was an eminent biographer, who helped found and develop the definitive encyclopedia of biographies of notable British people. He was also a noted essayist. And so she became… a noted essayist with a lifelong fascination in biography. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

This brief text isn’t anything like a biography or an obituary for her famous father. It’s more a eulogy but of a highly personal and limited nature. Woolf’s stock-in-trade wasn’t so much analysis but ‘memories’. Compare and contrast the way the supposed introduction to the book about the English Women’s Co-operative Guild (see my next blog post) is called ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’, and proceeds not by rational argument, not by logical structure, but through the highly personal medium of her own memories, dwelling on her own responses and feelings.

Back to this essay, it’s a relatively brief collection of memories of her famous father:

how Leslie Stephen’s adventurous days – as a rower, mountaineer and even author – were over before his children were old enough to know him
he liked to go on huge walks across the Cornish moors, rarely speaking more than a few words to anyone who accompanied him
he wrote lying almost horizontally in an old rocking chair, picking up and dropping source books as he needed them, with a thump which could be heard downstairs
he unconsciously doodled animals in the margins of his books as he read
he had a magical ability to make animal shapes out of sheets of plain paper
he didn’t speak much but even his briefest remarks were freighted with meaning
he disregarded conventional values, frequently embarrassing the family, such as when he wondered aloud whether people who had dropped in for tea were ever going to leave
he loved clear thinking and hated sentimentality
he hated wars
he was paranoid about running out of money and going bankrupt
he liked going for brisk walks from the family home at Hyde Park Gate, up to Kensington Gardens and round the Serpentine to the Marble Arch and back
his children regularly heard the story about him and his brother encountering Queen Victoria in the Park and bowing low to which the Queen curtseyed, and as a boy once seeing the great Duke of Wellington
he smoked a pipe continually
he worse clothes till they became shabby
like so many industrious Victorians, he hated idleness
he didn’t give his daughters higher education but when Vanessa expressed the wish to become a painter he promised to do everything in his power to help her
as for Virginia, he gave her free run of his large library when she was just 15 and taught her to be true to her own opinions, to be honest, never to pretend to admire something she didn’t

At the end is a flurry of tributes to him from the writers of his time. Woolf quotes a few lines by Thomas Hardy about Stephen. She quotes the novelist George Meredith saying her father was the only man worthy of her mother (who Meredith knew and admired).

You’ve heard of Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter? Well, this little sliver feels like Woolf’s Memories of a Dutiful Daughter. You’d never know from this pious recital, that she based the character of the occasionally malicious and hurtful Mr Ramsay in To The Lighthouse on her father. Scholars claim that Mr Ramsay is a much more subtle and nuanced depiction of some of her father’s complex and difficult character. By contrast, this reads like the official version.

4. The Art of Biography (1939)

Divided into four sections.

1.

On any given topic Woolf tends to revert to the same handful of ideas. Here she repeats the idea stated in ‘The New Biography’ that it was only in the 18th century that Westerners developed sufficient interest in other people to write really flavoursome biographies, with Boswell’s vast ‘Life of Johnson’ epitomising the new interest, while in the Victorian century biographies grew vast and ponderous and worthy.

Belleletterist writing often proceeds by asking rhetorical questions. Here she asks: Is biography an art? despite being well aware that ‘the question is foolish perhaps.’ In fact it’s such a fatuously pointless question that nobody cares about the answer and Woolf doesn’t answer it.

Instead she moves onto another question: Why do so few biographies endure? Because the novelist is free to write what they want, whereas the biographer is bound by friends and family, by legal restrictions, libel, slander and so on.

The novelist is free; the biographer is tied.

With the result that ‘the art of biography is the most restricted of all the arts.’

2.

She now goes on to discuss the significance of (her friend) Lytton Strachey, author of the volume ‘Eminent Victorians’ (1918), notorious in its day for its warts-and-all portrayal of four Victorian heroes: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Charles Gordon. (Victoria Glendinning’s biography of Leonard Woolf tells me that they weren’t just friends but that the flamboyantly gay Strachey actually proposed to Virginia only to be turned down, a season or so before his Cambridge friend, Leonard Woolf, proposed, and was accepted.)

She knows from personal acquaintance that Strachey wanted to be a writer but lacked the skills required for poetry or plays, whereas in 1918, after the immense disillusionment of the Great War, a new mood was abroad in biography. The plaster saints and stuffed effigies of the Victorian period were ripe for debunking and Strachey found his metier as a debunker and Eminent Victorians was his most famous debunking. That said, the examples Woolf gives of the controversial questions he raised seem ridiculously trivial.

Once more they were the centre of a buzz of discussion. Did Gordon really drink, or was that an invention? Had Florence Nightingale received the Order of Merit in her bedroom or in her sitting room?

Nowadays in our oversexed era, no biography can be published which doesn’t dwell at length on the subject’s sex life, whether they are abused as children or survived all the other horrors life can offer, a melodramatic concern which gave rise a generation ago to the mocking term misery porn. We’ve come a long way from politely wondering if a great military hero might have enjoyed a glass of wine too many.

Anyway, after this early success Strachey went on to write two massive and authoritative biographies of Britain’s queens, Queen Victoria (1921) and Queen Elizabeth I (1928). Woolf has an interesting point to make about these. Basically, the Victoria was a great success (winning prizes) while the Elizabeth was a relative failure. Why? Woolf thinks the answer tells us something about biography ‘as an art’, namely that when he wrote the Victoria he accepted the limitations of biography as a form, its need to stick to verifiable facts, documents, eye witness accounts and so on, and so he worked as a craftsman, assembling his materials. But when he wrote the Elizabeth he got cocky, he tried to make it a work of art, he wanted the book to have more of Woolf’s shibboleth, Poetry, ignored the form’s intrinsic limitations, and failed.

Strachey wanted to invent events and dialogue and motives, specifically in the mysterious relationship between Elizabeth and one of her favourite courtiers, the Earl of Essex. What he found out the hard way is that you can’t add fiction into biography in small doses. To work, fiction must have a free hand to develop character and plot. There was some obscurity in the Elizabeth-Essex relationship but not enough. Just as the fiction was getting going it bumped up against the documents and records we do have which contradicted it, blocked the flow of a narrative. Worse:

By fact in biography we mean facts that can be verified by other people besides the artist. If he invents facts as an artist invents them — facts that no one else can verify — and tries to combine them with facts of the other sort, they destroy each other. (p.120)

(All this prompts the obvious thought that in the 100 years since Strachey’s Elizabeth was published, thousands of writers have managed to write fictional books about historical characters i.e. which blend historical fact with fictional narratives, from Robert Graves to Hilary Mantel, so this last point doesn’t really stand.)

3.

But ‘the facts’ of biography change, they are coloured by changes of opinion by which she means social conventions or beliefs. To demonstrate this she chooses the subject of homosexuality, though she is not allowed to say so.

What was thought a sin is now known, by the light of facts won for us by the psychologists, to be perhaps a misfortune; perhaps a curiosity; perhaps neither one nor the other, but a trifling foible of no great importance one way or the other. The accent on sex has changed within living memory.

Maybe she chooses this particular topic among many other views which shifted with the end of the Victorian era, because Strachey was gay.

Anyway, given these ever-shifting social values, the biographer needs to keep on their toes, alert to the way that so-called biographical ‘facts’ are liable to change completely in a generation. This is why Woolf suggests chucking out the old conventional chapters in a conventional biography and rethinking it as more subtly psychological (like her novels).

Many of the old chapter headings — life at college, marriage, career—are shown to be very arbitrary and artificial distinctions. The real current of the hero’s existence took, very likely, a different course.

4.

Summing up, then, Woolf asserts that it’s exciting times for biographers as biography is poised to take significant new steps forward. But, in line with her obsessive need to rank literary genres, she persists in insisting that biography is an inferior type of writing.

It is a different life from the life of poetry and fiction — a life lived at a lower degree of tension. And for that reason its creations are not destined for the immortality which the artist now and then achieves for his creations. (p.122)

The great characters from fiction last forever. No biographer’s work will last forever. And so she comes round to answering the question she set herself at the start, whether biography is an art. No. No it isn’t.

The artist’s imagination at its most intense fires out what is perishable in fact; he builds with what is durable; but the biographer must accept the perishable, build with it, imbed it in the very fabric of his work. Much will perish; little will live. And thus we come to the conclusion, that he is a craftsman, not an artist; and his work is not a work of art, but something betwixt and between. (p.122)

So Woolf is very tough on biographers, then. According to her they are simply not in the top ranking. Oh well.

But she does throw biographers a consolation prize. This is that the Imagination needs a rest from time to time and biography provides good recreation. Their works make a good playground. A playground where, more importantly, the Creative Writer (the Important Writer, someone like Woolf) may find nuggets of fact, anecdotes or insights:

the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders

which may inspire the superior Creative Writer, which the superior Creative Writer may be able to incorporate into their Work of Art. And so all the biographer’s hard work will have been worthwhile. It would be entertaining to read professional biographer’s responses to this patronising, dismissive point of view.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. David Bradshaw’s introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on April 21, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Biography, English literature, Essays

Tagged Arketall, Augustus Hare, Biography, Bishop of Lichfield, Boswell's Life of Johnson, Cardinal Manning, Cornhill Magazine, Countess Canning, David Bradshaw, Dickens, Dictionary of National Biography, DNB, Donne, Dr Johnson, Duke of Wellington, Earl of Essex, Eminent Victorians, English Women's Co-operative Guild, Essays, Florence Nightingale, General Charles Gordon, George Meredith, George Smith, Harold Nicholson, Henry Fielding, Hyde Park Gate, In Search of Lost Time, J. D. Marstock, Jeanne de Henaut, Keats, Kensington Gardens, Lambert Orme, Leslie Stephen, Leslie Stephen: The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter's Memories, Life-Writing, Lytton Strachey, Mallarmé, Marble Arch, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Memories of a Working Women's Guild, Miriam Codd, Miss Plimsoll, Moll Flanders, Mr Ramsay, nervous breakdown, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist, On Being Ill, Orlando, Oxford World Classics, Principles of Biography, Professor Malone, Proust, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Victoria, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, Sidney Lee, Simone de Beauvoir, Sir Leslie Stephen, Some People, Story of Two Noble Lives, The Art of Biography, The Magic Mountain, the Marchioness of Waterford, The Marquis de Chaumont, The Morning Post, The New Biography, the Serpentine, Thomas Arnold, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Mann, Three Guineas, Titty, To The Lighthouse, Tom Jones, Virginia Stephen, Vita Sackville-West

Posted by Simon on April 21, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/21/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-2-life-writing/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (2)

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

Earlier blog posts give my introductory notes to the essays and summary of the first four essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section. This post summarises and comments on the last six essays in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section, numbers 5 to 10 in this list.

The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
Modern Fiction (1919)
The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]

5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923: 5 pages)

The essence of fiction is character but the complexity of the world the Georgian novelists face means they have to reject the simplistic notions of character good enough for their Victorian and Edwardian forebears.

The story of this and the following essay are a bit confused.

In March 1923 the bestselling novelist Arnold Bennett wrote a review of Woolf’s avant-garde novel ‘Jacob’s Room’ (1922) in which he claimed her characters would never survive in ‘the real world’. This triggered Woolf to write 1) a rebuttal of Bennett’s criticisms that was published in the Athenaeum magazine in December 1923 under the title of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

Woolf realised she was onto something and expanded her points into a 2) longer essay and, the following year, presented the expanded version in a paper read to the Heretics Society at Cambridge University, still titled ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, on 18 May 1924.

When T.S. Eliot, as editor of The Criterion magazine, asked Woolf for an article she submitted the text of this talk and it was published in July 1924 under the title ‘Character in Fiction’. This second version, the expanded version, is the essay following this one in this selection, number 6 in my list. Woolf and her husband then published it themselves, as a standalone pamphlet, in their own Hogarth Press, on 30 October 1924. What makes things confusing is that they chose to publish it under the title of the short version, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’.

So this is my summary of the original 5-page review. In his selection Bradshaw follows it by publishing the longer version, as published in The Criterion and under the Criterion‘s title, ‘Character in Fiction’.

***

Woolf quotes the best-selling serious novelist of his day, Arnold Bennett, as writing in a recent essay that the foundation of good novel writing is character but that the Georgian novelists have lost interest in depicting character in preference for a blizzard of details. Woolf agrees but claims that it is Bennett and the two other successful novelists of his generation, H.G. Wells and John Galsworthy, who are chiefly responsible for drowning character in facts and details.

She claims that the characters of modern books such as Kipps or ‘The Old Wives Tale’ pale into comparison with any character from ‘the splendid opulence of the Victorian age’, notable for ‘the astonishing vividness and reality of the characters.’

For Woolf the Edwardian novelists suffer from at least three disadvantage: 1) In a sense they simply couldn’t compete with the scale and depth of the great Victorians. 2) There was also something squalid and vulgar about them. She is very rude about Samuel Butler.

No sooner had the Victorians departed than Samuel Butler, who had lived below stairs, came out like an observant boot boy, with the family secrets in ‘The Way of All Flesh’.

In the same vein John Galsworthy is accused of being overly concerned with social injustices, which was even more true of H.G. Wells and his incessant issue-mongering.

3) The impact of Constance Garnett’s powerful English translations of the Russian classic novelists, particularly Dostoyevsky. Not only the Edwardians but even the Victorians couldn’t compete with the scale and depth and complexity of characters such as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin et al.

Galsworthy gives us his sense of compassion, Wells his generous enthusiasm and Bennett his sense of time passing, but none of them match up to the great Russians.

Woolf claims that it was this, the change to a new sense of the depth and complexity of human nature, which marked the decisive break between the culture of the Edwardians and of the Georgians (King Edward VII died and was succeeded by his son George V in May 1910). This is the thinking behind her much quoted saying that ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’, which comes in the expanded version of this essay (see below).

Character, she asserts, is crucial to human beings’ sense of life, of who we are and who other people are. Hence, if we disbelieve in the characters in novels as they are presented to us, then we want to go deeper and further, to search out their real meanings for ourselves.

At this point she introduces the figure of Mrs Brown – who is to feature so largely in the expanded version of the essay – but in a very different way from her later appearance. Here she is not much more than a name Woolf gives to her notion of a deeper, more unpredictable conception of character than the Edwardian writers can cope with, a notion which breaks up and shatters traditional ideas about character.

And it is amid these ruins of the old Victorian and Edwardian notions of ‘character’ that her generation of writers, the Georgians, have to somehow construct a reasonable dwelling place. She argues that the difficulties each of the Georgian writers encountered in trying to work out their own conception of ‘Mrs Brown’ (i.e. how to depict modern character) explain both the failures but also the daring experiments of her generation.

6. Character in Fiction (1924: 18 pages)

Extended criticism of the Edwardian novelists – Galsworthy, Bennett and Wells – for their excessive naturalistic detail which swamps their characters, for ignoring the spiritual for the material, which is why her generation of Georgian novelists must reject them.

This is the text of the paper read to The Heretics in Cambridge on 18 May 1924 mentioned above. (The Cambridge Heretics was a society formed at the University of Cambridge in 1909, to oppose compulsory Christian worship and celebrate humanist values.)

Woolf actually delivered it under the title of the original article rebutting Bennett i.e. ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (see above) which was also the title she used when she published it in her own Hogarth Press edition. But in an effort to distinguish between the two versions, David Bradshaw publishes it here with the title it was given when published in T.S. Eliot’s journal, The Criterion i.e. ‘Character in Fiction’.

This explains why, when you look it up online, you find the text given here as ‘Character in Fiction’ is everywhere else given the Hogarth Press title of Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown.

***

Woolf opens with a modest, self-deprecating tone. She describes herself as ‘one solitary, ill-informed, and misguided individual’ and goes on to say:

It seems to me possible, perhaps desirable, that I may be the only person in this room who has committed the folly of writing, trying to write, or failing to write, a novel. And when I asked myself, as your invitation to speak to you about modern fiction made me ask myself, what demon whispered in my ear and urged me to my doom, a little figure rose before me—the figure of a man, or of a woman, who said, ‘My name is Brown. Catch me if you can.’

She gets the ball rolling going by quoting Arnold Bennett as saying that the most important thing in novel writing is creating character, everything follows from that. So that’s the Mr Bennett of the title accounted for.

To the reader’s mild surprise, Woolf suddenly makes the grand declaration that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed.’ What changed? She explains. Between her generation and the Victorians there is a gulf:

All human relations have shifted—those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics, and literature. Let us agree to place one of these changes about the year 1910.

Ah. So it’s an arbitrary but useful dividing line which she has airily invented.

She goes on to admit that to some extent everybody is an expert in ‘character’. To assess other people’s characters is a fundamental human need. But novelists take it a stage further:

The study of character becomes to them an absorbing pursuit; to impart character an obsession. And this I find it very difficult to explain: what novelists mean when they talk about character, what the impulse is that urges them so powerfully every now and then to embody their view in writing.

Then she makes what appears, at first sight, to be one of her bewildering digressions. She tells everyone about an incident which occurred to her recently, when she was late catching a train and hurriedly climbed into a compartment where a man and woman seemed to be having an argument. They both shut up when she got in but she could feel the tension in the carriage. being Woolf, she promptly invented names for these two unknown strangers, naming the bluff irritated man Mr Smith and the much older, visibly poor woman, Mrs Brown. So this is the Mrs Brown of the title.

Woolf then reports this pair’s inconsequential conversation, Smith leaning forward and threateningly extracting from the woman what he wanted, namely a promise to meet someone named George somewhere on Thursday. Once assured of this, the man jumps out at Clapham Junction, while Mrs Brown continues on to Waterloo station, gets out and walks – like so many of the bit characters she observes in London streets – out of Woolf’s life.

What just happened? We have just watched Woolf conjure character and interest out of an apparently chance and trivial encounter and she begins to make her point:

I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite. I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character, and that it is to express character — not to preach doctrines, sing songs, or celebrate the glories of the British Empire, that the form of the novel, so clumsy, verbose, and undramatic, so rich, elastic, and alive, has been evolved.

She reminds us that Arnold Bennett claimed that fictional characters must be ‘real’ to make a book work, but Woolf asks the obvious question: what is reality? One man’s reality is another man’s nonsense.

For instance, in this article he says that Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes is real to him: to me Dr Watson is a sack stuffed with straw, a dummy, a figure of fun.

Anyway, her point is this: Why are there no plausible characters in contemporary (1920s) fiction? She has another go at Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy, saying their books lack the completion and closure of, say, Jane Austen. They miss something, they are incomplete.

To make her point she entertainingly speculates what Wells, Galsworthy and Bennett would have made of her made-up Mrs Brown. Her three little parodies are unusually funny for Woolf. She spends most effort on Bennett’s version. Then, to check, she takes down a novel of his, Hilda Lessways. She quotes from it, from the long factual description of Hilda Lessway’s house, in order to graphically demonstrate what a blizzard of realistic detail clutters up Bennett’s texts. No wonder his novels are so bloody long.

But Woolf says Bennett’s approach is the wrong way round. The house isn’t important, the person living in it, Hilda, is the important thing.

Back to 1910 and Woolf says that E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence spoiled their early work by giving in to the British public’s need for conventions and facts. They compromised with what she calls the Edwardian quality of Wells-Galsworthy-Bennett’s books. Foster and Lawrence had to wriggle free of the old conventions in order to capture the uniqueness of ‘Mrs Brown’.

By now we can see that this ‘Mrs Brown’ has become a metaphor for a particular view of reality, of Life as portrayed in fiction. And so Woolf comes to the present day and tells us that she can hear all around her the sound of authors crashing and smashing down those Victorian-Edwardian conventions in order to convey the truth of life. But the trouble with contemporary authors is they don’t know what to replace all those dead old conventions with. Hence the sense of confusion and lack of common values which she lamented in ‘How it strikes a contemporary’. It’s one thing to tear down the old rule, but what are the new rules and how do we agree on them?

Then Woolf is surprisingly harsh on a couple of notorious modern writers, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. She condemns Joyce for his indecency and Eliot for his obscurity. It’s part of her broader point that modern writers have to waste so much of their energy smashing the old conventions and forging their own way. This was not true of her ideal writers from earlier times, authors like Jane Austen or Macauley the historian, who were at one with their times and so wrote easily and gracefully. Instead:

We must reconcile ourselves to a season of failures and fragments. We must reflect that where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition. Ulysses, Queen Victoria, Mr Prufrock — to give Mrs Brown some of the names she has made famous lately — is a little pale and dishevelled by the time her rescuers reach her.

Drawing to a conclusion, Woolf asks her readers to be tolerant of the problems and difficulties of modern fiction, to ‘tolerate the spasmodic, the obscure, the fragmentary, the failure.’ Modern authors are trying their best but they are having to invent a whole new world.

After all this talk about smashing and crashing and difficulties, she ends with the surprising claim that:

We are trembling on the verge of one of the great ages of English literature. But it can only be reached if we are determined never, never to desert Mrs Brown.

Summary

Well, this is a Great Essay. She delivers a good, clear point of view, forcefully and vividly expressed. Just as T.S. Eliot’s essays in the early 1920s helped him think through his position and helped the perplexed public understand what his new type of poetry was trying to do, so Woolf’s essays show her developing her new and radical aesthetic, and this is very interesting. And her criticism of Wells and Bennett’s materialism becomes more debatable, discussable and powerful, the more you read it.

7. ‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926: 8 pages)

Justification of her wish to restore poetry to prose, on the model of her hero Thomas de Quincy.

She means poetic prose, prose poetry. She laments that most prose fiction is resolutely factual, that we are continually told that it is a solecism to include poetic flights in a prose text.

If the critics agree on any point it is on this, that nothing is more reprehensible than for a prose writer to write like a poet. Poetry is poetry and prose is prose—how often have we not heard that! Poetry has one mission and prose another

Trouble is that this occludes half of life, prevents us exploring our subjective, inner lives.

Therefore all that side of the mind which is exposed in solitude they ignore. They ignore its thoughts, its rhapsodies, its dreams, with the result that the people of fiction bursting with energy on one side are atrophied on the other.

Luckily there are in all ages writers who are not themselves of the first rank but who widen the possibilities of writing for contemporaries and successors. The example she has in mind is Thomas de Quincey who wrote a huge amount, and had a poetic sensibility, but never wrote any poetry because he didn’t have the sustained gift; and by the same token wasn’t interested enough in people to be a novelist so never write fiction.

In what form was he to express this that was the most real part of his own existence? There was none ready made to his hand. He invented, as he claimed, ‘modes of impassioned prose‘. With immense elaboration and art he formed a style in which to express these ‘visionary scenes derived from the world of dreams’. For such prose there were no precedents, he believed; and he begged the reader to remember ‘the perilous difficulty’ of an attempt where ‘a single false note, a single word in a wrong key, ruins the whole music’.

And so he carved out his own space, writing poetically in the other prose genres: essays, biographies, confessions and memoirs.

He was an exception and a solitary. He made a class for himself. He widened the choice for others.

She goes on to describe at length the strength and weakness of her favourite among de Quincey’s books, the ‘Autobiographic Sketches’. By this stage she’s made her point, for surely she is the modern de Quincey, deploying ‘modes of impassioned prose’ to convey a deeper perception of life, than the stony prose writers. We sit with our friends and family, eating, talking, in too close proximity.

But draw a little apart, see people in groups, as outlines, and they become at once memorable and full of beauty. Then it is not the actual sight or sound itself that matters, but the reverberations that it makes as it travels through our minds. These are often to be found far away, strangely transformed; but it is only by gathering up and putting together these echoes and fragments that we arrive at the true nature of our experience.

She is describing her own technique.

8. How Should One Read A Book? (1926: 11 days)

Quite frequently Woolf displays the number one mistake of intellectuals and writers in thinking that the present moment, the moment she’s writing about, is somehow uniquely special, and moreover uniquely degraded and decadent. Thus she opens this essay:

At this late hour of the world’s history…

But it isn’t ‘this late hour of the world’s history’. Who’s to say this isn’t an early hour in the world’s history, that the last 3,000 years are just a prelude to what comes after. In fact they obviously will be. Human history will go on as long as there are humans to record it and who knows how long that will be – maybe thousands and thousands of years to come. This decline-and-fall trope is a cliché and doesn’t give you confidence of her broader understanding of history or society. You get the feeling that her orientating herself in culture and history is subtly awry, but then there’s something awry about all her writings, the detachment, the alienation, but also the odd insights of the mentally ill.

Anyway, her point is that there are more books than ever before (another cliché, something she also complains about in ‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’) so how should you read them? Well, there are no rules but the first thing to acknowledge is that books come in all shapes and sizes and genres and forms and we should respond appropriately.

Her essays often address issues which feel very outdated; her values are those of another age. Still in thrall to Victorian earnestness, she asks whether one should read books for pleasure or profit? Answer: no-one really cares. It’s a non-question. Maybe a GCSE-level question to get schoolchildren thinking but tangential to our concerns.

Anyway, she does make one simple Big Point, which is that nobody really understands what reading is. The physical activity, yes; you can test people on their ability to read, on their level of comprehension, on what they understand or remember. But at the more advanced level of registering nuance and implication… I wonder if there’s a specialist area of modern neuroscience devoted to the science of reading?

Belles letterism

Belles-lettres is a category of writing, originally meaning beautiful or fine writing… The phrase is sometimes used pejoratively for writing that focuses on the aesthetic qualities of language rather than its practical application.

I can’t see how a lot of Woolf could not be considered belle-letterism: the concern for fine, flowing elegant prose redolent of nineteenth century fine writing (Lamb, Pater); the use of the royal ‘we’; mention of ‘turning to the bookcase’ which evokes the comfy air of a book-lined study in a fine house or gentlemen’s club. It’s a permanent puzzle how radical and drastic her experiments in fiction were and yet how conservative and backward-looking her prose style is.

The problem [of what to read] is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

The leisurely, all-the-time-in-the-world elegance of this authorial ‘we’, the royal we, the superior ‘we’ of the privileged literary elite.

Co-production

At the end of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Woolf introduced the idea that any book is a co-production between the writer and the reader. (This idea was taken up decades later, in the late 1960s, by reader response theory and to some extent anticipates Roland Barthes’ ideas about the death of the author and the birth of the creative reader.) She does the same again, here:

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice.

Writers’ worlds

She asks us to imagine encountering a beggar in the street (as I, in fact, routinely do, every time I go shopping there are people begging or selling the Big Issue at both the front and the back entrance to Sainsburys: no escaping the modern beggar in London town).

Woolf gives an entertaining account of how such an encounter would be turned into fiction by 1) Daniel Defoe, 2) Jane Austen, 3) Thomas Hardy. Out of this little frolic she makes the fairly obvious point that each really great writer is a world of their own with a distinct perspective.

It is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us.

She makes the equally obvious point that: sometimes the writing we have to work hardest to understand is ultimately the most rewarding; and that different works appeal to us in different moods. (Along the way she betrays her bias or premise that ‘real books [are] works of pure imagination’, in contrast to histories and other factual books.)

Over-reading

She mentions something equally as common but which I’ve never seen described before, the risk of ‘over-reading – when you overdo it with a book you’re enjoying, read too much, become tired, and suddenly realise you’re tired, fed up, and abruptly take against the whole thing:

Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and can not attend.

The cure (pretty obviously) is to read something else of a different type, Woolf’s favourite alternatives being biography or history. But:

However interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.

Thus speaks the novelist who (surprise) believes that the novel is the highest form of writing. The risk of reading literary writers is taking them at their own value. As you get older you realise there are many other types of writing with just as much claim to importance, and that’s before the thousands of other human activities we need (doctors, nurses, teachers etc). Presenting the reading and writing of novels as some kind of heroic endeavour is a form of chauvinism; deeper down, a type of narcissism, defined as: ‘an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one’s own needs.’ All Woolf’s essays are about herself.

Reading poetry

Then she switches to what is required of reading poetry and its rewards.

Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity.

Good description.

After-reading

In the last part of the essay she describes what happens when we’ve finished reading a book i.e. we judge it. Here she suggests that in reading we go through two processes: one might be called the actual reading; the other the after-reading. It is really in the after-reading that all the bits and pieces we’ve been bombarded with during the reading coalesce into an overall view and opinion. Neat idea.

And is it good or bad, the novel, the fiction you just read? It’s the question which has been dogging literary theory for two and a half thousand years. The simple answer is – it’s up to you. Critics can’t help. They all disagree with each other. Opinions aren’t much help because ‘minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail’. The best approach is:

by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past.

We must ask demanding questions of the book and follow the answers to the limits of our ability. Only when we’ve completed this process can we hold our opinion up against other people’s or the criteria laid down by the great critics.

Summary

To summarise:

A good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people.

A defence of reading

She has a last word for the moralists who criticise reading books as a lazy self-indulgent activity. She thinks the firmest defence is that books give pleasure, ‘mysterious, unknown, useless as it is’.

This is the argument of an aesthete and could have come from the lips of Oscar Wilde (we always have to remember what a Victorian Woolf was). The most obvious defence of reading is that it is educational and an educated population is an undeniable public good. The more educated and literate a population, the more economically active, productive and wealth creating. Then there’s the liberal defence that reading imaginative literature broadens the mind and produces a population of broad-minded, empathetic readers. Personally, I’ve always found this a weak argument because the twentieth century provides ample evidence of highly literate and civilised populations which allowed fiendish behaviour, Germany being the obvious one. Other factors are required to produce a liberal, civilised population besides just widespread literacy and reading.

Personally, I think practical arguments which eschew lofty aims and avoid moral principles, are most effective in a debate. And so it’s most effective not to argue that reading is valuable for this or that noble or social or moral end, but to start with the empirical fact that lots of people simply like reading. Begin with the evidence in the real world, the statistics about the numbers of books published, bought, borrowed and read each year. Can’t argue with the facts.

Lots of people go to football matches or pop concerts or go fishing or potter in their gardens. Reading takes its place among the range of activities practiced by tens of millions of people in a civilised society. It needs no more defence than that.

Comic conclusion

Woolf concludes with a piece of satirical exaggeration, stylish and silly, which made me smile.

That pleasure [of reading] is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.

Heroically wrong. Houses, pavements, plumbing, wiring, power stations, reservoirs and sewerage farms aren’t designed and built by bookish readers. But it’s a rare florescence of humour in Woolf’s writing and so a little treat.

9. Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927: 11 pages)

Describes a theoretical work of fiction in the future which will incorporate into its prose a high degree of poetry and drama, pointing towards her own novel The Waves.

Woolf claims that the present (1927) is problematic for fiction. She and so many of her contemporaries are struggling to express themselves. Why? One reason is that poetry, which was so easily available and expressive for the Victorians, has become impossibly complicated and difficult. Not only that but society is in turmoil, with the old Christianity destroyed yet people yearning to believe; with the awesome scale of scientific discoveries, from the age of the earth to the size of the universe, crushing the human spirit, creating an atmosphere of ‘doubt and conflict’.

For some reasons she moves on to consider the poetic play and notes how the attempts of the great nineteenth century poets – Byron, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne – were miserable failures, and how the attempts of her contemporaries (maybe she’s thinking of T.S. Eliot’s doomed attempts to revive the play in Elizabethan blank verse) have likewise failed.

Why? You have to go back to the Elizabethan dramatists (as she so often in her essays goes back to Shakespeare) to understand why. It’s because the Elizabethan playwrights could write about anything; they completely shared a worldview and experiences and a diction with their audiences and readers, and so didn’t need to hold back. Modern authors, by contrast, live in a highly atomised, class-ridden society, where everyone lives locked up in their own houses, in their own living rooms, listening to their own records or radio or reading their own books, each in little worlds of their own. No wonder the modern writer finds it so hard to cut through.

Above all there’s a corrosive cynicism which means the modern writer daren’t be caught out celebrating simple beauty without hastening to show the dark and ugly side of life as well. Poetry hasn’t the flexibility, the ability to change subjects and register, which the fragmented modern mind requires.

Therefore – and here’s her point – it may be that modern prose is going to take over some of the duties formerly performed by poetry. It may be that in 10 or 15 years’ time prose will be used for purposes it has never been used for before; that that cannibal, the novel, will have swallowed up even more of the territory of literature.

In particular there may come a book which is written in prose but with the sensibility of poetry, which will have some of the exaltation of poetry but written in prose. It will be read but not acted. We won’t even have a name for its hybrid form. I realise that she is referring to the experimental novel she was currently writing, The Waves, published in 1931 and which she referred to not as a novel but as a ‘playpoem’, and she goes on to describe other ways in which poetry will be melded with prose in her experiment.

Surprisingly, maybe, she thinks the classic novel which most successfully incorporated poetry is Tristram Shandy by Lawrence Sterne. Because it is continually changing subject matter, tone and register, we tend not to notice that there are passages of deliberately exquisite feeling, because these are completely incorporated into the text alongside the farce and pratfalls and bawdy and sentiment. Sterne fashions a prose which is getting on for being as flexible and omni-expressive as the Elizabethans.

10. Craftsmanship (1937)

A radio broadcast on April 20th, 1937. This text is immediately bewildering because it starts with a series of claims all of which seem questionable, simplistic or wrong.

We know little that is certain about words, but this we do know—words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

‘Words tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ This is so wrong it’s hard to know where to start. What words are, what language is and how it works, is too encyclopedic a subject to be knocked off in a pithy phrase. The claim is so vague and insubstantial I wondered if it’s one of her mad essays.

Let us then take for our starting point the statement that words are not useful. This happily needs little proving, for we are all aware of it. When we travel on the Tube, for example, when we wait on the platform for a train, there, hung up in front of us, on an illuminated signboard, are the words ‘Passing Russell Square.’ We look at those words; we repeat them; we try to impress that useful fact upon our minds; the next train will pass Russell Square. We say over and over again as we pace, ‘Passing Russell Square, passing Russell Square.’ And then as we say them, the words shuffle and change, and we find ourselves saying, ‘Passing away saith the world, passing away… The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ And then we wake up and find ourselves at King’s Cross.

Woolf comes from another time and place. Having never done any real work, having servants to do all the housework, leading a pampered, sheltered life, Woolf has no idea, no idea at all, of the importance of words in professional contexts, in the law, in the civil service, in the administration of nations and counties and cities, in rules and regulations, in the vast world of healthcare and medicine. Only if you leave out most of what people in civilised societies use language for, can you acquiesce in the dreamy digressions of this pampered lady.

Very symptomatically the quote which ends the piece – ‘The leaves decay and fall, the vapours weep their burthen to the ground. Man comes…’ – is from Tennyson, patron saint of mellifluous dreaminess. It’s a characteristically Victorian reference point, to a man who devoted his long career to ignoring the gritty, complex realities of the Victorian age and created a dream otherworld into which his many readers and fans could take refuge. Despite her often challenging handling of her content, in terms of her style Woolf’s novels offer a similar level of mellifluous, elegantly shaped escapism, part of the reason for her enduring popularity.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on April 18, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays

Tagged Arnold Bennett, Athenaeum magazine, belle-lettreism, Belles letterism, Cambridge University, character, Character in Fiction, Christianity, Co-production, Constance Garnett, Craftmanship, Craftsmanship, D.H. Lawrence, Dostoyevsky, Dr Watson, E.M. Forster, Edward VII, Edwardian novelists, English literature, Essays, fiction, George V, Georgian novelists, H.G. Wells, Hilda Lessways, Hogarth Press, How Should One Read A Book?, Impassioned Prose, Jacob's Room, James Joyce, Jane Austen, John Galsworthy, King's Cross, Kipps, Lawrence Sterne, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown, Mr Prufrock, Mrs Brown, Over-reading, Oxford World Classics, playpoem, poetry, Poetry Fiction and the Future, Raskolnikov, reader response theory, Reading and Writing, Reading poetry, Roland Barthes, Russian novelists, Samuel Butler, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Stavrogin, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, The Criterion, the Heretics Society, The Old Wives' Tale, The Waves, The Way of All Flesh, Thomas de Quincey, Thomas de Quincy, Tristram Shandy, Ulysses, Virginia Woolf, Waterloo station

Posted by Simon on April 18, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/18/selected-essays-by-virginia-woolf-1-reading-and-writing-2/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – 1. Reading and Writing (1)

You may well complain of the vagueness of my language.
(Woolf acknowledging that she doesn’t always have clear ideas or express them very clearly, in ‘Character in Fiction’, page 48)

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’, edited by David Bradshaw, brings together 30 of Woolf’s non-fiction prose pieces and groups them under four headings:

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

I’ve published introductory notes on the themes and style of the essays. This blog post summarises the first four essays of the ten in the ‘Reading and Writing’ section (many but not all of which are available online).

The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905)
Modern Fiction (1919)
The Modern Essay (1922) [review of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920]
How It Strikes a Contemporary (1923)
Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923)
Character in Fiction (1924) [a talk]
‘Impassioned Prose’ (1926) [Thomas de Quincy]
How Should One Read A Book? (1926)
Poetry, Fiction and the Future (1927)
Craftmanship (1937) [BBC radio talk]

1. The Decay of Essay-Writing (1905: 3 pages)

Summary: good essays are always personal and autobiographical.

Woolf was just 23 and exploring her talents in this early essay. She affects a world-weary omniscience of the literary scene and laments the overproduction of writing of all types:

Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger—come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them.

Like many conservative-minded people she laments all the newfangled tricks and innovations of ‘modern’ writers (this was written before the genuine wave of modernist innovations, so reads like the standard conservative lament about everything going to the dogs; and is also deeply ironic seeing as she was to go on to become one of the most notable pioneers of modernist techniques in English fiction).

She claims that one of the most prominent innovations of the age (end of the Victorian era, start of the Edwardian decade) has been the advent of the personal essay which gives the opinions of the author, in which every sentence starts with ‘I’:

Its popularity with us is so immense and so peculiar that we are justified in looking upon it as something of our own—typical, characteristic, a sign of the times which will strike the eye of our great-great-grandchildren

Rather ludicrously she attributes this tidal wave of personal essays to the simple fact that so many people have been taught to write, presumably as a result of the late-Victorian education acts which expanded the scope of state schooling. But it’s the personal, egotistical element of essay writing which interests her:

The essay, then, owes its popularity to the fact that its proper use is to express one’s personal peculiarities, so that under the decent veil of print one can indulge one’s egoism to the full. You need know nothing of music, art, or literature to have a certain interest in their productions, and the great burden of modern criticism is simply the expression of such individual likes and dislikes—the amiable garrulity of the tea-table—cast into the form of essays.

Then she arrives at a point, of sorts. When contemporaries write reviews about books (which we can all read for ourselves) or pictures (which we can all see for ourselves) what real value do they add? It’s only when critics write of what is really, distinctively theirs alone, ‘of that single book to which they alone have the key and of that solitary picture whose face is shrouded to all but one gaze’, that their essays have value. Too many essayists, like autobiographers, feel obliged to produce fine writing and orthodox views. For young Virginia Stephen, on the contrary, it is the personal element which is most valuable in criticism.

This call for the personal in criticism can be seen as a kind of manifesto for the deeply personal impressions and observations she would make a career out of.

2. Modern Fiction (1919: 7 pages)

Summary: Woolf rubbishes the novels of the popular writers of her day, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, for being obsessed with realistic detail and neglecting the spiritual aspect of human nature. Hence her calling them ‘materialists’. She goes on to define the kind of novel she desires, concerned with the internal psychology of its characters and registering the blizzard of sensory input and thoughts we all experience.

It is important to state that a good deal of Woolf’s essays consist of gaseous verbiage. She is prolix and verbose. She writes as if she’s being paid by the word, not the idea. Entire pages consist of filler. Particularly irksome is her adoption of the lofty, snobbish ‘we’ in her articles.

It is doubtful whether in the course of the centuries, though we have learnt much about making machines, we have learnt anything about making literature. We do not come to write better; all that we can be said to do is to keep moving, now a little in this direction, now in that, but with a circular tendency should the whole course of the track be viewed from a sufficiently lofty pinnacle. It need scarcely be said that we make no claim to stand, even momentarily, upon that vantage ground. On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us. It is for the historian of literature to decide; for him to say if we are now beginning or ending or standing in the middle of a great period of prose fiction, for down in the plain little is visible. We only know that certain gratitudes and hostilities inspire us; that certain paths seem to lead to fertile land, others to the dust and the desert; and of this perhaps it may be worth while to attempt some account.

The ‘we’ refers to ‘people like us’, privileged, educated, upper-middle-class who have the right stuff, an advanced sensibility and sophisticated tastes. Another reason for using it is that, very simply, it protects the writer from coming out into the open and admitting it’s just their own personal opinion. It makes it sound like she’s speaking on behalf of a group, a class. Safety in numbers.

It need scarcely be said that we make no claim…

This orotund phraseology is the tone of a conservative snob, the tone of an old buffer in clubland. The fact that it emanates from the consciously feminist Woolf makes it all the more ironic. If she’d been a man, she would have been unbearably snobbish and reactionary.

This is a notorious essay because it’s the first in a series in which Woolf criticises three of the most successful novelists of her time, H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy. Why? Because they lacked the refined and sensitive spirituality of a superior soul such as Woolf. They describe real people in an all-too-rackety and realistic way. Woolf struggles to find a word to describe what she dislikes and the best she can come up with is materialism.

These three writers are materialists. It is because they are concerned not with the spirit but with the body that they have disappointed us.

Woolf was an atheist. Her novels rarely bother with traditional Christian belief or, if they do, do so only to mock it, as in the figure of the Reverend Streatfield in Between The Acts. As always, to get the full measure of her real opinions, you shouldn’t consult the novels but read her searing criticism of the Church of England as a perpetrator of misogynist patriarchy in Three Guineas.

But here, in this essay, in order to diss Wells and Bennett and Galsworthy, she is happy to invoke traditional religious metaphors, contrasting the heavy, materialist, clay of their writings with her ideal of writing which is, of course, pure, airy and spiritual.

Of Bennett she says that his books are solidly built and well crafted and present hosts of characters but ‘it remains to ask how do they live, and what do they live for?’ Bennett depicts nothing but comfortable lives, first class railways carriages and fine hotels at Brighton i.e. all the externals of life. Similarly, Wells overstuffs his novels with issues and ideas:

In the plethora of his ideas and facts scarcely having leisure to realise, or forgetting to think important, the crudity and coarseness of his human beings. Yet what more damaging criticism can there be both of his earth and of his Heaven than that they are to be inhabited here and hereafter by his Joans and his Peters? Does not the inferiority of their natures tarnish whatever institutions and ideals may be provided for them by the generosity of their creator?

‘The inferiority of their natures’ – there you have, in black and white, the clearest possible expression of Woolf’s snobbery.

All three novelists, in Woolf’s opinion, describe in immense detail the material facts of life and completely neglect the higher, spiritual aspects, the aspects, in other words, which Woolf intended to devote her novels to. They:

write of unimportant things… they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.

‘The true and enduring’ being exemplified by the Classics of English Literature which Virginia found in her father’s well-stocked library and which he taught her to revere as the true repositories of Poetry and Truth – Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Shakespeare – you know the list.

So, in Woolf’s view, All Bennett, Wells and Galsworthy’s novels fail to capture ‘life’ – but the obvious question is, Whose definition of ‘life’? Hers, of course, The higher, spiritual life, not the low, clay life of ‘inferior natures’.

For us at this moment the form of fiction most in vogue more often misses than secures the thing we seek. Whether we call it life or spirit, truth or reality, this, the essential thing, has moved off, or on, and refuses to be contained any longer in such ill-fitting vestments as we provide.

‘Vestments’, by the way, are ‘liturgical garments and articles associated primarily with the Christian religion’. See what I mean by how, in order to insist on the important of the spiritual in art, she has to temporarily resort to explicitly Christian metaphors, despite her contempt for the Church of England?

As so often in her polemical essays, it becomes more interesting when it opens up to describe Woolf’s own practice. She very vividly describes what she feels as the oppressiveness of having to create characters, think up a plot, come up with some comedy and generally conform to the existing pattern of The Novel. Does the novel always have to be like this? she asks.

It’s at this point, if it wasn’t obvious before, that you realise that Woolf is deploying her criticism of Wells et al in order to better define what she is aiming to do with the form.

Nevertheless, we go on perseveringly, conscientiously, constructing our two and thirty chapters after a design which more and more ceases to resemble the vision in our minds. So much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception. The writer seems constrained, not by his own free will but by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole so impeccable that if all his figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour. The tyrant is obeyed; the novel is done to a turn. But sometimes, more and more often as time goes by, we suspect a momentary doubt, a spasm of rebellion, as the pages fill themselves in the customary way. Is life like this? Must novels be like this?

This is an interesting description of Woolf’s own dilemma as a novelist: she had written two traditional, conventional, heavy realistic novels but knew she wanted to break free and works out in the essay what that would mean and feel like:

Look within and life, it seems, is very far from being ‘like this’. Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions–trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old; the moment of importance came not here but there; so that, if a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it.

And then a ringing statement of intent:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?

This is a very eloquent defence of the new aesthetic she was to embody in Jacob’s Room and even more so in Mrs Dalloway. It is a manifesto. You can see why these passages are routinely quoted in introductions and essays to her works.

Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness. Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

Surprisingly, she goes on to praise James Joyce, whose ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ had been published just three years earlier, in 1916. Why? Because he, like she, and unlike the clayey materialists she deprecates, is spiritual.

In contrast with those whom we have called materialists, Mr Joyce is spiritual; he is concerned at all costs to reveal the flickerings of that innermost flame which flashes its messages through the brain, and in order to preserve it he disregards with complete courage whatever seems to him adventitious, whether it be probability, or coherence, or any other of these signposts which for generations have served to support the imagination of a reader when called upon to imagine what he can neither touch nor see.

