Queen of arts
At one point in The Value of Virginia Woolf, Madelyn Detloff talks about variations in categories of identity. She gives examples of relatively new ones (such as intersex, queer, or transsexual) and points out that the arrival or departure of viable statuses is not in itself a new phenomenon. “It was simply not possible to identify as an American, for example, before the seventeenth century.” This must have been hard. Even more unexpectedly, she continues: “Nor is it possible today to identify as the King of France, although the category certainly existed in the seventeenth century”. I don’t know how many people are (or were) personally affected by this cancellation of potential. But there is at least one king of France who has been alive and well for some time. Bertrand Russell brought him into legitimate existence as a logical problem of reference, with the announcement, in an article of 1905, that “The present King of France is bald”. Thus exposed in a wigless twentieth-century world, this French monarch has nonetheless continued to enjoy a high level of recognition in the pages of philosophy journals and student essays ever since.
Virginia Woolf was attuned to the shifting ambiguities of identity and identification. In A Room of one’s Own, she speculates about a day to come, a century into the future, when people might well exclaim in surprise at the sight of a woman. Even the most commonplace, common-sense categories, in other words, may disappear or be superseded by other modes of existence or classification. Post-American, for instance; or, at the opposite, King-of-France-end of the spectrum, a new kind of uniqueness may emerge from a category currently without any occupant. In the same essay, Woolf invents a fictional non-fictional sister of Shakespeare – who didn’t exist in reality, but might have, and if so would not, Woolf insists, have survived in the real time of early modern London.
A successful sixteenth-century Judith Shakespeare would be a contradiction in historical possibility, and Woolf does not try to imagine her. Instead, she gives a brief but detailed and poignant story to show how the life of a gifted young woman born into the same world as Will would have run an entirely different course from his, even after a childhood in which reading and thinking were not out of reach. Not only would she not have been able to get involved in theatrical productions in the same way as a male counterpart, but being a woman she would have come up against every form of sexual discrimination and harassment (as they weren’t yet called in the early twentieth century, let alone in the sixteenth). But she would also have experienced such external barriers as a conflict within her own mind, so that, all told, “To have lived a free life in London in the sixteenth century would have meant for a woman who was poet and playwright a nervous stress and dilemma which might well have killed her”.
Judith’s real-life brother, meanwhile, was not constrained in these ways, and Woolf is rapturous in her description of his unbounded capacities: “his poetry flows from him free and unimpeded. If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare’s mind”. Yet the great man’s existence comes over as somehow less interesting than the woman’s. The sister’s story has tensions and tragedies, a miniature blighted Bildungsroman that takes its thwarted heroine from a home where she reads in the apple loft to all the dramatic risks of the big city. Shakespeare, back in the bookcase, just “got his work expressed completely” – job done.
Shakespeare is today, as he was for Woolf, the peerless figurehead of English literature. And as Woolf was already able to report, the prospects for gifted sisters have improved, with women writing about modern lives like their own; the creation of Judith is itself a symptom of that continuing change. In the later part of the twentieth century a further movement began. A multiplicity of causes converged to make women’s writing a primary focus of literary-critical attention, not least on school and college syllabuses. Woolf acquired a prime position, becoming something like a queen in the widening world of women and literature. There had been a more doubtful period when her writings were sometimes disparaged or downgraded, and her Bloomsbury associations might detract from her status as a thinker. But by the time she came out of copyright for the first time in 1992, she was all set for the long canonical haul: ripe for instant endowment with the footnotes of scholarly and studently editions. She could be called on at any time and in most contexts for a challenging, memorable quotation – not just about women or literature, but about any topic of current or universal interest, from war to love to money to colonialism to class. Alongside Shakespeare, Woolf is a literary celebrity, to be found in every corner of cultural consciousness and public or private space: from mugs to T-shirts to films and plays. on the purely textual front, as with him, there is a steady output of Woolf books and articles. No other non-male writer has received anything like this degree of recognition and attention. It is not clear whether this is more of a consummation or an irony, but without a doubt Woolf has herself become Shakespeare’s sister.
Now that she has attained this extraordinary status, there is no reason to think that the volume of books on her – her life, her works, her connections with just about anything – is likely to diminish. Of this recent batch, Ira Nadel’s Virginia Woolf, a mini-biography, is the oddest. It begins with the bright idea of telling the Woolf story by way of the houses she lived in, but in practice that angle is not so visible. What we get instead is an often incoherent rehash of well-known elements, interspersed with partial descriptions of some of her works. Bad writing is a constant source of confusion. At the start of one chapter: “Monk’s House, purchased for £700 by the Woolfs in 1919 and owned until 1969, was constantly improved by the Woolfs as monies permitted”. As well as the uncanny suggestion of posthumous property management (one of them having died in 1941), the repeated “by the Woolfs” makes the sentence even stranger. Throughout the book there are paragraphs harbouring phrases or sentences that seem to have been cut and pasted in without subsequent checking, so that you have to keep going back to try to work out what might have been meant. Did no one read the thing through?
