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.

Related links

• Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf on Planet Gutenberg (a different selection)
• The Virginia Woolf Society

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews