All posts tagged David Bradshaw

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:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. 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:

  1. Thunder at Wembley (1924) [the British Empire exhibition at Wembley]
  2. The Cinema (1926)
  3. 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]
  4. The Sun and The Fish (1928) [a solar eclipse and visit to London Aquarium]
  5. The Docks of London (1931)
  6. Oxford Street Tide (1932)
  7. Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car (1942)
  8. Flying Over London [an imagined flight in a small plane over London]
  9. Why Art Today Follows Politics (1936)
  10. 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

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:

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.

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.

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Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1931)

It is impossible to say how much I owe the Guild.
(Mrs Lizzie Layton, page 54)

‘Life as We Have Known It’ is a collection of first-hand accounts of the lives of working class women from the later nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth. Many of them escaped poverty or were inspired to write, by membership of the Women’s Co-Operative Guild, and the accounts were collated and edited into a collection by the Guild’s secretary, Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Despite the Victorian provenance of many of the accounts the book wasn’t published until as late as 1931. It made a big splash at a time when the study of social history was just starting to be a thing, typified by the foundation of the Mass Observation movement in 1937.

The Women’s Co-Operative Guild

The co-operative movement

In the first half of the nineteenth century workers formed co-operative groups in many countries across Europe in response to the Industrial Revolution. Wherever it occurred, the Revolution created a large industrial proletariat which the factory and business-owning classes brutally exploited.

A central activity of these various co-operative movements was to band together to open their own stores selling good quality groceries. In 1844 10 weavers and 20 other workers in Rochdale set up the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers and opened a store which became well-known for selling good quality food and groceries at prices their working class customers could afford. In the process they developed the so-called Rochdale Principles which went on to become widely copied and famous. Over the following decades in Britain, larger co-operatives were formed from the merger of many independent retail societies. In 1863 the North of England Co-operative Society was launched by 300 individual co-ops across Yorkshire and Lancashire. By 1872, it had become known as the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) and so on.

Women and the co-operative movement

Meanwhile, something had been missing from all this well-intentioned activity, namely women. Women worked side by side men in factories and, of course, ran most households, did most of the shopping, cooking, cleaning and child-rearing, and yet they not only had no representation in society at large, could not vote or take part in civic life – they didn’t even have a role within the Co-operative Movement.

So in 1883 a handful of women activists set up the Women’s Co-Operative Guild to fill the gap. There was no shortage of Victorian charities run by high-minded middle-class women who wanted to do something to the working class – but right from the start, the Guild was about working class women doing it for themselves.

The role of Margaret Llewellyn Davies

In 1889, the young Margaret Llewellyn Davies (born in 1861 and so 28 years old) took over as President of the Guild. She began implementing an ambitious agenda to broaden and expand the organisation. She encouraged working women around the country to form local groups, to organise and attend regional and national congresses, to educate themselves about broader political issues such as higher wages, shorter working hours, better working conditions, health and safety and, of course, the campaign to give women the vote. Davies was to serve as the Guild’s general secretary for over 30 years, until 1921. Her personal views, a combination of socialism and feminism, shaped the Guild’s direction.

In 1915, 16 years into the job, Davies edited a book titled Maternity: Letters from Working Women. it was based on letters from Guild members describing their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and child rearing and was an eye-opening example of social history.

And now we finally come to the book under review because 16 years later, in 1931, Davies published a sister book, Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women. By this point the Guild had 1,400 branches and 67,000 members for whom it had opened doors and given them undreamed of opportunities.

Life as We Have Known It

It’s a lot shorter than its reputation suggests, at just 170 pages of big type, and that’s with various bits of editorial matter added onto the original text, such as the introduction by Virginia Woolf, a note on the Women’s Co-operative Guild by Margaret Davies, and an afterword by the publishers of the 1977 Virago edition.

From everything I’d read about it I was expecting it to be mammoth and encyclopedic along the lines of Henry Mayhew’s epic ‘London Labour and the London Poor’. Instead it contains only six substantial accounts:

  1. Memories of Seventy Years by Mrs Layton (60 pages)
  2. A Plate-Layer’s Wife by Mrs Wrigley (12 pages)
  3. In A Mining Village by Mrs F.H. Smith (7 pages)
  4. A Guild Office Clerk contributed by the Editor (8 pages)
  5. A Felt Hat Worker by Mrs Scott J.P. (24 pages)
  6. A Public-Spirited Rebel by Mrs Yearn (8 pages)

These together make up 120 just pages.

There follow several slightly eccentric appendices. The most powerful is a brutal account of working as child slave labour in East Anglia by a Mrs Burrows. This is followed, a little oddly, about 20 extracts from letters from Guildswomen all round Britain which address the topic of what books they like reading and have read recently, with the result that many of them are just glorified lists of popular books of the first decades of the twentieth century, mildly interesting but not a patch on the searing accounts from the first part of the book.

1. Memories of Seventy Years by Mrs Layton (60 pages)

This is by far the longest memoir and is so long it has to be divided into chapters.