A second Virginia Woolf, edited by James Acheson, is announced on its cover as “A collection of all new critical essays by contemporary scholars”, almost as if the writing might have been run through an online plagiarism checker to be sure, with the scholars meanwhile being put through a quick and secure validation process. In fact, though there isn’t a subtitle to say so, the book’s essays are focused on Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, the two novels most often assigned for study. So the collection essentially looks like an up-to-date textbook, one of those periodic upgradings of the Woolfian wheels to fit the current critical vehicles. But it is a fine book. All the essays are lucidly written, and most have something new and suggestive to offer. H. Porter Abbott, for instance, in a chapter on Mrs Dalloway, looks freshly at Woolf’s mistrust of the standard narrative protocols of her time in the context of her preoccupation, always, with questions of biographical writing. Patricia Moran has a sharp and sensitive chapter on the complex topic of Woolf’s relation to feminism, in her own time and in the subsequent use of her work. The collection is particularly strong in its focus on visual representations, as in Kate Flint’s essay, which considers the two novels’ various depictions of the relation between the post-war, post-Victorian present and its pasts. Bonnie Kime Scott discusses different manifestations in Woolf of the artist figure, and Maud Ellmann places To the Lighthouse alongside the psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s writing about painting. There is an engaging two-part discussion – by E. H. Wright and then by Jane Goldman, editor-in-progress of To the Lighthouse – of the aims and implications of the scholarly Cambridge University Press edition of Woolf’s works.
Together with Edinburgh University Press, CUP has become a noted publisher of Woolf-related books. In the latest critical title, The Value of Virginia Woolf, Detloff evaluates Woolf’s writing by reference to four terms that she thinks were significant in Woolf’s own writing. The first concept is eudaemonia (eudemonia, in Detloff’s spelling), an ancient Greek word never used by Woolf (as Detloff says). Its philosophical use to mean something like “flourishing” or “well-being” derives from Aristotle’s Ethics – which Detloff can’t be sure Woolf read.
Detloff’s second key term, not much more useful, is “incandescence”. This is a word that Woolf did use a couple of times, adjectivally anyway, in her praise of the unsurpassed Shakespeare. But it is not elaborated and seems, as in the quote above, to be mainly a brighter, less workaday word for the adjacent “unimpeded”: “If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded”. After lushly exotic eudaemonia and incandescence, “interdependence”, the third term, is matter-of-fact (and again non-Woolfian). “Civilisation”, the last choice, is very much a Woolf (and a Bloomsbury) word, and here Detloff usefully draws attention to the need to allow for historical mutations of critical and political terminology. “While the words of her text have not changed, the culture and context in which Woolf’s writing is read and regarded has changed significantly” – in the decades since she, Detloff, was at school, she goes on to say, but the point can extend all the way back to the time of Woolf’s first writing.
In reality, Detloff veers away from her title and introduction: what she writes about is not so much the value of Woolf as some of Woolf’s values, as she sees them. Mid-book, in the middle of a very long sentence, she suddenly seems to hear a question – isn’t this values, not value, you’re talking about? – and pauses to state that what she is doing with Woolf is “communicating the value of reading her work through an exegesis of what the work values”. It is a good formulation.
Barbara Lounsberry’s two books (so far) about Woolf’s diaries stand apart as a different kind of project from the other titles under review. Woolf’s diaries were superbly edited decades ago, by Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie. In the 1970s and early 80s, five volumes came out one after another, in chronological order, just as their originals had been written; and they were soon also issued as affordable Penguins. So, years before there were scholarly or teaching editions of the novels, the diaries had explanatory footnotes supplying historical and biographical annotations that were models of precision and pertinence. With the publication of A Passionate Apprentice in 1990, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska, the earliest journals became the last to appear in print.
In 1953, long before Bell began work on her edition, Leonard Woolf had issued a single-volume selection. When Triad/Granada published a full run of cheap Woolf paperbacks in the late 1970s, A Writer’s Diary was among them, its cover looking no different from one of the novels, and no editor’s name in view (it appears, in small lettering, inside on the title page, and Leonard’s short preface is also present). So at this point the much abridged diary was one of Woolf’s most easily available published books (the copy in front of me, a 1983 reprint, is priced at £2.50). As the title indicates, and the preface explains, the initial justification for the volume was its value for understanding the work of an important writer (“no one denies that she was a serious artist”). Woolf wrote about her writing in all the stages of its thinking and doing, and her writing about others’ writing is also included. But lots of other material was left out. Much was considered “too personal”: on grounds of discretion, but also because of being unrelated to the overarching literary criterion.