Although she immediately goes on to qualify her praise, claiming that Joyce’s work ultimately fails:

because of the comparative poverty of the writer’s mind, we might say simply and have done with it. But it is possible to press a little further and wonder whether we may not refer our sense of being in a bright yet narrow room, confined and shut in, rather than enlarged and set free, to some limitation imposed by the method as well as by the mind… centred in a self which, in spite of its tremor of susceptibility, never embraces or creates what is outside itself and beyond?

This is her response to the early chapters of Ulysses which were circulated among potential publishers from 1918 onwards. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that her aversion to the later book is due to its inclusion of sex, always a queasy subject for Woolf.

Does the emphasis laid, perhaps didactically, upon indecency, contribute to the effect of something angular and isolated?

As far as I understand it, Woolf deprecated sex in fiction not so much because of the sex itself, per se, but because sex is vulgar. A properly brought-up person, a well-bred writer, simply doesn’t talk about such matters. It is a paradox that Woolf cheerfully criticised other writers for being narrow and shut in and yet, on the subject which went on to dominate the fiction of the century, sex, it is she who is fastidious, aloof and taciturn.

Back to her manifesto, Woolf says the modern novelist must overthrow, ignore and reject all the constraints of the traditional novel – the concerns for realism and realistic detail and realistic settings and realistic plots, which she so dislikes in Wells-Arnold-Galsworthy – and strike out for new points of interest.

She thinks the new, the modern style will concern itself with a new psychology. She cites a short story by Chekhov, ‘Gusev’, for its obliqueness. She tells us that it is, at first reading, a little hard to work out what this story is ‘about’, whether it’s comic or tragic or really has an ending. It is this type of inconclusive obliquity which she thinks presages The Modern.

The last paragraph of this important essay briefly tells us that any serious conversation about modern fiction has to defer to the Russians. Why? Because of their superior spirituality.

If we want understanding of the soul and heart where else shall we find it of comparable profundity? If we are sick of our own materialism the least considerable of their novelists has by right of birth a natural reverence for the human spirit.

Woolf is that very characteristic modern type, the spiritual and superior woman who, however, rejects all established religions (as male and sexist). They became a very common type in the 1920s, heavily satirised in their stories by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, but nonetheless real for that.

As to Russia’s superior spirituality, regular readers of my blog will know that I despise this point of view. The classic Russian authors (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy) defined the superior spirituality of the great Russian soul by comparing it with the decadence and superficiality of the West, of the corrupt France and materialist Britain. My view is, look where Russia’s supposed superior spirituality got it in the following hundred years and look where Russia’s superior spirituality has landed it today? Woolf was just one of many sensitive souls who identified with the superior spirituality of the Russian soul.

In every great Russian writer we seem to discern the features of a saint, if sympathy for the sufferings of others, love towards them, endeavour to reach some goal worthy of the most exacting demands of the spirit constitute saintliness. It is the saint in them which confounds us with a feeling of our own irreligious triviality, and turns so many of our famous novels to tinsel and trickery.

Well, Stalin wiped out any tinsel and trickery in his Russia. The great Russians wrote about the nobility of suffering and their children and grandchildren got the revolution, the civil war, the gulag archipelago and the Great Patriotic War. After a decade of drunken chaos under Yeltsin we are now back to traditional Russian values with Vladimir Putin, who has made speeches asserting the superior civilisation of Mother Russia and the hopeless decadence of Western democracies. Russia’s superiority over all other civilisations is an essential part of Russian culture and here we have Woolf espousing it.

Woolf backs up a little and concedes there is some merit to the English tradition:

English fiction from Sterne to Meredith bears witness to our natural delight in humour and comedy, in the beauty of earth, in the activities of the intellect, and in the splendour of the body.

For me it is telling that she doesn’t really draw the obvious conclusion from this thought, which is that maybe the characteristic tone of the greatest English literature is comedy. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens are comedians, to which Bennett and certainly Wells, in their smaller ways, are the heirs. But Woolf has little or no sense of humour and so doesn’t see it. Given a choice between Dickensian humour and the solemn pieties of Romantic poetry, she chooses Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson every time.

She ends with more manifesto:

Nothing – no ‘method’, no experiment, even of the wildest – is forbidden, but only falsity and pretence. ‘The proper stuff of fiction’ does not exist; everything is the proper stuff of fiction, every feeling, every thought; every quality of brain and spirit is drawn upon; no perception comes amiss.

This essay is an impressive and resounding rallying cry for the type of novel she was to write over the next decade even if, like so many manifestos, it has to be unduly critical of her contemporaries in order to clear the space for her new approach.

3. The Modern Essay (1922: 10 pages)

The best essays are highly personal and express personality.

This was a review of a hefty five-volume collection of Modern English Essays 1870 to 1920 which was published in 1922. It explains why this review refers freely to a variety of the essayists included in the set. It contains the paragraph on what makes a good essay which Bradshaw quotes in his introduction and I quoted above, the paragraph about the main purpose of an essay being to entertain and give pleasure.

The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. (Modern Essays)

The review rambles through the famous names in these volumes but the striking thing about Woolf is that, despite the vast amount she wrote about fiction and literature, she’s not a particularly useful critic, either in theory or practice. What I mean is, she very, very rarely analyses a passage by someone to tell you whether and why it succeeds or fails. And she has few general critical ideas apart from the ones which help her gather her thoughts for her own endeavours.

For example, she thinks Walter Pater’s essay is best because ‘he has somehow contrived to get his material fused‘. Not very useful. She thinks Max Beerbohm’s essay is a success because in it ‘he is himself’.

He has brought personality into literature… We only know that the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes.

Not dazzlingly insightful, is it? And his style? ‘The triumph is the triumph of style.’ These are close to platitudes and she hits a kind of low when she tells us that the important thing in writing an essay is ‘to know how to write.’ Yes. Sounds likely.

This is pretty thin pickings, isn’t it? Barely exists as criticism. You can see why, despite fans like Bradshaw bigging her up, few if any of Woolf’s critical ideas are widely used or cited for the simple reason that she hardly has any critical ideas, apart from the ones where she is working out her own approach – but those passages are cited everywhere.

4. How It Strikes A Contemporary (1923: 9 pages)

The present age lacks one commanding critical figure, a symbol of the way that, since the war, literature has become fragmented and difficult.

The ‘it’ in the title isn’t the modern world or politics, it refers to contemporary literary criticism i.e. it’s a commentary on contemporary literary criticism circa 1923.

Why are there such radical disagreements about new books? Because there is no one critic who dominates the age. Like all conservatives, Woolf looks back to supposed Golden Ages when there was one towering critical figure who dominated their era – to the ages of John Dryden (the 1680s and ’90s), Dr Johnson (1760s to ’80s), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1810s to ‘1830) or Matthew Arnold (1860s, ’70s, ’80s). The fact that these are nostalgic conservative tropes is given away by her own phraseology:

Once upon a time, we must believe, there was a rule, a discipline, which controlled the great republic of readers in a way which is now unknown…

‘Once upon a time…’ reveals that this is a fairy tale version of history, removing all its complexity and conflict.

Anyway, in Woolf’s opinion the real problem is simply the scale of output. No one critic could read everything that is produced nowadays and so the situation she laments, with thousands of reviewers scribbling away but no one central Man of Letters setting a standard.

It is revealing who she picks but then dismisses as possible contenders for this title of Master of the Age: Thomas Hardy has retired from novel writing; Conrad is an exotic outsider. No, like all cultural conservatives, Woolf thinks the present day (1923) was one of special collapse, decline, decay. It is an age of fragments, ‘it is a barren and exhausted age’ etc.

Interestingly, she gets it wrong about W.B. Yeats, thinking he will only be remembered for a few poems. Similarly and notoriously, she thinks that James Joyce’s Ulysses was a disaster and failure. In both of these opinions, she was, of course, dead wrong.

There are several passage of incoherent impressionism before she emerges with a tangible point: the present age is defined by The War. The First World War changed everything.

Nor has any generation more need than ours to cherish its contemporaries. We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale—the war, the sudden slip of masses held in position for ages—has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present. Every day we find ourselves doing, saying, or thinking things that would have been impossible to our fathers. And we feel the differences which have not been noted far more keenly than the resemblances which have been very perfectly expressed… The most casual reader dipping into poetry, into fiction, into biography can hardly fail to be impressed by the courage, the sincerity, in a word, by the widespread originality of our time.

But:

Our exhilaration is strangely curtailed. Book after book leaves us with the same sense of promise unachieved, of intellectual poverty, of brilliance which has been snatched from life but not transmuted into literature. Much of what is best in contemporary work has the appearance of being noted under pressure, taken down in a bleak shorthand which preserves with astonishing brilliance the movements and expressions of the figures as they pass across the screen. But the flash is soon over, and there remains with us a profound dissatisfaction.

We live in a special age, uniquely cut off from the past. Many writers are capturing this new spirit. But there is something unsatisfactory about their work. This is a useful impression and certainly a very useful background to understanding her own practice from ‘Jacob’s Room’ onwards.

But the essay also conveys a sense of Woolf feeling adrift in this new age. As so often with Woolf you feel that this is due, in part, to her own personal intellectual inadequacy. In her essays and her novels, you get the impression that things are always just a bit too much for her to cope with. She needs help. She needs Daddy.

And Daddy, here as everywhere, takes the form of looking back nostalgically to the age of Wordsworth, Scott and Austen. She likes those old authors because they were so sure of themselves. By contrast, her contemporaries:

afflict us because they have ceased to believe. The most sincere of them will only tell us what it is that happens to himself. They cannot make a world.

Her conclusion uses a silly metaphor to make a valid point:

It would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made.

The great critics of the past spoke with confidence for their entire age. The Great War has made that impossible because it has shattered all traditional values. This explains the daring experiments but also the failures and sense of blockage and frustration among so many of her contemporaries. But she nonetheless cleaves to the hope that out of the current chaos great things will come. And she was, of course, correct. She was in fact living in an age of masterpieces, which included her own works.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on April 16, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Literary criticism, Literature

Posted by Simon on April 16, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/16/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-1-reading-and-writing-1/

Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf – Introductory notes

As well as her famous novels, Virginia Woolf wrote a prodigious number of essays and reviews, over 500 in all. The definitive edition of her collected essays runs to six ‘meaty’ volumes and contents range from the book-length polemics A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, through numerous book reviews, talks and lectures, introductions to other people’s books, critical essays about novels and biography, meditations on women’s writing, descriptions of London and the countryside, to fugitive pieces she contributed to student magazines. Tracking these down has been a labour of love and taken decades.

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’ edited by David Bradshaw brings together 30 of these prose pieces and groups them under four headings:

Reading and Writing
Life-Writing
Women and Fiction
Looking On

Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I’ve broken my review up into separate blog posts. This is by way of being an overall introduction to the main themes and ideas.

Woolf’s aestheticism

I found Woolf’s essays hard to read for a number of reasons. On the face of it the essays cover a range of topics, at different lengths, and using different approaches, from the reasonably logical to the whimsical and impressionistic. But they all have two or three things in common, which, I suggest, are:

their foundation on a doggedly aesthetic or arty set of values
an emphasis on a poetic approach to writing, which explains and justifies her often impressionistic and hard-to-follow style
all of which sounds radical but embodies an underlying attitude which is often surprisingly conservative and backward looking

The modernists I read as a lad – T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme – consciously rejected the hazy verbosity of late-Victorian Romanticism and called for a new poetry and art which was to be hard, brief and unsentimental, hence Imagism in poetry and Vorticism in art.

Woolf is the opposite. Her heroes are the hard-core Romantics John Keats in poetry and Charles Lamb and Thomas de Quincey in prose writing and her prose displays the very qualities of belle-letterist posing, of poetic prose and digressions and imaginative fantasias, which those other modernists despised and rejected.

In her most famous essays, the ones criticising the Edwardian novelists and setting out her own views of what fiction should be about, Woolf is making a polemical point and so is reasonably easy to follow. But much of the time she approaches her subject in a deliberately roundabout, digressive manner and in a prose style which continually strives for very conservative notions of Elegance and Beauty.

Above all, Woolf committed the anti-modernist sin of constantly making her prose aspire to the condition of poetry. Her writings are obsessed with this thing called Poetry which she very narrowly insists represents the highest possible art, the highest expression of human values, harping on about Truth and Beauty in a way which makes her sound just like John Keats from a hundred years earlier.

Woolf’s conservative conception of the essay

Woolf’s conception of the essay is surprisingly conventional, almost conservative. She looks back to the classic English essayists of the nineteenth century, Hazlitt, Macauley, etc and especially to the essays of Charles Lamb who she regularly name-checks (‘no one has approached the Essays of Elia’).

In her view an essay doesn’t set out to analyse or explain anything. Instead it is a charming distraction, an entertainment whose main purpose is to reveal the character of the author, a magic spell. In this, as in so much else, Woolf has a very late-Victorian, Aesthetic attitude.

It’s not just me who finds her whole attitude puzzlingly anti-modern, nostalgic and backward looking. The editor of this edition and big Woolf fan, David Bradshaw, freely acknowledges it:

At a time when Modernists such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot turned their backs on the ‘amiable garrulity’ of the late-Victorian and Edwardian personal essay, Woolf embraced this belletristic model as an appealingly ‘egotistical’ model. (Introduction p.xiii)

So even a devoted fan and scholarly expert on Woolf concedes that she is deliberately belletristic, she is consciously egotistical, she is contrivedly poetical, in a deeply old-fashioned way – Keats and Lamb.

Personally, I’ve never really bought the idea of Woolf as a modernist precisely because her style is so self-consciously mellifluous and euphonious, elegant and refined. No matter how fragmented and experimental her narrative structure, when it comes to style her primary concern always seems to be to maintain good taste and good manners. It’s a snobbishly high-minded attitude which explains her disdain for the vulgar energy of more realistic and rackety writers from Dickens to H.G. Wells, the ‘materialist’ novelists who she famously criticises in several of the essays included here. Hers is consciously fine writing which you are meant to savour in the same way that a connoisseur savours fine wine.

So: Woolf’s essays are often hard to read because they are more concerned with maintaining a style appropriate to this aesthetic worldview, and with the airy digressions thought appropriate to the belles-letterist tradition she espoused, than in conveying her thoughts clearly and concisely. You often have to wade through passages of highly subjective verbiage or deliberately whimsical digressions to find the nuggets of insight.

Admittedly these nuggets are usually well worth the effort, and she does have interesting things to say, especially about her core subject, modern fiction and modern novels. Some of the observations of contemporary life, and even some of the fantastical passages, are rich and rewarding. I can see that 1) she was a great writer and 2) her opinions about writing are historically and aesthetically important, 3) her writings on feminism and women authors ditto – but God, what a slog wading through the swamp to get there.

Maybe a savvier way of putting it is that Virginia Woolf’s essays can be, and often are, every bit as demanding as her most demanding novels.

It is symptomatic that of all the authors in a collection of modern essays which she reviews (in Modern Essays) she thinks by far the best is Walter Pater because of its aesthetic ‘purity’.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure — pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. (p.15)

You can see from this excerpt how earnestly she aspired to a refined and aesthetic purity untainted by facts, arguments or even opinions.

So if you’re looking for logic and argument you might, like me, find it a grind to work through her deliberately digressive and self-consciously elegant style. If, on the contrary, you are happy to be beguiled and distracted, and to submit to her many extraordinary fantasias, passages of delirious description which make barely any sense – such as the storm which seems to end civilisation at the end of Thunder at Wembley or the death visions in Flying over London or the extraordinary description of the whole planet dying in The Sun and The Fish – to submit to her magic spell, then there is much to revel and lose yourself in.

But I couldn’t help continually comparing all this with the straightforward intellectual pleasure offered by the lucid essays of George Orwell or the perspective-changing insights of T.S. Eliot’s wonderful essays. Much easier and much more opinion-changing, because so much clearer.

Woolf’s long career but narrow range

Woolf had a long writing career. She published her first reviews in the Times Literary Supplement in 1905 and her last novel in 1941 – 36 years of writing and publishing, in total. And she was incredibly prolific: besides the nine novels and two biographies, her collected essays fill six ‘meaty’ volumes.

The Oxford World Classic edition claims these 30 essays show Woolf’s thoughts on ‘a range of subjects’ but when you look closely, the most striking thing is just how narrow her range of subjects was. I’ve tweaked Bradshaw’s section titles to make their subject matter clearer.

Writing Fiction and Criticism
Writing Biography
Women and Writing
Miscellaneous pieces

Writing novels, reading and criticising novels, writing biography, criticising biography, theorising about fiction and biography, women and writing, writing about the world around her, mostly London – it’s not a massive range, is it? After a while it feels like Woolf circles round and round a relatively small number of the same issues like a goldfish in a bowl. A word about her background maybe helps to explain why.

Like father, like daughter

Virginia Stephen grew up in a highly literate and bookish household, deeply influenced by the example of her father, Leslie Stephen, the eminent author, critic, historian and biographer. To quote the biographical note to this volume:

Both her parents had strong family associations with literature. Leslie Stephen was the son of Sir James Stephen, a noted historian, and brother of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished lawyers and writer on law. Her father’s first wife was a daughter of the great Victorian novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray. His second wife was an admired associate of the Pre-Raphaelites and had aristocratic connections. Stephens himself is remembered as the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography but he was also a remarkable journalist, biographer and historian of ideas.

So her father was a writer of journalism, essays and biography and she grew up to be… a writer of journalism, essays and biography. The fact that Bradshaw’s first two categories are ‘Reading and Writing’ and ‘Life-Writing’ (biography) indicates just how little distance she travelled from her father’s interests: literature and biography. And, as above, it’s not just me saying so. Bradshaw’s introduction to this book quotes Woolf scholar Rachel Bowlby as saying:

Woolf was directly following in her father’s footsteps, in a move that was composed of both rivalry and honour; in fact, she took over where he left off, quite literally, since she began publishing… just after he died [in 1904]. (quoted in the introduction, page xii)

Woolf was a nepo baby

So she had the big advantage in terms of instruction, guidance and support of having a famous, well-connected literary figure as your dad – then you learn that her first two books were published by the company set up by her half-brother George Duckworth – and you begin to get a feel for the immense advantages in terms of useful family connections which Virginia Woolf enjoyed compared to most other women (and male) writers of her time. D.H. Lawrence grew up in a cramped coal miner’s house and could only read what he found in the school library.

There’s no doubting that Woolf was a nepo baby, which the internet defines as: ‘a term for someone whose career is similar to their parents’ successful career. It’s short for “nepotism baby”.’

Harsh? Not according to Rachel Bowlby: ‘Woolf was directly following in her father’s footsteps.’ What she added to her father’s interests were 1) an interest in just observing the life around her, especially the hectic street life of modern bustling London and 2) her feminism.

1. Woolf’s observational essays

1) Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves famously contain passages doing nothing more than describing London’s endless hustle and bustle; To The Lighthouse is so wonderful for the calm and lyrical descriptions of life on the idyllic holiday island; and this selection contains many impressionistic essays in the manner of Street Haunting (1927), The Docks of London (1931) and Oxford Street Tide (1932).

Then again, this was hardly a new subject. Charles Dickens (who the snobbish Woolf disliked for his vulgarity and lack of artistic purpose) began his career with ‘Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People’, observations of London life and people published in various newspapers and periodicals between 1833 and 1836 i.e. just about a century before Woolf’s comparable pieces. Obviously Woolf’s pieces deploy the distinctive subjective, free-associating point of view which she perfected in her modernist novels, but the basic idea is the same.

2. Woolf’s feminism

The one category in this book which is definitely new and unique to Woolf (unlike Dickens, her father, Lamb, Macauley or Samuel Butler or any other male writer) is her feminism. Personally, I don’t think any of the six feminist essays included here really cut it. They all pale by comparison with her book-length polemic Three Guineas which is a masterpiece.

In my opinion, anyone who’s interested in Woolf should read Three Guineas. Reading even the modernist novels can easily give you the impression of a posh, privileged, upper-middle-class white woman who writes airy, dreamy, drifting fantasias about other dreamy, impractical middle-class women (Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, the female characters in The Waves, Mrs Swithin and Isabella Oliver in Between the Acts) who drift along in a cloud of flowers and tea parties.

Compared to the studied inconsequentiality of her novels, Three Guineas is a revelation of Woolf’s stone-cold fury at the legal, financial, traditional, educational and professional oppression of women, at women’s systematic exclusion from all aspects of life except marriage and baby-making by a ferociously repressive and woman-hating patriarchy, right up to the time of its writing, the 1930s. It’s a sensational, eye-opening book, not only for the genuinely shocking roster of facts it marshals but for the unexpected fury of the author.

Woolf’s mental illness

But for me the really distinctive quality Woolf brings to her observational essays is her mental illness. I thought her description of a ramble across London at dusk, Street Haunting, would be a fun description of the bits of London I know as they appeared a hundred years ago and, up to a point, it is. But the most powerful passages describe her mind being assailed by multiple selves clamouring for expression and rather harrowingly portray her desperate attempts to calm her neurotically anxious thoughts.

The same anxiety dominates the piece titled Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car, namely the problem of how to control the many voices in her head. And what you’d expect to be a larky in the essay titled Flying Over London, contains extended passages about wanting to be dead.

I don’t raise this as a criticism. As the father of two children with mental health problems I feel pretty sensitised to the issues. Which is in fact why, maybe, I feel so sensitive to the thread of mental illness running through all her texts, fiction and non-fiction, why I can almost physically feel the difficulty she had concentrating, her evasion of the dangers of introspection, her preference for escaping into long descriptions of a steady stream of surface images, passing sights and sense impressions, rather than risk deeper thoughts. I find it in all her writings and it has deeply coloured my response. Basically, I feel desperately sorry for her.

Woolf is weird

And, last point, many of the essays contain passages which are strange, often very strange, far stranger, more lateral, random and sometimes inexplicable than David Bradshaw makes out in his sensible and useful introduction. Woolf was often just plain weird.

It’s one reason why you should always read her works rather than summaries and commentaries by academics. Academics and critics have to make sense and if you only read them you’d think Woolf did too. But she often really didn’t and rejoiced in the fact, and her refusal to conform to ‘male’ standards of reason and logic may, after all, be a really important aspect of her enduring appeal.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews

Leave a comment

by Simon on April 14, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays

Tagged A Room of One's Own, Aestheticism, belle-letterism, belles-letters, Between The Acts, Biography, Charles Dickens, Charles Lamb, Clarissa Dalloway, D.H. Lawrence, David Bradshaw, Dickens, Dictionary of National Biography, Essays, Essays of Elia, Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car, Ezra Pound, Feminism, Flying Over London, George Duckworth, George Orwell, H.G. Wells, Hazlitt, Impressionism, Isabella Oliver, John Keats, late-Victorian, Leslie Stephen, London, Macauley, mental illness, Mrs Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, Mrs Swithin, nepo baby, Orlando, Oxford World Classic, prose, Rachel Bowlby, romanticism, Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir James Stephen, Sketches by Boz, Street Haunting, T.E. Hulme, T.S. Eliot, The Waves, Thomas de Quincey, Three Guineas, Times Literary Supplement, To The Lighthouse, Virginia Stephen, Virginia Woolf, Walter Pater, William Makepeace Thackeray, Wyndham Lewis

Posted by Simon on April 14, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/14/selected-essays-virginia-woolf-introduction/

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (1938)

Almost the same daughters ask almost the same brothers for almost the same privileges. Almost the same gentlemen intone the same refusals for almost the same reasons.
(The eternal patriarchy, skewered by Woolf in Three Guineas, page 147)

I think this long essay is Virginia Woolf’s most important book 1) for the subject matter itself 2) because it is a key which explains the attitudes and experiences of so many of the female characters in her novels.

First the basic fact that this long essay or pamphlet was originally conceived as an integral part of an experimental fiction. Wikipedia tells us that:

Although ‘Three Guineas’ is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a ‘novel–essay’ which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1928). The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay chapters, demonstrating Woolf’s views on war and women in both types of writing at once. This unfinished manuscript was published in 1977 as ‘The Pargiters’. When Woolf realised the idea of a ‘novel–essay’ wasn’t working, she separated the two parts. The non-fiction portion became ‘Three Guineas’. The fiction portion became Woolf’s most popular novel during her lifetime, ‘The Years’, which charts social change from 1880 to the year of publication through the lives of the Pargiter family. It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War II.

‘Three Guineas’ is 127 pages long in the 2015 Oxford University Press version, compared to ‘A Room of One’s Own’s 83 pages i.e. half as long again. It is a far more serious, structured and well-argued book than its predecessor. It is also far more mocking and scornful of the many forms of sexism, chauvinism and misogyny current in 1920s and ’30s British society. It is far more angry and, in the final, third, section, far more radical.

Woolf did a lot of reading and research for it. Whereas ‘A Room of One’s Own’ has only a dozen or so footnotes, ‘Three Guineas’ has an entire section at the end devoted to extensive notes, references and quotations which make up 36 tightly printed pages in the OUP edition, some 124 notes in total, some as much as a page long.

These notes are well worth reading, in fact in one way they are more rewarding than the text itself. This is because they are extremely focused and to-the-point, whereas the text tends to demonstrate Woolf’s weaknesses: these include her own deliberate foregrounding of her own amateurishness and haphazard research; her temptation to wander off into lyrical passages, to paint a picture and populate her essays with fictional characters.

Most importantly, the overall premise of the essay (which is that she’s answering a series of letters from people who’ve written asking donations to their causes) and its structure – the way answering a pacifist’s request for her support leads into an extended and impassioned defence of women’s rights – these are sometimes hard to follow and can feel a little cranky. By contrast, her extended footnotes present the range, extent and impact of the anti-women animus of the patriarchy of her day with shocking clarity.

The essay is in three parts. Each part purports to answer a correspondent who’s written to Woolf asking for a donation to a good cause. After very extended, discursive and sometimes baffling arguments, Woolf ends each section by agreeing to give a guinea to their cause, but only on the basis of the conditions which she’s spent the section exploring. There are three parts, three causes and so three guineas. Neat.

Part 1. Women’s education

The master letter which gets the whole thing rolling and to which she returns throughout all three sections is a letter she’s received from a gentleman of her own class, a barrister, writing to ask Woolf ‘how can war be prevented?’

What the unnamed correspondent can’t have expected was that this apparently straightforward question would trigger this vast screed about the historic oppression of women throughout English history, described in such boggling details, and Woolf’s outraged calls for sweeping reform.

To kick off, Woolf explains that you can’t even begin to think about answering this question (‘how can war be prevented?’) until she has considered her place as one of a class and gender in a society which still restricts the education and life opportunities of millions of women like her.

First of all Woolf establishes the completely different ways of approaching and thinking about the issue taken by men and women, which is caused by the enormous discrepancies in their life experiences. She points out that all the men of their (her and the letter-writer’s) class have enjoyed expensive private educations topped off at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge, whereas both these (private school, Oxbridge) have been denied all through history to all women of her class.

While the men of her class enjoyed what she jokingly refers to as Arthur’s Education Fund (AEF), the daughters were given little if any formal education. Their plight is symbolised by the ethnographer, writer and explorer Mary Kingsley (1862 to 1900) who complained that she received no education whatsoever except a little bit of instruction in German. Woolf quotes a letter:

‘I don’t know if I ever revealed to you the fact that being allowed to learn German was all the paid-for education I ever had. Two thousand pounds was spent on my brother’s…’

(As in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, these initial ideas or quotes, fairly innocuous or random the first time you read them – in this instance the contrast between the fortunes English middle class families lavished on ‘Arthur’s Education Fund’ and the pitiful amount grudgingly spent on Mary Kingsley – will be repeated again and again, until they acquire a kind of mythic status, coming to symbolise the grotesque gender inequalities of English society.)

So – Woolf explains to her correspondent – it’s because of this and countless other differences in upbringing, education and opportunity between the sexes that her response will be different from an educated man’s. She thinks this massive difference in educational opportunities and women’s exclusion from all-male institutions explain why an educated woman’s response to calls for patriotism, and to the patriotic cliché of calling England ‘the home of freedom’, will be very different from a man’s. It’s for the simple reason that most women, through most of English history, have been radically, drastically unfree.

Her correspondent’s suggested ways of opposing war

Woolf tells us that the (unnamed) writer of the letter to her has suggested three ways of opposing war:

sign a letter to the newspapers
join a pacifist society
donate to the society’s funds

These seem laughably ineffectual to us, but Woolf takes them seriously and they in fact provide a structure for the whole essay.

Woolf’s blistering descriptions of the patriarchy

Possibly the main strength of the essay derives not from its sometimes confused, circular and even contradictory arguments (I try to give a critique of these shortcomings at the end of this review), but from Woolf’s vivid depictions of the plight of women, the numerous concrete examples she gives of women’s exclusion from so many elements of a patriarchal society, in the Victorian era through to her own day.

She starts by giving her innocent letter writer a basic explanation of women’s condition in 1930s England.

You [her male interlocutor], of course, could once more take up arms – in Spain, as before in France – in defence of peace. But that presumably is a method that having tried you have rejected. At any rate that method is not open to us; both the Army and the Navy are closed to our sex. We are not allowed to fight. Nor again are we allowed to be members of the Stock Exchange. Thus we can use neither the pressure of force nor the pressure of money. The less direct but still effective weapons which our brothers, as educated men, possess in the diplomatic service, in the Church, are also denied to us. We cannot preach sermons or negotiate treaties. Then again although it is true that we can write articles or send letters to the Press, the control of the Press – the decision what to print, what not to print – is entirely in the hands of your sex. It is true that for the past twenty years we have been admitted to the Civil Service and to the Bar; but our position there is still very precarious and our authority of the slightest. Thus all the weapons with which an educated man can enforce his opinion are either beyond our grasp or so nearly beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one scratch. If the men in your profession were to unite in any demand and were to say: ‘If it is not granted we will stop work’, the laws of England would cease to be administered. If the women in your profession said the same thing it would make no difference to the laws of England whatever. Not only are we incomparably weaker than the men of our own class; we are weaker than the women of the working class. If the working women of the country were to say: ‘If you go to war, we will refuse to make munitions or to help in the production of goods,’ the difficulty of war-making would be seriously increased. But if all the daughters of educated men were to down tools tomorrow, nothing essential either to the life or to the war-making of the community would be embarrassed. Our class is the weakest of all the classes in the state. We have no weapon with which to enforce our will.

And:

Your class possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically all the capital, all the land, all the valuables, and all the patronage in England. Our class possesses in its own right and not through marriage practically none of the capital, none of the land, none of the valuables, and none of the patronage in England… Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.

