Once More, Virginia Woolf

 I keep writing about Virginian Woolf, hoping that people will take my advice and read her. My Woolf posts can be found here.

So here I go again.

Henry Oliver's Woolfish Perception (Liberties) takes a tack I like. For all the problems of Woolf, she deserves our attention. Perhaps, it was that they were male that I was taught Hemingway and Faulkner, that I read James Joyce and Marcel Proust. That he writes about The Common Reader, the first of Woolf's books I read, is another point in the essay's favor.

And she was personally unlikeable: racist, snobbish, uncharitable, snide, a malicious gossip. Perhaps her feminism rankled readers, but that her nastiness has put off a great many more is surely undeniable. This is the Virginia Woolf we think we know: hard to read, easy to hate. That is the image of her which has calcified in popular imagination. But the image of her is an artifact we have created, and the women, her books, and her world are stranger to contemporary readers than they have been to any previous ones. Her novels were written when our grandmothers or great grandmothers were in their cradles. If, on her centenary, we can cast off a century of accumulated interference, we might begin to see her less familiarly, less divided from us. 

As you have likely heard by now, Mrs Dalloway has just turned one hundred. She keeps good company. 2025 is the one hundredth anniversary of Carry On Jeeves, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, and The Painted Veil. But Mrs Dalloway is not the Woolf book I have come to praise. This year is also the anniversary of her first collection of critical essays, The Common Reader. Woolf was the great critic of the twentieth century and The Common Reader deserves as much praise and celebration as all its fellow centenarians. In her essays, Woolf showed herself to have been deeply influenced by England’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson. She places herself in his tradition and claims it for her own.

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The other tradition she breaks from is the Victorian mode of large ideas. She is not a Carlyle or an Arnold or a Wilde. She has no larger ideological scheme, nor much of a larger literary one. She is the student of Johnson, author of the Rambler, not Johnson the Shakespeare editor; she would never have produced, as he did, a Preface to Shakespeare (that is still one of the great theories of Shakespeare’s work). She is, as Strachey was, resolutely impressionistic, imagistic, essayistic. She had no grand scheme. She chose to be herself, not  the representative of any ideology. 

And we are richer for it. In The Common Reader Woolf gave us all she could, all she had. She gave us all that criticism ought to be. 

The full essay needs to be read, so does The Common Reader.

sch 5/22 

Lizzie Hibbert's Mrs Dalloway's war wounds  (Engelsberg ideas) brings Woolf up to our time.

Just because we deny a traumatic event’s significance does not mean that we can escape from its effects. That is what Mrs Dalloway’s message is. ‘This late age of the world’s experience’, as Clarissa refers to the war in typically euphemistic terms, ‘bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears.’ The scars of war are most visible in Mrs Dalloway when its characters try to hide them. As Alexandra Harris writes in her 2011 biography, Woolf is still sometimes ‘criticised for not facing directly enough the great conflicts of her time’, but ‘all her postwar novels are concerned with the indirections by which we come to understand our losses’.

A hundred years on from Mrs Dalloway’s publication, that concern with ‘indirections’ is as pertinent as ever. The lasting effects of Covid-19 and the lockdowns are all around us, every day. Loneliness. Ill-health. Contracting standards of living. But how often do we speak or read or write about 2020? All of it, pace Woolf, we have ‘already half forgotten’.

It is this enduring insight that makes Mrs Dalloway a masterpiece. Woolf wrote it quickly, in a burst of creative energy. The only roadblock came in January of 1923, when news reached England of Mansfield’s death at 34. When Woolf sat down to her manuscript, the next morning, there seemed all of a sudden to be ‘no point in writing’. No point anymore, because ‘Katherine won’t read it’.

I have not noticed much written about COVID. Being in prison, reading news reports about what life was like only sounded like what had been going on at Fort Dix FCI since my arrival in 2021. Coming out, I notice these little behaviors, all somewhat anti-social, from the ways people drive to how we talk (or do not) to one another. I have no idea if this related to COVID, or not.

sch 5/24