1. Childhood in Bethnal Green

Elizabeth ‘Lizzie’ was born in Bethnal Green 1855, one of 14 children, so that her mother was permanently pregnant or suckling or both. In those days Bethnal Green was a village and they had a big garden in which they kept pigs and ducks and chickens. When she was 6 they moved to a bigger house but in a more cramped neighbourhood with little outside space. A neighbouring dairyman kept cows whose manure stank out the house. There was no sanitation or running water, with human waste piled close to water butts with the result that there were recurring outbreaks of cholera. At the age of 12 her older sister went into service. One day a week all the babies were washed with the girls kept back from school to help. They used to hire a pram for a penny to take the babies to Victoria Park for a treat. One day she and her sister were naughty and went on an outing, walking, with one of the babies, to Epping Forest. Her parents were worried sick and relieved when they reappeared.

Her father was an educated man with a job in government service, who dressed smartly and was musical. He played at the coronation of Queen Victoria (1837). He taught himself tailoring to supplement his income, and grew all their own vegetables. Lizzie is never among the poorest of the poor.

As the family grew her mother had to take on extra work and became continually exhausted. A doctor prescribed spirits and so little Lizzie saved up pennies earned minding babies and running errands and bought treats of gin for her mother. This probably didn’t help and her mum went downhill and died when she was still a girl.

A development of bigger grander houses is built nearby. Some of the girls become ‘step girls’ who can earn up to 9d a Saturday for cleaning all the steps. The Sisters of Mercy are attached to a nearby church and have a spooky reputation but they give Lizzie and her sister food when they go knocking on their door.

The Sisters visit a house they’ve heard is poorly and discover a mother and two sisters with smallpox. In that neighbourhood people made matchboxes at home and the matchboxes were being made in the same room as the smallpox patients then taken out onto the streets to be sold and distributed.

As London expands fine old houses get converted into tenements or even into factories. Women and girls have to beg for their pennies pay while in the grand house the family of the owners live off roast joints.

Little Lizzie is ill, the doctor recommends a change of air and so she goes and stays with her aunt in the countryside. She loves the countryside and her first stay lasts five weeks. Her uncle is a farm bailiff. He lets her ride on the cows or on the cart piled with fresh fodder for the cows. She is scared of the bees but loves the sunsets she sees from the windows of the cottage.

2. Ten years in domestic service

When she’s 10 she starts earning a living as a baby minder, interspersed with attending one of Lord Shaftesbury’s Ragged Schools. The baby belongs to a couple who keep a small shop and pawn shop, so Lizzie sees the misery of families so poor they have to pawn their children’s clothes to pay for food.

Age 13, goes to Hampstead in service for a year. She is kept inside the house all week except for Sunday morning excursions to church. She has confirmation classes and is confirmed by the Bishop of London.

Age 15 went to be a maternity nurse in Kentish Town, where a young mother of 3 children and a baby died or puerperal fever. She gets 3 shillings a week which she ekes out by repairing her own clothes. One evening a gentleman offered her ten shillings to have sex with him and she was tempted but refused. the two oldest children are taught to read and write at home and Lizzie picks up some of this by watching. She develops an appetite for instalments of sensational stories in magazines lent her by the servant next door, but had to read these in secret.

Age 17 she quits the job when the family try to make her take the children on the only spare hours she gets to herself, on Sunday afternoons. She gets a new post with a lady and her daughter. This is a good gig as they happily let her read and the grown-up daughter even corrects her reading and writing. She has days off to go walking with her father, which she loved, and develops a cult of poring over maps and railway timetables and dreaming of travelling to farflung places such as Manchester!

She gets time off to assist at the lying-in of her sister and is horrified by the realities of childbirth and the harsh treatment of new mothers (not allowed to wash afterwards and fed on water gruel and toast).

Age 18, she can afford to dress well and starts having male friends. Men start proposing marriage to her. She happens to attend a wedding and is horrified at the vows a woman has to make and give up her freedom. Nonetheless she becomes engaged and the engagement lasts two years.

She accompanies her kind family for an extended stay at Hastings. The mother invites her fiancé to stay but he makes an improper suggestion to Lizzie and follows it up by trying to force her. She fights him off but from that point despises him. When they move back to London, this man keeps trying to see her until eventually she gives up her post and moves to Balham in south London to try and escape him.

3. Married life, Midwifery, Co-operation

She meets a man at a Mission Hall, Mr Layton. By now she is interested in social issues. They are engaged for three years and then, in 1882 Lizzie marries, aged 26. On the eve of the wedding the piano-making firm her fiancé works for goes bankrupt and he is thrown out of work.

After slogging round for work her husband gets a regular job as a carriage cleaner for a railway, working 12 hours a night, 6 days a week for 19 shillings i.e. 95p.

September 1883 first child. It is a forceps delivery with no anaesthetic. Imagine! She is all alone to look after the child. Three months later husband lost his job. A friend lodging in the same house tells him about a job working at St Pancras loading and unloading for 17 shillings a week. What with the rent and the cost of commuting to work, there isn’t much left over and Lizzie often goes hungry. The long hours make husband sick and he is routinely off sick for months at a time.

She takes in washing which she can only do when the baby is asleep and often only gets two hours sleep herself. Three years later a second child but it dies after three months from lack of nourishment and she says she might have died, too.

Her husband joins the Railwaymen’s trade union. She comes to understand the importance of trade unions for protecting working people A co-operative store opens 2 miles away and Mrs L becomes a member. An Education committee is set up and through them a branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild. She loves that it’s not a question of middle class women coming and lecturing but working class women presenting and explaining and being open to questions.

She saw Margaret Llewelyn Davies speak. She was only a member for ten months before she was elected president. She nervously attends meetings of the general Co-Op Management Committee. She is invited to give lectures on domestic economy to guilds around London. She begins to speak in the meetings about political issues.

Her husband gets a promotion, they move to Cricklewood, Lizzie takes up nursing instead of taking in washing and ironing. She is encouraged by doctors but can’t possibly afford the fees for a midwifery course which start at £30. So she remains a maternity nurse but one who reads and studies and is show techniques by supportive doctors.

She handles so many cases that the friendliest doctor says he’d be confident her handling deliveries by herself, only contacting him if there are problems. Eventually she saves up the £30 and takes the exam, which she found intimidating, especially the five-minute interview, but fails. In the event the landmark Midwives Act of 1902 allowed her to trade on her extensive practical experience to become fully qualified.

Her local Guild fails but she joins a new one in Willesden where she is soon elected President. it’s quite clear by now that Lizzie Layton is an extremely competent, conscientious and hard-working woman. It’s an inspiring story. She is the first woman sent by the (male) management committee of the Willesden Co-Op to represent them at the national Co-Operative Union Congress. Then she attends the next Congress in Swansea.

For ten years she scrimped and saved enough to buy a house or, more precisely, to have a house of two apartments built to her specifications. She surprised the builder with her knowledge of drainage and ventilation. She insists the deeds of the house should be in her name, not her husband’s, despite the latter’s protests.

The last few pages of her account turn to how much she owes the Guild. Without them she would have had no focus to her life. The family they shared a house with worked all day and went to the pub every night. Without the Guild, its lectures and disciple, she might easily have taken to drink like her mother.

From a shy, nervous woman the Guild made me a fighter. (p.54)

She becomes a political lobbyist, meeting Sir Rufus Isaac to get maternity pay included in the Liberal Party’s forthcoming National Insurance Act (1911). When war came and so many men disappeared, she lobbied for the creation of home helps to support hard-pressed mothers left alone. She memorably describes lobbying the Prince of Wales’s Fund to change its decision not to support unmarried mothers (because of Anglican clerics, obviously) arguing that they needed support more than the married.

In 1921 she retires as Vice-President of the Guild and initially feels bereft. but her local branch was in trouble and so she sets up and runs a clothing club to help working people save for affordable clothes. She has been to three international Congresses but still patches her own boots, repairs her own clothes, and has an allotment. And the last two pages given an idyllic account of her allotment with its little shed, its seats and paraffin stove for cooking supper and the view over the railway embankment to the tower of Hampstead Old Church. Here she lives on her pension and a little money she has saved, and cooks and cares for a friend who is not very well.

What an inspiring narrative!

2. A Plate-Layer’s Wife by Mrs Wrigley

Much shorter and less epic but describing a childhood of extraordinary hard work. She was born in Cefn Mawr in Wales in 1858. Her father was a shoemaker earning 12 shillings a week, her mother went out sewing all day long for 1 shilling. As a small child her chores included:

  • looking after the 4 younger children
  • walking 2 miles to a pit bank to collect coals and carry them home in a basket on her head
  • walk 2 miles to a local farm to buy and bring home buttermilk
  • fetch water from a well in a jar she carried on her head
  • cleaning other people’s backyards for a penny
  • carrying men workers’ dinners to the iron forge for twopence a week

Some of her happiest memories are of going with other children to wash the family clothes in the River Dee. All this by the age of 8.

When she’s about 9 she goes to be a nurse for a child to a family in Stockport. But they make her work long hours as a lackey till a friendly old lady writes her parents to come and fetch her back.

Then she goes to work on a dairy farm near Oswestry. She’s paid 2 shillings and sixpence a month and stays there till she’s 12 years old. Then to work at another dairy farm, at Marple.

1872: aged 14 she moves to a job at a Temperance Hotel in Oldham. The master and mistress teach her to read and write and send her to school. She’s there to the age of 19. Here her wages rise to a pound a month.

1877: moves to a job as servant in a big house in Saddleworth. Hard work for two years. Here she first meets her future husband on the few hours a week she’s allowed out.

Aged 21 she moves to a gentleman’s house to be a cook. It is an excellent house kept by real Christians who were fair to the staff and allowed them balls and entertainments. Five years, until her husband persuades her to marry and leave.

Her husband was a platelayer on the railway earning 18 shillings a week, not enough to support a household so she had to do sewing. She soon joined one of the Oldham Co-operative stores and never looked back for the next 46 years. She’s 72 now and can’t imagine how she’d have survived without the Co-Op.

When she discovered she was pregnant she took in more sewing and washing to make up money but the extra work made her ill and she had to go home to her mother to look after her.

She tells the story of the mother she knew who was much worse off, she couldn’t sew, she often went without food, the children had rags. She got a job minding a house while two fine women went on holiday. There was a marble timepiece and she pawned it to get money to feed her family but the two ladies returned before the could redeem it and she was committed to gaol overnight, while her husband found the sum. A few days later she had her baby and was all alone, so Mrs Wrigley took pity, sent for a nurse, brought round clean bed clothes, and looked after her till she was well. Christ was in that woman.

1894 moved to Stockport. She had the fourth of their children. When they were small the table was often bare or she went without eating anything. One by one the children grew old enough to run errands and small jobs, a newspaper round, delivering milk, it made all the difference to the total family income.