Lounsberry’s ambitious plan, now moving towards completion, is to produce a trilogy on the subject of Woolf’s diaries. But if three whole books seems astonishing, perhaps it is partly because of the equally surprising absence, before now, of much critical consideration of this work – when practically everything else that Woolf wrote has had decades of published discussion attached to it. The diaries have been trawled and tunnelled, of course, for quotes illuminating her writing process or artistic aims: some stand-out nuggets are staples of editors’ introductions to the novels. But they have only occasionally been written about outside this ancillary context.
Apart from the sheer scale, another surprising feature of Lounsberry’s work is its resolute sense of an order – an organization – to be found in a kind of writing that is almost bound to be subject to the variations of given days. In her introduction to Becoming Virginia Woolf she sets up the problem of finding a way to handle her multifarious material: “How to sort through and say something meaningful about such a variegated mass?” The answer she gives, in two words, is “close readings”, glossed as “something never as yet attempted” in this context. In case you are then wondering how this is going to sort things out, Lounsberry is quick to provide a second response: “Close study of the diary books themselves reveals that Woolf’s diary-keeping falls into three stages: her experimental early diaries from 1897 to mid-1918 (treated in this book); her mature, spare modernist diaries from 1919 to 1929; and a final diary flowering from 1930 to her death”. The simplicity and assurance are remarkable. This isn’t just some sort of frame that Lounsberry provisionally sets up to be able to manage her matter. Instead, the close reading, close study, has brought out a three-part truth that it is now her task to expound in sequence.
This is exactly what she then does in these first two volumes (the third will appear in a couple of years). She not only keeps to the scheme, but she repeats its formulations over and over in summary form: “mature, spare modernist”, and so on. It is like an extreme version of the old adage that the way to write an effective essay is to say what you’re going to say, say it, and say that you’ve said it. It’s also anything but a modernist practice (at least in a textbook definition of what that would be), since it posits a straightforward set of separable stages in a subject’s life, one, two, three, to which all the apparently disparate matter of these different years and different physical notebooks can be fitted. The three-part structure appears as well in the smaller sections of Lounsberry’s book: she guides readers along, with an introduction to each of the original diary volumes, followed by a more extensive commentary, then finally a recapitulation of what has been said.
And yet these are absorbing books – like the diaries themselves. Lounsberry’s years of meditation on her material can be felt, beyond the firmness of the developmental structure, as a quiet confidence of style and direction. She focuses most on Woolf’s writing choices – for the diaries themselves and in what she says in them of her works in prospect. So this is also, as it turns out, a return to Leonard’s 1950s concentration on the writer’s diary: with the difference that Lounsberry considers the diaries to be a consciously constructed creative work in their own right. She is single-minded in her tracking of Woolf’s artistic vocation; aside from their bearing on writerly activity, she is not very interested in the details of daily life or social encounters, for instance.
Leonard’s scheme for the published diary allowed for the inclusion of “passages in which she comments on the books she was reading”. Lounsberry’s literary emphasis has a related extension: she goes beyond Woolf’s own diaries to discuss (in the subtitles’ words) “the diaries she read”. Because she read lots, and throughout her life; and it is clear that this reading fostered an interest in the diary as a distinct kind of writing practice which – like the novel – was open to very many forms and practices. It also developed her fascination with the otherwise largely unrecorded history of women’s daily lives, a preoccupation which emerges most strongly in A Room of one’s Own, Orlando and The Years.
Lounsberry provides separate small chapters on each of the published diaries that Woolf read. Usually Woolf’s responses to them are written down in some form – but not always. Many may well have been overlooked as sources of her thinking. Or, for that matter, as further discoveries for her own readers. It is in these sections, on diaries other than Woolf’s own, that Lounsberry’s book is at its most unusual and appealing; her descriptions and samplings of these diverse works create new diary-reading (or diary-writing) desires. Here is Fanny Burney, for instance – quoted by Lounsberry and by Woolf – on keeping a journal: “I cannot any longer resist what I find to be irresistible, the pleasure of popping down my thoughts from time to time upon paper”.
After the discovery of a cache of Boswell manuscripts in 1929, Woolf’s diary records her feelings about the find: “Think! There are 18 volumes of Boswell’s diaries now to be published. With any luck I shall live to read them. I feel as if some dead person were said to be living after all”. In the passionate diary-reader we find here, Barbara Lounsberry has brought to life one more Virginia Woolf.