Vivid and repeated descriptions of the extent, depth and power of the patriarchy in England.

Within quite a small space are crowded together St Paul’s, the Bank of England, the Mansion House, the massive if funereal battlements of the Law Courts; and on the other side, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament. There, we say to ourselves, pausing, in this moment of transition on the bridge [where she imagines herself standing], our fathers and brothers have spent their lives. All these hundreds of years they have been mounting those steps, passing in and out of those doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, money-making, administering justice. It is from this world that the private house (somewhere, roughly speaking, in the West End) has derived its creeds, its laws, its clothes and carpets, its beef and mutton.

And from all of which, all women, through all of English history, have been excluded.

Shortcoming 1. Lack of analysis of the causes of war

However, quite early on you become aware of various shortcomings in her approach. One is that the entire essay is triggered by that question, ‘how can war be prevented?’, but Woolf gives no analysis of the causes for the momentum towards war in the 1930s. No attempt to describe the triumph of fascism in Italy and, especially, Nazism in Germany. She gives no sense of the economic and social causes of the war i.e. the crushing of the German economy after the Great War and the confiscation of so much German territory by the Allies, which undermined the viability of the Weimar Republic and led so many Germans to vote for extreme populist parties offering magical solutions to their impoverishment and humiliation.

War is seen as some great looming threat (which it obviously was in 1938) but her analysis almost entirely omits the fact that the threat comes from abroad, in order to focus on the role of the patriarchy in England. That’s what I meant by saying that her blistering account of women’s suppression sometimes sits oddly with the essay’s nominal subject.

Men, status and silly costumes

Nothing that intellectual. Instead Woolf digresses into a long and amusing passage about the ludicrous ceremonial outfits which many men wear on formal occasions or as part of their ceremonial roles (judges, Chelsea pensioners, officials in Parliament) and the medals and titles men give each other. In her opinion these are all designed to flaunt their superiority over others. The book includes four contemporary photos of contemporary men dressed in regalia at formal ceremonies and very silly they look, too.

A university procession, from ‘Three Guineas’

She makes a simple point: men down the ages have ridiculed women for being so concerned about their clothes and dress; well, just look at these preposterous old buffers in their wigs and gowns and cloaks and gaiters.

But there’s also a serious point which is germane to her war theme: for she suggests that it is this flaunting of hierarchy and status, this cursed male wish to be superior, which is one of the roots of war. And so she thinks a good way to prevent war would be to attack this cause at the root and refuse to accept honours (as she did) or take part in silly ceremonies (a point developed at length in section 3).

Shortcoming 2. Over-reliance on biography as her primary evidence

The limitations of her education partly explain Woolf’s over-reliance on biography as evidence. She shows little sign of having read much history, economics, science or engineering, philosophy, psychology or sociology – some, but not much, and when she cites history books it’s rarely for the economic or social data.

Instead, what she does rely on to an overwhelming extent is biographies: all the damning evidence she assembles to demonstrate British society’s engrained misogyny and the power of the patriarchy is rarely drawn from history or sociology but relies exclusively on biographies and autobiographies and letters. The phrase you get in so many book titles, ‘Lives and Letters’, sums it up exactly. As an indication of her reliance on biography, here are quotes from just on one page:

‘The witness of biography — that witness which any one who can read English can consult on the shelves of any public library…’
‘Biography proves this in two ways…’
‘Of this, too, there is ample proof in biography…’
‘The study of biography… proves…’
‘Perhaps the greatest testimony to the value of education with which biography provides us is…’
‘You will find, if you consult biography…’

No need to consult facts and figures, assess data, decipher manuscripts, spend years in the archives. Again and again she takes the biography of an eighteenth century bluestocking or a nineteenth century hack writer like Mrs Oliphant off the shelf, and finds and pastes into her narrative their complaints about their limited lives and the dire condition of women in their time, which suit her argument.

(She does mention some histories but, when you look closely you see that she picks out of her historical sources the lives and opinions of her women witnesses: in other words, she selects the biographical elements of history and ignores the statistics, data, political history and so on.)

Late in the essay, rather as she does with her claims to be an amateur, untrained in academic enquiry, she turns an apparent weakness on its head. She tells us that she relies so much on (a very limited view of) history, on biography and newspapers, because they are the only sources of information open to a woman who has been denied a better, higher education, because of her sex; for:

history, biography, and… the daily paper [are] the only evidence that is available to the ‘daughters of educated men’.

Her very lack of scholarly rigour is itself an indictment of the patriarchal oppression which kept her excluded from the higher education her brothers and millions of men had benefited from.

And newspapers

She regards newspapers as ‘history and biography in the raw’. The excellent introduction by Anna Snaith tells us that Woolf kept three scrapbooks in which she gathered evidence for this book. It is striking how many of these snippets and excerpts are taken from newspaper articles or magazines, not the most in-depth kind of research. Newspapers are, by their nature, selective and biased and superficial. They sensationalise in order to sell copies. They are, in other words, the opposite of academic research into history, sociology and so on. This is a weakness in her evidence base.

On the other hand, newspapers are topical and up to date and give her useful snapshot of contemporary opinion – which makes them very interesting for the causal reader, 90 years later. Here’s a sample of the sources, taken from the numbered list of references at the back, which shows the combination of biography and newspaper cuttings which she overwhelmingly relies on as evidence.

‘Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade’ / a cutting from The Herald
a cutting from The Listener / ‘Reflections and Memories’ by Sir John Squire
‘The Life of Sophia Jex-Blake’ by Margaret Todd
Letter to The Times
Debretts
‘Life of Sir Ernest Wild, K.C.’ by R.J. Rackham
Lord Baldwin, speech reported in The Times
‘Life of Charles Gore’ by G.L. Prestige
‘Life of Sir William Broadbent’ edited by his daughter
‘The Lost Historian, a Memoir of Sir Sidney Low’ by Desmond Chapman-Huston
‘Thoughts and Adventures’ by Winston Churchill
Speech at Belfast by Lord Londonderry, reported in The Times

You get the picture: her main sources are lives, letters and newspapers.

The second letter: funding a women’s college

Since the essay is in three parts and the introduction says it addresses three letters, I thought it would be a part per letter, so I was surprised when the second letter pops up at the end of part one. It is from a women-only college writing to ask Woolf to contribute to their fund raising. Anna Snaith’s excellent notes tell us it was a real letter Woolf received from Joan Strachey, Principal of the women-only Newnham College in Cambridge, asking for a donation to renovate the college buildings.

Woolf shows with some doleful quotations and examples, how petty-minded, snobbish and fierce for their stupid rules and regulations the existing (men-only) universities are. She harks back to the notorious incident of being kicked off the grass by the beadle early in ‘A Room of One’s Own’, which clearly still rankles.

Therefore, she replies to this letter that she will consider contributing to a women-only college but only if it is drawn up on a completely different basis from the male colleges. She proceeds to lay out the principles for an experimental college, one which will eschew all competition and exams, be open to the poor, and teach the humanities in a spirit of openness and collaboration:

A place where society was free; not parcelled out into the miserable distinctions of rich and poor, of clever and stupid; but where all the different degrees and kinds of mind, body and soul merit cooperated. Let us then found this new college; this poor college; in which learning is sought for itself; where advertisement is abolished; and there are no degrees; and lectures are not given, and sermons are not preached…

She warns that if the women-only colleges model themselves along male lines, with all the snobbery and competition and status-seeking and petty rankings that entails… those are precisely the kinds of habits of thought, the endless seeking superiority, which create the war mentality and she will not contribute to it.

And no chapels. She is as vehemently against the all-women colleges having chapels as she is violently against the engrained misogyny of the Church of England.

No to teaching English literature

She has a fierce passage execrating the teaching of English literature and its packaging into classes and exams, which she describes as ‘vain and vicious’. This is why Woolf herself refused to accept honorary degrees or prizes, despite being offered many in the later part of her life, and turned down offers to lecture (the exception which proves the rule being the lectures which formed the basis of ‘A Room of One’s Own’).

Woolf explains women’s war patriotism as an escape from domestic oppression

In a wonderfully irrational peroration she thinks that it can only have been delirious joy at being released from the narrow, cramped, uneducated lives forced upon Victorian daughters and spinsters which explained the huge outburst of patriotic enthusiasm among women at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

So profound was her unconscious loathing for the education of the private house with its cruelty, its poverty, its hypocrisy, its immorality, its inanity, that she would undertake any task however menial, exercise any fascination however fatal that enabled her to escape. Thus consciously she desired ‘our splendid Empire’; unconsciously she desired our splendid war.

This is splendid rhetoric but it’s a symptomatic of her failure to understand the causes of war, her failure to understand the psychology of crowds and societies embarking on war, her failure to understand genuine feelings of patriotism or national pride which are such big motivators for large numbers of people in any country – in a nutshell, her failure to understand anyone outside her own narrow upper-middle-class milieu.

Shortcoming 3. Ignorance of the wider world

I think her failure to understand the patriotic zeal which accompanied the start of World War One is indicative of her broader failure to understand the range and complexities of human nature, of all human nature across all of society.

Of the narrow little world of upper-middle-class women whose lives are supported by fleets of nameless servants which allow them to pursue their tedious obsession with art and poetry, of this tiny privileged world, she was a brilliant painter.

Of the big wide world, of the thousands of occupations, jobs and livelihoods, in finance, business, economics, trade, law, science, technology and engineering, of the lives of the working classes with their labour in coal mines and iron works, building ships, sailing the oceans, building trains and cars, laying down telegraph cables – in other words, in almost all the wide world and its billions of inhabitants, she has little or no interest and makes no effort to understand.

As an artist, as a writer, it doesn’t matter. Her novels focus on her chosen terrain and are masterpieces. As an essayist, claiming to gather evidence in order to analyse large social issues, it is, to say the least, problematic.

Giving a guinea

Out of this rather convoluted flow of arguments, Woolf concludes that she ought to give a guinea to the building of the women’s college, because it was entrapment in the family home that led so many women to explode with patriotism upon the outbreak of war. Building a college for the public education of the same class will prevent that and so materially contribute to the prevention of war which, if you recall, was the aim proposed right at the start of the essay.

Part 2. The professions

How can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings, human beings who discourage war?

Woolf says a woman like her has only one weapon at her command to use against war, ‘the weapon of independent opinion based upon independent income.’ Now she will try to use this to sway the men in the professions.

The pretext is another letter she has received, from a society supporting women in the professions, asking for another donation, this time to the support of hard-up professional ladies. For Woolf it begs the question why, 20 years after women were admitted to the professions (1919) so few have risen to the top rank and so many are hovering round the bottom.

Woolf’s answers are convoluted and involve replies to other letters and lengthy addresses to her fictional interlocutor, they but boil down to:

women have much shorter traditions of thriving in the professions and so lack the centuries-old networks of male patronage and preferral
there are no limits to educated men churned out by the public schools and major universities, whereas there are far fewer schools for girls, only four or five colleges for women, and even the numbers admitted to these are severely restricted (only 500 women students were permitted at Cambridge in her day)
exams in the professions advantage those who have spent their lives taking exams, i.e. privileged, privately-educated men, and bar women who have (as she shows) vastly less access to private education
the nearly universal sexism and misogyny found at all levels of English society

Sexism and misogyny

As mentioned above, the flow of Woolf’s arguments is sometimes hard to follow, especially when it feels like she’s twisting the flow in order to fit her broader feminist critique to fit the essay’s ostensible subject of how to prevent war – but what the essay indisputably does do is powerfully convey the deeply entrenched tentacles of the patriarchy in contemporary 1930s England. She presents a wealth of facts and figures about the systematic prevention of women being educated, getting jobs, entering the professions and so on.

In this second part, the essay builds up into a devastating demonstration of English society’s hair-raising sexism and misogyny. In the main text but especially in the extensive notes which illustrate it, Woolf gives extended quotes from a wide range of men in powerful positions expressing the most hair-raising prejudices and slurs. I can’t give brief quotations, you have to read the notes, and the extended stories she gives, of awful politicians, judges, professionals, writers and commentators taking every opportunity to demean and limit women.

Fascists and Nazis

Woolf cranks up the temperature a lot by comparing several terrible British chauvinists who pontificate that a woman’s place is in the home, with a quote from none other than Adolf Hitler saying the exact same kind of thing.

Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini have both often in very similar words expressed the opinion that ‘There are two worlds in the life of the nation, the world of men and the world of women’; and proceeded to much the same definition of the duties.

The juxtaposition of the two explains in a flash why Woolf is so resistant to all male talk about patriotism and ‘our country’. In what possible sense is it ‘her country’ when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the editor of the Daily Telegraph hold identical views about women’s place in society as Adolf Hitler? The same point is made in one of the long notes:

‘My husband insists that I call him “Sir”,’ said a woman at the Bristol Police Court yesterday, when she applied for a maintenance order. ‘To keep the peace I have complied with his request,’ she added. ‘I also have to clean his boots, fetch his razor when he shaves, and speak up promptly when he asks me questions.’ In the same issue of the same paper Sir E. F. Fletcher is reported to have ‘urged the House of Commons to stand up to dictators.’ (Daily Herald, 1 August 1926.)

Why, Woolf asks, all this fuss about opposing dictators abroad when every level of British society supports domestic tyrants at home?

Pay for housework

Men work in the public realm and get paid, sometimes a small fortune, often for jobs of dubious worth. Women labour in the home to raise families and manage households and care for the elderly, all unpaid. So: women’s domestic work should be paid.

The work of an archbishop is worth £15,000 a year to the State; the work of a judge is worth £5,000 a year; the work of a permanent secretary is worth £3,000 a year; the work of an army captain, of a sea captain, of a sergeant of dragoons, of a policeman, of a postman – all these works are worth paying out of the taxes, but wives and mothers and daughters who work all day and every day, without whose work the State would collapse and fall to pieces, without whose work your sons, sir, would cease to exist, are paid nothing whatever.

I wonder who first originated this call? Mary Wollstonecraft in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1792)? Certainly Friedrich Engels mentions it in his 1884 book ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’. Anyway, Woolf makes a sustained case for it over many pages, 30 years before the issue was revived by second-wave feminists in the 1970s:

The History of Wages for Housework

Note: I was a househusband for eight years. I did all the childcare, running children round to nurseries, playgroups, parties, doing all the shopping, cooking and cleaning, changing thousands of nappies, giving bedtime baths and so on, while my wife earned the family income. So I have lived experience of issues like this. It’s this lived experience which feeds into my scepticism about feminism, not as a theory (fine and dandy) but in practice (complicated and compromised). I met plenty of women who were extremely happy to pack in office work and become full-time mums and housewives, who loved looking after their young children, dressing them up, holding parties, dropping them at nurseries or infant school and going to meet girlfriends for lunch or coffee.

Then again, some didn’t. Some felt trapped and needed support, would have welcomed free or cheap childcare, or just wanted to go back to work which they found more fulfilling than hanging round playgrounds or hosting rooms full of screaming kids.

I had many conversations with scores of mums about how the state should provide cheap childcare, or if only companies would allow more flexible work based around school hours, if only housework was recognised and paid for like other forms of work, and so on and so on. Hundreds of conversations on these and related subjects, over years and years.