She ensured the children all got an education and, as the boys turned 14, were put into apprenticeships. All five of them were given music lessons so that they made quite the little orchestra. During the Great War one was killed and two got married and moved away. The son died when she was 30 and just 11 months later he husband passed away.

Since then another son died, aged 30. She’s been a widow these 14 years. She couldn’t have stood her life if not for the Guild. It educated her, she became a member of her local branch, then a worker on committees, then was president for two years.

She joined the Suffrage to prevent the next generation having the hard life she endured. She doesn’t think there’d have been a war if women had had the vote beforehand. That’s what they all say. Women had the vote by the 1930s and look what happened next. But it was 1931 and she said she was working for peace. History suggests no-one can keep the peace if enemies (Hitler, Putin) are determined for war. But that shouldn’t stop anyone working to make their little part of the world a better place.

3. In A Mining Village by Mrs F.H. Smith (7 pages)

Born in Cardiff in 1884, Mrs Smith was 19 when she left the job in service she had to marry a miner in 1903. She discovered that miners had baths but no running water. Water had to be brought in from outside and boiled over a coal fire and emptied into the bath a bucket at a time. The miners’ houses weren’t built for convenience, just the bare minimum for the corporation to screw rent out of. There were just two rooms, bedroom and living room. The weekly wash had to be done in the same room as the miner stripped off in, so it was impossible. There was a continual layer of coal dust over everything.

The open fires and freedom of boiling water in numerous containers explains the high rates of child scaldings and burns in Wales. A 5-year old she knows died after falling in a bath of boiling water.

1904: baby daughter born. 1905: rented a house from the colliery company her husband worked for. 1906: a terrible pit explosion which killed 122, including the husband, two sons and adopted son of the woman opposite.

She describes the long hours of pit shifts and only 20 minutes food break. Sometimes so cold they shiver, sometimes so hot they emerge drenched in sweat.

Eventually she had nine children. Since 1925 her husband’s been ill, latterly with neuritis for 9 months. He tried to get light work at the pit but there wasn’t any so he went on the unemployment list.

All the facilities in her town are a cinema, the British Legion and some unfinished playing fields. There are two lovely parks and they can send the children for walks in the beautiful hills.

These days it is heart-breaking to see the unemployed men and lads down at the Labour Exchange. Being a member of the Guild and the local Co-Op has been one of the things that’s kept her going through all the hard times.

4. A Guild Office Clerk contributed by the Editor (7 pages)

This is Davies’s tribute to Harriet A. Kidd, chief secretary at the Guild head office from 1906 to 1917. Davies tells us she was a prickly but fiercely opinionated woman.

She started at a steel mill at Leek when she was ten years old. Whole families were employed by the paternalistic owners, who looked after morals and ensured they went to church.

She became a member of the local Co-Op and then of the Guild in 1897. She became secretary of her branch and of the Macclesfield region. She stayed up late doing Guild work then went to the mill next day. She got involved in trade unionism.

In 1906 she was invited to become a clerk at the Guild’s head office in Westmorland at which point she wrote back a letter confessing that when she was 18 she was seduced, or raped, by her employer and made pregnant. He refused to acknowledge the child and she had to bring up her son in secret, with the help of ‘her people’.

Nonetheless she was taken on at Guild headquarters among women who were supportive. In 1908 she followed the move of the headquarters to Hampstead in London. She became a proficient typist and insisted on hogging the office machine. She lacked much education but enjoyed reading. She became the Guild cashier, and also the cook and caterer whenever Guild Schools were held at the office.

She was the first woman to be elected to a position in the Amalgamated Union of Co-Operative Employees. She was a great advocate of the right of women to run their own lives, to vote, and receive equal pay for their work.

She was a wholehearted socialist, her hero Keir Hardie, her favourite song The Red Flag.

In 1916 she was diagnosed with a fatal illness but bore it with fortitude. Margaret often visited her after she became bed-ridden.

5. A Felt Hat Worker by Mrs Scott J.P.

Nellie. When she was seven her family moved into a draper’s shop. She was given the task of going round the customers every Saturday asking the poor to pay their bills and debts. Her extended family were very opinionated, with relatives who were Conservative, Liberal, an uncle who was a follower of Darwin, a regular visitor to the shop who was a Bradlaughite i.e. atheist. As a child she sat under the counter and listened to the grown-ups arguing back and forth.

When she was 12 she was sent to work in a hat shop, a nice clean job. When she was 14 she was sent to a hat manufactory, one big smelly room. Work started at 6.20am every morning and she had to walk a mile to get there. She only later realised a lot of the girls there were also prostitutes.

She was now living with her uncle, who had returned from Canada and America, and subscribed to American magazines, which she read from cover to cover.

She is badly ill for three months. When she recovers she goes to work in Christie’s Hat Mills. She is bolshie. She tells a conservative woman that the charwoman who brought up her family was as good a soul as Queen Victoria. The hat-making was hard, difficult to push the needles through tough fabric, and the senior women judged their work and sent back anything with uneven stitching to be redone. They had to take work home to work on it till 8 or 9 at night.

It’s too hard so she goes and works at Lees and Hatconks. There a fierce debates between the Conservatives and the Radicals. She joins Clarion Hall and there’s a Ruskin Hall Settlement in Stockport.

She gets married but, on her return, joins the Felt Hatters Trade Union and becomes an activist, getting all the other girls to sign up. When her mother dies she takes over the family ‘ticket’ for membership of the Co-Op. She becomes treasure of the Women’s Labour League, is on the Labour representation Committee and so on. She’s involved in the long campaign to stop girls having to take work home at night.

The text then turns to tell us about her favourite books by authors such as J.M. Barrie, Charles Kingsley, George Eliot, George Egerton, and half a page about H.G. Wells. She says the thing about all Wells’s novels is you seem to know the characters.

[I’m reading this book because the Penguin Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf includes the long introduction to it. Elsewhere in her essays, Woolf launches a sustained attack on novelists from the generation before hers – Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy and H.G. Wells – and one of her central criticisms is that they describe characters who are ‘not like us’. It is, therefore, extremely enlightening to read the praise for Wells coming from ordinary working class women on precisely this point, that they identify with Wells’s characters. What this does is highlight the class-based nature of Woolf’s opposition to Wells et al. Woolf finds Wells’s characters common and vulgar. Inextricably mixed up in her radical innovations in the novel was a huge amount of unattractive snobbery.]

In 1908 she was asked to set up a Women’s Co-operative Guild in Stockport. There are now 300 members. It’s been a battle for women to take their place alongside the men.

I think sometimes, when I hear the women speaking of the influence of the Guild, what a wonderful organisation it is, and what it has meant to so many women. (p.106)

She stops working in hat factories to become superintendent at a place for feeding school children, was there during the start of the War when there was great want. Then she becomes a sickness visitor for an Approved Society in a part of Derbyshire, for seven years, the last 3 of the war, then 4 afterwards. She describes the bleak snow-packed countryside, the emptiness and beauty, and the kindness and hospitality of the people.

Then a doctor tells her she’s strained her heart and needs to quit the arduous work, sometimes walking over 20 miles a day etc. Now she works as a justice of the peace, or magistrate. The Guild lost members during the war because of its pacifism but it has since restored its numbers. She is proud when she hears testimonies of women who it has helped through deep trouble.

She describes a Guild member who lives out in India with her husband who manages a cotton mill and how she supervises creches and support for the native women.

She says how gratifying it is to think that her work for the Guild, the Co-Op and other progressive movements have paved the way for the women who come afterwards; how the Guild opened doors and minds, how it helped working women become articulate and express their demands.

6. A Public-Spirited Rebel by Mrs Yearn (8 pages)

‘We’ve had enough of posh men lording it over us, we’re not going to accept their posh wives!’

One of 14 children, eight of whom died in childhood. Dad was a brick-setter and couldn’t work for half the year, so mum went to the mill, leaving childcare to the older sisters. The family became slowly better off and mum joined the Stores. She died of cancer.

She married but her husband was out of work during the Engineers strike so she went to the mill. She was a trade unionist and got all the women to join, for which she was given the sack.

Then she joined the Guild and was soon elected to the committee. She attended her first Congress in 1915. She pioneered women in public roles in Oldham and stood for the town council, incurring much mockery from the men. She gives a CV of her activities, roles and positions through the 1920s, often the first woman to hold particular posts.

Class conscious, she objected to Lady Beaverbrook standing as a candidate in a local election. We’ve had enough of posh men lording it over us, we’re not going to accept their posh wives!

She tells us the International Co-Operative Women’s Guild will ensure there is peace.

Appendix

The appendix is made up of excerpts from lots of letters sent to Davies. It opens with the longest one, at 6 pages long, then settles down to 1- or 2-page snippets.

A childhood in the Fens about 1850 by Mrs Burrows

An account of an incredibly hard childhood. On her 8th birthday she was taken out of school and set to work in the fields. She worked alongside 50 or so other children and was among the oldest. The working day was 14 hours long. It was at Croyland near Peterborough and some of the children were as young as 5. The ganger used a long whip to make them work. They left town on the stroke of 6 and had to walk at least 2 miles, sometimes 5.

In the four years she worked there they never had a single meal under cover or in shelter except on one occasion, on a particularly bitter cold day, when a local shepherd’s wife told the ganger to let the children come into her house to eat their lunch.

As a child at Croyland she saw many opium addicts and knew a child whose daily task it was to go to a pharmacy to collect a shilling’s worth of opium.

After 4 years slavery she was sent to work in a factory in Leeds. Her father was a kindly man but sick with a brain tumour. Her mother worked like a dog. When the children grew up they paid her back and tried to make her last years comfortable.

Extract from letters

There follow 16 short extracts from letters. They all appear to have been commissioned to answer a question along the lines of ‘What books have you been reading?’ or ‘What are your favourite books?’ because they all address this question, briefly or at length. None of them have interesting views per se but it’s interesting to see the different levels of literacy and articulacy on display, as well as getting a sense of which authors’ names recur, notably H.G. Wells, but also Shaw and Hardy. And among the classics, everyone loves Dickens.

  1. Mrs Hood: never a day without attending a committee, reads the progressive newspapers; likes Scott, Dickens and Thackeray, would love to read Tess, wants to read a good history of the French Revolution
  2. Mrs Ferguson: reads the daily papers and the Co-operative press but also interested in books on international affairs; and dips into Tennyson for rest
  3. Mrs Foister: lists books she’s read in the past 2 and a half years, an interesting insight into what was available to the serious reader
  4. Mrs Axten: some of the books she’s read in the past 4 years
  5. Mrs Corrie: reads pamphlets to keep up with the Labour and Co-op movement; including Kipps, Bennett and about to start Tess
  6. Mrs Preston:  Dickens, especially the Pickwick Papers and Nicholas Nickleby
  7. Mrs Burman: the Happy Traveller by Frank Tatchell
  8. Mrs Woodward: reads newspaper and journals for research for her position in the Guild; then gives a list of 27 novels
  9. Mrs Rix: Little Women and Ella Wheeler Wilcox
  10. Mrs Garrett: reads to inform her work for the Guild; reads the classics but singles out H.G. Wells; her son lent her ‘The Green Hat’ which she strongly disapproved of
  11. Mrs White: a Guild officer, she and her husband have long attended the Working Men’s College in Camden Town; her list of 20 or so books includes ones by Wells and George Bernard Shaw
  12. Mrs Bedhall: gets books from the students library at the Warwickshire Education Committee; she gives an interesting list of books on serious topics such as co-operation, socialism, education and so on
  13. Mrs Bampton: likes books about the supernatural or history
  14. Mrs Smith: likes books about London and so likes Martin Chuzzlewit (by Dickens)
  15. Mrs Marshall: Hardy and Lorna Doone
  16. Mrs Russell: busy with Co-op and Guild work but scrapes together a list of books she’s liked in the past, Hardy, Eliot, Bronte and Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The last ten pages contain five excerpts on very specific subjects.

Pioneer Poor Law Guardians

From a Lincolnshire Guildswoman

In 1895 the unnamed author overcomes male opposition to get elected to the Board of Guardians. How she and two women colleagues win round the Chairman of the Board. Becomes the first woman Vice-Chair of the House Committee. She has a jokey relationship with the chairman. He warns the ladies not to take the seats of ‘the old fossils’ on the committee. After serving for nine years she wonders if she herself has become one of ‘the old fossils’. When it was proposed to send a woman to the national Poor Law Conference the men cried out that women should stay at home and mind their families, but she overcame this opposition and went anyway.

From a Lancashire Guildswoman

When a young girl the mill she worked in burned down and she was unemployed and often went hungry. When she got another job she saved her pennies and invested in the local Co-op shop. Only later did she hear about the women’s Guild.

I attended the Guild Annual Meeting, which was a revelation. Each day my vision seemed to be widening and my spirit felt that here was the very opportunity I had always been seeking but never put into words. I had longings and aspirations and a vague idea of power within myself which had never had an opportunity of realisation. (p.147)

She comes to understand why the campaign to give women the vote was so important. The Guild was about widening its members’ sense of what their duties, rights and responsibilities could be. All girls and women were brought up to believe their job was to look after their man, their home and their children. The notion that they could break out of this prison and take on broader social, administrative positions came as a revelation to tens of thousands of women, as these letters testify again and again.

She quotes men who resisted women taking roles in Poor Law administration but learned that they were the most reliable and clear headed. And she describes her weekly schedule to show how routine and organisation allowed her to do all the housework, and then all her administrative and Guild jobs on top.

Pit-head baths

From a mid-Lancashire Guildswoman

This woman quotes the account of her husband describing the arrangement of baths at the colliery where he works, and comments on the enormous benefit for miners’ wives of having the men strip, bathe, and put on clean clothes at the pit, rather than bring the dirty clothes home to take off and shake coaldust all round the house.

From a Durham Guildswoman

Her husband’s pit have had showers since 1926 and she describes the advantages for him and her: no dirty clothes bringing soot and dust back to dirty the house; no smell of pit which used to fill the house; no need to boil water for the miner’s bath and for his dinner on the same fire at the same time. Vast improvement.

A member’s view of the Guild

From a London Guildswoman

An inspiring page and a half in which the unnamed author describes how membership of the Guild not only liberated her but gave her a profound understanding of the power of unity and united action. She praises the Guild for its democratic spirit whereby all the members feel absolute equals. She cites members who the Guild has given the confidence to think about bigger issues, outside the home, realise that their voice and opinions have value, given them to confidence to speak up, even in situations previously reserved exclusively for men.

Paratexts

According to Wikipedia:

Paratext is material that surrounds a published main text supplied by the authors, editors, printers, and publishers. These added elements form a frame for the main text, and can change the reception of a text or its interpretation by the public.

The main body of ‘Life as We Have Known It’ is not only fragmentary in itself, but strewn with additional paratexts which enrich or complicate its reception, depending on your point of view. There are three:

1. Introductory letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies by Virginia Woolf (28 pages)

The original text was published by the Hogarth Press, the small publishing house set up by Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard. Virginia knew Davies so it’s no coincidence that the text has a long  and characteristically digressive introductory essay by Virginia, which describes her own involvement with the Guild, specifically her impressions of visiting a 1913 Congress and then the Guild’s London headquarters.

Woolf’s factual writing, her essays, and reviews, are generally very chewy, meaning they are often highly digressive, approaching their subject in a roundabout way, and this long essay is no exception. In sheer length, Woolf’s introduction is longer than all but one of the Guildswomen’s contributions i.e. in depth and complexity it threatens to overwhelm the stories that follow. It also spends a long time going into detail about the distance which she, as a privileged upper-middle-class lady, felt from the earthy working class women of the movement. For these reasons I’d definitely leave reading it till after you’ve read the main body of the text.