So my scepticism about feminism is not ideological or temperamental. It’s based on the lived experience of being a housekeeper and child-rearer myself, and talking to hundreds of women in the same situation. The problem is not the top-level slogans and demands, anyone can come up with catchy slogans and carry banners – “Wages for Housework” – it’s figuring out the practical policies and application: where would the money come from? How would it be paid out? Who defines ‘housework’? Like child benefit would it go to anyone caring for a child or be subject to conditions? How would you prove that you do the housework and don’t sub-contract this or that part to cleaners or nannies? etc etc.

The procession

Back to the Woolf on the professions. She gives a vivid description of the processions of all the professions through London’s streets to the centres of law, finance and so on and asks her women readers: do we, in fact, want to be part of this procession? Do we want to do the same jobs but for less pay and more condescension? Or do we want to strike out on our own and lead our lives differently?

The facts… seem to prove that the professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practise them possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them. Are we not right then in thinking that if we enter the same professions we shall acquire the same qualities? And do not such qualities lead to war? In another century or so if we practise the professions in the same way, shall we not be just as possessive, just as jealous, just as pugnacious, just as positive as to the verdict of God, Nature, Law and Property as these gentlemen are now?

She gives a number of quotes from lawyers, clerics and politicians complaining they lead a dog’s life, and have sacrificed all their pleasures and family time to their work. Do modern women want to rush into exactly the same kind of wage slavery?

Woolf wonders if we can turn to the lives of nineteenth century women in the professions to help us find a more humane way to have one of these high-powered jobs and live properly? No, because there weren’t any women in the nineteenth century professions. They weren’t allowed. Instead:

We find, between the lines of their husbands’ biographies, so many women practising – but what are we to call the profession that consists in bringing nine or ten children into the world, the profession which consists in running a house, nursing an invalid, visiting the poor and the sick, tending here an old father, there an old mother? – there is no name and there is no pay for that profession; but we find so many mothers, sisters and daughters of educated men practising it in the nineteenth century that we must lump them and their lives together behind their husbands’ and brothers’.

The validity of housework and child-rearing, again, and the long buried, unrecorded of the scores of millions of women who spent their entire lives doing it.

Giving the second guinea

All these arguments have been contained, rather confusingly, in a very long letter replying to the letter she received asking for financial aid for impoverished women professionals. Woolf sums up her position by saying she will send the letter-writer one guinea ‘on condition that you help all properly qualified people, of whatever sex, class or colour, to enter your profession’, and in addition ensure that women:

must earn enough to be independent
must not prostitute their brain to their profession
must refuse all prizes, medals and awards, and be content with obscurity
must rid themselves of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them

These are obviously very strict, probably utopian conditions, as with her demand for a completely different type of college which ended section 1. But:

If you agree to these terms then you can join the professions and yet remain uncontaminated by them; you can rid them of their possessiveness, their jealousy, their pugnacity, their greed. You can use them to have a mind of your own and a will of your own. And you can use that mind and will to abolish the inhumanity, the beastliness, the horror, the folly of war.

Antigone saying No to male tyranny

Part two rises to a very powerful invocation of Sophocles’ play, Antigone. Woolf studied this when young and it stayed with her all her life as a powerful story of female resistance to male tyranny. In the era of Hitler and Mussolini it was more than ever relevant. She comes back to it later.

No risk because of exclusion

Woolf ends part 2 with a grand fanfare of irony, saying there is no immediate risk of women professionals losing their souls and working themselves to shreds so long as the laws of England hold their nationality so lightly, prevent them from working in many professions, limit the numbers who can attend university, and ensure that so many women continue to live in the tradition of neglect and contempt, living gruelling lives of unpaid work in dark patriarchal homes.

Part 3. The Outsider Society

The sarcasm and irony which have been present throughout the essay rise to a real anger and bitterness in this, the longest of the three parts.

Woolf reverts back to the original letter she was sent, the one from the unnamed male correspondent asking her how they can prevent a war, and she repeats his three suggestions, namely that we should:

sign a manifesto pledging ourselves ‘to protect culture and intellectual liberty’
join a certain society, devoted to certain measures whose aim is to preserve peace
should subscribe to that society which like the others is in need of funds

Failure of the universities

She addresses these points one by one. First she is satirical about this idea of ‘protecting culture and intellectual liberty’. Isn’t this what the Great Universities have said they were devoting themselves to for centuries, the ones which have been teaching men these values and brutally excluding their sisters and daughters? Is the fact that these values now need such support from society an admission that all those centuries of learning have failed? And if they’ve failed, why should the impoverished, life-opportunity-deprived daughters and sisters suddenly rush to the help of their oppressors?

What is ‘culture and liberty’?

Anyway, what is this ‘culture and liberty’ the letter writer refers to? She knows what it isn’t. Characteristically, she turns to biography and uses the life of an author like Mrs Margaret Oliphant (1828 to 1897) who, after her husband died, churned out meretricious romances to support her children. Was this intellectual liberty? No, this was intellectual prostitution and Woolf angrily takes it as typical of the intellectual prostitution forced on so many women writers and artists who had to sell their souls and prostitute their art because of the patriarchy’s refusal to let them earn a living any other way.

So she mocks the letter writer’s suggestion that women, victims of centuries of repression, should suddenly rush to help the poor privileged men in their time of need. He wants her to join his pacifist society, does he? Well, no. The very word ‘society’ denotes the systematic exclusion of women from education and influence and power and money, so screw society.

The very word ‘society’ sets tolling in memory the dismal bells of a harsh music: shall not, shall not, shall not. You shall not learn; you shall not earn; you shall not own; you shall not – such was the society relationship of brother to sister for many centuries.

The Outsiders Society

She’s not going to join any boys’ club. Instead she proposes setting up a separate organisation, for women of her class and (lack of) education. It would be called The Outsiders Society. It would consist of educated men’s daughters working through their own class and by their own methods for liberty, equality and peace. Members would:

not fight
not work in munitions factories or nurse the injured
not encourage men to go and fight but maintain an attitude of neutrality, as fighting is a ‘sex characteristic which she cannot share’

She rises to real bitterness:

She will find that she has no good reason to ask her brother to fight on her behalf to protect ‘our’ country. ‘”Our country,”‘ she will say, ‘throughout the greater part of its history has treated me as a slave; it has denied me education or any share in its possessions. “Our” country still ceases to be mine if I marry a foreigner. “Our” country denies me the means of protecting myself, forces me to pay others a very large sum annually to protect me, and is so little able, even so, to protect me that Air Raid precautions are written on the wall [i.e. women are defenceless against modern warfare]. Therefore if you insist upon fighting to protect me, or “our” country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or to protect either myself or my country. For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’

Wow. Very powerful. Furthermore, The Outsider will cultivate complete indifference to male nonsense about patriotism, war and fighting. On the contrary, she will:

take no part in patriotic demonstrations
not take part in patriotic praise
absent herself from military displays, tournaments, tattoos, prize-givings and all such ceremonies as encourage the desire to impose ‘our’ civilization or ‘our’ dominion upon other people

The idea is that this ‘indifference’ will damp down patriotic fervour in those around her and thus, in a tiny way, help to avoid war.

All this makes a sort of sense. But it feels like twisting logic when Woolf goes on to assert a link between these anti-war steps and the positive demands of her feminist programme. The connection feels tenuous and forced. Because she now switches to say that in order for their opinion or actions to matter, the outsiders must push for a raft of feminist requirements, being:

they must earn their own livings
they must press for a living wage in their professions
they must create new professions in which they can earn a living wage
they must press for press for a money wage for the unpaid worker in her own class – the daughters and sisters of educated men
they must press for a wage to be paid by the State to the mothers of educated men

Make the state pay for housework

This last is vital because until she has complete financial independence, a wife is dependent on her husband for money and will follow his opinions and men are for war. Therefore, in order to create an influential bloc of educated women who are against war, this class must be given financial, and so intellectual, independence. Women must be paid by the State for their work as mothers.

And she tells her male interlocutor that this step – paying women for their housework – would also liberate husbands, because by sharing the burden of earning an income they would no longer be wage slaves, slaves to the rat race. It would have an enlightening and life-enhancing effect all round.

I gave my thoughts on this proposal earlier. It sounds great, and you can see her logic – that women can only be truly independent and free if they have their own income, separate from their father’s or husband’s – but how would it be implemented in practice?

I’ll just make the additional point that its recurrence here is characteristic of how key themes and suggestions recur throughout the essay, building up power through repetition and echoes, not unlike her technique in her novels.

Outsider demands

But she hasn’t finished with her demands. The Outsiders would:

not only earn their own livings but become so expert that their threat to down tools would have power and influence
when they have earned enough to live on they would earn no more i.e. not pile up obscene wealth
they would reject any profession hostile to freedom such as the arms trade
they would refuse to take office in any institution which pretends to respect liberty but actually restricts it, such as Oxford and Cambridge

Outsiders will eschew all the stupid costumes and ceremonies so beloved by men (see the section about silly ceremonials in part 1).

Outsiders will eschew ‘the coarse glare of advertisement and publicity’ and prefer to work in honest obscurity.

The secret society already exists

Wandering into thriller territory, Woolf suggests that this Outsider Society already exists but is secret and underground in its activities. Her very dubious evidence for this far-fetched claim is a clutch of newspaper reports of various women officials making comments against war, opposing arms manufacture and the like. From random quotes and newspaper clippings she based the existence of a secret society operating across English society. Is this an example of her sometimes utopian or far-fetched argumentation – or an example of her dry sense of humour? Difficult to tell.

Against the Church of England

Outsiders will:

fearlessly investigate and criticise public institutions they are forced to contribute to, such as the universities, but especially the Church of England
by criticizing religion they would attempt to free the religious spirit from its present servitude and would help, if need be, to create a new religion based it might well be upon the New Testament, but, it might well be, very different from the religion now erected upon that basis

Woolf’s attitude to the Church of England had already been indicated in the passage about cited above about Antigone where she writes that ‘Antigone’s five words are worth all the sermons of all the archbishops’, those five Greek words (they total 11 in the English translation) being:

‘Tis not my nature to join in hating, but in loving.’

Pages 196 to 202 give a scathing account of how Jesus Christ’s own admonition that his followers are equal which promised equality between men and women was denied by St Paul, who invented the idea that women must be veiled in church and not speak. This bigotry hardened over the centuries into a church which forbids any positions of power or influence in the most powerful and prestigious organisation in the land, to women.

With the result that the salary of an archbishop is £15,000, the salary of a bishop is £10,000 and the salary of a dean is £3,000. But the salary of a deaconess is £150; and as for the ‘parish worker’, who ‘is called upon to assist in almost every department of parish life’, whose ‘work is exacting and often solitary…’ and who is most likely to be a woman, she is paid from £120 to £150 a year.

It’s a pattern mirrored in all the other professions and walks of life: women excluded from all the prestigious, well-paid higher positions, and forced to undertake the most menial and poorly-paid jobs.

Psychoanalysis, anger and fear

One of Anna Snaith’s excellent notes tells us that ‘Woolf’s brother Adrian [Stephen] and his wife Karin were trained psychoanalysts and were crucial in disseminating Freud’s work in England.’ This is relevant because Woolf quotes at length from the Archbishops’ Commission on the Ministry of Women (1936) and in particular from the appendix written by Professor Grensted, the Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion in the University of Oxford.

This professor concluded that there is no reason in theology (Christ’s teachings) why there should not be women priests, but there were strong objections to women priests among the clergy. Digging deeper he uses Freudian terminology to suggest the deep conviction held by many men of men’s superiority and women’s inferiority.

The causes are obscure but the outcome is obvious: that whenever a conversation lights on the topic of equality for women and women holding roles up till now reserved for men, many man become angry and many women become fearful. This imbalance leads women not to raise, mention or discuss the issue which, as a result, goes underground.

The infantile fixation

Woolf takes from Grensted the notion of the ‘infantile fixation’. I didn’t quite understand this and I didn’t see her defining it anywhere. Instead she gives three examples of what she means (taken, inevitably, from biographies), namely the wildly irrational anger and jealousy triggered in three classic Victorian fathers when their daughters asked permission to get married or (worse than that) to get a job. The fathers being:

Mr Barrett (father of Elizabeth who wanted to marry the poet Robert Browning)
the Reverend Patrick Brontë (father of Charlotte who wanted to marry)
Mr Jex-Blake (father of Sophia who was offered a small sum for tutoring mathematics to a friend)

By contrast, to show the impact of a father’s liberality, she gives the story of Mr Leigh Smith. It’s worth quoting at length because the impact is in all the details. Smith had a daughter, Barbara, who he loved.

When Barbara came of age in 1848 he gave her an allowance of £300 a year. The results of that immunity from the infantile fixation were remarkable. For ‘treating her money as a power to do good, one of the first uses to which Barbara put it was educational.’ She founded a school; a school that was open not only to different sexes and different classes, but to different creeds; Roman Catholics, Jews and ‘pupils from families of advanced free thought’ were received in it. ‘It was a most unusual school,’ an outsiders’ school. But that was not all that she attempted upon three hundred a year. One thing led to another. A friend, with her help, started a cooperative evening class for ladies ‘for drawing from an undraped model’. In 1858 only one life class in London was open to ladies. And then a petition was got up to the Royal Academy; its schools were actually, though as so often happens only nominally, opened to women in 1861; next Barbara went into the question of the laws concerning women; so that actually in 1871 married women were allowed to own their property; and finally she helped Miss Davies to found Girton. When we reflect what one father who was immune from infantile fixation could do by allowing one daughter £300 a year we need not wonder that most fathers firmly refused to allow their daughters more than £40 a year with bed and board thrown in.

The difference just one liberal father made. What if all Victorian fathers had been like that.

Sexist science

There follows a passage giving some examples of how even contemporary science is twisted to prove the inferiority of women. To be honest this section is neither very compendious nor persuasive. She doesn’t really go into the most basic accusation against women, that their bodies are designed for childbirth and child-rearing and this explains why their minds are limited to domestic subjects and childish logic. (I’m not saying this, I’m repeating the sexist, misogynist accusation.)

This is a failing but I think reflects the limitations of Woolf’s knowledge and education. Of science she knows next to nothing and so is simply incapable of unpacking all the biological and psychological aspects of woman-hating. She is much more at home in her comfort zone of education and literature, the lives of women writers.

She cites Bertrand Russell pointing out the sheer sadism of much medical science towards women (the medical profession’s reluctance to provide painkillers to women in childbirth) or the twisting of scientific knowledge to justify male superiority – but not as amply as this huge subject demands.

Cleons

Instead she reverts to literature again, and her obsession with Antigone. In the play the oppressive father is Cleon, the archetype for the Victorian paterfamilias and the modern fascist. Here is Cleon speaking dictator-talk:

‘Whomsoever the city may appoint, that man must be obeyed, in little things and great, in just things and unjust… disobedience is the worst of evils… We must support the cause of order, and in no wise suffer a woman to worst us… They must be women, and not range at large. Servants, take them within.’

Order and the oppression of women, Mr Barrett and Mussolini.

The personal and the private

In the essay’s last pages she brings things together by (rightly) saying that she has shown how male tyranny in the personal, domestic realm and in the public realm, are intimately linked:

that the public and the private worlds are inseparably connected; that the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other.

Despite the strangeness of the letter-answering structure and the oddly digressive, rambling flow of the argument, by the end she has presented a devastating barrage of evidence, as well as making a host of demands and suggestions.

The third guinea

So she refuses to sign the form her correspondent had sent her. She refuses to sign up to his society because of her opposition to all such male bodies, but she will send him a guinea to support it.