Woolf’s introduction is included in David Bradshaw’s edition of Woolf’s collected essays, and I’ve summarised it at length in a separate blog post.

You could give students an exercise to place Woolf’s introduction side by side with one or two of the working women’s texts, and ask the students to identify what the Woolf has that the others don’t, in a bid to extract and define literariness. Distance, detachment, acute observation of details, self consciousness, class consciousness, anxiety, non-linearity, obscurity, digression and indirection, these would all be elements you would note in the Woolf which are completely absent from the Guildswomen’s accounts. Are they aspects of what makes Woolf literature while the Guildswomen’s accounts remain social history?

Conversely, what do the women’s accounts have that Woolf’s introduction doesn’t? Some kind of authenticity?

2. Notes on the Women’s Co-Operative Guild by Margaret Llewelyn Davies (1930)

Davies was a radical in the old sense of the word, a genuine socialist. She emphasises that the Guild she ran took its place among many other working class movements, especially trade unionism. They make up the fabric of working people’s lives: trade unions stretch the warp of a decent living wage, while the cooperative movement threads the woof of intelligent spending. The aim? Gaining control of industry by the people for the people, consciously echoing Marx.

She sees the co-operative movement as ‘the beginning of a great revolution!’

The Movement shows in practice that there is nothing visionary or impossible in the aspirations of those who desire to see the Community in control, instead of Capitalists.

The co-operative system is designed to prevent people making fortunes and instead distributing wealth fairly among all.

Capital becomes the tool of labour and not its master. (p.165)

When she wrote there were over 1,000 co-operative societies across England and Scotland with some 6 million members, forming one of the largest trading and manufacturing concerns in Great Britain. The union is allied with the Labour Party and with an international co-operative alliance with members in 34 countries.

So she sees all this as part of a peaceful revolution ‘from autocratic Capitalism to democratic Co-operation’ and sees the Women’s Co-Operative Guild – with its 67,000 members in 1,400 branches – as playing a key role and the central mechanism of reform is shopping. In her day it was women who ran all households and did all the shopping for everything. Therefore, if they chose not to shop at normal commercial businesses designed to maximise profit, let alone at shops tied to factories and pits, but instead spent money at co-operative stores which they part-owned and ran, they changed at a stroke from being exploited consumers to empowered decision makers.

She explains the administrative structure of the Guild, staffed and run entirely by working women so that as soon as they joined, opportunities arose to volunteer for this or that committee or role. With responsibility came education in how to run and manage things, alongside political education into the big issues of the day, a kind of ratchet effect leading women who joined inevitably forward into greater enlightenment and empowerment.

And roles in the local Women’s Guilds acted as springboards for roles in the local and regional Co-operative movement. Despite opposition from men at all levels, at the time of writing many Guildswomen had taken up roles at all levels of the regional and national Co-Operative Movement.

In addition, newly liberated, informed and confident women have been active in national campaigns for:

  • the establishment of school clinics
  • a national maternity scheme
  • the inclusion of maternity benefit in the National Insurance Act of 1911
  • ensuring this maternity benefit was legally awarded to the mother not the father

Not only have women been educated to take on administrative roles within the Guild, the wider Co-Operative Movement, but in local and regional government. And this momentum has become international with the creation of an International Co-Operative Women’s Guild including 27 countries (including the Soviet Union). At the most recent Congress, in 1930, delegates discussed whether the position of women would be improved by state family allowances, which sounds like the perennial proposal of state pay for housework.

She ends with bracing optimism that the International movement is committed to peace and lobbies the League of Nations for universal disarmament. We know all the fine words for peace during the 1930s completely failed, and its abject failure casts a sad shadow over what had, up until this last paragraph, been a bracing list of outstanding achievements.

3. Afterword by Anna Davin and Gloden Dallas (1977)

Most historical documents are written by educated men, so most accounts of working class lives, especially the lives of working class women, have been written by outsiders. The rarity of accounts written by genuinely working class women makes the testimony of this book priceless, with its first-hand testimony to lives and sufferings, of their childhood, marriages and children, above all of the unremitting burden of hard labour, long hours, poverty and endless worry.

And not just that, but the second part in many of these accounts – describing how these downtrodden women discovered the Co-op movement and then the Guild and its huge impact in liberating them, opening their minds, educating them and encouraging their abilities to think more widely, to take up positions of influence and power – are just as rare and valuable.

So the book is not just a document of working class immiseration but at the same time uplifting and inspirational, giving example after example of how uneducated working women were empowered to escape the prison of their homes and domestic responsibilities and engage with the wider world.

4. Virago

There’s a fourth context not contained in the text as such, which is that 46 years after it was first published, the book was chosen by the founders of the new feminist publishing house, Virago Books, as their first publication. So it has a signal importance from two quite distinct moments in feminist publishing, 1931 and 1977. So that reading it now is not only to engage with a classic of women’s social history but to also see it through the lens of the optimistic feminist editors of the 1970s. There are, as it were, at least two eras or types of feminist aspiration radiating from the text.

Thoughts

Horror The primary thought is, of course, horror at the appalling conditions and experiences described by the six core accounts and especially the childhood in the Fens. The authors thought readers in 1931 might not credit the miseries they lived through, how much harder is it for us a hundred years later.

Triumph Next you respond to the ‘triumph over adversity’ theme of the accounts, awed by how these women supported their menfolk and families through decades of grinding poverty, by sheer, unremitting hard work and commitment. None of them ran away from their responsibilities through years and decades of grinding poverty, not enough money, not enough to eat, no clothes for the children, depriving themselves of food to make sure their children ate and so on. Mind-bogglingly exemplary commitment and what used to be called moral fibre.

The Guild And then all the accounts take the same turn, which is to describe their discovery of the Co-Op movement, then of the Women’s Guild within it, often running alongside a commitment to trade unions and other movements for the improvement of working people. In this respect, it’s a self-selected group – if they praise the role the Guild played in opening their minds, supporting their education, boosting their confidence, allowing them to take on administrative roles of a sort previously unavailable to women, it’s precisely because these are letters written to Davies from Guild members in praise of the Guild’s role.

Which doesn’t stop them being eye opening about not just the misery of childhood and work in the Victorian working classes, but about the role the Co-Op movement and the Guild in particular played in liberating so many working women’s minds and abilities.

Oddity Then there’s puzzlement. It’s hard, at this distance of time, to understand why there are the 16 short letters or snippets from Guildswomen listing their favourite books. Why was this considered important? Was it to address some concern at the time about working class literacy or women’s literacy? Was general reading considered a marker of cultural achievement and so was valued as much as the financial support the movement offered? On the face of it you’d have thought these 20 odd pages would have been better filled with a few more detailed autobiographical accounts on the pattern of Mrs Layton or Mrs Burrows. But maybe it was important to Davies and the Guild to make a point about the cultural uplift the Guild supported?

Paratexts It’s already a text made up of multiple sub-texts and fragments, which set up complex echoes and cross-references, raising lots of issues of social history and politics which it doesn’t quite complete or fulfil. But then there are the paratexts which add a whole new layer of complexity. Davies’s afterword gives a factual account of the Guild which provides context for the letters but it is itself haunted by the fact that – when you look it up – you discover that the Women’s Co-Operative Guild closed in 2016. So not only are the women whose accounts the book contains long dead, but the organisation which Davies describes in such loving detail, is itself now defunct, a ghost.

Virginia Woolf‘s introductory essay is important but is so characteristically self-involved and tortuous, so long and impactful in its literary and psychological complexity, that it threatens to overawe the much simpler, starker texts from the working women. Above all, it enters a big note of doubt and scepticism about the Guild’s work, which you should definitely only read once you’ve first fully read all the original accounts.

Anna Davin and Gloden Dallas’s afterword radiates the kind of radical socialist feminism of the 1970s which, as far as I can tell, has completely disappeared. 1977 was still close to the radical politics of the late 1960s, it was a world of squats and huge trade union membership leading to regular national strikes and mass protest marches which gave a real sense that some kind of radical restructuring of society was possible, was maybe just round the corner. All that has disappeared like morning dew.

Gone When I try to describe to my kids what it felt like to be young and left wing in the 1970s going into the embattled 1980s they look at me like I’ve just landed from Mars. Their world is mediated through TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp. Rather than changing the capitalist basis of the economic system my daughter, the queer 4th wave feminist, is concerned about gender fluidity, MeToo in the American film industry and Black Lives Matter on the streets of American cities.

TikTok The world of coal miners, of unionised heavy industries, the world of local communities dotted around Britain loyally supporting their local Co-op, in fact the whole concept of people living all their lives in small close-knit communities, has disappeared utterly, to be replaced by cosmopolitan networks of globetrotting buddies keeping in touch via social media. And they all love it, young people love the gadgets and opportunities provided by billion-dollar American corporations and don’t want to change a thing.

Lost So, for me, the book is (obviously enough) testimony to the lost world of Victorian and early 20th century working class poverty and the fightback against it – but it is also witness to the lost world of 1970s radicalism, to the optimistic feminist editors who chose it to be Virago’s first ever publication. As I read it I had the complicated sensation of engaging with not one but two lost worlds.

Credit

‘Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women’ edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies was first published by The Hogarth Press in 1931. It was republished by Virago Press in 1977. I read the 2012 Virago paperback edition.

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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.

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. 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.

  1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
  2. Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
  3. Women and Fiction (1929)
  4. Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
  5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
  6. 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.

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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.

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. 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.

  1. The Feminine Note in Fiction (1905) [book review]
  2. Women Novelists (1918) [book review]
  3. Women and Fiction (1929)
  4. Professions for Women (1931) [a talk]
  5. Memories of a Working Women’s Guild (1931) [introduction to a collection of letters]
  6. 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.

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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:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. 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:

  1. The New Biography (1927) [review of Some People by Harold Nicholson]
  2. On Being Ill (1930) [fantasia]
  3. Leslie Stephen: The Philosopher at Home: A Daughter’s Memories (1932) [memoir of her father]
  4. 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.

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by Simon on April 21, 2025  •  Permalink
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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 – 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:

  1. Reading and Writing
  2. Life-Writing
  3. Women and Fiction
  4. 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.

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)

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.

  1. Writing Fiction and Criticism
  2. Writing Biography
  3. Women and Writing
  4. 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.

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by Simon on April 14, 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in English literature, Essays
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Posted by Simon on April 14, 2025

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