Their aims are the same, to oppose the tyrants in the name of Justice and Equality and Liberty. But, as this amazing book has explained, as a woman, as the patchily educated ‘daughter of educated men’, as someone with completely different life experiences and, consequently, utterly different perspectives from the male sender of the letter, she shares the same aim but insists that she will try to bring it about using, not the old male forms and words, but new words and new ideas appropriate for women.

Magnificent

For all its faults, ‘Three Guineas’ is a magnificent, powerful and very persuasive piece of work. Her assembly of a very wide range of evidence, facts and figures really bring home the historical endurance, depth and wide range of the legal, financial and cultural oppression of women throughout English history and the stupid, patronising and misogynist attitudes and opinions deployed to maintain that oppression.

The notion of the Outsiders Society is the crystallisation of the massive theme which emerges repeatedly throughout the text, the idea that women – not because of any biological or psychological differences – but purely because of the legal, financial, professional and cultural apartheid they have suffered for centuries, bring to the table a different perspective from men across a whole range of issues.

I think it’s a magnificent example of a polemical essay, of an impassioned political pamphlet.

Criticisms

There are a number of problems or issues with Woolf’s way of arguing. Initially I included them in my review where they occurred but they cluttered up the flow of my review, and gave an unduly negative opinion too early on. I mentioned three earlier on. Here are a few more.

Shortcoming 4. Woolf’s intellectual confusions

Periodically throughout the text Woolf freely admits to own intellectual shortcomings: for example, right at the start she admits being bewildered that there seems to be a wide range of opinions about whether war is good or inevitable. She herself tells us that the more she reads, the more opinions she discovers, the more confused she becomes. But… is that not the point of being an intellectual: to read all the opinions, weigh the evidence, and develop your own line of argument, based on the evidence you uncover and reacting to other people’s arguments?

This activity, intellectual activity, always puzzles and confuses Woolf. In ‘A Room of One’s Own’ there’s the section where she orders up some books in the British Museum and opens them up, expecting to discover The Truth staring her in the face.

Sometimes this is part of her general mocking irony, mocking the pretensions of pretty much all male activity, including the grand Pursuit of Truth. But at other times it can give you the worrying sense that she doesn’t really understand what intellectual enquiry is.

Her intellectual confusion as evidence of her case

In the opening and then at various transition moments, Woolf explicitly tells us that she struggles to marshal the evidence, is embarking on something too big for her abilities, and wonders if she’d be better off abandoning it. After a while I realised that maybe these passages are designed to dramatise the issue of women’s exclusion from formal education by using herself as an example.

Woolf’s brothers went to top private schools and Oxbridge whereas she more or less had to educate herself at home and mostly taught herself by browsing through her father’s extensive library. In other words, every time she shares how confused by the evidence or daunted by the challenge of answering big question she is, she is demonstrating the effect of the grotesquely unequal education of the genders, how women have been the victims of ‘tradition, poverty and ridicule’, and showing the reader how she (and we) are suffering for it.

Maybe that’s why she flaunts her own intellectual limitations so much: the intellectual inability she frequently laments is the result of her exclusion from higher education. It makes her case for her.

Shortcoming 5. Her analysis is restricted to a (relatively) small class

Her lack of real confidence in her own research, and her need to make her feminist points as categorical and powerful as possible, explain why Woolf makes the strategic decision of restricting her analysis to a relatively small class, to women like herself, to ‘the daughters of educated men’, as she describes them. As she puts it:

Our ideology is still so inveterately anthropocentric that it has been necessary to coin this clumsy term – ‘educated man’s daughter’ – to describe the class whose fathers have been educated at public schools and universities. Obviously, if the term ‘bourgeois’ fits her brother, it is grossly incorrect to use it of one who differs so profoundly in the two prime characteristics of the bourgeoisie – capital and environment.

She makes it quite clear on page one that she is only discussing upper-middle-class women, women like herself, women with immaculate manners who are used to managing servants and know which of the many forks and spoons to use at a formal dinner.

In order to avoid the confusions, contradictions and conflicting evidence I mentioned above, in order for her analysis to work, she has to reject the vast majority of the population (the working class and lower classes, of both sexes) and identify her cause with just this numerically small and limited class of posh ladies.

It isn’t just me pointing this out. The Wikipedia article about Three Guineas tells us that the noted academic Q.D. Leavis wrote a scathing review of ‘Three Guineas’ soon after it was published:

She denounces the essay because it is only concerned with ‘the daughters of educated men’, seeing Woolf’s criticisms as irrelevant to most women because her wealth and aristocratic ancestry means she is ‘insulated by class’.

And Anna Snaith’s notes in the Oxford University Press edition tell us that Woolf received letters from working class women readers who complained about being left out of her analysis, notably a long semi-autobiographical one from a working class woman named Agnes Smith.

This is closely related to what I called shortcoming 3, ignorance of the wider world. But it’s also a decision. She found it hard enough gathering the evidence for the sexist discrimination against her own type and class of woman. If she opened it up to the broader middle and working classes she’d never have finished it.

2025: the perils of intersectionality

Many of these criticisms are mentioned in Anna Snaith’s introduction to the Oxford University Press edition. Here she indicates the larger cultural and political problems the essay falls foul of. This is that there are, nowadays, so many grievances, so many groups claiming to be victims, so many communities and identities who feel that they, too, have been subjected to centuries of oppression, that it is hard to focus on just one, and it is especially hard to focus on the group Woolf defines as the ‘daughters of educated men’.

As you read Snaith’s account of Woolf’s life and social circle, with so many friends among England’s political and cultural elite, the idea of her as a persecuted outsider feels more and more ludicrous. She wasn’t a Jew in Hitler’s Germany, a Black in the American South, a kulak in Stalin’s Russia, an Aborigine in Australia, she grew up in a house full of books which she was actively encouraged to read and went on to become a centre of London’s literary and artistic elite.

This doesn’t invalidate any of the points she makes in the book or detract from the essay’s tremendous power. It’s just to say that the struggle for women’s equality takes its place among quite a few other struggles. I’ve a book about the Irish Civil War on my desk and Irish nationalists have quite a story to tell about 1,000 years of British oppression. Her husband was a Jew who had his own story about the legal and financial persecution of Jews. Something similar could be said of England’s Roman Catholics, prevented by law from holding official positions. Or – a group close to my heart – England’s non-conformists, banned by law from holding any positions of authority for 300 years after the civil war. Citizens from India or any of the colonies we ruled for centuries might have a thing or two to say about Britain’s oppression of their peoples and cultures.

Being a modern academic, Snaith is contractually obliged to drag in slavery – the progressive topic par excellence – to her discussion of ‘Three Guineas’, on the rather tenuous basis that guineas were, apparently, first used as currency in the British slave trade. Don’t know what Virginia would have made of that scholarly leap of imagination.

To repeat – this little digression about the modern over-abundance of historical grievances is not entirely my view but simply expanding points made by the book’s editor, Anna Snaith, in her introduction.

All these other issues don’t invalidate any of the points Woolf makes in the book but they place it in a much larger, real world context. If you’re a feminist, you can insist that your cause and your history of oppression is the real one, the big one, the important one and, convinced of your righteousness, overlook or downplay the grievances of all the other groups I’ve mentioned. In a sense, to get anything done, you have to focus on your issues and grievances; nobody can represent the issues of the whole world. You have to pick your battles. And this explains why Woolf realised that, in order to get her book written, she had to concentrate just on relatively privileged upper-middle-class women like herself, on ‘the daughters of educated men’.

Conclusion

It’s a very powerful book. Very. To repeat what I said at the start, from one point of view it may be her most important work. It’s a bit of a struggle, a bit meandering, a bit puzzling in places, her proposals such as for the Outsider Society are a bit eccentric – and yet so many of her main points drive right home, and the evidence gathered in the notes at the end is searing, blistering, eye-opening. It shook this old cynic. It materially changed my views about feminism. I strongly recommend it.

Credit

‘Three Guineas’ by Virginia Woolf was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1938. Page references are to the 2015 Oxford University Press paperback edition, edited and annotated by Anna Snaith, although the text is easily available online.

Related reviews

Virginia Woolf reviews
1920s reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on April 4, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Essays, Feminism, Politics

Tagged 1920s, 1930s England, A Room of One's Own, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Adolf Hitler, Adrian Stephen, AEF, Agnes Smith, Anna Snaith, Antigone, Archbishops' Commission on the Ministry of Women, Arthur's Education Fund, Barbara Leigh Smith, Bertrand Russell, British Museum, Cambridge, Charlotte Brontë, chauvinism, Christianity, Church of England, Cleon, Debretts, Desmond Chapman-Huston, Elizabeth Barrett, English history, English literature, essay, fascism, Fascist Italy, Feminism, feminist essay, feminist ideology, folly of war, Freud, Friedrich Engels, G.L. Prestige, gender, gender inequality, Germany, Great War, Herr Hitler, hierarchy, House of Commons, how can war be prevented?, inequality, infantile fixation, irony, Jesus Christ, Joan Strachey, Karin Stephen, Lord Baldwin, male tyranny, Margaret Oliphant, Margaret Todd, Mary Kingsley, Mary Wollstonecraft, middle-class feminism, misogyny, Mr Barrett, Mr Jex-Blake, Mr Leigh Smith, Mrs Oliphant, Nazism, New Testament, Newnham College, non-fiction, notes, novel–essay, oppression of women, Oxford, patriarchy, patriotism, polemical essay, political pamphlet, Privilege, Professor Grensted, Psychoanalysis, Q.D. Leavis, quotations, R.J. Rackham, references, Reverend Patrick Brontë, Robert Browning, sarcasm, second wave feminism, sexism, Signor Mussolini, Sir E. F. Fletcher, Sir John Squire, Sir Sidney Low, Sophia Jex-Blake, Sophocles, St Paul, status, Stock Exchange, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, The Outsiders Society, The Pargiters, the patriarchy, the personal is political, The Times, The Years, Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf, Wages for Housework, war, Weimar Republic, white feminism, Winston Churchill

Posted by Simon on April 4, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/04/04/three-guineas-virginia-woolf/

Search for:
Follow

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address:

Join 744 other subscribers
Topics
Africa America Ancient history ancient Rome art book British Empire British Museum China Christianity Cicero Cold War colonialism comedy Communism drama Egypt English literature exhibition Feminism fiction First World War France Freud Germany Great War H.G. Wells history Hitler imperialism India Italy Julius Caesar literary criticism Literature London love murder narrative Nazis New York novel Oscar Wilde Painting Paris photography Play poetry Politics religion Roman Empire Rome Royal Academy Rudyard Kipling Russia Samuel Beckett Satire science fiction sculpture Second World War sex Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes short stories Slavery South Africa Spain Stalin suicide Surrealism Tate Britain theatre thriller Translation war
Categories
- Adventure (148)
- Africa (118)
- America (105)
- American literature (32)
- Ancient history (145)
- Anglo Saxon (24)
- Antisemitism (4)
- Archaeology (3)
- Architecture (27)
- Art (619)
- Australia (11)
- Autobiography (32)
- Biography (83)
- Biology (10)
- Black art (5)
- Books (779)
- British Empire (19)
- Buddhism (2)
- Cartoon (14)
- Chemistry (4)
- Childrens (22)
- China (15)
- Christianity (77)
- Classical music (20)
- Comedy (194)
- Communism (27)
- Concert (15)
- Contemporary classical music (21)
- Cosmology (4)
- Crime (32)
- Crusades (9)
- Design (7)
- Detective stories (70)
- drawing (5)
- English literature (182)
- Environment (9)
- Essays (31)
- European History (176)
- Evolution (4)
- Exhibition (584)
- fairy tale (3)
- Fantasy (32)
- Fashion (6)
- Feminism (48)
- Film (23)
- Flowers (4)
- France (63)
- French literature (51)
- German literature (4)
- Germany (26)
- Graphic novel (3)
- Great War (77)
- History (482)
- Holocaust (15)
- Horror (12)
- Illustration (13)
- imperialism (28)
- India (8)
- Irish literature (36)
- Islamic terrorism (8)
- Italy (4)
- Japan (18)
- Latin America (13)
- Latin literature (3)
- Law (4)
- Literary criticism (97)
- Literature (173)
- Marxism (1)
- Mathematics (6)
- Mexico (14)
- Middle Ages (72)
- Middle East (16)
- Museum (14)
- Music (1)
- Mythology (18)
- Nature (8)
- Noir (18)
- Novel (703)
- Novella (12)
- Old English (23)
- Opera (1)
- Painting (64)
- Philosophy (41)
- Photography (133)
- Play (130)
- Poetry (103)
- Politics (115)
- Prints (12)
- Psychoanalysis (19)
- Psychology (5)
- queer (1)
- Radio (3)
- Rock music (6)
- Russia (19)
- Russian literature (18)
- Saga (39)
- Satire (1)
- Science (29)
- Science Fiction (130)
- Sculpture (57)
- Second World War (111)
- Sex (42)
- Short stories (167)
- Slavery (48)
- Spain (2)
- Spy novel (71)
- Sweden (4)
- Theatre (141)
- Theology (4)
- Thriller (239)
- Tragedy (2)
- Translation (93)
- Travel writing (18)
- Turkey (3)
- TV (11)
- Uncategorized (11)
- Vietnam War (7)
- Walks (14)
- War (267)
- World War One (19)

All posts in category Essays

Novels

Reportage

Essays

About Orwell

Share this:

Wodehouse and the Nazi broadcasts

Outcry in Britain

Orwell’s Defence

Orwell’s interpretation of Wodehouse’s motivation

The Nazis’ propaganda aim

The Nazis’ misunderstanding of Wodehouse

Orwell’s interpretation of Wodehouse’s worldview

1. Wodehouse was not a critic of the upper class

2. Wodehouse not satirical enough

3. Wodehouse’s datedness

4. Orwell dismisses Wodehouse’s ‘Fascist tendencies’

Wodehouse didn’t realise how Britain had changed by 1941

Class war

7. Orwell’s conclusion

My conclusion about Wodehouse

My conclusion about Orwell

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

1. Thunder at Wembley (1924: 3 pages)

The Cinema (1926: 5 pages)

3. Street Haunting: A London Adventure (1927: 11 pages)

4. The Sun and The Fish (1928: 5 pages)

5. The Docks of London (December 1931)

6. Oxford Street Tide (1932: 4 pages)

7. Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942: 3 pages)

8. Flying Over London (6 pages)

Contemporary flying reviews

9. Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936: 3 pages)

10. Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid (1940: 4 pages)

Comment 1: the failure of feminism

Comment 2: preparing for war

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931: 14 pages)

Summary

Background

No prefaces

Scene 1. The 1913 Congress of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

Scene 2. At the Hampstead headquarters of the English Women’s Co-operative Guild

Scene 3. The letters themselves

A Virago classic

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Women and fiction

1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905: 2 pages)

2. Women Novelists (1918: 3 pages)

3. Women and Fiction (1929: 8 pages)

4. Professions for Women (1931: 5 pages)

6. Why? (1934)

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

Woolf, her father and biography

1. The New Biography (1927: 6 pages)

Caveat

2. On Being Ill (1930: 10 pages)

Thoughts

3. Leslie Stephen, The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories (1932: 5 pages)

4. The Art of Biography (1939)

1.

2.

3.

4.

Credit

Related links

Related reviews

Share this:

5. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923: 5 pages)